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 beat B2B marketing benchmarks 3-5 times?

Rolands Ozolins — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 11:19:44 +0000

As we look at performance campaigns we did for our clients (in 2025 we run around 50 campaigns), we can proudly say that our campaigns are beating industry benchmarks 3-5 times.

For our clients it means that their marketing becomes become 3-5 times less expensive – that is a hugely positive impact on business growth and profitability.

As a result, choosing to work with us becomes a major competitive advantage for IT companies all over the world.

But enough bragging, lets take a look at numbers and hard facts.

What are B2B marketing industry benchmarks in 2025?

As the main benchmark I am using Wordstream’s benchmark research data about Cost Per Lead of Meta campaigns.

Wordstream is a US company that since 2007 provides services to online advertising industry. They have over 12 000 customers and, therefore, rich access to data.

According to their Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2025 research report, an average cost per lead (CPL) in Industry and Commercial industry is 37,34 USD (circa 31,66 Eur).

This is an average cost what advertisers pay to get a single registration (or similar action) for things such as ebook, webinar, free consultation and similar.

So, to put it simple, if you want to get 300 registrations to your webinar, your average cost would be 11 202 USD (circa 9 568 Eur).

Now, lets take a look at CPLs that we are able to get for our customers that we run campaigns for.

Results of campaigns IBD runs for IT companies

Let’s start by looking at campaigns we are running in September for our customers.

September was not a super active month, however it is obvious that we are beating industry benchmarks significantly. 6 times in Hungary, 4,5 times in Israel and 3,5 times in the UK, which is one of the second most competitive market in the world after the US.

But is it just one-time performance?

No.

Lets look at campaigns we run in q1 this year all over EMEA region.

In each case in every market we comfortably beat the benchmark on average 5 times.

So if we return to example of getting 300 registrations to webinar, the likely media costs if IBD rans this campaign would be 1800 – 3500 Euros.

That is a huge difference.

How IBD is able to beat B2B industry benchmarks 3-5 times?

There are number of factors and one of the most important is the advice we give our clients about the topic of the webinar.

There are topics that are in high demand, such as everything related to AI, and there are topics which do not have interest and, therefore, doesn’t make sense do do a webinar about at all.

Even more – there are differences in interest of various topics across various markets.

As example, in the US there is an interest in optimising (reducing) cost of enterprise AI models. A few months ago there was not enough interest about this in Europe to justify running a webinar.

Our client decided to go ahead anyway, and, as a result there were only dozen people participating.

Second most important aspect is how the webinar is described and positioned.

You see, when announcing webinar, we are asking people to give away their attention and their time.

Both are in short supply.

In effect, we have to be able to sell the webinar.

We have our proprietary frameworks developed which help selling webinars. These cover description of webinar, clear positioning of the webinar and producing multiple copies to run AB tests.

Best performing copy can be 20x better performing. It makes every sense to test.

Third – we have developed our own AI agents and fed them with every element of hundreds of our previous campaigns.

As a result we have a process and technology that can produce large number of variations to test quickly.

And this is how we are able to beat benchmarks 3-5 times.

What is the business impact of 3-5 times better performance?

Now it is best to show, not tell.

I would be more than happy to discuss how we can help you improve efficiency of your campaigns. Schedule a call to discuss here.

The post How to beat B2B marketing benchmarks 3-5 times? 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.

First class of Masterclass and Challange graduates

Rolands Ozolins — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 13:14:57 +0000

We are happy to announce that inaugural class of our Masterclass and Challange is graduating these days.

This is a specialised training program developed specifically for founders and CEOs of IT service companies outside of Western countries.

Over the years we have worked with hundreds of founders and CEOs of IT service companies, and we know quite well what are some conceptual things they need to know to be able to plan their business strategy better, run their business better, delegate better and, ultimately, sell more to the customer that they love working with.

This program’s creation was largely inspired by the massive revenue and value-added per employee discrepancy between countries in Western and Eastern/Southern Europe.

Eurostat data about value added per employee in software industry, 2022

Eurostat data indicates that the value-added difference between these countries is two to five times.

We believe this is grossly irrational, particularly knowing that most software development, web and mobile design and UX design specialists in East Europe deliver services of higher quality than those in the West.

We invite every founder of a company that is involved in providing IT services to consider participation in the Masterclass.

The best path forward is to start by viewing our free webinar recordings, such as How to Sell IT Services as Products, which SaaS Innovation Hub, a platform sponsored by Microsoft, hosted.

