There is no shortage of ways to get a contact at a prospective account.  In the off-line world there are traditional and still powerful techniques such as partner or customer referrals and attendance at trade shows.  On-line we can connect through LinkedIn or Facebook.  We can perform an email marketing campaign.  Alternatively our storefront to the internet, our website, can provide us with contact information to follow up on.

Qualification the Hard Way

Once the contact has been collected you need to judge their propensity to buy your software.  Tracking that contacts behavior on social networks and your website is a definite way to understand their interest.  But the only true way you will know you have someone your sales team should be focused on is when they want to try your software out.

Software Downloads Don’t Work

A download of an evaluation version of your software is fraught with uncertainty.  Was the download successful?  Were they able to easily install your software?  Once they installed your software, did they actually use it?  In fact, an increasing number of your customers ban the ability to download software behind the firewall, and so this is not even an option for some of your customers.

Shipping Sales Engineers with Software is Costly

Sending your software with a sales engineer to install your software on your customers system may appear to be a sure-fire way of gauging interest and ensuring a good user experience, but that’s a very expensive way to do it.  Increasingly your customers are spread out all over the world, so you could be spending thousands on airfares and accommodations.  That may be considered a small price to pay if the ASP of your software is high enough, but what about the opportunity cost involved.  While your valuable sales engine is on the plane, in a hotel or asleep in a different time zone they cannot be serving other potentially higher qualified prospects.  Finally, after the software has been installed on-site at the prospect your sales team is blind.  They don’t know when the software is being used, how often, or if it’s being used at all.
All of this effort and cost can ultimately result in a very expensive “fishing expedition” and the potential loss of other prospects that would have been better served.  This is where Xuropa comes in.

Three Steps to Prospect Self-Qualification

By installing your software on the Xuropa Platform you now have the perfect vehicle to qualify leads from all of the globe 24/7.

Step 1: Invite Your Contacts

Take the contacts that you’ve generated from a trade show or an email campaign and invite them to try out your software on the cloud.  Using Xuropa you simply upload your contacts and send out an email from the platform.  The platform includes a link that takes your prospects directly to your software on the cloud.

Step 2: Your Contacts Self-Qualify

Those prospects that click on your invitation link will start using your software on the cloud with just their browser.  There are no downloads or installations at all.  And the whole process is extremely secure.

As your prospects use your software (or review documentation, presentations, or manuals, etc.) the Xuropa Platform is gathering data.  Everything that your prospect does is analyzed and their propensity to buy calculated.

Step 3: Automated Prioritization and Follow Up

The Enterprise level account of Xuropa provides sales analytics, lead qualification and prioritization tools.  Each prospect is literally plotted on a Sales Funnel and ranked for your marketing team and sales team to follow up appropriately.
Now you can replace the costly and vague processes of software evaluations of the past with a powerful software sales solution.  Xuropa was built from the ground up to enable your customers to qualify themselves while they use your software and provide you with complete control and visibility into your customers and how they use your software.
Check out the Case Study if you’d like to see the results that Cadence Design Systems were able to achieve.

Posted under CRM, Xuropa

A traditional method of generating leads is to attend an industry focused trade show. This is extremely useful to not only generate leads, but also to qualify them. With a brief conversation a seasoned sales professional can quickly ascertain the prospects propensity to buy.

However, software sales professionals need cost effective ways to generate and qualify prospects year round and globally. The best way to do that is to have your software available on the cloud for prospects to try out for themselves, with just the use of their browser.

Data gathered while the prospect uses your software can be used to qualify the prospect. And your sales force is then able to focus their efforts on the select few customers with the highest propensity to buy…..to immediately impact their sales numbers in the short term.

This is exactly what Cadence used the Xuropa Platform. To review some of their results and how you could benefit from using the Xuropa Platform, download the Case Study now.

Posted under CRM, Xuropa

OK, part of why this post is here is that it gave me an excuse to put up an image of Iron Man. Out of all of the Avenger movies that have come out recently, this has to be the best IMHO. Maybe it’s because of Robert Downey Jr.’s acting ability, I don’t know - he plays RDJ so well though! But I digress.

What really caught my eye was an article on Forbes.com that gave a peak into the future of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) made by Anthony Leaper of SAP.

Essentially, in the age of absolute awareness of your customer’s actions (and reactions), your CRM should be able to take the mountains of relevant data generated, process it and then present to the customer service representative and the customer themselves the type of service they would expect from an all knowing and extremely thoughtful butler - Jarvis.

The customer should feel like they are known, cared about and being taken care of.  The sales representative should be provided information salient to the customer in an easily digestible form.  All of this is to happen seamlessly, intelligently, and in real time.

It’s all quite impressive.  You should read the article here.

(Having said all of that, when you go to www.sap.com you’re first presented with a drop down menu to select your country and region…)

Posted under CRM, Sales Automation