Improve your SaaS sales results
A 10-minute read of bespoke material designed to be read within a Polish-Anglo context.
This article is how to make a prospect feel safe about hiring you in preference to:
Developing their UK internal capacity.
Engaging a UK based resource.
Engaging a big brand player.
Delaying their decision.
The authors of this article are:
Bob Spence: Director of International Business Development for C4DI.
Kaja Szczygieł: International Business Development Lead at C4DI and Relationship Specialist at Future Processing Software Gliwice.
Bob: Why should you care about the UK Tech economy?
Kaja: It has the biggest need for Tech talent! The UK is the ‘Number One’ Tech revenue opportunity in Europe. An exceptional country to raise capital…less exceptional in terms of accessing readily available talent and developing a scalable Tech capacity. Tech vacancies make up 12% of all available jobs in the UK, with just over 50% of these jobs available outside of London and the Southeast.
More opportunities to subcontract, partner, collaborate, sell to, and engage with exist in the UK than anywhere else in Europe.
Tell your marketing Director and shareholders that:
UK ‘spend potential’ in Tech should be your target market.
UK Tech investment was 35% of the £76bn that flowed into Europe tech 2021.
2021 was the best year ever for UK tech sector with £26bn in VC, 116 unicorns
63% of investment into UK Tech was International!
The UK Tech ecosystem is valued at $585bn. 120% more than in 2017.
Germany is valued at $291bn. (Less than 50% of the UK).
The UK Tech sector launched a new business every 30-minutes in 2020.
This sales material has been developed from experiences in 2020 and 2021.
Bob: We explore the impact of national culture on business development; A.K.A. making sales! To measure differences our reference points are the national culture models of Geert Hofstede. Prof Hofstede is renowned for his thinking and research on cross-cultural behaviour.
Kaja: This article is how to make a prospect feel safe about hiring you in preference to developing their existing internal capacity or engaging UK resources.
It is an old marketing strap line that:
‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’.
The expression: “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, has been around since the 1970s. This was never an official strap line of IBM but the unattributable nature of this expression amplified its power. In doing so this expression has become ingrained within the psyche of many decision makers over the past 40 years.
In broader terms it means nobody ever got fired for investing Tech budget by:
Scaling up their internal resource.
Reengaging an incumbent supplier.
Engaging with a Megabrand.
Some other safer option.
(Please feel free to replace IBM with the “safe” option of your choice).
Bob: In the previous decade, from 2010, this mantra was compounded by UK purchasing reacting to FUD:
Fear.
Uncertainty.
Doubt.
FUD has been used as a lethal tool in the decision-making justification arsenal, to stay safe. It is still very much part of that armoury today. To an extent it has been driven by an earlier outsource environment in the UK where projects had been outsourced on an international basis with poor results. It is highly likely that in any boardroom that they will either be someone that has first-hand knowledge of that experience or has a highly credible reference point to a case study of outsourcing internationally that eventually had to be brought back in-house.
Kaja: What are the safest decisions for a UK decision maker that will future proof their enterprise?
Can the UK organisation strategically afford to embrace FUD as part of a decision-making process?
Can the UK organisation financially afford to embrace FUD as part of future proofing thinking?
Part of the antidote to FUD is to demonstrate how smaller and agile software companies are innovating and disrupting the marketplace and include them in your options.
If you are going to improve your business development results in the UK, you need to support the UK decision-maker manage the presentation of risk and engage with FUD clearly and competently.
Can you support them prove to their UK board that the potential benefits of working with a non-UK Tech business outweigh the potential risk of working with a non-UK Tech business?
Bob: At has been my experience that the majority of procurement leads know they can secure comparable if not stronger performance externally, sometimes with a lower cost base if they look outside the safe option…but they take the safe option even though it costs more.
You should put aside the procurement part of the UK Tech economy who will never have the decision-making ability to do something different.
The pandemic has been immensely disruptive and has produced new thinking in the UK. Writing in 2022 there are procurement leads who understand if they keep doing the things that they have doing historically they will get the same results in the future.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Kaja: "Insanity" also speaks directly to the International Business Development leads that may be stuck in the past. When we reference the "past" I am not referring to 3-5 years ago but pre-Covid thinking. The speed at which new technologies and innovations are occurring is mind blowing. If you are not keeping up, you will be left behind. It is that simple! There are more opportunities in 2022 to sell capacity, MVP technology, demos, innovation, and talent than ever before. Your sales process needs to engage with the many accredited reports based on research that embed that Polish software developers are world-class and exceptionally proficient at solving problems.
Bob: If you want to engage with UK Tech procurement you should be able to communicate the following from a Polish-to-UK context:
Your story.
The story of your team.
What you plan to do.
Why you plan on doing it.
How you plan on doing it.
This is not physics, and it is not rocket science, either.
“A scientist who can’t explain his theories to a barmaid doesn’t really understand them.”
Kaja: In the first instance. Do not position yourself as a lower cost version of the company that you are talking to. If you are to go down that route, then you are essentially competing in the space where there is always a lower priced opportunity available.
In the second instance. You may not be able to ‘out’ brand your UK based competitors, but you can outsmart them and exploit the agility you have. They will struggle to offer your agility because they will already be focusing on recruitment and replacement of developers around-the-clock.
Bob: In our experience you have to ‘niche down’ in the UK. Make the effort to pick a particular area of the UK Tech economy that you know is at its weakest point. On that basis target this area and develop your sales narrative to perform specifically in this area in a unique way for a particular type of client.
“Do not be an aspirin looking for a headache in the UK economy”.
This approach does not have to dictate how you run your software business in general but when it comes to UK business development opportunities you need to be clear in terms of what you need to be. Develop the perspective that:
“A person who chases many rabbits catches none”!
Chasing too many rabbits makes it impossible to maximise your appeal to any one rabbit. As you try to be appealing to everyone, real meaningful differentiation feels risky. Your language and messaging are dialled right back to being generic and vanilla.
Kaja: There are many views around this but be prepared to alienate certain segments of the UK market.
“They will never work with you anyway and by extension make you become even more attractive to those that will want to as you are sector specific”.
Can you completely articulate your position. I am not referring to an elevator pitch or a sixty-second statement. Procurement leads ‘do not know’ what they ‘do not know’ and if you are solving complex multidimensional problems a one sentence offer or soundbite will not take you forward. In our experience your position has to be built from these components:
What you do.
Who you do it for.
Your perspective.
The problems you solve.
How you solve them.
The outcomes you deliver.
Do not assume your prospective UK clients have correctly diagnosed the right cure to solve the problem. More often than not what they may be addressing is not the root cause.
EG: Increasing developer rates to secure internal talent when the culture of the business is a poor fit to secure innovative talent.
“Initially the outsource of software development is just a means to an end for a self-diagnosed prospect”.
Bob: Unfortunately, a common trap is thinking that your processes differentiate you. Everyone in software development has one. In the software development agency world essentially, they all follow the same basic model of discovery, design, implementation, and support.
Unless what you do is highly specialised you will struggle to differentiate your service or process, but you can differentiate on your perspective.
The golden egg is to achieve both which is specialisation and perspective.