Another alternative is to view our on-demand webinar, How to Sell IT Services, hosted on this website.

Screenshot from the Masterclass and Challange discussing B2B buyers behaviour and purchase process

Based on the first class’s success, the coming courses’ starting dates have been announced.

November class starts on November 11th, and the January class on January 7th, respectively.

Learn more and register on the Masterclass and Challange page!

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IBD Consulting joins SaaS Innovation Hub

Rolands Ozolins — Thu, 23 May 2024 12:26:00 +0000

We are happy to share that Rolands Ozoliņš, our cofounder and Business Growth Strategist has been selected as an expert for SaaS Innovation Hub, an international platform supporting SaaS companies and software developers in their journey to Cloud, AI and business success.

Saas Innovation Hub is a Microsoft-sponsored platform featuring over 80 technical and business experts from all across Europe and Middle East.

As part of this collaboration, IBD Consulting will run a number of webinars helping IT service companies productize their offerings and improve their approach to sales.

Additionally, as part of the platform, you can now book a FREE consulting call with Rolands Ozoliņš directly on SaaS Innovation Hub platform.

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The first class of IBD’s GTM Bootcmap trainings graduates

Rolands Ozolins — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:36:46 +0000

On March 14th, we started our first GTM Bootcamp online training. Before the bootcamp we did number of interviews with marketing professionals and CMOs to make sure the content of the training is tightly aligned with needs of working marketing professionals.

As a result, 4 step training was developed to help marketers with common challenges they face daily.

Specifically, it is designed to help marketing managers and CMOs to

align with business revenue goals,
research their audience,
develop a strong UVP (Unique Value Proposition),
prepare a content plan,
develop an integrated marketing plan,
and make sure there are regular plan review proceses in place to make sure stakeholders are happy and marketeer is in charge.

While we have been delivering tailored training to customers since 2017, this was the first time we ran an online training open to any participant worldwide.

The trainings turned out to be extremely well recieved as evidenced by the number of unsolicated feedback participants shared online.

Apart from online classes, participants reciev proven planning templates to use. Every week there is a Q&A session to cover all the participant questions and provide participants with an opportunity to learn from each other.

The next cohort of GTM Bootcamp will start training in May 2024. Exact dates are not yet announced, however the registration waitlist is open.

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Does cold outreach work?

Rolands Ozolins — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 15:15:30 +0000

Have you seen lead generation proposals with very attractive pricing?

I have as well.

In fact, I have been in contact or researched 4 service providers.

Here’s what I think.

Cold outreach is becoming more popular.

You can see evidence in your mailbox – the number of emails is increasing.

Most of them are low quality, confusing, poorly researched, and annoying.

Does it mean cold outreach doesn’t work?

Not necessarily.

If done right, cold outreach may be everything you ever need to grow your business.

I have myself responded to cold outreach a few times to learn more about what cold outreach companies offer and how it works.

Let’s explore what it is, how it works, and if it can work at all.

What is Cold Outreach?

Cold outreach is a lead generation approach where you contact potential customers through different channels like LinkedIn, e-mail, and phone calls without prior interaction.

Typically, you target thousands of contacts, use automation, multiple e-mail accounts and, increasingly, AI to try to personalise the message text.

When doing this, you also engage in struggle against being placed in spam folder or banned from sites, such as LinkedIn.

Does cold outreach work?

Yes, cold outreach can work in some cases, particularly with longer messaging and activity sequences spread out in time.

We have had our own share of success with projects that involved reaching out to a narrow segment of people who are likely interested in demonstration of a product which uniquely fits their needs.

However, conditions for cold outreach to work are very specific and rare.

For cold outreach to work:

You need a really strong match between the offering and the buyer’s needs. It also helps if a product is easy to explain and demonstrate.
It must be either a unique offering with no competition or a completely standard (and therefore familiar one) with some very strong standouts.
Your offer must be super low risk. You do not sell with the cold outreach. Instead, you try to get the buyer to take the first step, like joining a demo or ordering free samples.
You have to contact buyer in right time when they are open to consider your product.

Moreover, you have to be super specific about your Ideal Customer Profile and Buyers Personas.

Generally, cold outreach works in rather rare conditions.

I cannot imagine that it can work well for complex products, those involving risks, requiring education, or depending heavily on the vendor’s good reputation.

If you are looking for ways to sell IT services, cold outreach is not for you.

