How do I market and sell software to businesses through direct mail?

Three People Whose Decision You Must Affect

Business software looks simple until you try to sell it. In most organizations, there are three people whose decision you must affect.

• Senior management: CEO, CFO, COO, Vice Presidents, etc.
• Second, the actual users, who are usually middle managers or administrators.
• Finally, the IS department, from the programmers to the systems analysts.

Most C-level executives, end users, and administrators are not techies. They value different things, and respond differently to a mailing, and you shouldn’t write to them the same way you would to IS.

Non-technical buyers don’t care about process, only results and how it affects the bottom line. They want the big picture. They want problems solved, while engineers, scientists, programmers are happy figuring out how to get problems solved. Give an engineer a hard problem and you have made their day, because they LIKE solving the problem.

So remember: when selling to the non-techies, push benefits, business results, and the vendor’s credibility. A big and established name, backed by good credentials, does much of your selling for you.

The IS people, on the other hand, want to hear about the platform, the scalability, the integration, the reliability, the specifications, the limitations, how easy it is to install and maintain.

High-priced Software

When selling software that the customer perceives as expensive, put it in units per user, or per site. If you have a quick payback, then talk about return on investment. Do this only if you have the statistics to prove it.

A mailing for SurfControl, software that monitors and controls employees’ Internet usage, says $300 a week per employee is being lost to personal surfing and 4 out of 5 visits to the Playboy site are coming from Fortune 500 companies. The price of a license is shown as only a few dollars per user. Once you made the point that personal use was costing them a small fortune, the price was tiny.

In most cases, the purpose of your mailing for high-priced software is not to actually take an order from the reader. Rather, it’s to get you an appointment with the decision maker. Call the appointment a free needs analysis with recommendations. What you are really doing is getting information that you can use to write a bid that the customer will accept.

One way to increase response to your mailings is the use of premiums — bonus items as an incentive to order your product or service. For lead generation and mail order packages, premiums are proven to increase response. Free white papers, books, software, training events, phone or Web conferences have all worked.

You could offer a premium that is an ROI calculator, typically an Excel-based application on a disk. The customer would enter their own figures and see whether the product pays for itself. It’s a smart way to get the customer to do his own analysis.

The premium has to be something the prospect really wants, and relate to your offering. Example: suppose a Web site design company offers to make four free digital pictures of a prospect’s employees for their site’s staff page. Seeing his employees online, the prospect asks what a pro job on the entire site would run.

Reply Medium

There are four basic ways to reply: a paper form (fax-backs, reply card, reply envelope), online, phone and fax. A software firm owner at a conference claimed all they needed were Internet replies. Here’s the truth: there is no way to know for sure what reply medium an individual prospect prefers. So offer all of them.

The IS staff will be perfectly happy with an online reply, but oddly enough, you can’t assume that about other non-techie prospects. Some non-techies may dislike or be intimidated by using Web sites.

So when you do a mailing to an IS audience, always include an option to reply on the Web.

In the end, it’s a few simple things. Speak the buyer’s business language. And test every variable and don’t assume that you know. You may think you know all that works, but most times you don’t and your customers are going to show you this very soon.