Since this is pure B2B sales, there are several approaches to this issue.

There is a concept of inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing

This is a strategy to attract potential customers naturally, by creating useful and interesting content that solves their problems and answers their questions.

Examples for an IT company:

·       Maintaining a technical blog .

· SEO-optimization of the website and articles to attract organic traffic.

·       Webinars on highly specialized topics.

The goal: The client comes to you because he sees the value and expertise of the company.

Outbound Marketing

This is an active promotion and customer search, when the company itself initiates contact with potential customers.

Examples for an IT company:

·       Cold emails on LinkedIn (outreach).

·       Participation in exhibitions and conferences with the presentation of services.

·       Launch of paid ads (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads).

·       Direct calls to companies that may be interested in outsourcing IT projects.

The goal: To find a client proactively and convince them to consider your services.

We have now decided to focus on outback marketing, especially considering that we would like to develop the export of our company's IT services, which means attracting customers from other countries.

We've been thinking for a long time about how to do this with a small budget, because in the process of marketing experiments and hypothesis testing, there will inevitably be mistakes and wasted budgets.

In the beginning, we decided to focus on the UPWORK platform. This platform is designed to work with "hot" clients who have projects "here and now". Here you need to respond very quickly, be ready to communicate with clients (correspondence and calls) at any time of the day without delay, and, of course, in English.

I will not hide that not everyone can successfully earn money on this platform. We need expert advice on filling out and optimizing profiles, a clear specialization (preferably a narrow niche where there will be less competition – after all, about 50 performers usually respond to one project, and only one will be chosen.

In addition, on this platform, you need to be ready to work with small checks (at least for the first time) – $ 100 per project may already be a good result to start with, while you are building a portfolio of completed works.

Now we have decided to pay more attention to sales through LinkedIn. This professional social networkThe network makes it possible to write directly to the people you are interested in in the companies you are interested in in any country of the world. However, to do this, you need to buy a subscription to Sales Navigator, which is expensive – more than $ 100 per month from each account.

But using the built–in filters, you can find the clients you are interested in (including filtering by geographical location, company size, position of a person - from a simple developer to CEO, work experience in the industry and specifically in this company, etc.).

Next, you need to create a "selling" message that you will write to this person. Ideally, you can personalize it for this company. (considering the news of this company, for example).

There are various programs that allow you to automate the sending of such messages. We don't really like automation. Despite the fact that we are an IT company and use advanced technologies and solutions, my opinion is that sales should be done by people for people, especially in such a complex B2B field as custom service development. Therefore, we decided not to use programs that automate lead generation. Aren't you also tired of annoying personal and email messages from hundreds of faceless companies that send spam for $100 per month on a budget?

We decided to hire live client managers and sales managers. This allows you to have high-quality communication with clients, to understand the needs of a partner in order to offer the optimal solution, both in terms of quality and budget.

 Yes, it costs more, but we don't want to save money on communicating with clients (and potential clients).

We also decided to develop our representative offices in different countries, so that , if necessary, we could hold not only a conference call, but also a live meeting offline. Now We have found several partners in European countries, and we continue to try to find a partner in the USA or Canada.

You need to be prepared that this is a long way, and it may take 6-9-12 months from the first contact to the conclusion of the contract. But you will get the opportunity to work with large clients who have development needs and appropriate budgets to pay for your company's services.

P.S. the text was written manually by a human, not an AI :)

With respect,

AgileSoft.kz

Kruglyak.oleg@agilesoft.kz