Read the blog How to Sell Software Development Services in 2025 instead.

Moreover, for those who have a good reputation and guard it closely, the legal risks of cold outreach may not be something they are comfortable taking.

Nobody buys high-risk, high complexity IT services, such as software development from random guy on internet who sent you an e-mail.

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Are cold e-mail lead generation claims real?

Well, on average they can be.

I’ve heard of successful projects, although one doesn’t hear much about unsuccessful ones.

I talked with two companies which approached me via cold outreach but I wasn’t convinced these companies can do better than we can do ourselves.

Moreover, if you read the fine print, like in Linked Hacker’s terms of service, the data is based on average values from past projects.

They state: “We, therefore, cannot guarantee a minimum number of leads. Any numbers shown on our website are an average across our 2,000+ clients.”

This confirms what the other company I talked with said.

Yes, the average numbers may hold, but they cannot guarantee results.

As usual, the devil is in the details.

You should pay attention to the very definition of what a lead is.

According to Linked Hacker, “We define a lead as someone in your target market who has responded to your email or contacted you after clicking through to your website and has the potential to go on be a customer. Typical replies might include people who have shown an interest, have questions about your service, refer you to a more relevant colleague, or people who ask you to follow up with them at a later date.”

Assuming out-of-office replies are not counted as a leads, I believe only 10-30% of “leads” might indeed become sales-qualified leads.

Mathematically, it means that a qualified lead would likely cost from 249 to 747 Euros.

And this is huge cost!

And here we are – at this cost per lead, cold outreach doesn’t look any better than other ways of lead generation.

Moreover, lead generation companies require a minimum commitment, which typically is a few thousand euros.

I say – there are better ways to spend few thousand Euros on marketing.

Is Cold Outreach Legal?

For some businesses, this is a critically important question.

Some others would happily trade growth for (what they perceive) insignificant violation.

You see when doing cold outreach, you are likely using personal data, such as emails and phone numbers of decision-makers.

You are the ultimate beneficiary of the cold outreach campaign; therefore, by extension, you are responsible for handling personal data, even if you have contracted somebody else to do the outreach and you actually have never touched the initial database.

Do you have documented consent from those people to be contacted?

Probably not.

The good news is that according to GDPR, companies can use personal data in case of legitimate interest. Direct marketing can be considered a legitimate interest.

But is it?

It is more complicated than that.

Laws vary across EU countries, and even qualified lawyers and data protection officers have different opinions on whether cold outreach methods are legal or not.

So, there are certainly legal risks involved, which are hard to estimate as they vary across countries.

Some data vendors can provide contacts with documented consent to be contacted by third parties.

However, such data are not inexpensive. Using such legally acquired data would increase the cost of a lead generated at least tenfold, thus rendering the whole campaign financially impractical.

Is there a better and legal way?

Actually, there is a way to get contact details of people interested in your offerings and get the consent to be contacted simultaneously.

If you produce high-quality content, such as a guide, a whitepaper or an ebook, people who are interested in this content would be willing to register, leave their contact details and agree to be contacted.

Webinars work even better, because they allow you to obviously demonstrate competency and build trust.

Reaching out to those contacts is much easier for a number of reasons.

First, if your content is high quality and appreciated by the contact, she will be more open to talking with your sales rep. So the call our e-mail is not “cold” anymore.

Second, because contacts have self-identified as interested in respective content, you can be certain that they have genuine interest. As a result, you do not need to reach out to random people in your target audience, but instead, you can focus on those who showed interest.

This approach works much, much better.

Conclusion about cold outreach

No doubt, cold outreach can work for some offerings.

We’ve worked with such offerings that have a clear value, are easy to understand and demo, and are relevant to people we reach out to.

Even then, you aim to get a demo and not close a sale.

However, for most tech products or IT services cold outreach is not the right way to generate demand.

Additionally, there are legal risks, and with competition increasing (probably evident by your mailbox), and the volume of fraudulent outreach and phishing rising, companies are under pressure to up their spam protection.

The post Does cold outreach work? appeared first on IBD CONSULTING.

How to start with marketing your IT company?

Rolands Ozolins — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:58:29 +0000

Most IT companies reach a point where it’s time to get the word out about what they do.

That’s where marketing comes in.

It’s not just about telling people your business exists but making sure your business has a steady demand and is able to charge premium pricing.

In other words – marketing is a path to growth and profitability.

