selling software development Archives - IBD CONSULTING

How to sell IT services with webinars?

Rolands Ozolins — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 12:53:56 +0000

Selling IT services generally is difficult, unless you know how.

The good news is that your system for selling services must not be complicated.

Once you find out what works, do it again and again.

In last 12 months our team ran over 100 campaigns for IT service companies: AI, AI Agents, Ai for DevOps, Cloud infrastructure, ERP and other topics.

We learned obsessively, used every piece of data and trained AI.

As a result we were able to beat the benchmarks and generate millions in pipeline.

What was the winning approach?

We tried many things – getting calls scheduled with experts, getting people to sign-up to ebooks and other things.

One approach consistently stands out—webinars. When done correctly, a webinar does four things in a single shot:

Gets attention
Demonstrates your team’s competence
Builds trust with the buyer
Opens the door with a clear first-step offer

There is no any other way to achieve these four things in one go.

However, if done right, this is all you need to sell a large project to people that hear about you for the first time.

We had 208 registrations and nearly 100 attendees. From just 40% of the leads processed so far, we’ve already created six validated opportunities and started three POCs.

Zsombor Gaal, Founder and CEO, Dezerius

Here’s how you can turn webinars into a repeatable digital sales engine.

Step 1: Plan with a Sales Goal in Mind

Most webinars fail before they begin—because they start without a clear purpose. Quick idea “Let’s run a webinar” is not a strategy.

Instead, start by asking: What is the business goal I want to achieve?

And what are the necessary previous steps before I am able to achieve the business goal?

To sell with webinars, you need to do 2 things very well:

You must have you have prepared the first-step offer and
Planned for the follow-up the next day after the webinar.

Prepare a first-step offer.

This is critical.

Selling a €200K project right away is nearly impossible – too much risk, too many stakeholders, too complicated.

This is also why cold outreach doesn’t work.

Nobody buys high complexity, high risk IT services from random guy who send and e-mail.

Instead, think, what buyers would want to know and what would they find valueable before they are ready to commit to large project:

A half-day architecture workshop
A fixed-price audit
A limited proof of concept

The first-step offer isn’t about revenue.

It’s about opening the door, showing competence, enaging buyers group and creating momentum for the larger deal.

My clients report 50–80% closing rates after delivering this kind of entry engagement.

This is huge.

This is why you focus your effort on selling first-step offers and not the large projects.

If you do not have the first-step offer ready, then you leave your webinar audience guessing how to start working with you.

Even if you delivered a great webinar, you will fail to sell anything, unless you provide a clear next step: the first-step offer for your audience.

Plan webinar follow-up

Second critical element is follow-up.

You must have a follow-up script ready, tried and tested well before webinar. A good way to finetune script is to do roleplays within your team.

The person doing follow-up should have their calendar blocked for the few days after webinar focussing on one thing only – researching participants, calling those who are qualified and selling the first-step offer.

Step 2: Run a Campaign That Sells the Webinar

Just think about it: you’re not just promoting an event—you’re asking decision makers to give up their most limited resource: time.

If you can’t “sell” the webinar itself, nobody registers and nobody shows up.

So you have to invest your best effort to sell the webinar.

Here is what works every time and what has helped us to beat industry benchmarks.

Use the “get the job done” framework.

Every campaign must answer three questions clearly:

What will participants learn?
What will they see (a demo, case study, or real results)?
What will they be able to do after attending?

If you can’t write answers to each question down in plain words or bullet points, you are not ready to to sell webinar.

Also this is not something you ask marketing or agency or AI to invent.

Selling webinar is a team effort that is lead by the CEO and selling starts with clear description of the value of attending.

Keep webinar ad texts clear and specific.

No poetry, no buzzwords, no methaphors.

Write like you would speak.

Forget “Elevating experience” or “Unlocking potential” – what does this even mean?

Instead focus on important business results your audience want to get, like: “How to Cut ERP Migration Costs in Manufacturing by 30%.”.

Short, to the point, specific.

Not creative.

Just pure business value.

Great webinar speaker photos

People buy with their eyes.

Speaker photos matter more than you think.

A professional, positive photo can lift registration rates by 20–30%.

If needed, use AI tools to polish them.

Test relentlessly.

Never assume you know what works.

Test webinar titles, headlines, descriptions, and images.

One of my best-performing ads started with headline: Stop chasing cold leads.

It outperformed several seemingly more “professional” versions.

Choose the right channel.

Experience shows:

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is fastest to start and delivers low cost per lead.
Google Ads can work but are slower to optimize.
LinkedIn Ads are expensive and reach is limited—may be fine for niche targeting, but not for scale.

If I need to choose one, I choose Meta.

In fact, I only use Meta.

All my experiements with other channels led me back to Meta.

Step 3: Deliver webinar content with Professionalism and Energy

If planning and campaigns get people to show up, delivery is what builds trust.

Prepare speech, not slides.

