The #1 mobile app platform worldwide
Posts tagged selling to smbs
Resellers - Get Free Small Business Leads with Bizness CRM
Oct 10th
Every business needs customers. But sadly, they don’t generally come lining up at your door begging to buy from you. Instead, you need to find a way to reach out to your target audience and make the necessary connections. This can take a lot of hard work, but with the right tool, the workload can become a lot lighter.
Enter Bizness CRM, a tool for generating small business leads that we provide free of charge to our app resellers!
With Bizness CRM, the process of tracking down leads becomes a lot simpler. It can be used in conjunction with other marketing efforts, or it can be used as a standalone channel for locating customers. With a helpful tool like Bizness CRM, a lot of the administrative work is done for you, freeing you and your team up to focus on selling.
Getting Started With Bizness CRM from Bizness Apps on Vimeo.
What is Bizness CRM?
Bizness CRM is a customer relationship management app that lets you locate small business leads, and track your sales efforts as you make appointments and attempt to close deals. It’s easy to use, mobile-accessible, and your account can support multiple users, making collaboration seamless.
How do I get leads with Bizness CRM?
The process is simple. First, head to Bizness CRM’s Lead Generator tab and select your desired lead criteria (location, keywords, etc.). A list of small businesses in your chosen area that fit your chosen criteria will appear. Then, chose the leads you want from the results, and each one will be imported into your sales pipeline. This becomes your working list of initial leads.
From there, you can contact leads, make appointments, track progress, and hopefully close some deals! Taking notes is easy, and all the contact info you need is automatically imported when you select leads to bring into your pipeline.
The rest is up to you.
Are you talking about cold calling?
We are, but don’t be scared. It’s how Business Apps was built, after all.
By connecting with leads over the phone, you’ll suffer a lot of rejection, but the conversational practice will allow you to fine tune your pitch and you’ll also learn a great deal about what matters most to customers. Listen well, and you’ll soon have your first sale.
After that, the next one is easy.
Good luck!
For more detailed instructions for getting started with Bizness CRM, click here.
Bizness CRM Tip – The Importance of Scheduling Follow-Up Appointments
Aug 30th
In sales, persistence is often key.
While many prospects don’t want to hear from you again after an initial contact, others just need more information before they see the value in your offering. But salespeople experience a lot of discouragement as they go through this process. For this reason, a majority of salespeople simply don’t conduct follow-ups. They step up to the plate, take a single swing, and then consider it a strikeout.
This is a huge mistake!
This is because half of all sales are closed in follow-up conversations. And many of these closed deals started out with a prospect that simply wasn’t that interested. That is, missing the sale on the first swing is not uncommon. But it’s the salespeople that keep swinging that ultimately get a hit.
For this reason, scheduling follow-up appointments is critical. Don’t leave things open-ended when you’re finishing a sales meeting or a sales call. Nail down a time for a follow-up and stick to it. And keep following up until you reach a, “Yes” or a firm, “No.”
This way, you can take charge of the sales process.
Of course, the goal is not to irritate the prospect. You won’t bully people into sales. Instead, your focus with follow-ups should be to push the conversation forward. Don’t say things like, “I’m just checking in’ or “Are you ready to buy?” The first one is unproductive, and the second puts too much pressure on the customer, who may not yet understand the value of your offering.
That’s why it’s essential to do one of three things:
1. Ask questions.
2. Offer information.
3. Offer a special deal.
Asking questions helps you learn about the prospect. Everyone loves to talk about themselves, so tap into that natural inclination and get your prospect to open up. The more you understand about their needs, the better you will be able to sell or tailor your offering to suit them. And you might also hear why your product simply doesn’t work, which is information you definitely want.
Offering information helps the prospect start to see what the value is in your product. A common sales mistake is assuming that people know too much. You’re no doubt very familiar with your product, and it can be easy to forget that others don’t know anything about it. Provide your prospect with useful info, and you can go a long way toward closing a deal.