But let’s discuss this is a level further.

Why marketing matters for IT companies?

In simple terms, marketing helps you stay top-of-mind.

It’s about sharing your story often and in ways that stick.

When people see or hear about your brand regularly, they’ll start to trust it.

And when they’re ready to buy, they’ll think of you first.

It is unbelievably simple.

Only people that know about your offering can buy it from you.

If you want to sell more, ensure more people know about your offering.

As an additional bonus, good marketing means you spend less time chasing people and more time talking to quality leads who are genuinely interested.

And when you do it right, you can even charge more because people see the value in what you offer.

How can I charge more for IT services or products?

You see, the most straightforward way to increase profitability is to increase the price.

Price increase beats almost any other measure a tech company can make to become more profitable.

However, the price must reflect the value of your offering or nobody will pay it.

Value is a highly subjective thing, even for technology products.

As with most subjective things, it depends on perception and value perception can and must be managed.

This is what marketing is exceptionally good at doing.

You invest in marketing to manage your buyers’ perception of the value of your offering.

So that you can charge a fair price against perceived value.

What is a fair price?

A fair price is what buyers are willing to pay.

And if you want to increase the fair price, you must invest in marketing and manage your buyers’ perception.

Or else you end up in a downward spiral of high difficulty to sell and low profitability.

Sadly, many IT companies are in that space.

To conclude, your investments in marketing help sell more of your offerings at higher prices.

But how to start with marketing?

Lets discuss two options you have.

Option 1: Hire a junior marketing employee

Hiring someone sounds great because they’re right there in the office with you.

Many companies hire junior people right out of college as their first marketing hires.

I think this is not a good choice for the company of for the employee.

Here is why.

Modern B2B marketing is not a simple affair. For it to work you need to design quite a nuanced system.

Junior employees are very unlikely to be qualified to do that unless guided by experienced experts in the field.

Moreover, there is a considerable risk that your new hire will be unable to quickly understand your complex products and offerings, particularly if you sell to highly technical buyers.

So, you risk spending time and money with little results.

And quite frankly, junior employees need guidance and on-the-job training. Can you really provide that? Can you help your new employee grow professionally?

If you cannot provide that, it may not only be waste of time and money but also a bad first career step for your new employee.

Option 2: Hire consultants or a specialized agency

Here things are quite different, however, you need to pick your partners carefully.

An experienced partner will bring not only a wealth of knowledge and experience, but also proven frameworks (such as our GTM planning framework) along with them.

It will help you get up to speed quickly, avoid risks and implement best practice based proceses, which dramatically reduce your marketing costs.

In other words, you will reach your business goals faster and at less cost.

You may think external consultants are expensive. However, I would argue against this assumption.

You see, consultants are hired to do specific jobs and reach specific results. This naturally creates an incentive to work efficiently and optimize processes.

As a result, the productivity of external consultants is no less than 10x higher than that of internal resources.

Really.

The thing is that many businesses, once they are past the decision to hire their first marketing employee, consider marketing labour to be “free” or already paid for.

If, however, you invest even a small effort to estimate the cost of marketing output and results, you may quickly realize the enormous costs involved.

When planning IBD Business 9 years ago, we assumed we could deliver world-class all-included marketing for tech companies at a cost less than a single full-time employee.

This still stands.

Option 3: Learn

There is a third option, and arguably the best if you ran an IT service, such as software development, company.

It is learning the fundamentals or marketing and sales yourself.

Why?

Because with today’s AI technologies there are less and less need for specialist competency to run marketing activities.

Moreover, for your service business to grow, you really do not need a large team and complex proceses and systems.

Check out my 6-week Masterclass for Founders and CEOs of IT service companies.

This is an on-demand learning program that will help you grow your business without marketing team and even iof you hate selling.

How to choose external B2B marketing agency or consultant?

I would recommend looking at the following:

Has extensive experience in technology marketing and sales in the B2B space
Preferably has technical certifications and hands-on experience of delivering on sales targets.
This is important to ensure flawless collaboration with your sales team.
Knows economics of technology business, particularly SaaS business model
This is important to make sure marketing plans fit with business economics.
Demonstrates professional competence and shares professional content with the community
Somebody really knows things when he or she is able to explain and teach others. Producing original content is a strong sign of competence. You probably would prefer to work with somebody who can bring knowledge and insights to the table.
Have strong references
Have strong technical competency in marketing automation and other marketing technologies. You need somebody able to integrate different marketing and sales technologies and make sure your marketing and sales (CRM) tools are connected.
Insists on early involvement of company’s management and sales in the planning process.
This is a very good sign that your partners take the partnership seriously.
A bad sign would be your partner avoiding you and only working with your marketing team (if you have such).

