Yesterday on a call with my mastermind group, someone asked a question:
How do I sell to my E-Commerce App to Agencies, so that they can in turn sell it to their customers?
As the majority of us in the group either currently run an agency or have participated in one in the past, it was good to hear a stream of opinions come forward, but most of them focused on a couple of fundamentals.
Key principles for getting Agencies:
- Have a dedicated customer person for agencies & their customers.
- Focus on selling the solution to a core problem a customer is experiencing & how you differ from the competition. Talk about pricing in terms of extra revenue generated or time/money saved by using your solution.
- Build relationships with your agency partners, remember that there’s always another person on the other side. Win them over & you get referrals for days.
What NOT to do when trying to work with Agencies:
- Focusing on pushing some kind affiliate deal structure. This leads to lack of alignment between what the customer needs vs what the agency is motivated in selling. People motivated by a small percentage of your license will bring crappy customers, that in turn with result in a lot more customer support needs.
- Outbound sales emails, especially mass mailing based on utilizing any form of a mail merge. In other words, if you email someone out of the blue and the email isn’t written custom to that particular person (spam), you’re basically building up bitterness in that person & your company.
- Focusing on the point that your solution is cheaper than existing competitors. Perceived value is a major factor when choosing a partner to work with: too cheap and you seem like you might not last a year & most likely have poor customer support.
So to re-iterate: Establish a relationship, build trust, focus on helping without pitching & provide excellent customer support, the rest will take care of itself.