The main rules for sales channels and revenue generation

Life is hardly possible today without Lead Generation. Everybody wants to set up a sales department without dreaming it in their nightmares or having it like some kind of pipe dream for any IT company. Everybody wants to have lead generation as the main sales channel. And it has to be as effective as possible, cheaper than Google AdWords, with high-quality leads and highly scalable, of course. Sounds unreal? For most people, yes! Most IT companies have only 1 or 2 working sales channels. Usually, the simplest sales channel in terms of clarity is Upwork.

From the very start of the software business, IT companies were the first to use this sales channel and achieve good results in many ways, finding opportunities to work there for years. For those who have not been in sales and in the IT business for decades, and do not have a name and personal network, it is really easier to start with understandable cases.  You immediately see a request from a potential client on Upwork and understand what you can offer in terms of benefits. The second channel is partnerships with other IT companies or clients who recommend you to other companies. Most IT companies grow their business well at the very beginning of their journey and treat their first customers very carefully, earning their trust and growth further in terms of project or feedback development, plus recommendations. This has led some companies to experience strong growth.  Someone at the very beginning was lucky to meet a client who turned out to be a strong player in the market and grew up quickly, gaining turnover and stability in the market for the outsourcing company.

Today we will talk about the main difficulties in sales channels, which most people are afraid of due to uncertainty and a lack of proper planning. They avoid long-term channel development because of a lack of knowledge and positive experience, thus finally blocking all the investments and development.

I have arranged everything according to the complexity of the implementation of these channels in the sales department. Half of IT companies didn’t launch or tried to launch these channels with no success with regular sales, but chucked in. On the one hand, it is sound not to waste time on things that do not work for you, but on the other hand, I have never seen a company able to start up successfully from the first try. Diligence, engagement, focus, a clear plan, and confidence that this channel has to be developed and not copied every month – then you are on your way.

Content-Marketing & SEO

It is good to write a lot of content for SEO promotion. But it’s worse to have an ill-considered content with no real value for the readers, only for traffic pumping. Even now, when you are reading this article written by me, you parallel your and my expertise, want to know more, and your interest grows.

When SEO content consists only of sets of keywords or phrases to increase traffic, you have problems. Content is the first thing that the reader can return to many times if he lacks time or something has distracted him and he postpones reading for later. That way, content is the best option to get used to your site and brand, take a look at other pages, find the author and the team and read the company’s history in more detail. But all this will happen only when the content is fascinating. I strongly recommend that you not promote your blog if your articles do not carry practical value. Your page’s engagement metrics are 20-30% or your new reader spends 30 seconds on content; the conclusions are obvious. Such content will not cause a desire to write to the form, contact, or share, and will not fix in the client’s mind the will to address your company for advice.

The content can be different depending on type: an article, an interview, a review, or even an offer with details. It is very important to work with overtones in every article to create an image that will encourage the reader to float through the articles of the blog and to cast a vision and a desire to buy, respectively. Distribution is an important element of a content marketing strategy. There can be different thematic groups where your customer audience gathers, such as thematic sites, comments with a link to your article, and customer posts on LinkedIn. This should be churned out for you to be noticed and heard. Nothing will happen if you just publish your articles, even with SEO traffic that is  possibly not very qualitative. You may create separate campaigns that will collect the target traffic faster. It is also a big mistake to base all your content marketing only on informational content. Yes, you will get a lot of new user visits, but the content will not solve the problem for the user, and thus you will waste money. A very small part will follow it into other pages and get what it entered to the Google search.

Create outlines of decisions, make video podcasts, and reveal more details. Prepare for this completely. Taking the project, you should have a pipeline for the article (pictures of the team, how it started the project), show your first concepts, then your first 5-minute interview of the client, then add the second one, where he shares his various experiences. You should have all this in the process as a point of information gathering for a cool article. Not after someone has left the team, and you have forgotten half of it and are trying to do something.

Email Outreach

Personal corporate domain, unconfigured sending protocols, two mailboxes for sales and the third one for the CEO, and sending 30-50 emails a day. What is the result? Well, after one month, all correspondence with the clients will be in spam, and your Hi {first_name} will not reach the servers of the collected contact database at all. Your domain will be accordingly marked as unwanted for the new emails, and all your new mailings will go nowhere.