Wrapping it up

Starting with marketing might seem like a big step to take.

However, it is essential for business growth and profitability.

Partnering with a specialized agency or consultant grants you instant access to world-class competence scaled to your needs and budget.

You get an increased probability of meeting your business goals faster with less risk than hiring a junior employee.

Basically, you get a variety of different competencies (strategy, project management, content creation, marketing technologies, analytics), which otherwise would require a sizeable team packed into a scope that you need and actually can afford.

What not to like about it?

If you are interested in exploring if and how IBD can help you with marketing and business growth, go ahead and schedule a call.

The post How to start with marketing your IT company? 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.

A Guide to Planning Go-To-Market Strategy

Rolands Ozolins — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 13:29:28 +0000

I wrote this GTM Strategy planning guide specifically for tech company leaders and marketing managers in companies that have a product and:

– already have at least a few paying customers;

– are looking for ways to scale their offering in B2B markets;

– average lifetime value (LTV) of a customer if over 5000 Eur;

– relies on a sales team to close the deals.

While this guide undoubtedly will be useful for companies outside these strictly defined criterial, keep in mind that this approach has been specifically developed over time to meet planning needs of specifically these types of tech companies.

IT service companies would benefit from different and simpler approach.

What is Go-To-Market Strategy?

In essence, a Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy is “a plan that details how an organization can engage with customers to convince them to buy their product or service and to gain a competitive advantage [1].”

This plan is developed to meet companies’ business goals considering realities and trends in the marketplace and the company’s resources and capabilities.

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/glossary/go-to-market-gtm-strategy

Why spend time and resources planning GTM Strategy?

Documented GTM strategy is an important tool for business leaders to be able to delegate marketing and sales work to others.

A company may consider that they already have clarity about the GTM strategy. However, my experience tells me that unless a company has made a deliberate effort to develop, discuss, document and regularly review its GTM strategy, different team members have different understandings of what their strategy is.

In such conditions, you cannot expect cohesive and coordinated teamwork. Therefore, despite everyone doing their best, there cannot be a good result.

Documented GTM strategy is an important tool for business leaders to be able to delegate marketing and sales work to others.

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One main reason for having a GTM Strategy is to reach team cohesion, clarity, and shared purpose within a team. Such clarity increases synergies within the team and frees company leaders from needing to manage low-level details of everyday work.

Another important reason is the better business results you can expect with a sound GTM strategy. A good strategy produces better business results at decreased costs.

The video below is a good example of practical calculations demonstrating strategy impact on business results.

Finally, a formally documented GTM strategy allows for easy review, measurement of results against plans and quick iteration if things do not go according to plan. My experience shows that reviewing the GTM strategy every 3 to 6 months makes sense as competition evolves.

How to begin planning GTM strategy?

Before planning the GTM strategy, it is best to gather information about objective reality in the marketplace. We have found that conducting competition analysis and buyers’ interviews are the indispensable first step before getting to strategy discussions.

Competition analysis

If you were going into battle, you would certainly like to know what you are dealing with and what it would take to win. Similarly, in business, analysing competition before committing to demand generation in the market is very useful. However, it is possible that after competition analysis, you may want to review your market choices. I have had several cases when after competition analysis, my best advice has been not to enter the market. Usually, this is related to very strong competition from venture-backed competitors in overheated markets, such as the US, before 2022.

Typically, we review competitors’ websites, and analyse traffic and source of traffic. We also look at the SEO status of the competition and the keywords they are ranking for. In addition, social network analysis provides information on what content works (and what does not) on which channel. On top of that, we analyse competitors’ use of marketing content and review website codes to identify marketing and sales technologies they are using.

Usually, it is also possible to get samples of your competitors’ advertising and get advertising budget estimates.

In practice, competition analysis means a mostly manual gathering of around 50 data points and summarizing findings and recommendations in a slidedeck.

Buyers' interviews

Byers interviews are perhaps the most revealing part of market research, which reveals a lot of information that otherwise would not be available. It also prevents biases and the risk of echo chamber effect when planning strategy.

