Customer Identification Tips for Better Marketing

To 5 Tips for Identifying Your Ideal Software Customer

Customer identification is one of the most basic, essential activities that must take place anytime you start a business. Your market research should have identified a consumer or industry segment where there’s high demand for what you plan to offer. This is as true in the B2B software industry as it is in retail, wholesale, or any other type of sales. After identifying high-demand segments, though, you still need to narrow down an exact definition of your ideal customer. There are several reasons for this, but the most important ones have to do with your sales and marketing efforts. You don’t want to spend resources trying to reach people who are not likely to ever become customers. You’re much better off focusing your marketing and sales budgets on the people who will truly find your software useful. Here are some of the best tips we’ve learned about how to figure out who your ideal customers are, and how to reach them.

1: Put yourself in their shoes

What does your software look like from the customer’s point of view? Imagine what the conditions would have to be like in your customer’s office, what workflow problems they would need to have, for your software to represent an elegant and cost-effective solution. This customer identification strategy helps you to see exactly the kinds of problems you can solve, with the side benefit of helping you discover potential flaws and areas where you could refine your product for either wider or more specific appeal.

2: Where does your buyer stand?

You may be offering software solutions to other businesses, but it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, you’re also dealing with individual human beings. Not only do you need to identify the exact sort of company that would find your product useful, you also need to figure out which person in that company you’ll be dealing with. Where is this person in their career? What role do they have in their organization? What kind of budget will they have at their disposal? You also need to be able to relate to this individual on a more personal level. How old are they and what kind of education and skills do they have under their belt? Are they a business major, or were they a coder who’s risen through the ranks? Knowing this in advance can make a huge difference during the sales process.

3: What’s in it for them?

You’ve done the market research, so you know your competition. You know who offers products like yours that are either cheaper or have more features. Why does your ideal customer care about your software, then? What do they find in your product that makes it better for them than what your competitors are peddling? Are they looking for better customer service? Something that doesn’t crash all the time? A local provider instead of a faceless multinational blob? A sleeker UX? Discover what sets you apart in the mind of your ideal customer, and your sales pitch practically writes itself.

4: Speaking of local providers…

You should be targeting customers in a specifically-defined geographical area. Eventually, that specific area could just be “Earth,” but not likely when you’re first starting. Facebook famously started out serving only Harvard alumni, then other Boston-area universities, where Mark Zuckerberg and associates lived and studied. For the first two years of its existence, it focused on serving only individuals at educational institutions, before opening up to anyone in the world with an email address. The lesson here is to focus your customer identification at first on an area that you know well. Make it as easy as possible for yourself to serve that market. This is because once you do open up to new geographies, you’ll need to become as familiar as possible with the idiosyncrasies of each market you enter. Focusing on what you know at the beginning greatly simplifies this step.

5: Customer identification includes strategy identification

Not only do you need to know who your customers are before you ever meet them, you need to understand what they’re going to do. How are they going to buy your software, and when? If their work tends to be seasonal, when will it be best for them to make a change? Learn from your customers’ experience buying similar products in the past, ad find ways to make it even better for them this time. At Boom Demand, we help our clients through this process of customer identification. We use outreach strategies like sales development to hit the ground running and funnel qualified prospects to your sales team for deal closing. We also develop powerful experiential marketing events that get your brand out there in the wild of the market and bring interested customers on board. Contact us today to start driving new leads into your sales funnel!

Outbound Emailing That Actually Works

Teaching Your Sales Team How to Craft Effective Emails

Technology has changed the way salespeople work multiple times within our lifetimes. It used to be that the only ways to make a sale were in person, or through print advertising. Then came the telephone, followed by radios and television. New worlds began to open up. None of it compared to the power of the internet and the most enduring form of communication associated with it: email. We now consider outbound emailing a key part of modern sales. There are drawbacks to every tactic, of course. One of the biggest problems in sales is that everyone is using all the same tools, all the time. Inboxes are swamped with offers and solicitations. The main issue then becomes the question of how to stand out.

What’s the Single Most Important Part of an Email?

Hint: it’s the part that determines in the recipient’s mind whether they will open it or trash it without a second look. It’s the subject line. If you don’t get this part right, it does not matter what else you do. So make sure that your teams fully understand the purpose of the subject line. What’s that purpose? It is to get the recipient interested enough to open the email. Nothing more, nothing less. The subject line of an outbound sales email should not be boring, dry, or formulaic in any way. It should grab their attention in a fast, personal way, and get them intrigued.

