The pace of business usually picks up as the Fall buying season begins – making it a perfect time to get new customers. As you address this opportunity, here are some actions that can pave the way for future, enterprise-scale sales.
Today, the path to even the largest deals often starts at your website – whether your application is SaaS or on-premise. Sales that are high-five-figures or above are never “click to buy” transactions, however.
7 Easy Steps To Increase Sales During Fall
So, how do you maximize revenue today and pave the way for the future? Here are six ways to address this apparent conflict. They’ll help you position your company as a credible enterprise-scale vendor, without sacrificing all-important near-term sales – in fact, near-term sales will likely be enhanced.
- Show you understand your customer’s business well enough to add value. The key is aligning what you charge for with how your customers will derive value. Getting this right improves the chances that customers will make an initial commitment, and Sales will have an essential foundation for downstream value arguments and ROI discussions.
- Establish the “dimensions of value” your solution delivers. If your solution can help increase customer revenue, your website (including your pricing page) should speak in those terms. If cost savings is your advantage, speak of that. Prospects need to relate to – and believe in – the value you deliver for near-term sales, and it will be vital when customers are asked to make major financial commitments.
- Think seriously about “downstream” packages. Having packages and plans that get customers to “kick the tires” and easily upgrade to “paying their own way” is very important but don’t stop there. Make sure there is a packaging path that leads customers from simply “paying their own way” to making an enterprise-level commitment – and make that path obvious. This helps today’s sales and sets the stage for large deals in the future.
- Go beyond the Olympics analogy in naming your packages. Bronze, Silver, and Gold (or Small, Medium, and Large) may help today’s deals but isn’t good enough. The names and contents of your packages should reflect your understanding of your customer’s business – and how your solution can be increasingly integrated into that business. Sometimes this can’t be done but the potential payoff justifies the effort. As a start, think in terms of usage – e.g., work group, department, or company – or functionality – e.g., data acquisition & storage, data analytics, analytic report distribution.
- Be ready with large-deal pricing. Prospects considering a large deal will always want a better deal. How you handle these requests can be critical to your long-term success, so think things through in advance. Set a threshold for big-deal pricing to avoid horse trading on deals that are smaller.
- Determine the structure of big-deal pricing. Will you tie concessions to unit volume or dollar volume? Will you make more concessions when the contract term is longer, or payment term shorter? Will these concessions be lower unit prices, free functionality, free months (for SaaS), or something else?
- Don’t overlook the potential role of channel partners. Think through the role that channel partners play in your current business and how that role might change in the future. Will channel partners play a role in developing and consummating enterprise-level deals? How will the structure of channel-partner pricing compare to price structure of enterprise-level deals? How about price levels?