Our experience shows that existing buyers are relatively open to discussing their preferences and purchasing paths. In some cases, we have revealed very significant insights. For example, we have had instances when buyers consider that our clients are providing products in different categories than our clients think.

In addition, it is pretty common for buyers to use different language when describing the products than the language our clients use.

Some questions asked during buyers’ interviews include:

What happened before you started to look for this offering?
How did you learn about the offering?
What alternatives were you considering?
Why did you choose this offering?
Who else was involved in the buying process?
What is the product category?
How would people like you learn about products like this?

GTM Strategy Planning Process

It is best if the planning process involves the company’s founder/CEO or product owner, marketing, and sales teams, as each of these parties can contribute insights into strategy development.

Before planning commences, it is recommended that the team get acquainted with modern marketing principles. This means understanding today’s buyers’ behaviours, the role of marketing content and the benefits of the latest marketing and sales technologies. Also, understanding the terminology and generally being on the same page with the rest of the team.

I estimate 2-3 hours of the briefing is sufficient for this.

The planning phase should begin with a review of competition analysis followed by a review of the results of buyers’ interviews. This creates a shared understanding of the market reality and sets the stage for the next steps.

Once the planning group is on the same page with modern marketing and reality in the marketplace, the planning process can begin.

Our experience with planning over 200 demand-generation campaigns suggests that GTM strategy planning usually takes 3 to 4 in-person or online meetings in 3 weeks.

This, however, is only possible if planning follows a proven planning framework and is conducted by an experienced process moderator. In addition, it is preferable if the process is undertaken by a person not too involved in the company’s everyday business, such as a non-executive board member or an external consultant.

10-step Go-To-Market Strategy Planning Framework

We at IBD consulting are using our own developed 10-step planning framework that has been tried and tested with hundreds of customers in tech industry. This framework allows us to focus attention on what is truly important for tech companies selling products in B2B space and complete planning in 3-4 weeks.

I estimate this framework covers 95% of all situations. There are cases when some elements of the framework are redundant or cases when additional analytical frameworks, such as barriers to purchase, need to be used.

Step 1. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

The first step is to define the ideal customer (company) profile. Typically, we look at the industry, company size and other criteria, such as technologies used, revenue, profitability, growth rate and other indicators.

In some cases, use of European NACE2 classification allows to identify of target customers precisely, as well as access to detailed statistics about such companies.

This allows us to focus next planning steps with clear consideration for the specific customers we are going after.

Step 2. Defining Target Markets

In many cases, companies going internationally are open to considering several markets.

In this step, we analyse and compare multiple options to select the best markets to reach the company’s business goals.

In this step, we often consider the number of ICPs in the respective market (step 1), interest in the category of the offering, expected marketing costs, need for localization and other relevant criteria.

Based on business objectives and number of ICPs in the market we may recommend focussing on one or more markets.

Step 3. Target Scenarios

More often than not, technology product purchases can be driven by different needs and different buyers within a company.

A simple example is selling to new customers instead of migrating customers from an existing solution to a new one.

In this step, we compare and choose the scenario we believe has the most potential to open the doors to conversation.

As an example, in one case, buyers’ interviews revealed that buyers chose produce because of their advanced process planning features above all else. It was clear that planning was the right scenario to promote, as it offered the strongest competitive advantage and provided most value to customers.

Step 4. Product positioning

Positioning is perhaps the most important part of GTM strategy to get right.

Positioning is the way how you want your buyers to perceive your product in a way that is simple and easy to remember.

Simpler is better since you want your product to be understood with as little mental effort as possible.

In this step, we develop product positioning and positioning against key competitors. The competition analysis and buyers’ interviews provide very useful information for this step.

Positioning statements serve extremely well later when developing marketing content, such as landing pages, sales scripts, ebooks, etc.

Step 5. Developing buyers' personas

Buyers’ Persona development is a technique which summarizes the common traits of your buyers.

Typically you want to document the following:

Title and demography
Jobs your buyers want to accomplish with your offering
The risks buyers want to avoid
The information they need to know to be able to proceed with the purchase
Objections that buyers are likely to have
Objectives your buyers want to achieve
Channels and media your buyers use

Buyers’ Persona profiles save time and effort when briefing content creators about the content you need to be developed. In essence, it describes target audience very well.

This is another technique which makes delegation much easier and content development simpler.

Step 6. Charting the buying process

In B2B setting, buying decisions are made in groups of several people from multiple functions.

