Do you want to push your SaaS software to target companies? If YES, here are 7 result-oriented tips on how to sell SaaS product to enterprise without stress.
A lot of business ideas today revolve around Software as a Service (SaaS). A lot of entrepreneurs are today generating SaaS products that they can use in making improvements in various areas of business. With the sheer number of businesses churning out SaaS software and related products, it is now becoming a little too cumbersome to successfully sell these products and software to clients and businesses.
To be quite competitive, you always have to be a step ahead in making sure that your products offer more than what your competitors are offering, but asides that, there are other things you have to take note of while attempting to sell your product. Listed below are procedures to follow for you to successfully sell your SaaS products and software to an enterprise.
How to Sell SaaS Products and Software to Enterprise
- Set your price
Before you start selling anything, you need to set an appropriate price tag for it. So to get started in selling your SaaS software or product, you need to set an appropriate price for it according to your pricing model. You should note that if you put a lower price tag to your product in a bid to entice clients, you are unwittingly undervaluing your product. You should endeavor to align your sales approach with your pricing model so as not to make your product look questionable.
2. Have all the right people in the right places
Selling is a big deal, and you need a lot to get it moving. It is a fact that you cannot do it all alone. You may need help to make sure you sell to all the right people across board. You should gather a consistent, performance-focused sales team that works hard and is passionate about what they are doing.
You must never compromise on the quality of your sales team. Make sure to put together a great sales team that is knowledageable in your area of concentration. When you hire, make sure that your pay package is quite attractive to entice them to stay put with you. To get the best, you have to;
- Have at least 2 salespeople in the team, for friendly competition
- Still be hands-on, and leading this team
- When you hire, make sure the candidates are able to sell their capabilities well
3. Keep your trial days short
When making a SaaS software or product sale, you have to give trials days. A long trial might seem like a good way to hook your customer, but you’re really just hurting your startup. For 99% of startups, trials shouldn’t be any longer than 14 days. This is because most people don’t use free trials for the full duration. It has been found out that the vast majority of trial users duck out after about three days.
Users take a short trial more seriously. Your prospects will procrastinate, and when they procrastinate, they forget. With a shorter trial period, they’re more likely to try your product immediately. Again, when you shorten your trial, you also shorten your sales cycle. If you’re able to shorten your sales cycle from six weeks to three, you will significantly reduce your customer acquisition costs.
4. Optimize Your Email Campaign
Unless you have a killer email campaign, most of your prospects are going to forget you exist within hours of enrolling in your trial. Here are three strategies to get the most out of your email campaign.
Use “human” email addresses. Don’t ever send an email from a department. Instead of “Sales@YourBusiness.com”, use “YourName@YourBusiness.com”.
Send a lot of emails. If no one is calling your emails ‘spam’, maybe you’re not sending enough emails. Your drip campaign should automatically email your leads.
5. Find your customers
Before you can start selling, you have to know who you are selling to. You need to know if they need the products you are selling, and furthermore find out if they can provide referrals and testimonials for your business. You also need to explore if there are ways these customers can help point you to new opportunities, or provide resources to grow your business. You may also have to build fictitious customers from real data. To get this real data, talk to your existing customers, and find out what value they actually get from your product.
- Generate Your Leads
An important part of SaaS sales process is generating leads. You can source leads using any of the following approaches that are reputed to work a lot:
- Buy lists from reputable providers of potential customers. There are many such providers, for example com, Data.com, and Infousa.com. You will get plenty of data but the quality will be low, and over 30% can be outdated.
- You can use a code web scraping program and extract data from websites. The quantity will be less than the 1st approach, and the quality of the leads will be a little higher. Be careful, many websites don’t allow this practice.
- You will receive even lower quantity but better quality of data from a lead generation team if you outsource. You need to give them specific criteria. Costs might be higher but the returns are greater too.
- If you create customer profiles, you get the highest quality of data. You can do this if you have existing customers. You need to ask lots of questions to determine the common denominators, for example, company size, number of employees, the software they use, location, tenure in business etc.
