Business to business marketers who have been generating leads for enterprise software or software application development companies have seen better days than the times we live in for sure. When you’re selling software consultancy services and development solutions the cycle is long and generating qualified ‘sales ready’ leads is a process that constantly needs a supply of qualified prospects and business contacts in target accounts.
I’ve often seen software development companies go after volume of business contacts and try and sell their services to just about any “IT” contact who is manager level and above irrespective of his exact responsibility and relavence as the correct decision maker. Whether you sell directly over the phone or nurture your leads through several messages, when it comes to software development, knowing roles, responsibilities and knowing they are the right decision makers within the company for the area of application development is extremely important. An IT Director isn’t necessarily your right decision maker because the letter I.T. are in his/her job title. The IT Director may be repsonsible for hardware, IT security, application testing or other areas. Similarly even a single Director of Applications may not be your best bet in every single case because he/she maybe repsonsible for only Java applications, only SAP applications or only web applications. While building an internal marketing database to use, be as specific as possible while identifying your decision makers.
For example: If you are in the application integration space, then verify the roles of your target decision makers to ensure they are responsible for applciation integration and would be the right person to connect with. Once you build a strong database of role based contacts, they can be leveraged in a lead nurturing program to help identify regularly which of these are ready to be engaged by sales. So if you are into software development services sales or marketing, go role based, it will help considerably.