Putting a special deal on the table can also be productive. A discount is always a motivator, especially one with a time limit. Offering something like that may bring out your prospect’s hidden objections, which gives you a chance to resolve them.
The point is, follow-ups should always be designed to move things forward. That way, you’ll advance the relationship and figure out whether you can reach a deal or not.
Happy selling!
For step-by-step instructions for scheduling appointments with Bizness CRM, click here.
Small Business is Big Business – Why the Next Successful SaaS Companies Will Be Those That Serve the Little Guy
Aug 23rd
There is a disturbing trend lately of SaaS companies going public before they show a profit. (I’m looking at you, Eloqua and Marketo). And what’s worse, the problem is systemic. In fact, in an article for Venture Beat, Jason Cohen clearly sets forth why a typical SaaS company that serves enterprise customers can take four years to produce even a 2.5% profit! If you want to dig into the numbers behind the trend, the gory details are all laid out here.
Mostly, this is due to the extraordinarily high up-front costs of chasing enterprise customers, and the relatively low monthly fee earned even if the chase is successful. That’s why, if Gartner’s predictions come true and the SaaS market grows by almost 20% over the next few years, we think the lion’s share of the gains will go to a special type of SaaS company:
The one that serves small businesses.
Why?
Due to three extremely powerful facts that I’ve become intimately familiar with as I grow a SaaS company serving small businesses:
Reason 1: Costs are much lower and hurdles are far fewer
When you sell to the enterprise, you need to invest heavily in a sales team. And you won’t ever reach a decision-maker right away. Instead, you’ll participate in a long series of meetings and conference calls (if you’re lucky enough to get to that point).
You’ll have to hire a lawyer to help handle extensive contracting and other matters. You’ll need to get a bunch of technical support people to train and service the customer extensively. And once you’ve done all of this, and invested hundreds of hours into the project, you’ll get dropped unceremoniously after someone you’ve never met decides there isn’t room in the budget for you.
Damn, that’s cold.
In contrast, when you sell to small businesses, you can reach a decision-maker right away. You don’t have to do the same level of marketing, sales, technical assistance, and training. You can afford to court a large number of clients at once, and the time and energy invested from first contact to closing is much, much shorter. With a rapid, low-cost sales cycle, the results are simple:
You get paid 1) quickly, 2) often, and 3) profitably.
It’s a lot easier to become profitable with a payment structure like that.
Reason 2: Product requirements are similar across customers
Each enterprise customer, even if they aren’t different from the others, can sometimes demand that everything be customized to their whims. And their whims will change multiple times before the project is complete. Much like the sales dance, you’ll spend a lot of time and effort trying to please your prospect, and it may not pay off in the end.
In contrast, small businesses tend to have more basic needs and simpler demands. They don’t need a unique solution. They need something functional, easy-to-integrate, and cost-effective. For this reason, you can design a solid product and it will fit into a wide variety of small businesses. Instead of having to approach each customer as a redesign, you’ll be able to simply provide a solution that already performs the necessary functions, and customers will like it.
There’s less hard work, and your efforts are more likely to produce returns across a large number of customers, without extra tweaking. That is, small business customers let SaaS companies max out the profitability of each solution they develop.
Reason 3: There are literally millions of prospects
Small businesses are staggeringly numerous. In fact, there are over 5 million businesses with less than 100 employees in the U.S alone. In comparison, the number of companies that have over 1,000 employees in the U.S. is only around 10,000. Therefore, the opportunity presented by small businesses is orders of magnitude larger than that presented by the enterprise.
Taken together, the three facts above present a case for why the next group of successful SaaS companies won’t be riding tidal waves – they’ll just hang close to the shore and ride the small waves in over and over again until they make it.
Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself mobile app & mobile website platform for small businesses and Bizness CRM, a CRM designed to make selling to small businesses easy.
Bizness CRM Tip: Build Your Sales Pipeline!
