Forty percent of all the leads your software firm generates will never be ready to engage with your sales team.
Why? Avangate, which is responsible for that figure, believes it's because you keep filtering out leads that don't "qualify" or meet a certain set of purchasing power standards. Raj Badarinath, senior director of product marketing at Avangate, says this creates a "lead purgatory."
As you might have guessed, Avangate believes there is a better way. By taking all of those leads and prospects who are never going to be ready for direct sales and giving them an online self-service path, those leads, which may not be ready for large-sized deals just yet, are given small-sized deals. Thus, growing businesses are able to sign up, explore the products and upsell when ready.
Software companies can work with Avangate to put their portfolios online, making their products consumable in smaller chunks. Instead of selling 1,000 seat licenses, for example, they are now selling five seats of 10, making it accessible at the lowest common dominator.
From a sales perspective, enterprises are also able to engage with those leads in a more personalized manner, because they can track what parts of the application the businesses are using, who is using it, etc. Badarinath says by clients using software applications in accessible amounts, they are training themselves, reducing sales team costs and then upselling themselves. They are becoming more educated than the salespersons with companies that have hundreds of items to sell.