Keep up the growth momentum even during an economic hurricane

Jamie Dimon, the head of the largest bank in America, told us recently that he is worried the signs of an economic hurricane are coming and we should prepare. He's not alone - many others have sent warnings about what will happen when bad news continues to pile up. We have already seen how consumer confidence is eroded, and rising inflation hurts buying power. With market uncertainty, purchase decisions typically change with companies looking at  

• Re-evaluating priorities
• Postponing new investments
• Focusing on cash flow by containing costs and reducing unnecessary spending
• Slower to no new hires

But this isn't a time to freeze; it's your chance to take action. As a sales and marketing leader, here are ways to optimize pipeline, increase sales productivity and boost customer retention while keeping costs under control.

Optimize Your Pipeline

You need to optimize your sales cycles to ensure selling teams are laser-focused on the right opportunities.  

1.Scale presales with demo automation

Presales are your most precious resource. Manually building demos, tutorials, and training that are not easy to reuse and reproduce will only slow you down. Worse, you’ll get bogged down on maintenance issues and technical debt. The technology demo should be stood up and ready to go. Solutions like Instruqt enable you to build reproducible, reliable, and scalable labs faster and without stress.

2. Grow efficiently with self-service demos

Give or take, 50 percent of your prospects aren’t a good fit for what you sell.  Save the valuable SEs time for meaningful conversations. How? Relieve your selling team from giving repetitive demos to unqualified prospects. Offer self-service demos to qualify, engage, and educate your technical buyers at scale.

3. Spend marketing dollars wisely - product qualified leads (PQLs) are worth more than MQLs

What’s the cost of generating an MQL today? Using paid ads can easily cost you $100 - $200 to get a lead to download an ebook or whitepaper. Wouldn’t you rather generate a lead that has gotten hands-on with your product? Getting hands-on helps to demystify your product and get buyers to experience the value. This interactive hands-on product experience helps your sales team discover new prospects via generating product-qualified leads (PQLs). Software companies have been using Instruqt to build free training for their products that ensure buyers understand their value drivers through interactive learning.

4. Skip the broadcast approach in your marketing

If you market to developers, you know by now that they are very practical. If you have fewer marketing resources, evaluate what activities to focus on and what to stop. One-to-many webinars don’t get the attention of developers. Developers want to experience the actual code. To get their attention, put your expertise into interactive experiences. Run workshops that include active learning, and developers will have the technical information to help them make an informed decision about whether your product is right for them.

5. Reduce business risk by continuing to build and maintain a strong brand

A strong brand helps you go a long way, especially during tough times. People are more risk-averse. So it would help if you find a scalable way to grow your tech brand. We have seen from our customers like Kasten, Solo.io, and Codefresh that they can attract the interest of thousands of developers with their free on-demand training. And build brand and authority in their space.

6. Help SEs do more with less

An educated customer is a loyal customer. However, how do you manage a surge in technical resource requests while meeting the demands to onboard and train new customers? For example, if it takes two solutions engineers two days to onboard and train a new customer, would you rather the onboarding process's repetitive part be replaced by effective on-demand hands-on training on your product? While your solutions engineers can focus on sales and bring in new deals.

7. Cut out the waste in your cloud costs

Have you ever checked your cloud bills? When it comes to cloud resources, almost everyone is spending more than they need to. Unchecked cloud costs for demos, labs, and POCs can easily lead to a six-figure bill from your cloud provider.To keep cloud costs under control, you need to run your demos and training on a platform that takes care of:(1) spinning up the correct sized environment,(2) only leaving it open when being used, (3) tearing it down when completed.  Instruqt platform enables temporary, secure cloud accounts that let you track interaction and completion and teardown when the user is finished.

8. Focus your prospects on your value proposition

Essentially, your customers should focus on your solution instead of the initial setup or configuration before joining a workshop or demo. By providing an engaging pre-configured lab experience, you skip the headaches of installation and setup.  Your lab experience should focus on your prospects and ensures that you’re selling to qualified leads.

9. Team up with Instruqt

Don’t take our word for it - take this Instruqt lab to see how Instruqt’s approach to interactive learning will help.  You can also learn more about how we can help you increase productivity and reduce waste. Speak with one of our virtual IT lab experts.