salesforce

There are 2 posts tagged salesforce (this is page 1 of 1).

Provide services, not just products

In the last two weeks there were some discussions about (enterprise) software sales [1, 2] on hacker news. The main complaint is that software sales are often nontransparent, complicated and highly time consuming.

I think this comment sums the problem up:

As you imply, there are segments in every market. Of course there is a segment of companies with hundreds or even thousands of employees with gigantic budgets. These guys are going to do RFP’s and spend months evaluating the different payroll providers.

Then there is the segment of small guys lik me who have under 10 employees who frankly don’t need anything too complicated. You can say “I am only going to serve large enterprise customers through a complex sales process” and that’s completely fine with me. But don’t pretend to cater to my segment if you are not to adapt your model. —labaraka

The last sentences is probably the most important. Don’t pretend to serve a segment just to be “present” in this segment. If your sales process sucks for this segment then it’s better not to serve this segment at all.
Some big software companies tried to enter the SMB market but most failed. Why? I think that it is really hard to sell for 10-20 years products to big cooperations who want customized modules, pay for consultants and don’t care if a basic module costs $100k and then to try to reduce one’s product, make it easy and create a new sales process for said businesses.
The great thing about this is that there’s always a market for software for SMB even if there are big names out there. Salesforce is such an example. At the time there were big names like Microsoft, SAP or Oracle who fought over market shares for CRM systems but Salesforce decided to gather a different market – a market where people don’t have a multiple millions IT budget or even a IT staff.
But even Salesforce can’t serve the whole tail. Still, there are companies that are overwhelmed by Salesforce’s offer or don’t feel adequately served by them.

In conclusion, as a customer I want to know that somebody cares about my company or my segment. If you are just trying to be present in a segment without really caring, people will go to other companies that care. This will allow entrepreneurs to create companies for different niches that other companies don’t really care about. Care about your customers.

#39/111: Think Outside the Inbox

What is it about?

David Cummings and Adam Blitzer explain how to automate your sales process and how marketing automation can save you time and increase your customer count.

Key points?

Segment your customers: It’s nothing new to segment your customers into age, location or job occupation. But you could also segment your customers into their willingness to buy. They propose to add scores for each customer on which they get treated differently. For example, you could give someone +10 points, if he enters his email address or +25 if he downloads the trial. This allows you to tailor individual action to each willingness segment.

Join your customer informations: Most companies got a CRM, website analytics, bid on Adwords and maybe work with salesforce.com. It’s important to collect all data and make it more useful. If you connect your CRM and website analytics, you can ask people why they don’t use your website anymore or offer upgrades for power users. But beware, it shouldn’t be too creepy.

Drip marketing: In Referral Engine I presented this concept at first. It’s about staying in touch with your customers and prospects. You can send them useful information, offer specials or invite them to webinars. It becomes especially powerful if you use it with customer segmentation. You could take people with low willingness scores into a nurture program where you offer them useful information and slowly build a relationship.

Conclusion

There are some really cool ideas which only a few companies use today. I think these tools are extremely powerful and you should really consider starting to employ them. Think Outside the Inbox is not really a how to guide but maybe there is one. If you know one, please comment on this post. Thanks!