Getting started in this industry can be tough which is why we’ve put together some key strategies that you can use to sell more apps and services. Throughout the article, keep one idea in mind:

More Conversations + More Prospecting = More Sales

Sales is a numbers game, at least at first. So the more chances you have at landing a conversation with a target customer — the better! It might seem lackluster in the beginning, but keep pushing through. You’ll get more business in no time, especially when armed with the following strategies!

Here are some basic mobile facts that are good selling points to make when convincing prospects of considering creating a mobile app.

This can then segway into setting up a call to learn more or even into a sales pitch.

Walking them through the ROI is a very clear and easy way to convince them of the most important thing they’re thinking about: how can an app make me money?

We’ll use a simple restaurant scenario as an example.

You’re a local restaurant owner that is experiencing a slow night at your restaurant. You realize around 7PM that it’s not going to pick up. Without an app, there’s nothing the restaurant can do other than to just wait and hope a stray customer wanders in. In this scenario, though, you do have control over the situation because you have an app.

You, the restaurant owner, bust out your laptop and log into your app’s control panel. You send out a notification that promises customer that from 7PM-10PM, all dine-in orders will receive a 10% discount and all take-out orders will include free delivery. Within 15 minutes, you see a trickle of customers roll into your parking lot, phone in hand and wallet in their pockets, ready to buy your food.

With some quick math, you can estimate how much money they can make in that night. Times that weekly or daily and you can come up with their revenue from this action for that month — all from sending out a simple notification.

The point of the walkthrough is to show them the value of the app. Restaurant owners have a pain point, which is the problem of not having a steady and consistent flow of customers, and they expect the app to address that. As you can see, this can be an incredibly powerful tool.

A great way to emphasize the advantage your business has over, say, an app development company is to talk about the cost. On average, it takes 18 weeks to build 1 version of a native app and for this you can pay anywhere from $250,000 to $1,000,000.

Now let’s say you have a customer who consulted with an app development company and they gave them a lower estimate. That’s when you can come in and explain that paying for the initial build of the app is the easy part. The hard part is what comes after you receive your app.

You’ll have to deal with updating the app, it’s infrastructure, integration issues, sending out push notifications, on top of not being able to communicate with their team in real-time. They build the app for you, but their services don’t include the management of the app afterwards. Need an emergency push notification sent out after office hours, their time? Probably won’t happen. Tell them that these are the long-term issues that tend to crop up when working with one of these companies. Tell them that not only are your services are cheaper and more affordable, but all of the code and back-end stuff will be taken care of. Push notifications? They’ll have full control over that.

Standing out amongst your competitors, locally and online, might be one of the hardest parts of sales. Fortunately for you, we have some basic actionable strategies you can utilize in order to overcome this obstacle.

Market to a Niche

One way to stand out in a crowd is to stand in a smaller crowd. By marketing to a niche, you ensure not only that there’s less competitors, but it’ll also be easier for you to tailor your messaging and hone know your knowledge and expertise about one industry in particular. You can market to real estate agents, dentists, restaurants — whatever it is, just make sure you become the absolute expert in that field.

Use Testimonials to Your Advantage

When either starting a conversation with or closing a deal with a potential customer, leverage testimonials and case studies. An example of what you  can say is:

“Here’s another dentist that we helped with this app. He’s getting 3x his ROI and is getting 5 more patients a month because of it. Do you want 5 more patients a month?”

Use something that’s simple, sweet, and convincing. You just need to prove to them that what you’re doing not only works, but has a positive effect on the bottom line.

Have a 25/7/365 Sales Person…

…which is your website. It’s your biggest marketer and it works around the clock in order to get you potential customers. You have to make it a professional, slick, and informative website or else your prospects might not take you as seriously. If they’ll be paying you for an app and for marketing services, then they’ll be expecting the quality of those to be similar to how your website looks.

How Does Your Product Solve Their Pain?

Another great strategy to convincing your prospects that your product and services are necessary is by showing them how it solves a pain they have. For example, with the walk through with the restaurant mentioned earlier, a common restaurant pain is getting customers in on slow days. An app with the ability to send notifications would alleviate that pain.