Aug 14th
There are two approaches to sales:
1) systematic, regular, and self-correcting
2) not
Many businesses can get by without ever evaluating their sales efforts and developing a formal ongoing sales program. These businesses, however, can get rusty when current business is sufficient, and they miss out on the opportunity to improve sales programs over long periods of time.
The result is a business that is somewhat unprepared for tough times (when sales hustle is needed), and a sales team that is underdeveloped. A better approach is to maintain an ongoing sales pipeline. The flow can be increased or decreased as needed, but the important thing is to keep a formal structure in place that allows the sales team to stay sharp and keep improving in good times and bad.
That way, when you really need them (e.g. when a big client goes away unexpectedly), they’ll be ready. To help get your business on the right track, here’s a sample sales pipeline that’s easy to understand and implement:
Step One: Gather Leads
This can be done in a variety of ways. Some people rely on ads or their website to bring leads to them. Others do research to find prospects, or purchase lists for cold calling. And others use a simple tool like Bizness CRM that can find all the small business leads in a given area.
However you meet prospects, this is the starting point of your sales pipeline. Once you’ve got the contact info of a party that is interested (or may be interested) in your product or service, your sales team can take action.
Some owners might be saying, “Stop right there. I have enough business now. Why should I still be on the hunt?” Even if you don’t want to grow, you might be surprised what kind of business is out there. Every business can rank their current customers in terms of profitability or other characteristics. By prospecting, you may find better replacements for your least-favored customers, and improve profitability without having to grow at all.
Step Two: Follow Up and Close
Once you’ve got contact information, it’s time to reach out to your prospects. Whether you do this via email, phone, or in person, it’s important to take notes and keep a detailed schedule. A program like Bizness CRM can help you seamlessly select a prospect, reach out, take notes, schedule meetings, and collaborate across team members (noticing a pattern, yet?) That way, the ball never gets dropped, and everyone can keep tabs on evolving relationships.
Follow up regularly until you’ve got a response one way or the other. It’s important to keep active when pursuing a sale. Try not to irritate people too badly, though!
Step Three: Track and Analyze
This is where things get interesting. Your note taking and data gathering (you were using Bizness CRM to track everything, right?) can now reveal ways to improve. If your CRM tool has a report-generation function, you can easily understand your sales efforts at-a-glance. Now you know which types of customers to focus on, when to reach out to them, which sales angles were the most persuasive, what the most common objections were, and more.
Armed with powerful info like that, it’s easy to see what you need to change.
Step Four: Get Better
Now you can design some policies to help your sales team get better on the next go-round. Be sure to track key metrics like conversion rate so that you can compare from month-to-month and seller-to-seller. In time, you’ll see black-and-white improvements that will directly translate to more revenue and profit for your business.
Sound like a lot of work? It isn’t, if you have the right tool. You know where we’re going with this… we have just the right tool to help you implement a simple, cost-effective pipeline, and you can try it out for free to see just how powerful it is.
4 Tips for Building a Successful Mobile App Sales Team
Jul 9th
If you want to develop apps for businesses, you may be tempted to sit back and let your advertisements bring in the prospects. But sadly, things don’t work that way – not even with a very strong ad campaign running. It’s important to continue actively pursuing customers to ensure that the time and effort invested in your app development enterprise pays off.
For many developers, this may require that you build your very first sales team. Don’t be scared – it isn’t as hard as it sounds. You don’t have to hire an army of salespeople. You just need to start with a few dedicated reps that are ready to roll up their sleeves and help make your business a success.
You might be tempted to go forward without a sales team due to the cost or headache associated with bringing new team members on board. But make no mistake: a sales team is the engine of your business’s revenue and growth. What you invest now can generate significant returns later on as your company gains momentum.
The following tips will help you build a team that creates sales and also cultivates long-term benefits for your company.
1. You don’t need programmers
Don’t be overly concerned with hiring technically oriented folks for your sales team. As long as your team members are familiar with apps and computers, you can teach them everything they need to know in order to sell app development. Some companies get hung up trying to find people that are extremely tech-savvy for their sales team, but it is more important that your sales team members have interpersonal skills.
