Nearshore Marketing: How Do You Get Your Sales-Ready Leads?
November 22nd, 2011By Fernando Labastida
Imagine this: Suddenly 2012 has arrived. You’re happy because you’ve successfully completed all your projects for 2011. But you’ve got no deals in the pipeline. Scary scenario, right? It’s also a very likely scenario, and it happens to far too many Nearshore IT firms.
Nearshore Marketing: Educate Prospects
August 29th, 2011
By Fernando Labastida
Why do most Nearshore providers treat marketing as a one-off event they do whenever their pipeline is empty? To survive and thrive, you’ve got to treat marketing as a process. You have an accounting or payroll process, and if you’re a software development company you probably have a specialized development process like agile or scrum. As a recent McKinsey article stated: marketing is the company.
Following are the seven steps to marketing success you should implement as a Nearshore marketing process, adapted from John Jantsch’s 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success.
1. Narrow Your Focus
Just like the allies stormed the beaches at Normandy and established a secure beachhead from which to launch their European operations against the Germans, you too should establish a beachhead by focusing on a narrowly defined market segment.
This comes in two parts:
Focus on your …
5 Marketing Lessons from SXSW Interactive
April 7th, 2011By Fernando Labastida
I just spent five days at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, a conference that focuses on emerging technologies such as social media, web 2.0, development tools, cutting edge marketing and startups.
It’s a wild and woolly cornucopia of ideas, networking, presentations and parties.
As somebody who is in the business of helping nearshore software development companies market themselves to U.S. buyers, I am always on the lookout for new ideas to help generate awareness and bring in customers. Since SXSW provided too many great ideas to list here, I narrowed down what I learned into five key lessons that Nearshore providers can implement in their businesses.
1. Think like a startup
SXSW Interactive is THE conference for startups. Many of them launched their products right there at the festival, or participated in …
Vendor Mistake #1: Hiring a “Rep”
January 24th, 2011
By Fernando Labastida
Nearshore success stories such as those of Globant, Softtek, CPM Braxis and Stefanini IT Solutions have inspired a new crop of nearshore hopefuls across the Americas region hoping to get a piece of the US outsourcing pie. But the fact is that only a small percentage of up-and-coming IT and software development outsourcing providers will experience long-term success.
There are many reasons why a nearshore provider might not make it in the US market, such as poor service quality or the limited skillet of delivery staff. But one of the more important factors is how a company sells in the US, a factor directly tied to their level of commitment to the US market.
Good and bad market entry strategies
There are good and bad ways to sell in the US market, each one correlating …
Q/A: Lack of Marketing Savvy Hurts Latam in Web 2.0
November 11th, 2009As Latin America emerges as a significant player on the worldwide outsourcing stage, questions are coming up around how well Latam sourcing providers are marketing themselves. With US buyers looking for knowledge and insights, providers need to step up their digital marketing capabilities, says Fernando Labastida, owner of Latin IT Marketing, and a leading expert on marketing practices in the offshore industry.
We sat down recently with Fernando to get more of his thoughts.
What do Nearshore service providers need to do to improve marketing practices in the digital age?
For lack of a PC term, they have to look and behave American (or European or Canadian, depending on which market they’re going after).
1. They have to have modern, user-friendly, straightforward and to the point websites with flawless English. No more flash websites. No more “good enough” translations. No more typical corporate websites with information about their company, their wonderful reliable, expert developers who know Java .NET, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM and can develop anything from an iPhone app to an add-on for SAP.
2. They need to start blogging, creating eBooks, making videos, do webinars. They essentially need to take a content marketing approach, because that’s the best long-term strategy to turn their web presence into a destination and become thought leaders.