Understanding and charting the buying process helps identify which persons at which stage in the buyers’ journey need to be engaged and educated with what kind of content.

It is quite possible that in this step, you will discover that there are additional personas involved in purchasing decisions that usually do not have direct contact with sellers, such as finance, legal or security professionals upon whose acceptance purchase decision depends.

Making a simple flowchart of the buying process is often sufficient to document the typical purchase process and identify stages in this process when you need to have content available to influence decisions.

For example, one project charting the buying process revealed that it is necessary to create specific content explaining specific data handling procedures for lawyers and data protection officers. While these persons were not usually involved in sales meetings, it was critical material necessary for their approval of the purchase.

It is important not to disregard technical buyers that, while not engaged in the purchase process, may be important behind-the-scenes decision-makers upon whose opinion purchase decision depends.

Learn more about engaging technical buyers in one of our #FriTalks webcast episodes.

Step 7. Planning the Customer Journey

Customer journey is a marketing technique that implies that before the purchase decision is made, buyers proceed through different mental stages. In these stages, they have different questions they need answers to, and therefore sellers can plan respective marketing activities and content to support buyers in their decision-making.

My experience tells me that this and a few next steps should be prepared between the planning meetings by internal marketing or consultants and then reviewed at the planning meeting.

In this step, it is necessary to consider what kind of questions which buyer’s persona would have at different stages of the buyer’s journey and what would be the best way to answer these questions.

Step 8. Content strategy

Content strategy is closely related to step 6. (Customer Journey) and again – it is best done outside of meetings and results reviewed at the meeting.

The goal of this step is to plan what kind of content, such as videos, blogs, ebooks, webinars, demos etc. would be appropriate at different stages of the customer journey.

Step 9. Engagement strategy

In this step, sales funnels are planned, and the most optimal marketing channels are decided based on decisions in step 6 (Customer Journey) and step 7 (engagement strategy).

Typically, tech companies use paid channels such as Google Ads, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Less used, but in some conditions effective, can be direct cold outreach over e-mail or phone. This works in cases when 1) it is possible to define and identify specific decision makers and 2) your solution hits an acute business pain.

Companies also must consider offline channels such as trade shows and industry events. Sometimes, PR or influencer marketing can be the most appropriate channel.

Customer interviews and competition analysis provide insights to make select the most appropriate channels.

The practical result of this and the previous two steps is a flowchart detailing channel and content use over the customer journey.

Step 10. Planning marketing and sales pipeline

The final step in GTM strategy planning is perhaps the most revealing in terms of answering the question of what exactly it will take to reach the business objectives.

In this step, we are combining all previous experience, information, assumptions, and decisions to plan how the combined marketing and sales pipeline will look like and how much we think it will cost to acquire a new customer.

While we certainly know that any projections are approximate, these calculations give a fair estimate of how the pipeline is going to look like.

This projection is immensely useful in planning business growth. Once you add on top of this calculation time perspective (basically the average time necessary to close the deal) and resources required in sale processes, such as the time of SDR (sales development representative) or presales engineer, it is possible to calculate detailed costs of sales and marketing in each stage of the pipeline, plan necessary personnel resources and plan respective cash flow from the newly generated business.

It must be noted, however, that while pipeline projection provides directional guidance and is useful to set KPIs, it is not a precise forecast.

GTM planning: outcome and deliverables

The outcome of GTM strategy planning is clarity and a shared understanding of demand generation activities that are required to meet the company’s business goals. This helps to plan marketing and sales activities supporting each other, reduce business risks and almost always – prevent company from wasting money in efforts to reach business goals which are not attainable.

Although such situations are generally rare, we have had customers that walked away from the strategy planning process with clear and data-based conclusions that their business objectives are not attainable from a financial perspective.

The deliverables of the strategy planning process are slide decks with competition analysis, buyers’ interview summaries and outcomes of the 10-step planning process.

These documents must not be shelved and forgotten.

Instead, they must be used to develop messaging frameworks, internal KPIs, briefs for content creators and paid media professionals and so on.

Companies should regularly review their GTM strategy, and I recommend doing it at least twice per year.

Lift up your management team

It is rather common that tech companies struggle to define GTM strategy and implement modern marekting and sales principles.

One of the main reasons for that is the lack of shared understanding and even a shared language about modern marketing and sales principles.

Modern marketing and sales are tightly interconnected effort that involves the whole team. Therefor it is very important for the whole management team to understand the foundational principles of business growth.

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