October 25, 2005

Compelling voice mails, pre-tests for your marketing, live coaches for your users, and insight on China's software market: Fresh ideas for ISVs

by Gordon Graham, Editor, SoftwareCEO

Every sales person — heck, every business person — leaves voice mails every day. But the tired formula you've been using for 15 years won't get you where you want to go. Here are eight tips on how to leave compelling voice mail.

Want to pre-test some possible terms for your next AdWords campaign? Two free tools on the Web make it fast and easy.

Looking for a way to guide users through the maze of complex product features? An innovative company from Toronto is rolling out a unique offer: live, personalized coaching to guide users through the maze of features in a complex product.

Trying to get a handle on China? It's not easy. But these slides from a recent conference of the Chinese Software Professionals Association point the way.

How to leave compelling voice mails
Selling enterprise software has gotten a lot tougher lately. But so has selling anything to big companies.

Just ask Jill Konrath, founder of Selling to Big Companies. She helps sales people learn how to penetrate major corporations, and she says it's harder than ever to get a meeting today.

"The average executive in a corporate account has 59 hours of work sitting on their desk," she says. "And they may have one open spot on their calendar a week. Executives can barely keep their heads above water. So they use voice mail as a screening device."
Every sales person — heck, every business person — needs to learn how to leave a voice mail that isn't instantly erased and forgotten. Here are eight quick tips on leaving compelling voice mails.

Voice mail tip #1: Don't leave a standard, self-serving voice mail.

You'll be erased in five seconds flat.

"If you say, 'Bob, this is Jill Konrath. I'm an account executive with XYZ Corporation and I'd like to' — you're gone! They immediately assume you're a salesperson, and they don't want to meet with you."

She says an executive will listen to two sentences of your voice mail before they zap you into oblivion.

Voice mail tip #2: Make your first sentence short and sweet.

The first sentence of any voice mail is your introduction.

Make it short and sweet, something as clipped as, "Bob, Jill Konrath from sellingtobigcompanies.com."

Anything more is wasting valuable seconds, which you can't afford to do.

Voice mail tip #3: Keep them listening with your second sentence.

One sentence down, one to go.

"That second sentence better do something to keep them listening," Konrath says. "You have to lead with a referral, your business case, or some interesting information.

"What problems can you help them solve? What goals can you help them achieve? What's new? What are other people doing?"

The key is to show that you've put some advance thought and research into your call. That alone will make you stand out from 95 percent of all callers.

Voice mail tip #4: Cite a triggering event.

This is a powerful technique that few salespeople practice.

Cite some knowledge of a "triggering event," something that happened recently that creates a need for your software in their company.

The classic example is a merger or acquisition, since that could well put much of the prospect's enterprise software up for review.

"Maybe the two firms have competing systems. Any time an M&A happens, that puts any software decision up for re-assessment," says Konrath.

Here's how she would craft that all-important second sentence of a voice mail, in this example for a supply chain software vendor.

"With your recent acquisition of XYZ Company, I know a lot of things are up for discussion, in terms of how to best eliminate overlap and redundancies in your supply chain.

"Name the particular business challenge your software solves," she says, "but remember, it's not about your software, it's about their business challenge."

Other examples of triggering events:

• A change in leadership
• Poor financial results
• New regulations
• Even a natural disaster, like Hurricane Katrina (be subtle here)

Once you've got your prospect intrigued with your second sentence, you may have another 20 or 30 seconds to spell out the rest of your message. Make that count, but don't dump your entire message in the first call. You will be calling again.

Voice mail tip #5: Script, rehearse, record, discard.

Tinker with your message on paper until you get it to your liking.

Then dial your own number and leave yourself a voice mail. Try standing up and smiling as you speak; many believe this will make your voice more positive. Try it. Repeat until you would take a meeting with yourself.

Then discard your script, and start leaving real voice mails without it.

Voice mail tip #6: Wait one week, then follow-up.
Even if your prospect doesn’t call you back — and he probably won’t — you’ve made a solid introduction with your first voice mail. Wait a week, then follow up with another phone call

Remember, your job is not done until you’ve actually spoken to your prospect.

Voice mail tip #7: Create compelling follow-up voice mails.

Don’t keep leaving the same lame message and expect a prospect to call back.

Follow-up voice mails should build upon your previous messages. Revisit our voice mail tips 1-4, and create enough of an interesting background so that your prospect is fully filled in by the time you actually connect.

Voice mail tip #8: Plan to make 7 to 10 contacts over a three-month campaign... not all of them voice mails.

Your voice mail is only the beginning.

Prepare for a three-month campaign, during which you'll make 7 to 10 contacts with that prospect. Leave several messages, and also send out materials during your campaign.
Konrath likes sending white papers and case studies, anything that will catch the prospect's eye — except a brochure.

"You want to toss all those brochures," she says. "For most of my years, I've been working with companies that create all this glitzy stuff. I've always had to reverse-engineer what marketing does for me."

