How To Reduce The Effects Of Pandemic On Your Software Development Business

The sudden rise of the pandemic has created a stir in the world leaving behind hundreds of nations with the worst economic crisis in their history. Besides, it declined the growth of various industry verticals and shattered the lives of billions of people with unemployment.

Simultaneously, it has compelled thousands of software industries to shut down their offices and let their employees work from home. With this, remote work has caught a great hype and become a new trend of working for software employees. But now the question is how to maintain consistent growth for any software development company in this pandemic.

Table of Content

1. Provide time-based and freemium offers to the customers
2. Direct sales and outbound marketing
3. Understand future needs of the customer
4. Nurture your existing clients
5. Adopt emerging technologies and innovations
6. Focus on trending development
7. Provide professional and quality services
8. Embrace virtualization and remote working strategies
9. Conclusion

However, to scale new heights and keep a possible balance of productivity, companies have to prepare for the change and acclimatize with new conditions. This blog will highlight some significant tips for software companies to quickly jump into the growth stage in Pandemic.

Provide time-based and freemium offers to the customers

“Here is my take on your question:

• Make time-based offers for the COVID19 period - With the various lockdowns, a great opportunity arises - the ability to expose your product to people who wouldn't see it otherwise. This is also good since the ones that do sign up can explore your service/product and see the value that it brings - something that they might have never done before. So take this chance to attract brand new clients by making time-based offers specially for the lockdown period.
• Have a freemium model with a good benefits package for the people who upgrade. The benefit, in this case, can't be just full access to your great system, it has to be something that goes up and beyond e.g. passes to a popular global event for the people who upgrade to the premium plan.
• Offer your customers a yearly prepayment plan, since if a customer signs up for this plan you have a guaranteed twelve-month period which can really increase the customer retention rates and boost the ROI. Even if you have a discount offer for the yearly plan, the lower churn mostly will balance out the MRR decrease and will have an overall positive growth.

These steps should be implemented in an individual timeframe that matches your companies’ ability to prepare and launch them. Of course, the state of things and adapting to the changing situation of the world should be taken into mind, especially in regards to points connected to the pandemic.

So by using these offers and methods we got a chance to attract brand new clients during the lockdown period and saw an increase in leads generated by 37% and the lead conversion rate was also up by 19% vs the average of the outstanding periods.

Creating a time-based offer is nothing special, but the key is making an offer that stands out and draws in the customer. And the way to get that done is by having done proper research into the target audiences and understanding the specific difficulties that they are facing in the specific time period.”

- Chris Bolz, CEO @ Coara

Direct sales and outbound marketing

“Direct sales and outbound marketing are the keys here. Hence channel sales are more reliable long term that will take time to establish. Same for inbound marketing - passive way of generating leads however takes enormous time to start seeing some traction.

Look at what you’ve done best in the past, what type of project is the most cost-efficient, and what you did unique or special. Then wrap it up into the offer and start approaching your buyer personas via your most established channels. It will take a few weeks to start getting some traction but what is great you can start with only one person dedicated to that.”

- Dmytro Okunyev, Founder at Chanty

Understand future needs of the customer

“The number one thing software development companies can do right now is to ask ‘How has my customer's life and pain changed?’ Many software companies are already in the cloud and thus were well equipped for the pandemic.

But what have customers experienced or learned in this time? Software companies need to be talking to customers to understand what they need in the future. Is business going to be the same, just with more Zoom? Or will they be shifting to a zero-trust orientation? What devices will their customers use? Where are they?

To mine a seam of profitable growth coming out of the pandemic, need to take our minds off of what we're selling, and empathetically consider how we can use our resources to solve the pain that customers have discovered in this time.”

- Greg Wood, CEO at MASV

Nurture your existing clients

Yes, it is a fact that the situation has become quite difficult to secure new sales. Therefore, it would be an imperative move to focus on existing customers. Stay active with them, keep the focus on resolving their concerns, and ensure they renew their current product or buy new products from your company.

Try to understand how they are employing your product in their business. Look at gathering reviews from them and work on it accordingly. This way you can build trust in your company, strengthen your brand reputation and gain new customers through client references.

Adopt emerging technologies and innovations

Adopting emerging and innovative technologies for future implementations would be one of the best ways to stay on the bleeding edge. The pandemic has prompted people to go online for their needs and created a huge demand for e-commerce and online booking applications.

To escape from the viral infections, people have started to prefer these platforms to book vehicles, purchase items, make digital payments, perform end-to-end transactions, etc. Therefore, this is the right time for the software industries to adopt the latest technologies and develop cutting-edge applications that could help people in this situation and ease their work.

Focus on trending development

According to NASSCOM’s recent annual report, IT companies have experienced 2.3% growth despite the pandemic situation. This means if a firm makes proper planning strategies with the right focus, it can easily manage to get high returns.

In this pandemic, increased gaming habits among people of all ages have made a drastic transformation and provoked more demand for online applications. As they do not have any option of wandering outside, they just tried to impart their interest in utilizing mobile phones, surfing the net, and playing games via applications.

Therefore, this is one of the best chances for software industries to keep the focus on trending app development such as gaming, e-Learning, etc. and jump into the growth stage rapidly.

Provide professional and quality services

As the times have become really tough to earn enough clients, the competition has become even stronger with this pandemic. Due to the economic crisis faced by most nations, clients have reduced the outsourcing of their software projects. Even if they do, they are expecting high-quality consulting services on a marginal budget without any compromise in development.

Therefore, the only way is to ensure client satisfaction with your quality services. With this, you might also gain new clients with their references in their circle.

Embrace virtualization and remote working strategies

While every industry got hit severely in this pandemic that might take them years to get into normal, the software industries have remained less affected and gained a tremendous growth rate. One of the reasons for this is most companies started embracing virtualization using cloud technology.

With this, every employee of a firm can access work resources and perform their tasks without any hassles. Therefore, embracing virtualization by moving to the cloud and offering Remote work strategies would help a lot for any software development company to quickly jump into the growth stage.

Conclusion

Pandemic has provided software industries with an opportunity to experiment with remote work models to preserve the balance of productivity. As the pandemic hit very hard to the industrial progress, companies need to look out for the strategies to get back into growth under this pandemic situation. This blog will help software industries with significant strategies to jump into the growth stage quickly.