I have worked with numerous software development companies all over Europe, helping them establish a repeatable marketing and sales system. I make a living helping them do exactly what I describe in this blog.
You will learn the following:
- How Buyers of Software Development Services Make Purchase Decisions
- How to Stand Out as a Specialist to Sell Software Services
- Why You Should Focus Your Efforts on a Specific Customer List (and make your marketing 10x more efficient)
- Developing a Unique Value Proposition for Software Development Services
- Use Content to Demonstrate Competency, Build Trust and Sell Your Software Development Services
- Why Webinars are the Best to Demonstrate Competency and Build Trust
- Why to Focus Your Efforts on Selling The First-Step Offer
- How to Replace Efforts with a Robust System
This article is written by Rolands Ozoliņš, Business Growth Strategist at IBD Consulting, former Microsoft executive and business trainer. Follow him on LikedIn. You will learn a lot.
How Buyers of Software Development Services Make Purchase Decisions
Here’s the hard truth:
Buyers of software development services are not buying hours of work.
They are seeking clarity and certainty about achieving important business results.
Once you can provide the clarity they seek and once they feel they can trust you, welcome to the table!
You are now among the shortlist of suppliers considered for the project.
But what exactly does certainty mean for them?
Certainty means lower personal risk.
You see, no one wants to be the person who picked the wrong supplier, especially not for a high-cost, high-stakes project.
That’s why buyers prefer suppliers that stand out as proven specialists—companies that have delivered exactly the kind of results they need, in a context that looks like theirs: same industry, similar technology stack, comparable company size, and matching priorities or constraints.
The more familiar you are with their situation, the lower the perceived risk.
That’s also why selling general custom software development is nearly impossible, and methods such as cold outreach are ineffective.
Services, as complex as software development, are not purchased on the street, from a random guy who sent you an e-mail or from the cheapest supplier.
If you want to build a repeatable system for software development sales, the first thing to stop doing is trying to sell “custom software development.”
Stand Out as a Specialist to Sell Software Development Services
As we just explored, buyers prefer specialists. It’s the easiest way for them to reduce personal risk and the easiest way to explain their purchase decisions to management.
So, if you want quality leads, easier sales calls, and higher margins, you have to find a way to stand out as a specialist.
The good news? For most companies, standing out is easy once you make a choice.
You don’t need to be the best in everything.
You just need to be the go-to expert in something that enough buyers care about.
Just one project, one case study, one slide deck and demo may be enough to claim world-class competency.
However, choosing a specialisation may also mean that the local market is too small to justify specialisation.
Fortunately, we live in an interconnected world and selling your services to international buyers has never been easier.
If you are specialised, that is.
To stand out in the market, choose a specific context where you can show you deliver world-class results, by industry, company size, technologies, or unique challenges.
This is how trust is born. This is how you get onto the shortlist. This is how you get into conversations.
When a buyer sees that you’ve solved the exact problem they’re facing—for a company just like theirs—you instantly become someone they want to learn from.
They would be happy to have a call.
If not for any other reason, then to ensure they are not missing anything important for their business.
How to Make Your Marketing 10x More Efficient?
There is a myth that marketing is expensive.
No, it is not.
Trying to sell without marketing is indeed expensive.
Let’s explore how to make your marketing 10x more efficient.
Marketing is expensive when you try to target everyone. When your message is vague (like we offer custom software development), your audience is broad, and you rely on luck.
But when you sell specialised services, you don’t need mass reach.
You need to market to a very specific set of companies—those that your services would serve best.
Start by developing your Ideal Customer Profile and building a target list.
Today, that’s easier than ever.
You can use commercially available databases, such as apollo.io to build a list of just a few dozen to a few thousand companies—filtered by industry, size, tech stack, and other key attributes.
With a small, focused audience, your entire marketing effort becomes affordable and entirely doable—even without an in-house team.
In fact, many successful IT service companies grow their pipeline without any dedicated marketing staff.
Just a great webinar, a compelling first-step offer, and a targeted customer list.
That’s all you need.
Developing a Unique Value Proposition for Your Software Development Services
Creating a strong Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is one of the most complex parts of marketing if you try to do it without direction.
You can easily waste hundreds of hours on vague, abstract discussions going in circles and getting everyone pissed off.
Try to do it differently.
Once you’ve chosen your specialisation and defined your Ideal Customer Profile, everything becomes easier.
You’re no longer trying to please everyone.
You’re laser-focused on clearly describing how you create value for one type of customer.
Start by listing the features, processes, and outcomes that deliver value.
Then explain the customer benefit of each item.
Add data points, metrics, customer quotes—anything that proves the impact.
Also ad importance of every item on the list (simpe A, B, C would do).
You will end up with a long table.
Great!
This is precisely what you need to do.
Once this is done, you can use Chat GPT or most other AI tool to help you turn that UVP into:
- Website content
- LinkedIn posts
- Blog articles
- Webinar scripts
- Sales presentations
Your UVP becomes easy to inject in any type of content you need to prepare.
And, because you have done your homework with strategic choices (specialisation, ICP, UVP), your content is highly relevant to your target audience.
And you’ll never again struggle to answer, “Why us?” or “Why so expensive?”
Use Content to Demonstrate Competency, Build Trust and Sell Your Software Development Services
Your business is almost virtual in the eyes of your buyers.
That’s certainly the case with most of my international customers.
Your customers see your business through your content.
In some ways, your content is your business—at least in the eyes of potential buyers.
And by content, I don’t just mean blog posts.