Really analyze whatever niche you’ve chosen to focus on and think about what pains your services can address and solve. It’s even better if you can show how your app can help bring in more business as well. When selling, just make sure to focus on how you can address their pain, rather than talk about product features. The technical aspects of the app are less likely to convince them of opting into your service because they’re just a means to an end. You need to find out what that end goal is and start there instead.

Now that you have an idea of how to grab the interest of prospects, how should you go about actually finding them? We have four ways for you: cold calling, cold emailing, using your LinkedIn network, and asking for referrals.

Cold Calling

Cold calling is basically when you make a call to a complete stranger in the hopes that they’ll stay on the line long enough for you to schedule another call. That’s right — you shouldn’t try and make the first cold call a sales call because it takes time for you to build up trust with your prospect. Here’s a basic structure of how the calls should go:

Here’s a tip for every single call: try and schedule the next call while you’re still on that call.

Cold Emailing

Cold emailing is just like cold calling, except you send an email instead. While cold calling gets the sale done in around three calls, you can expect the cold email process to take a bit longer just because of response times and how much harder it is to build trust online. Regardless, the cold email should result in a call at the end anyway in order to close the sale.

Here’s a basic structure of how the emails should go:

When you’re ready, try and get them on a call and start by summarizing everything. Mention their pain, how it can be solved, and how you can help. Then go for the sale. If possible, try and take the payment on the phone — this will reduce the drop-off that tends to happen once you get off the phone with them.

Use Your LinkedIn Network

The great thing about LinkedIn is that most people on it are already in the networking kind of mindset. That doesn’t mean you should go off sending cold messages to everyone you can contact, though. Keep your target market in mind and message people thoughtfully. As long as you use it correctly, you can close up to a deal a day.

Ask for Referrals

If any of the prospects you reach out to respond saying that they’re not interested, don’t let that connection end there! Odds are, they might still be able to help by referring you to a friend or colleague that might need your services instead. Don’t be afraid to ask for referrals from your existing customers as well. If you’ve been doing great work for them, then they should be more than happy to refer you to someone else in their network.

Local Networking Events

On websites like meetup.com, you can look up local networking events such as for small businesses or any other events that your target market might be attending. At these events, the inevitable questions always arises, “So, what do you do?” You can give an answer such as, “I help dentists achieve three times their revenue by acquiring up to 5 new patients a month. Would you like me to help you?” Chat a little bit and be sure to get their email. After the event, email then right away so by the time they get home, your email will be in their inbox just waiting for a response.

Strategic Alliances with Agencies

We talk more in-depth about this in this article here ***, but basically you can build out your business by partnering with other companies that might be bigger than yours and have more resources, but you are still able to offer them value. The key is to ally yourself with a company that’s complementary to your business, not competitive.

Build Authority Through Seminars, Conferences, Podcasts

Personal brand is a buzzword nowadays, but how is it helpful to your business and how do you build it up? By building up your authority in your particular niche and tying that into your personal brand, naturally you’ll become known as a leading expert in your industry. If you do it well, then your prospects will start coming to you instead of the other way around. You can build up authorities by speaking in seminars, at conferences, and on podcasts. Just research your niche, find events and media that your target audience listens to, and work on getting on there to give some advice and industry knowledge.

Direct Response Marketing

And while it’s implied, it doesn’t hurt to mention that you should also consider direct response marketing when trying to find customers. Facebook marketing, content marketing, and even direct mail, depending on your niche, are all good methods to consider. Make it easy for your target to find you and then even easier for them to reach out.

We’ve got another article on outbound sales that provides an in-depth look to some of these strategies too. Check it out here.

An easy way to target specific people would be through Facebook and Google advertising. The steps to do this are as follows:

Some good tools to use for getting email addresses for this would be:

Now that you have an idea of what you should be doing — what are some things that you can do right now?

Set Daily Goals

Take daily actions towards making appointments and opening conversations. Set a goal like send out 10 or 100 emails a day, or close at least 1 deal a day. Whatever goal you set, make sure you work hard to reach it everyday.

Focus on Volume

The first few emails you send out are going to be the hardest ones. But trust me — it’ll get easier after the first dozen, then hundred, then five hundred. The more you send out, the more responses you’ll get. The more responses you get, the more sales you’ll close. Over time, you’ll get better and find more success. With volume comes more success and with this success you’ll have better data and more case studies to show to future clients. So don’t let the numbers came scare you, the fear will pass.