What you want to do, she says, is your own research to help personalize the generic material that marketing comes up with. That's the only way to break down those walls.
"Remember that your biggest competitor is the status quo. Nobody cares about your software. They don't want to change. They don't want to spend money. They don't want the hassle, or the potential mistakes.

"Your software is simply a tool. If you can figure out the difference your software makes to the customer, the business value, that's what you need to express."
Konrath has lots more advice where that came from, and it's all good stuff. There are many free articles on her website.

For the past couple of months, she's been giving an intriguing set of teleseminars on getting your foot in the door at big companies. All past sessions are available as downloads for $79 each.

And SoftwareCEO readers can get 15 percent off your choice of sessions; just use this voucher code when ordering: SWCEO-NovPromo. Act fast — this offer is only valid until November 15, 2005.

Or if you'd prefer a book, check out "Selling to Big Companies" at Amazon.

Pre-test terms for your marketing campaigns

Here's a quick, free way to check which word or phrase to use in your next direct marketing or AdWords campaign.

Just visit http://www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp and type in two competing terms. The engine will show which term is more popular in all the pages indexed by Google. It's almost like getting a free test, before you test.
We even use it for our own editorial purposes: We weren't sure whether to say "voice mail" or "voicemail" in the item above, so we tried both. "Voice mail" with a space was notably more popular with about 1 million vs. 600,000 hits.

For a rematch, we tried a similar site: http://googlefight.com.

The winner was the same, but the numbers were wildly different: 172 million for "voice mail" vs. 10.4 million for "voicemail."

Googlefight has a more interesting interface that shows a little animation while your results come in, plus some amusing fights from the past. Try "Microsoft" vs. "the law" to see what we mean.

A live coach for everyone who uses your software

How would you like a live coach — available on demand — to guide your users through the next release of your software?

SOS Personal Learning Solutions from Toronto can provide exactly that. Their unique offering will interest any software vendor with a feature-rich product and a steep learning curve.

Using the SOS system, a user sees a window on their screen with a live human coach who offers personalized, interactive help in learning the key functions of a product.

"Quite often the user doesn't understand the application, and has to dig around and find out where things are," says Don Matthews, company founder and director of sales.

"Our coaches ask pointed questions to quickly identify the 14 or 22 features within the 2,000 features that are most relevant to them. Then we engage in a coaching process — not to fix it, or do it for them — but to teach them how to do it on their own.

"We've integrated the concept of CRM, technical support, and learning management. Our whole approach is about learning. That's a completely different approach than support."
SOS can provide their software as a hosted or licensed application, along with all the consulting any client needs. Or they can do it all for you. The company lists "eight pillars of value" they can provide, from reducing support calls to increasing sales of add-on modules.

Sounds good; how much will it set you back?

As a hosted application, the service starts at $70 per seat/coach per month, plus consulting that would run "tens of thousands of dollars." For more seats, the price per seat drops.

For soup-to-nuts deployments where SOS does everything, they have in the past charged per "unit," which might include a CD-ROM, headset, and 30 minutes of coaching bundled with a retail product.

For quantities of 50,000+, they charged $10 per unit.
Now they're moving to "value-based pricing" where they put their money where their mouth is.

"We'll take a smaller amount upfront, and then be paid based on the results we deliver," Matthews says. "For example, when I sell 15 percent of your customer base ongoing modules of your product, I'd like to get a commission on that.

"Metrics are critical for us. If our customer agrees to measure results, we'll agree to put skin in the game."

Who's on board so far?

SOS hasn't gotten any references from software firms yet, but it ought to be a natural fit. And they have signed up most of the biggest ISPs in Canada, including Bell Sympatico and Rogers Cable.

HP Canada recently experienced great success using the live coaching system to build sales of digital cameras. During the campaign, HP zoomed from seventh to third place in the Canadian marketplace, and customer satisfaction reportedly went "through the roof."
Microsoft Canada was so impressed they created a detailed case study about the HP campaign.

If you're looking for a way to build user loyalty and make a unique offer, SOS's live coaching could be the answer.

Decoding the Chinese software market

We've been looking for good intelligence on the software market in China, but it's not easy to come by.

This week we checked out "China Venture Capital Yearbook 2005," a thick research report that sells for$1,000, but doesn’t offer much help for software firms keen to get started in China.

On the other hand, there was plenty of insight available at the annual conference of the Chinese Software Professionals Association held in Santa Clara, Calif. at the end of September.

You can still get the slides from Lip-Bu Tan of Walden International and Dixon Doll of Doll Capital Management. These two VC firms have been active in China for several years now.

For any software entrepreneur dreaming about a Chinese adventure, this is an ideal starting point.

One intriguing suggestion that hit home with us: selling software as a service in China. This gets around the whole intellectual property issue. If you're never shipping out discs, it's a lot harder for anyone to pirate your offering.

In the coming weeks, we'll bring you more detailed advice on cracking the Chinese market for software.