The Key Principle of Successful Outbound Emailing in 2018… and Always

It’s not about you. Yes, you want them to read the email you sent because you want them to buy a product or service from your company so you can be successful and enjoy your life and feed your family. They know that. Everyone knows that’s what sales emails are for. So tell them why they should care. Tell them what’s in it for them. It’s all about them. So write the email and its subject line accordingly. Talk to them, personally. Not “to whom it may concern,” but to the name of the person who you hope will actually be opening the message. Talk about their issues, their concerns, their problems. If you mention a solution, ask if it’s something they have considered.

Keep it Short

Don’t make your prospect do any more work than they already have to. Don’t use industry jargon or needlessly complex writing styles. Keep it conversational. Not inappropriately casual, but natural. Specifically, consider the fact that most emails are now opened and read on smartphones. What does that mean in the context of making it easy on your reader? They should be able to read your entire message and call to action without scrolling, and the subject line should fit in a single line of text. HubSpot has a great post that we recommend, about how to write emails that work well. They provide lots of useful insights and even templates to help you start. If you don’t want to worry so much about perfect outbound emailing on your own, you can rely on Boom Demand’s seasoned team of Sales Development Representatives, who come with years of experience in B2B outreach, including via email and social media. Contact us today to supercharge your sales funnel!

Sales Team With a Forward-Thinking Attitude

How to Establish a Forward-Thinking Sales Team

Do you want to build a sales team that can face the future? You ought to; the future keeps approaching with exciting and terrifying new changes every day. Building up a team of forward-looking individuals is essential to facing this reality. Constant change is, ironically, here to stay. Strangely, the best way to deal with constant change is to change ourselves to be more constant. Here’s what we’ve discovered about how to do it.

1: Unify Around a Shared Strategic Vision

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Abraham Lincoln said that just two years before being elected President of the United States. During his time in power, he saw the nation torn apart by a fundamental national disagreement as to the morality of slavery. He then used the full force of that power to ensure that one side would emerge victorious. His personal views on the moral issue informed his choices, but it was also because of the strategic danger the divide represented for the country. If the country were to remain divided, it would never be safe from the invasions of other powerful nations around the world. The question was not just one of unity or disunity. It was of unity… or annihilation. A country divided is a country more easily conquered from the outside. Likewise, your business organization can best succeed in the marketplace if your team is united around your visions and goals. Together they can carry out the plans that will make them a reality. It’s essential to inspire and require that your team share a unifying ideal, and a company culture that makes it natural. Make sure that the whole team understands the reasons they need unity, and the consequences of discord.

2: Develop Courage, Commitment, and Emotional Intelligence

These powerful personality traits and skills are not inherent in every person. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they can be learned. It may take a great deal effort, but by providing your sales team with training on these matters, it can makes them into far better salespeople. The reason these skills make teams more forward-looking is because they help individuals look outside of themselves, and become more focused on doing good work. Courage means doing something good and worthwhile regardless of momentary personal discomfort. It’s selfless. The benefits of commitment are clear and related. Sticking to a task when it gets hard pulls the team through to the finish line.

“[People] with high emotional intelligence have the ability to accurately identify their emotions and, most importantly, the ability to control and evaluate these emotions. They are also very empathetic of the emotions of others, making them better listeners, communicators and negotiators.” – thepitcher.org

There are other traits that make for great forward thinkers. These are the ones most necessary for the last piece of the puzzle, though.

3: Consider Wide-Ranging Possibilities, But Focus on Execution

Lisa Bodell, CEO of Futurethink, lays out a detailed guide for “Formalizing forward thinking” in any organization, in an article at strategy-business.com. Among the suggestions she makes, she put special emphasis on the importance of scenario planning:

“To analyze long-term trends and market forces, the following scenario-planning exercises can be useful:

“Set a time horizon (2025, 2055, etc.) and scope (a specific area of your business, all areas of your business, or the entire industry) for the analysis.

“Map the key trends and driving forces that could impact your business, including economic, political, technological, legal, societal, and industry-specific trends. Describe each trend, as well as how and why it will affect your organization.

“Look for uncertainties: wild-card factors that could upend current plans —such as an environmental disaster, vendor bankruptcy, or tighter industry regulation — and threaten your organization.

“Define two to four scenarios based on the trends and uncertainties you’ve identified. Include a mix of best- and worst-case scenarios.

“Assess the scenarios. What are your opportunities? What are the threats? How can your business prepare now for these scenarios?”

She also suggests keeping close tabs on new developments coming out of the tech scene and the academic world. Many of the world’s biggest game-changers have come out of those two sectors. With all of that, though, nothing beats action. There’s no value in doing all that thinking and research if nothing ever happens as a result of it. That’s why we at Boom Demand focus on execution. We maintain a strong culture of forward-thinking, especially in our sales team, which is at your disposal. We train our sales development representatives to be excellent listeners who also know how and when to push the conversation forward. Contact us today to make forward thinking an integral part of your sales strategy!