Create Demo Apps

Just as any regular salesman has the product in hand to show it off to their prospects, so should you. The way to do this is to create demo apps that are already available on your phone to pull up and showcase to them. You can even take this a step further and create demo apps specifically tailored to your prospect. Thinking of meeting up with a restaurant owner to discuss your business? Create an app for their restaurant before and show them on the spot what it’ll look like and how it’ll work.

Don’t get too hung up on the features, though. Like we mentioned before, prospects are much more interested in the end results. Create a demo app and show them the features, but don’t forget to tie this back to how these features can help their business.

Offer Value Upfront

This idea includes a lot of the thing we’ve mentioned earlier in this article such as creating an app and putting together reports and case studies. By building their app out for them, it takes the hardest part out of their side of the deal which is sitting down and creating the app themselves. Another thing you can do is put together a checklist of daily actions they should do on their app. The checklist can include things like check user messages, send a notification, make sure all information is up to date and so on and so forth. This solves the problem of them having to worry about managing their app, which is a common pain point when running a business app.

By offering all of this value upfront, you build up a relationship with them. By creating this goodwill, they’ll see you as a trustworthy business partner and are more likely to work with you.

Money Is in The Follow-Up

If the first email doesn’t net a response, keep trying. This is why you use an email sequence — which you can learn more about here — so you can keep following up afterwards. Follow up thoughtfully, of course, so you don’t risk annoying too many people, but the idea is if you keep following up, sooner or later they might think, “Hey, this person is really not going to go away. I guess I should take the time to hear what they have to say.”

If mobile apps is a new venture for you and you’re already a seasoned professional with other services, integrating the two together in your sales process might seem like a daunting task. You don’t want it to see like a random add-on or anything, but rather something that can really add value to your prospects’ businesses. You can do this in four ways: a checkbox upsell, adding onto a website sale, packaging it, or offering it alongside an offline customer engagement service.

One Click Checkbox Upsell

This is when you simply add it as an upsell option when you’re finishing up the sale. You can do this in person by inquiring, “Would you also like to add an app to this sale?” You can also do this online by adding a checkbox while checking out.

Post-Website Sale

After selling them a website you designed ask them if they’d like a mobile app that looks just like it. The app will be consistent with the website and is a supplement to it. You might have to convince them that having one does not forgo the importance on having the other, however. For more reasons as to why this is the case, please see our blog post on it here.  ***

Package It All Together

Include the app in a package with all of the rest of your services. Throw everything into one, website, mobile app, new logo, new business cards, and offer a discount for the whole deal. The advantage here is if there’s only one person or team working on everything, then you can ensure quality control and consistent branding.

Offline Customer Engagement Service

If your services include things like social media and customer engagement, then you can also offer an app. Apps help keep users engaged while offline. This is especially true if your users are on social media. If they’re on social media, then they’re most likely on their phones anyway. So why not create an app too?

One of the quickest ways to complete a sale would be to make it as easy as possible to say yes and achieve the results they want. How do you do this? Well, address the two biggest reasons why someone would refuse to take on an app: they don’t have time to build it and they don’t have time to manage it.

Build Their App For Them

Lots of businesses would love to have all the benefits of an app. They really do. They just don’t have the time to build it or they start and find that it’s too hard. In most of these cases, they’ll be more than happy to pay someone to build their app for them. If you’re trying to do this at scale, Buildfire can help you out with that. Just reach out to our White Label support team and ask about it.

So when trying to make the sale, try and feel out whether they’re reluctant to close because this is their fear. Then all you have to do is swoop in and offer this solution!

Offer a Tiered Management System

Just as a business might not have a time to build the app, they also might not have time to manage it. Offer one price that doesn’t include management on your part and another one that includes it. This “managed service” price could be a recurring monthly fee to have you or a junior team member run their app for them. Maybe you can meet or call them once a month to go over the any special events or deals you should be aware of that month, as well as any updates they’ll need to make to the app. Then you’ll go ahead and take care of all of this for them. It can become quite a lucrative steady stream of income — all from a simple upsell.

As a reminder:

More Conversations + More Prospecting = More Sales

At first your outreach might feel like a numbers game and that you’re not seeing much in terms of sales. But armed with these skills and strategies, you’ll find success in no time.

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