According to Sales Hacker, sales automation and applicable tools are “software-based solutions that help you perform many sales tasks faster, easier and more efficiently.”
For Independent Software Vendors, implementing the right sales and marketing automation helps reduce costs and apply resources that will provide the greatest impact.
Most of sales automation centers around the manual rote tasks that are done on a daily or weekly basis. HubSpot has a great article on the pros and cons of sales automation and what it is used for.
In the following article, we will discuss how you can apply the lessons of sales and marketing automation to the demo and trial process.
The Traditional Software Sales Approach is in Need of Automation
As an Independent Software Vendor you are well aware of the complexity and costs associated with the traditional software sales approach.
- Your sales team demonstrates the product.
- The customer agrees to a trial.
- Weeks later… your sales engineering team spends hours if not days installing and configuring your software in the customer’s environment.
All for a POC that is often times free.
At a previous software company, we did a good job of automating the sales process to lower costs and free up sales engineers for larger deals. Smaller organizations would be invited to a group demonstration of the software. They could then self select to enter an automated trial process that provided them with the software installer, a get started guide, written and video tutorials, user guides and knowledge base articles.
While the program was successful, it was not perfect. Installing software in a customer’s environment is complex – to say the least. Software companies have to deal with public and private cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments each configured in different ways. Installing a product in any environment is challenging and if a bug in your software or the wrong configuration causes a minute of network downtime, you can pretty much kiss that sale goodbye.
Move Your Legacy Applications to the Cloud to Cut Costs and Increase Efficiencies
To cut costs and increase efficiencies, ISVs should web-enable their software and offer it as a Cloud service. This gives them the ability to offer demos from the Cloud and trials from their website. This not only provides a better customer experience, but in many cases decreases the time it takes to close deals.
Moving Legacy Software to Run in the Cloud is Expensive, Time Consuming and Doesn’t Always Work
While moving legacy software to the Cloud sounds easy. It’s not.
The Internet is filled with analyst reports and articles detailing the complexity and cost of redeveloping software to work in the Cloud. Methodologies have been developed to help navigate through the redevelopment process.
Even with all the careful planning, we are talking about software. Software that likely includes millions of lines of code configured and reconfigured by multiple engineers over years and in some cases decades. It is a surprise to read reports that after all the careful planning and months of painstaking work that the applications don’t always work the way they are supposed to?
Moving legacy applications to the cloud is not only complex as discussed above, it’s also expensive. Rob Peterson at New Relic has a good article on “How to Calculate the Cost of a Cloud Migration“. As he points out, while “[n]early every major digital enterprise is in the process of adopting cloud computing as a core component of it’s technology strategy, [m]any companies fail to hire financial planning experts to who understand the technologies, processes and complexities required to complete a migration budget.”
Can I Afford Not to Deliver My Software as a Cloud Service?
The answer, of course, is no.
ISVs that do not deliver their software as a service risk losing market share to web-enabled competitors. In addition, they continue to carry the cost and complexity burden of the traditional software sales model. But for many ISVs, the time it would take to redevelop their software and the high cost are a barrier to moving forward. This is especially true for small- and medium-sized ISVs.
Instantly Deliver Your Software as a Service and Automate the Sales Process
Cameyo is a built for the Cloud application Platform as a Service that securely delivers Windows applications to any device from any environment.
ISVs around the world use Cameyo to:
- Provide their software as a service to their customers.
- Demo their software from the Cloud
- Offer immediate free trials from their website.
Cameyo seamlessly integrates with major CRM and sales automation services like Salesforce and HubSpot to ensure customer information is captured. Cameyo also includes the ability to integrate the CRM’s native chat giving customers the ability to talk directly with the support team during the trial.
This following video shows how ClockOn, Australia’s most powerful rostering, attendance and payroll system, uses Cameyo to offer their customers a 30 day free trial of their software from their website. As you will see, ClockOn’s branding and and it’s HubSpot chat window is prominently displayed.
Cost and Time is No Longer an Excuse for Not Offering Your Software as a Service from the Cloud
If you are an ISV, you know that everything is moving to the Cloud and you cannot afford to live in the past. With Cameyo, the cost, complexity and time are no longer a reason to do nothing.
To see how Cameyo’s Application Virtualization service can help you quickly, easily and cost-effectively deliver your software as a service and give you the ability to demo your software from the cloud and offer free trials from the website, start a free trial or send us an email at [email protected].