Recruiting ISVs is not rocket science, but it does take time and a carefully planned out strategy. Having a holistic approach and being present across channels is key to reaching your target audience. Here are five more ways that can help you improve the process.
Try account-based marketing (ABM)
By pre-selecting the exact named accounts you want to go after, you take out a lot of the guess work for your internal sales reps. It’s not easy to determine the right target audience to focus on, and sales reps that are not given direction will get lost. Should I try a particular vertical or horizontal? Is company size important, or should I be looking at the potential deal size instead? By researching accounts and coming up with a short list of between 25 and 40 (per rep per region), you will narrow the focus on your top priority—companies that have high potential to convert into large deals. Market intelligence can help you outline the triggers to determine whether a particular account is worth pursuing. Your sales reps can then spend their time getting their foot in the door with a variety of decision-makers instead of spreading themselves thin across too many organizations.
Have an “always-on” approach
A campaign-by-campaign outlook with little to no continuity from one quarter to the next is the equivalent of creating a silo. While setting quarterly objectives for your sales team is important, sometimes sales cycles are long, and it can take more than a quarter to convert an interesting prospect into a signed deal. By having an always-on approach, your efforts will continue over time without a sudden and unjustified change in direction. The benefit is that the prospects you are nurturing should eventually contact you when the time is right for them to take the conversation to the next level.
Social selling creates a nurture pipeline
Being present on social media is an essential way of creating a pipeline of prospects that you can educate and nurture over time. By regularly posting content on your social accounts (both your own personal profile and your company page), you can keep your prospects informed about interesting content you have published, and newsworthy events you are hosting or attending. People are much more likely to engage in a conversation over social media than they are to answer a cold call or respond to an email blast. By personalizing your outreach to each individual prospect, you should have a high response rate if you make social selling part of your daily routine.
You can never have too much content
Content marketing is a must-have and you can never have too much content. Making sure that your content speaks to your target audience is key in order to get across the “what’s in it for me” messaging you need to capture their attention. Leveraging content to establish thought leadership for your brand will help build trust and educate prospects about your value proposition. Content syndication is another way to help spread the word. Make sure to put in place a long-term SEO strategy by integrating the keywords you want to rank for into your content.
Externalization for scalability
When it’s time to scale, find a reliable outsourcer to help fill in the gaps. It’s a mistake to think that in order to have it all, you have to do it all yourself. By working with an external service provider, you should be able to delegate certain tasks so that your sales reps can focus on the areas where they bring the most value: meeting with prospects, conducting demos, and negotiating business deals. External providers can help build and cleanse data sets, fill in the whitespace with the job titles you are missing, design and implement an email marketing strategy, generate marketing and sales qualified leads … all of which should enable your sales team to focus on selling. If you find the right outsourcer, it should even help your sales team sell faster.