There are many services and strategies for building your email infrastructure. Someone sends a huge volume of 30-40k emails per month, while someone works very narrowly in their niche and a customer profile with up to 500 contacts per month. Of course, this does not mean you should have an equal approach, but it is very important to take care of the channel’s smooth running. No one wants to stop the channel for a month until you buy a new domain, create 5 mailboxes, warm them up with tools, and then start sending a minimum of five emails per day. There is always a risk. You need to plan constantly for 3-6 months and warm up domains with mail sequences. It is believed that email outreach is the most scaled channel and probably the most rational after direct advertising. But in terms of settings and management, it is one of the most difficult. It is a big mistake to place bets on only one channel, and especially, firstly, an email, because of the difficulty of keeping it in working order. Until you find your niche, determine what works for your customers as a message and an offer, and apply yourself to sending emails. I would recommend testing on LinkedIn first. Most companies launch this channel hoping to obtain lightning profits, then stop it after 3 months and start to sell on other low-margin but more conversion channels like Upwork again. To keep this channel working, you need not only the right infrastructure but also managers, their focus, control and ideas. Ideas are the most important thing here, which will fill this channel with the necessary hypotheses and approaches. The second most important thing is to constantly measure and analyze everything. Every step and every message is very important here. There is no quick entry into the market with the first template. But by the 10th campaign, you already start to see which message works better, which role responds to you more often, and from which market. Thus, you better arm yourself with patience, a lot of hypotheses, and work to run this channel right through the year! According to the tally, investing in this channel is 30-40% cheaper than direct advertising. This means you control requests, the market, and improve your channel communication skills.

Linkedin Outreach

Channel number three in importance, according to the launch complexity. To test a message quickly, go through a campaign and attract the first reviews, see which profiles respond to requests faster and who is more active among your potential customers. It is a direct way to use LinkedIn communication. That’s why it’s there as a business chat platform, first. This channel works faster with a response to your ok or not ok communication strategies here. Therefore, I would start with LinkedIn first and then combine different channels to see how effective your offer is. I would run a series of hypotheses there, get feedback and then tap email outreach, create blog content and strengthen, improve conversions by mixing between the channels. Many companies combine: start communicating on LinkedIn, then write an Email to those who did not respond, adding content. This also works, but in most cases, those to whom you have already sold are invited to the corporate page of the company on LinkedIn, where you show them your interesting articles from the blog. Using a massive approach – we just take the volume without strategy, so anyway, spend money in accelerated mode on the number of profiles. I saw a company with 50 profiles on LinkedIn, some of which were avatar profiles! The main thing is that you should have a really cool and deep analysis after running your campaigns in order not to send something for months that does not give any conversions at all. But you will wait a long time for the result if you are touchy-feely about analyzing the results and understanding which conversions to use as a guideline. LinkedIn is a platform for quick communication, firstly, but not an email or official correspondence channel. A long time ago, Linkedin automated both scheduled comments and contacts warming up: likes, viewing profiles and then sending friend requests. The big mistake is that many people in this channel start writing a lot at once, often in a banal template; this instantly reduces conversions, attention value and leads far away from future sales. LinkedIn should be regarded as a quick channel for testing hypotheses. It is impossible to work with this channel if you cannot arrange communication in the form of a “quick chat with questions”. It takes a long time to warm up the contacts. The strategies do not work point-blank, and they did not work before.

PPC & Remarketing

When you are determined to spend money on advertising, it is either a success or a last desperate attempt caused by a lack of results in other channels. Competent advertising expenses should be approached with all caution because money is spent very quickly. In most cases, low budgets are spent on the most expensive Google Ads keys and the most expensive advertising spaces in the USA and Europe. You should understand that the quality of advertising traffic is dependent a lot on where you are sending it and from where. If you promote the home page of the site, there will be up to 60% rejections. If you advertise services, there will be up to 80% rejections. In case you advertise a particular page of services, there will be up to 40% rejections. You should have an understanding that advertising does not start blazing fast, and its tuning also takes time. Usually,  brings first real customers after three months of launching. Before that, there will be some low-quality requests. We’re not talking about selling vacuum cleaners now, but about our IT services, which are more difficult to sell through direct advertising. Most advertising campaigns are conducted according to the principle that we pump out the needed audience from LinkedIn, upload it to FB, and request advertising to similar people. In this case, sometimes the cost per click can be much lower than in Google Ads, and we give advertising to the people we are trying to sell on LinkedIn. Remarketing is a very important strategy, but remember that more than half of your site visitors will reject cookies. The main expenses for advertising are made when there’s a need for case promotion and client portfolios, and an effort is on a growing interest strategy and forming the readers’ addiction to the brand through content consumption. The average IT campaign is up to $30k per month and while it doesn’t always pay off per year, it is more of an image-based nature to retain the attention of future partners and employees of the company. Do not start spending money on advertising while having a raw website, weak marketing, an incomprehensible customer profile, and the least amount of money.

