1. Yes, there is a ton of room for the company to grow (market is young and expanding rapidly).
2. I definitely can see the logic in making sales a priority. I have absolutely no experience selling to businesses, and would be happy to jump in the deep end. However, I don't know how you actually sell to large corporations. In the past we have just waited for RFPs to come to us. Any suggestions on how to actually pound the concrete looking for clients?
3. Good suggestion. Unfortunately not applicable in this situation.
We really dislike RFPs. Usually RFPs are a procurement requirement and the team has already decided on a solution. Typically they will be worded to favor the incumbent. We have never won an RFP, but that may be because we suck :)
Im not that good with inbound marketing, but we have been improving over the last few years. To get sales, people who are looking have to be able to find you. These days that means email campaigns, blog, SEO, adwords and conferences. Go to conferences and use them to start building a mailing list, before the conference identify who you want to meet and try to setup meetings beforehand.
Personally I hate all that and in my startup Im trying to do pure inbound marketing via SEO, blog etc.
Selling to large corps is hard, read spin selling and getting to yes for once you get in. The getting in is hard and the sales cycles are long. Basically you have to find someone that acts as a toehold to get you in and keep get referrals to eventually find the person who wants what you sell within the company.
If there is one thing I would recommend, that is go after small to medium businesses instead. they have their own issues, but you will have small dollars from a large number of companies.
Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate this.
1) I totally hear you on this. I was wondering what sort of response this would get. The goal is definitely to rewrite in portions. However, we've been trying to do exactly this for the past couple of years and it has been really slow going (because of the reasons I listed in the post). It seems to me that at least one more full time developer is really needed right now to make this happen.
2) Yup. That's one of the biggest challenges. Every customer needs something slightly different. I have few ideas in mind that would make the software more flexible so that custom work would eat up less development time. Again though...this means a big investment in the software.
3) That's a good question. Marketing has been pretty non-existent in the company. That said, we probably respond to 10 or so RFPs per year. We usually win a couple of those, but the bigger companies (Fortune 10000) have been passing us over. The questions this raises are 1) is this because of the software, or 2) is it because no one has hopped on a plane and flown out to meet with them and held their hand through the process (i.e. sales). I'm not sure what the answer to these questions are, but it's prob a good place to start.
1. Yes, there is a ton of room for the company to grow (market is young and expanding rapidly).
2. I definitely can see the logic in making sales a priority. I have absolutely no experience selling to businesses, and would be happy to jump in the deep end. However, I don't know how you actually sell to large corporations. In the past we have just waited for RFPs to come to us. Any suggestions on how to actually pound the concrete looking for clients?
3. Good suggestion. Unfortunately not applicable in this situation.