Slides are support, not the content itself.

You do not read slides.

Focus on what you will say.

Do a dry run.

Record yourself, transcribe, and review what you say.

It’s the fastest way to improve delivery, because any mistakes will be painfully obvious in text.

Respect attention spans.

Your competition isn’t another vendor—it’s YouTube.

People are used to speed and density of information.

So speak faster than feels natural.

Get to the value immediately.

Don’t waste five minutes waiting for latecomers—you’re punishing the ones who arrived on time.

Get the basic tech right.

Poor sound quality instantly destroys credibility.

Invest in a simple external microphone (€15+ in Europe and less than 2 Eur from Temu).

Place the camera at eye level. Add decent lighting. These are tiny investments compared to the value of the projects you’re trying to sell.

Here are links to the gear I am using.

Lights: Logitech Litra – great quality, adjustable tone and intensity, USB powered. The best: super easy to place on top of desktop monitor (that’s a rare feature). 1 unit is a great upgrade, 2 units will provide very good lighting from both sides.

Camera: Emeet S800 4K – large size Sony 4K sensor, more than enough quality, good low-light performance, easy to use. Easily beats Logitech C920 and similar. Works on Mac.

Lapel Microphone: I use IK Multimedia iRIg Mic Lav – all the quality you may need + allows to use of wired headphones in parallel (if necessary). A standard headphone jack is typically available on most laptops.

I use OBS Studio for recording videos and CapCut for editing and Demio as webinar platform.

Actively engage audience

Webinars are not lectures.

Use polls, surveys, and offers.

Ask participants to write in chat where are they joining from.

The more audience engages in chat and polls, the more they feel safe to engage and sign-up to offers.

You want your audience to feel as part of nice community.

Platforms like Demio make interaction seamless and provide valuable participant data for follow-up, such as attention % and focus %. These datapoints a very useful for lead scoring.

Step 4: Follow Up Immediately

Follow-up is where sales happen. Without it, webinars are just expensive content marketing.

Call, don’t just email.

One or two participants may respond to automated emails.

The majority won’t.

Pick up the phone and make calls!

That’s how you sell.

And after you delivered a great webinar, having a conversation with participant is very nice thing to do, because you are not stranger, but an expert who recently shared valuable knowledge and insights.

Use a clear script tied to your first-step offer.

Calls should focus on moving the buyer into that workshop, audit, or PoC—not a vague “what did you think?” conversation.

Therefor caller must use a script prepared and roleplayed earlier in planning step.

Prioritize with lead scoring.

Not everyone deserves a call. Score leads based on:

Attendance (full session vs. drop-off)
Focus (were they engaged?)
Job title relevance
Company fit

We use multiple AI models for lead scoring, since this is only technology that can make a reasonably good inference about participant titles (they may be misspelled, abbreviated, in various languages) and do deep research about companies.

Act fast.

Follow-up should start the next day.

Wait a week, and momentum is gone.

This is why in Step 1 you should prepare and plan for follow-up.

Common mistakes to avoid

No clear sales purpose – webinar must be focussed on helping you sell the first-step offer, which, in turn, is a logical step before buyer commits to full project. If you do not have the first-step offer prepared, you are not likely to sell anything.
Weak content quality – unprepared speakers, boring slides, poor audio will do the opposite of demonstrating competency.
No first-step offer – leaving buyers unsure of what to do next.
No structured follow-up – no follow up, leads sit idle, enthusiasm fades, sales never happen.

Get professional help

Webinars work great and, if you know how to do it, you can run them without a marketing team or any help.

However, to get there you must do webinars very frequently.

I recommend to start with using professional help from company that is running webinars frequently and with great success, like IBD Consulting.

By paying for help, you’ll likely save a lot in the end. Your marketing budget will be used more effectively, and webinar registrations will cost 3–5 times less than if you handled it on your own.

Learn more about our webinar offers and schedule a call to explore how we can help you generate quality leads with webinars.

The post How to sell IT services with webinars? appeared first on IBD CONSULTING.

How to Sell Software Development Services in 2025

Rolands Ozolins — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 15:06:30 +0000

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.

Selling Software Development Services in International Markets Can Easily Multiply Your Profits

Before we discuss how to sell dev services, I want to stress that selling your servics in international markets can easily increase your profitability by order of magnitude.

I have developed a tool based on Eurostat statistics that allow you to estimate your profits in any European country.

Use the tool and see what is your profit potential.

How Buyers of Software Development Services Make Purchase Decisions

Here’s something you absolutely need to know.

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.

It also can be highly profitable.

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.

To give a practical example, Fiverr’s take rate as reported in their investor information was 34%. That’s an extremely expensive way to sell.

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 any 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.

Moreover, my company has developed a process to get 3-5x better results than industry benchmarks.

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 100 webinar campaigns in the last 18 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.

Explore 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.

The post How to Sell Software Development Services in 2025 appeared first on IBD CONSULTING.