Of course, if you can find people with both technical and sales skills – that’s even better!
2. Have them use the products
It isn’t enough to just read about your service as sales training – your team members should download and actually use some of the apps your company has created for clients. This will give them familiarity with your product that will be extremely helpful in selling it.
A big part of the sales process can be answering questions about how apps work and the possibilities for development that your company offers. If responses from your sales team are genuine and specific, it can give sales efforts a real boost. If they’re canned and ambiguous, you’re headed for trouble.
3. Focus on long-term success, not just raw numbers
Only looking at sales and subscriptions is a straightforward way to measure success, but it’s important to also keep an eye on retention and satisfaction. Sales teams can sometimes makes promises just to “Get to yes,” and this can hurt your business down the road. Make sure that your team members are interacting with customers in a way that is good for sales, but also your business as a whole.
4. Back them up with excellent support
This is key to ensuring sales success: support your ongoing customers and deliver on your selling points. If reviews are bad and referrals are non-existent, your sales team will struggle to meet its goals. If, on the other hand, customers are happy, your sales team will have a very strong leg to stand on when it comes time to speak to prospects.
A well-rounded approach like this will make your company a success not just today, but also well into the future.
9 Tips for Mobile App Resellers Selling to Small Businesses, Part 1
Mar 5th
Selling to large companies, selling to consumers, and selling to small businesses are all three very different kinds of selling. While there are common issues, certain strategies that work in one context are actually harmful in the others. The tips below will help you focus in on what really matters when selling to small businesses.
1. Don’t make them feel small
Small business owners are independent people who take pride in their business and self-identify with it, often to a large degree. You might think it’s a great idea to try and show that you understand their concerns by talking about “small business” over and over again, but the word “small” is sometimes a word to be avoided. They’re in “business.” Sometimes it’s best to just keep it at that.
2. Title isn’t everything
Small business teams are often tight-knit groups. Don’t be surprised if someone you think is low on the totem pole actually has the ear of a key decision-maker. Treat everyone with the same level of respect, just in case. (In fact, just do that everywhere, all the time, just to be safe!)
3. “Is this a bad time?”
If you’re cold calling, sometimes this phrase is a great way to show you know how busy people are. They’re still going to hang up on you left and right, but you just might score some humane treatment, even a lead, if you give it first up front.
4. Make their lives easier
This is so obvious we feel a little silly repeating it, but it’s also so true that it can’t be stressed enough. If you want to get anywhere with small business owners, you need to remove difficulties from their lives, and save them time, money, or both. Always focus on how you can be helpful and transfer problems from their laps into your own.
5. You’re not fooling them
Almost every small business owner is also a salesman. After all, at one point in the company’s history, they probably wore every hat on the rack. Don’t think you’re going to get anything by them in terms of slick sales tactics. They’re more likely to backfire than not.
6. Be straightforward
Small business owners don’t have time for roundabout conversational routes. Be direct, respect their time, and you’ll be doing yourself a favor.
7. Simple is king
On a related note, the simpler your offering itself is, the better off you are. Make sure that when you design products and services, they don’t contain needless complexity or extraneous features. Focus on your core offering, simplify it, and everything will become easier.
8. Make transition easy
On another related note, adopting your offering should be as seamless as you can make it. If you cause any troubles, the little bit of patience you gained with your successful pitch will rapidly be destroyed. Transition should be as unnoticeable as you can make it, so that the focus is on how hard things were before your company came along, and how easy they are now that you’re here.
9. Tread carefully when saying you identify with a small business
Small business owners are often at war, and they live deep in the trenches. If you try to identify with their problems, you better know where you’re coming from. If you don’t live in their world, don’t pretend you do, or you’ll quickly be shown the door.
Wow! This stuff came off as fairly serious. But, as we know, selling is serious business. Don’t take these issues lightly, and you just might convert more small business prospects than you know what to do with!