Upwork

It is always interesting to see how different companies started. Those who started immediately with outreach and companies that went to Upwork have completely different inner structures. Companies focused on Upwork only have numerous written scripts, bots for tracking applications, a lot of personal response managers, and a very large Pre-Sale staff for a fast offer production. The most important thing on Upwork is to quickly and specifically answer the client’s question. This is important for everyone, but in particular, it is a very specific metric for Upwork. Now that the work there has become more complicated, you have to spend more money for the sake of obtaining a request for the calculation of the project and still analyzing everything concerning applications. The first control, analytics and auto-bidding automation platforms appeared. Upwork is a convenient place for those who have decided to avoid the process of inventing expertise and forming internal knowledge laboratories. This platform can provide cool projects with big-name companies, but often these will be fast and low-margin projects. Most people say that feedback is an ideal channel for selling a bench. Why is it sometimes bad to switch from one channel to another in a hurry or on impulse, rather than developing everything in the bud? As I wrote at the very beginning, it’s all about the starting position. Those who develop outreach have a big bias towards business research and ideas—the formation of hypotheses—and there is no immediate reaction, only a bias toward other processes. You need to wait, warm up, clarify, and carry out such procedures for months with no quick results. On Upwork, you work at once with the query, and there are other metrics here. Therefore, channels need to be developed in parallel or by a separate team to focus; this is an ideal option. Upgrade works much faster in sales according to all formats of work in channels. The sale of your unoccupied developers goes faster on Upwork, as everyone says, projects are taken faster because of the low price.

Partnerships

Every company is looking for partnerships. Such partners can be in the form of a full-time sales representative in a larger IT company who introduces projects for a dedicated percent, or a full-fledged unit of the company interested in a future acquisition of the company or joint development of expertise. Strategically, it is a very important task–not fast, but important for the company—to develop a network of partnerships. You can ask for references and enlist support if you need advice on the local market! You get a lot at once. Signing contracts with any partner and then not moving these partnerships anywhere is a waste of time. You allocate resources to this type of channel, and if there is no special manager constantly engaged in the affair, it will be difficult. Five strong partners, each of whom can give you a client once a year, is a very good perspective. You can work with partners in tenders if you need to show yourself from a more attractive side, show more guarantees and infrastructure. Partnerships are not just with larger IT companies. There are plenty of food companies that can offer different types of partnerships and interactions. It is also important to develop relationships with them, go through various programs and earn a reputation as a reliable partner. The more you invest in a partnership, the more strategic benefits it will bring in the future. It is much easier to pass through any crisis with strong partners. It’s evident that strong partners are highly desirable, but few people really invest in this channel because of uncertain results and the lack of focus on the channel.

Road Shows or Business Trips

For some reason, ordinary business trips were considered a separate sales channel. Inviting yourself for a meeting is almost an extreme stage of outreach. It is a big mistake to start this channel with people who are afraid of new physical meetings. Yes, there are many sales reps who got used to online communication for almost 5 years, starting from the first months of COVID. There are sales reps who don’t have physical meeting experience with clients and cannot connect a laptop to a VGA projector because they started their career during lockdown. Therefore, pay attention to these aspects. Planning your trips to the prospects offices is one thing; meeting leads at exhibitions is another; and meeting at a café next to their office is the third. For each case, there is an appropriate preparation, style, pitch, and complexity of the presentation. In Europe, they really like business meetings and don’t like to waste their time at all. It’s easy to arrange a meeting, because they are polite, and most of them like networking. If you have a confirmed appointment, make sure twice that you are understood and that you have clearly stated the agenda of your meeting in order to avoid embarrassment when you arrive at the office and no one is waiting for you there, or when you start a presentation, but they do not understand why you are telling them this. The second rule—you should negotiate on your own behalf. Because when another person arrives instead of you, then  the meeting will not take place. You should prepare a campaign the same way as any other, but according to a roadshow, it is advisable to start planning a campaign and making mailings 6 months in advance. You need to work out a communication strategy—why you will be in this city, why it is important for you to meet, what your task is. Many still make 2-3 calls to clarify the purpose of the meeting and determine whether the client and you need it. It is a pointless waste of time to go to useless meetings when the client is very interested but has no tasks and does not plan anything.
Now is the perfect time to start updating the company. If you need help working through these sales channels and there is a need for an audit, write to us through the feedback form or schedule a call via Calendly.

High-quality leads and well-performed sales channels to all!

Good luck!