Cloud service sales development. First experience

    Hello! I want to share our first experience related to the development of sales of the cloud-service Zingaya web-telephony. In order not to describe again why our service is needed, I invite everyone to get acquainted with its website , and I will get right to the point.

    Strategy selection

    To begin with, we did not receive any investments, we initially did everything with our own money, that is, bootstraps and continue to bootstrap. From this it follows that we do not have too much free money and we need to use it as efficiently as possible. We tested the placement of contextual advertising by keywords for one month and realized that for our service it is inefficient and there is not enough money to debug such a channel for attracting customers. About the cost of media advertising on the resources that our potential customers visit, it’s better to be silent altogether, it’s a bust even if we got an investment :). Our service is quite new, in fact, the market for this type of service is not yet fully formed, and we need to bring information about our service to a large number of people. In the end, we came to the conclusion that we need to sell our service to large companies that have high traffic to the site, that is, in fact, have chosen the direct sales route to large companies. The idea is as follows - some companies will catch up with large ones, and we will handle those that won't catch up in other ways in the future, when additional free funds appear or we try to use other people's sales channels. Small ones need to be processed en masse to make sense. There are a number of advantages to the direct sales model. Firstly, this is a great way to find out what your customers really want (this is the most important information at the initial stage). Secondly, you are not dependent on partners and can flexibly change your offer in order to meet customer expectations. Thirdly, all funds from customers go to you and do not share with partners :). Fourth, this will allow you to learn how to sell, which is certainly a very useful skill.

    Choosing the right verticals

    Understanding that not all companies need the “Call from the site” function, we started looking for verticals in which our service will be in demand. To do this, ask yourself a number of questions and determine: for which companies the service will bring the greatest benefit, whether this customer is solvent, the size of this vertical, how difficult it is to sell to such a customer, who is a competitor in this segment, etc. For example, in our case, it is desirable that the company processes a large number of customers through a call center (many calls), and it is desirable that the call center number is clearly indicated on the company's website and the site should be visited. A very big plus of our service is its availability around the world, the main thing is to have the Internet, so if the company has customers-travelers, then this was also a plus for us. The main competitor is number 8-800. After analysis, we identified several main verticals: financial services (banks, insurance), airlines, large e-commerce / retail and travel companies.

    Collection and analysis of the first statistics

    We managed to put our function to collect the first interesting statistics on the website of the following companies:
    • Siberia Airlines (S7)
    • Bank Renaissance Credit
    • Qiwi payment system
    • Softkey Online Store
    • Megaplan
    • several more sites of travel companies

    I must say that the statistics helped us a lot, we began to present what approximately% of calls from the total number of calls to the company can go through our function, what is the approximate average call duration, geographic distribution of callers and we got a lot of other useful information. After analyzing it, we were able to more clearly formulate our “message” for one or another vertical. In the future we will prepare relevant case studies and post them on the site. It should be noted that when working with large customers, the sales cycle can stretch for months, so you need to constantly develop as many leads as possible, because not all of them may eventually agree to purchase the service. Sales is a system that needs to be built and debugged, boasting that we have already achieved this, unfortunately, we cannot yet, but we work and hope

    Pricing adjustment

    Despite the fact that we sold to large customers, the small ones also pulled themselves up and it turned out that the minimum tariff plan that we had offered earlier ($ 30 for 500 minutes per month) was too expensive for them, and they didn’t need so many minutes, so we We changed the tariff plans for Russia and made a cheap plan ($ 10 for 150 minutes per month), to which small companies selling anything via the Internet are currently subscribing. In general, the main task is to determine the minimum entry price threshold for your service.

    PS If you liked the article, we will be happy to discuss it in the comments and, if the response is positive, we are ready to continue to write similar articles in the future as we gain experience.

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