Introversion Software's financial director, Thomas Arundel, on why selling shouldn't be seen as such a dirty practice by indie developers.

Perhaps this isn’t the sort of article that you’d expect from an independent games company, but in my opinion, selling is the number one thing to get right in a business. Yes, SELL, because without a sale, you have no revenue, no revenue - no wages, no wages – no staff, no staff - no business. At Introversion we don’t need huge wages, but bread and butter on the table is always handy and we like the odd razz in a fast car now and then.

Selling is one of those black arts that comes naturally to some, and is a real struggle to others. Sadly for those that making a living from selling, those that it naturally comes to tend to be ‘ol right gizza – 100 thousand miles, bargin eh?’ or ‘winter’s just around the corner and these windows will save you from the cold and increase the value of your home – makes sense, right? Makes sense’. The former is reliably chav-tastic, and the latter makes manipulative use of neuro-linguistic programming spikes, to brainwash the customer into thinking that shiny new windows really do make sense. They’re common because they work – and believe me, that ‘Derren Brown’ neuro-linguistic programming really does sell millions of windows a year.

Thankfully in the games industry, things are a little more professional. But to sell your latest game, you need a customer, and that’s not totally straightforward. Platform holders can withhold a release of a game, or refuse it all together, so you’ve got to sell to them. You’ve also got to sell to publishers, before they sell to their licensees or retailers. You might also have to sell to the distributor, and then convince the retailer that they should stock your game, and you haven’t even started talking to the end-customer yet. The trick with professional sales is long-term relationships, and everything you need to do, has to focus on nurturing and developing the relationship. Not massively dissimilar to managing the relationship with your friends/family/love interests really.

But sweeping that minefield aside (families can be very fickle), and assuming that you can sell direct to your market (e.g. digital download from your website), you need to start getting the end-user, the gamer, interested in buying your game. Again, professional selling is based on developing a relationship with the customer and developing it so they’re comfortable to buy from you again. People are naturally sceptical of the ‘hard sale’ – they’ve experienced it too many times, and can spot a dodgy sale a mile off – therefore tricks and gimmicks rarely work. By all means offer a promotion, but it should be honest and without hidden strings attached – consider it a reward for continuation of, or starting the relationship. In accounting terms, that desire to continue the relationship is called goodwill – in marketing terms, brand loyalty. You’d be surprised how loyal people really are to a brand that treats them well and doesn’t try and shovel everything down their throats.

Ideally, you shouldn’t have to ‘market’ to customers with an existing relationship, since you should be in touch with them frequently enough, such that they get first dibs on all the new cool stuff that you’re going to announce. Sometimes of course this isn’t possible, but a simple and short email letting them know that a big announcement is to be made will suffice. People, who have made a commitment to you in some way, don’t like to find things out after everyone else. Think of it this way, if you’re going to get married, you’d tell your friends and family first, before you go shouting it down the street!

So then ‘marketing’ becomes a means to find new customers (and to a lesser extent a means to reinforce the message/brand to existing customers). The trick with marketing though is to consider it to be the start of a funnel. When you market to potential customers effectively, you pique their interest and they then take an action to investigate you or your products more. After that, they might take interest in a specific product, and after that, they might download a copy of your game. Each of these steps is a mini-sale, progressively encouraging the new customer to find out more about the game, and become engaged with it. It’s a funnel of course as you start with loads of interest and at each stage the level of commitment increases (e.g. there’s a time commitment from customers who spend two hours playing your demo). As the required commitment increases, the number of people who remain engaged reduces. At the end of the funnel, you end up with those customers who were prepared to make the ultimate commitment – to purchase your game. If you treat them well, you’ll be able to develop a relationship with them and keep them as existing customers for future products.

As a brief interlude, this is generally why most companies keep to the same sort of product – you’ve invested a lot of time building up relationships and in some cases friendships with your customers who’ve expressed interest and respect in the games your making. From a sales & marketing perspective, the last thing you want to do is to change tack and make different games. Not only will you have to find new customers, but you may well alienate / confuse your old customers too. This is the justification for the much revered sequel-itis. An alternative approach to this would be to try to engage customers at a meta-level – i.e. it’s not about the genre of games, but about the higher level experience. This is much harder to pull-off, and as our recent experience of Multiwinia, it’s very hard to get it right. Uplink and DEFCON have been consistently good sellers, which suggest that Introversion’s customer relationships are working at a genre level, not the experience level that we had hoped would sell Darwinia and Multiwinia.

Back to the selling – what you end up with is a ‘sales pipeline’. ‘Marketing’ generates new ‘leads’, and at some point they’re handed over to ‘Sales’ to ‘convert’. It all sounds rather mechanical and heartless. But consider it from a personal social perspective. At a large party, you would probably have friends at all stages of the friendship pipeline – new people that you think you’d like to engage with in the future, your existing group of friends, and maybe a few of those that you tried to hang out with, but aren’t too fussed about seeing again. This of course becomes even more clear-cut when you consider it in a dating context. Digressions aside, it’s a natural thing for sociable people to develop new relationships, and if done with respect, everyone is willing to be complicit. The same should apply to your customers. You need to consider each step of the ‘sales pipeline’ and find a way to engage with your customers at each stage. Then through the escalation of engagement, you can turn interested people into your customers. They’re entertained by your games, and you make a living – a jolly nice win-win!

Visit Introversion Software at www.introversion.co.uk.