specialization Archives - 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.

Want to grow your business? Be obsessed with your ICP!

Rolands Ozolins — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:10:50 +0000

It may be tempting for a small and growing tech company to please as many customers as possible.

However, this approach is utterly unproductive and may, in fact, ruin your business.

Let me explain.

If you are offering your services to a broad market, it means you limit your possibilities for deep specialization in certain market segments and understanding the specific needs of that segment.

In other words – the result of your work is far from world-class.

This made sense in the past in limited markets (such as small towns or even a smaller country). This may still work in the public sector, which is very relationship and trust-based.

You build your reputation as a can-do technology service company that can do everything, and customers keep flowing in.

However, because you do not specialize, you cannot deliver a truly world-class product.

As a result, the innovative potential of your work is inherently limited, and customers keep choosing your services out of familiarity or habit.

The projects you take to a large degree are unique, so you work on them as doing work the first time. Because of this, you lack experience in managing project risks and cannot provide all-inclusive upfront pricing, scope, and project plan.

As a result, you risk project profitability and customer frustration due to being over budget and missing the timeline.

Naturally, the productivity of your work is limited, as possibilities for repeated processes are limited. You do many things as doing it the first time. Little, if any, economies of scale. Devs suffering from constant context switching. Nobody is happy.

This is hardly sustainable in an always-connected, always-on world.

Your customers will likely find out that other vendors provide products that are better suited to their needs, easier to start using, and cheaper.

On top of that, they come with best-practice business processes, and vendors are not only providing technologies but also know how about customer-specific business processes.

I talk about typical SaaS products here.

So, what can your company do to stay relevant, efficient and grow its business?

I have advised tens of companies to do this if they want to switch gears and grow their business.

I recommend taking 3 step approach.

The first step, establish your area of specialization.

You must have delivered some specific project for a demanding customer in a specific industry, and you learned a lot. Try to put that know-how to use to create a product which provides unique and demonstratable value to that specific customer segment.

Develop the profile of your ideal customer (ICP – Ideal Customer Profile). List characteristics of your ideal customer: industry, size, technology use, financial situation, etc.

Do market research and see in which geographies your ICPs are located. Analyze your competition to see where you stand in terms of competition and whether your product has sufficient commercial potential.

The point here is to develop something special with a super strong value for your ICP without regard for other customers. In fact, you should not work with any customer outside of ICP if your goal is growth.

Second step – standardize your processes.

You must standardize your processes to sell and deliver your product in this step. You want to plan your buyers’ journey and split the work and responsibilities by each stage of the customer journey.

You want to seek automation possibilities and possibilities to use less qualified and less costly employees thanks to developing standard procedures.

You do this to make sure you can sell and implement your offerings at a large scale with minimum effort and costs.

In this step, you also seek as much customer feedback as possible to finetune your product and achieve product/market fit.

Again, you only care about finetuning processes to sell and deliver products for your ICP efficiently, and you refrain from selling and delivering your product outside your ICP.

Third step – scale out

Once you are close to product/market fit and can efficiently deliver your product, it is time to scale out and invest in further demand generation. At this stage, you need to carefully plan financials to allow for investments in demand generation with considerations for the length of the buyers’ journey and payback period.

Most businesses recoup their customer acquisition investments in periods exceeding a year, therefore, it is crucial to secure sufficient investment to cover this gap.

Focus on your standard product for ICP customers only

There is a good chance that you will generate demand from companies outside of your ICP profile. Perhaps some large companies everyone dreams of selling to will be asking for that small additional feature.

Do not sell outside of your ICP profile. Be extremely careful with non-standard feature requests. Any deviation may lead to unpredictable inefficiencies if you have developed your product and services around serving a specific market segment.

For example, your whole customer journey may be blocked if your support engineers are working night and day to please a super large customer that asked for this one small feature that turned out to be not working. As a result, perhaps hundreds of paying ICP customers cannot get timely support.

Tuning your business to serve standard products to ICPs and then deviating from this path is probably one of the fastest ways to ruin your business.

Conclusion

Technology offerings are increasingly shifting to an as-a-Service model. The same happens with customer expectations for low friction experience.

This model significantly reduces friction on the customer side and can be extremely profitable.

There are three steps to start growing your business with the as-a-Service offering.

You have to specialize in delivering superb business value to specific market segments.
After that, you need to standardize your processes to deliver products extremely efficiently
You need to scale out once the product market fit is achieved.

The post Want to grow your business? Be obsessed with your ICP! appeared first on IBD CONSULTING.