At Drupal Europe, there was a productive discussion of challenges that Drupal agencies face in the areas of sales and marketing.
First, we listed the most common and burning issues that include:
1) Marketing Drupal. A general lack of experience, promotional materials, and a lack of a clear direction of marketing efforts led us to struggling on different stages of marketing Drupal and explaining its value to customers.
2) Explaining Drupal to non-tech people. Many BoF attendees mentioned the change in the paradigm of communication with a client. If in the past agencies were mostly working with tech people from a client side, then now usually a client’s company doesn’t have any Drupal experts and agencies need to work on projects with marketers or product managers. This is more challenging in terms of explaining the benefits of Drupal.
The benefits of Drupal that could be relevant for non-tech people are:
- It allows you to see a result right away.
- It is powerful and fast, as well as completely suitable for content-heavy projects.
- It is an open source technology.
- It is the best variant if you need a long-term solution because Drupal is highly scalable. You can change it in the future when your business is bigger.
3) Employer branding. It’s becoming harder to hire an experienced Drupal developer. Some companies have no choice but teaching new employees Drupal from scratch.
4) Competing CMS. There are different competing CMSs, it is the most challenging to compete with Wordpress and TYPO3. The main reason why it is difficult is that they are well-known by many people, Drupal doesn’t have such a strong brand at the moment. And clients usually go with something they are familiar with.
5) Small and big Drupal companies competition. It’s a difficult time for small agencies. Bigger clients choose bigger companies.
Then we decided to share positive experiences and successes in order to exchange knowledge and expertise.
One of the points here was replicating success, which means incorporating initiatives and tools that already brought good results. The second thing that benefits most of the attendees is promoting case studies for specific industries. For instance, if you have created a website for a university you can use it to sell your services to other universities because with this case study you become trustworthy in this particular area. The third point that brings results is a personal approach or meetings. Clients buy not from companies but from people. That is why personal meetings help sell Drupal or other services.
We also briefly mentioned the most effective channels of Drupal services promotion: word of mouth, referrals, case studies, conferences.
Further communication related to any of these issues can be continued in the Slack Channel https://drupal.slack.com/messages/C3BF0R7A9/