“It’s selling Jim, but not as we know it.”

If you have read our three reports: get compliant, get optimised and get marketing – there’s only one thing left to do... get selling!

Hopefully by now you have read our three reports: get compliant, get optimised and get marketing.

Now you need to get selling! We thought we’d share some tips in a blog post this time.

 

How can you ‘sell’ when you rarely have direct access to the buyers unless you’re shortlisted, by which time it’s too late?

Quite literally this is the £100K+ question. Lucky for us, we have the answer. And lucky for you, you don’t have to just take our word for it – you can take it from those who have worked hard to answer this question, and have got the answer right.

Go and look at the successful suppliers of services somewhat like yours and study everything about them. But above all, study how they sell.

Selling SaaS on G-Cloud is different from a commercial sales situation or responding to a direct procurement Invitation To Tender. G-Cloud buyers are self-educating and take control of the transaction process; we need to adapt our sales approach to that.

 

Here is what the success role models we follow and have analysed have taught us. (Thanks to you all, you know who you are, although you’re unlikely to be reading this):

 

Do

• Focus your energy. The public sector opportunity is big. Too big in fact. So focus on specific departments, services or agencies (Land and expand!).
• Study the public sector blogs relevant to your chosen target areas and learn how to express your service as a solution to their problems in their language.
• Talk to people in the sector at any opportunity. Listen to them and solve their problems, then remember to show this in your G-Cloud listing.
• Find out where your success ‘role models’ exhibit, speak and blog. Analyse and imitate their social footprint.
• Use everything you’ve learnt (and are learning) about your target audience to create inbound marketing that generates awareness and confidence.
• Use outbound sales techniques to reinforce your inbound objectives.
• Use the G-Cloud data to find out who’s buying services complementary to yours from providers like you and target them with your marketing.

 

Don’t

• Just be on G-Cloud. If you want a slice of the enormous public sector market you’ve got to invest in understanding it and creating multiple routes to market.
• Believe myths and excuses. If you aren’t making sales and you have a proven product – you’re doing something wrong, and you can fix it.

 

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UP NEXT: Wrapping up the G-Cloud Maturity Model.

 

 

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Published by Advice Cloud under licence.