Think wider:
Webinars, speeches at industry events, valuable contributions to online groups, articles, discussions at meetups—all of these help you demonstrate expertise and build trust before the first call ever happens.
Content is how you stand out, get attention, and earn conversations with the buyers.
But here’s the trick:
You don’t need a lot of content. You need clever reuse.
One good webinar or conference talk per quarter can become:
- Several blog posts
- Weekly social updates
- Short-form videos
- Email campaigns
- Presentation decks
The short videos in this blog started their lives as parts of webinars.
With AI, repurposing this content is easier than ever.
However, do not make the grave mistake of letting AI think for you.
AI is an amplifier, not an inventor.
Your insights, your thinking, your voice—that’s what buyers trust.
Use AI to edit, remix, rephrase, research and, ultimately, scale. But never substitute it for your own head.
Buyers will figure it out.
Who would want to take time to consume your content if you didn’t take time to create it?
Get in Front of Your Audience with Webinars
You’ve chosen your specialisation.
You’ve defined your ICP.
You’ve created content.
Now it’s time to get it in front of your audience.
Start with the ICP list we discussed earlier. Then figure out where these people spend their time.
Online channels:
- Forums
- Slack communities
- Reddit subreddits
- LinkedIn groups
Offline channels:
- Industry meetups
- Trade shows
- Research-driven innovation events
Ask yourself:
What do these people want to learn? What kind of demo or insight would get their attention (AI use on specific industry, business function is super hot right now!)
What would help them trust you?
I find webinars to be the absolute best shortcut to getting in front of your audience, demonstrating competency, building trust, and selling the first-step offer.
Nothing comes close to this, except speaking in front of a huge audience at a conference or industry event.
However, there are important nuances to consider.
When planning a webinar, start with the end result you want to achieve and then plan backwards.
The most critical aspects of webinars are 1) follow-up and 2) the first-step offer.
If you do not have these two things sorted out, you will just waste time, effort and money.
For context.
My team delivered over 60 webinar campaigns in the last 12 months, almost all paid by Microsoft to help their partners generate leads in the EMEA region as part of SaaS Innovation Hub. We helped generate tens of millions in new sales pipeline, and we know very well how to grow businesses with webinars, both online and offline.
Please let me know if you need assistance with your own webinars.
Focus Your Efforts on Selling the First-Step Offer
As discussed earlier, one thing that buyers fear greatly is project failure.
They are literally paralysed with fear of making a mistake (that’s in fact why 60% of purchase processes end without a purchase decision – someone chickened out).
Buyers want certainty.
They want to reduce personal risk.
And in most cases, buying decisions are made by groups, not individuals.
All these people have some questions, concerns, and fears in their heads.
Even one individual doubting the project’s success can sink the deal.
Your job is to make it easy for that group to say yes.
Here is how to do it.
Do not try to sell the large project you intend to ultimately sell.
Start by offering a low-risk, high-value first step.
Something that brings your buyers together and involves them in an activity that allows to:
- ask questions
- voice their concerns
- an experience of working with your team
- better understand their requirements
- arrive at a shared buying vision
- do some user research and prototyping
- and gain clarity about project requirements, timeline, risks, and budget.
What can be such an offer?
Examples include:
- Product discovery workshops
- Scoping sessions
- Architecture reviews
- UX workshops
- Proof of concept projects
- Etc.
These help the buyer team answer important questions:
- What’s the scope?
- Timeline?
- Budget?
- Risks?
- How will this affect our team?
Most importantly, can we trust this supplier?
Our clients who use first-step offers report conversion rates of 50–80% to the next stage – the big project.
That’s huge, and this is why it pays off to be obsessed with the first step offers.
Moreover, many of our clients sell the first-step offers at great margins.
As a result, they make money even in cases when the delivery of the first-step offer doesn’t lead to big project.
In the last 9 years, I have personally interviewed hundreds of IT service buyers. They describe these first-step engagements as a considerable relief. They learn something they didn’t know, align internally, and build confidence in the project’s success.
This is something they really find very helpful, before they commit to investments in large projects.
In other words, they love the first-step offers!
And that’s how customer software budgets get approved.
How to Replace Efforts with a Robust System
If you’re a founder or CEO, your job is to do two things: deliver and sell.
Most founders focus too much on delivery.
It feels safer. It’s what you know and are good at.
But that’s not how you grow a company or build a profitable business.
That is not how to pay yourself what you are worth and build a world-class team you love working with.
To build a business, however, you need to learn something that you do not know.
To grow, you must lear to make strategic choices, learn to delegate effectively, and establish a repeatable system for sustained growth.
Let me repeat – your job is not to invest a huge amount of time, effort and money in marketing and sales, but instead, build a robust and straightforward system you can use repeatedly.
As simple as running a webinar every 2 months.
Everyone can do it if they know the necessary nuances.
If you don’t understand the foundations of how to market and sell technology services, you’ll always struggle.
You’ll waste time, overpay for help, fail to delegate, and constantly deal with feast-or-famine cycles.
The solution?
Learn what you need to know in easy to use package made for busy founders like you.
Join the Masterclass: How to Market and Sell IT Services
I developed this training specifically for founders and CEOs of software development and related IT service companies with annual revenue less than 85K EUR per employee.
With this training, you will be able to increase your price and start selling directly to international customers. Your current challenges with lead generation and unpredictable sales will disappear.
However, you will face new kinds of problems, such as hiring additional employees, managing tight resources and schedules, and finding a new and larger office.
If you’d rather prefer the new set of problems (and the feeling of “I made it!” that comes with them), start learning right now and get ready to start solving the new problems before Christmas.