- Give Effective Product Demo
An important method to demonstrate the value of your product and to generate sales is your product demo. There are a lot of things you can do to improve your product demo, and they include;
- Planing: Set up a demo that gives you the best chance to make a sell on the spot. Plan your logistics well, coordinate closely with your team and have all infrastructure tested well before the demo.
- Focus your demo on how the product will make your customers more successful. A long-winding demo of every unimportant feature isn’t the way to go, you will lose their attention. Show them how your product will bring them success by solving their problems.
- Start with the most powerful feature of your product as that will make the biggest impact in your customers.
- Speak your customers’ language, use only phrases and words that they will know. Avoid complex programming terms.
- Never interrupt customers when they ask questions or provide feedback.
- Be honest if you don’t know the answer to a difficult product feature-related question. Note it down, promise that you will come back to them with answers, and keep your promise.
- Prepare for product crashes during the demo, because they usually happen.
- Don’t commit to difficult requests, note them down and follow through.
- Limit your demo to 15 minutes, and no more!
- At the end of the demo, try to lead your prospective client into action. You want to try to secure the sale as soon as possible. That was the purpose of the demo, wasn’t it?
- Call Your Trial Signup Users Within Minutes
If you are a business-to-business (B2B) SaaS entrepreneur, this is a particularly effective method to increase your SaaS sales. You don’t need exceptionally talented salespeople for such SaaS sales techniques. It’s simple! Call every trial signup user within minutes of sign up. You don’t need to say much. Just appreciate that they have just signed up and didn’t try the product much, and you are there to answer any question they have.
It’s a powerful action that some users like. If you wait for 30 minutes and call, your chances of a lead are much smaller. If you call within 5 minutes, you have 100 times higher chances of a lead and 21 times higher chances of qualifying that lead.
- Follow up relentlessly
You will rarely close a deal on the first call. Startup sales success is dependent on your ability to follow up repeatedly. If your prospect has ever expressed interest in your product, follow up forever. Don’t settle for silence or “maybe”; maybes kill your startup.
Keep calling and emailing until you get a clear “yes” or “no”. If the lead is completely cold, follow this 14-day plan:
- Day 1: Initial contact.
- Day 3: First follow-up. Reach out at a different time of day with a condensed version of your initial message.
- Day 7: Second follow-up. Reach out at a different time of day and restate your call to action.
- Day 14: Third follow-up. If you haven’t received any response from your lead, send the break-up email. This is where response rates skyrocket.
- If you don’t receive a response to your break-up email, move on to more promising leads.
10. Don’t scrimp on price
SaaS companies who rely on pricing to be competitive aren’t confident in their products. They think that the only way they can become viable is by devaluing their solution. Pricing shouldn’t make your product competitive—value should. You’ll know you’ve got it right when:
- 30% of your prospects say, “You’re crazy, I would never pay that!”
- 30% of your prospects say, “Your product is really cheap.”
- 40% of your prospects say, “Your product is expensive, but worth the price.”
It’s okay to be too expensive for some prospects. In fact, if you never lose deals over pricing, then your SaaS product is too cheap.
11. Sell prepaid annual plans
Startups love SaaS products because of the reliable monthly revenue. While those plans may offer consistent revenue, it’s a slow trickle.
When growing your SaaS startup you need a waterfall of revenue, not a trickle. Consider offering your prospects discounted rates if they buy a prepaid annual plan. Although this may bring down overall revenue in the moment, it gives you immediate access to substantial cash flow. You can use this influx of revenue to hire a sales team, expand into new markets, or improve your product.
12. Don’t be quick to hand out discounts
Discounts might seem like a great way to get reluctant prospects on board, but they end up doing more harm than good. It’s not how you sell SaaS. This is because discounts make salespeople lazy. It’s hard to sell prospects on value and easy to lower the price. When discounts are an option, count on your salespeople abusing it.
Discounts make predictable revenue impossible. When every new customer pays a different price, there’s no way to know what your revenue will look like next week, let alone next year. Discounts are bad for branding. Customers talk, and when they start to realize that their competitors are getting the same product for cheaper, they aren’t going to be happy.
You need a strict discount policy, and you need to stick to it. Outside of prepaid annual plans, you should not offer discounts at all.
6 Things to Keep in Mind When Selling SaaS Products
- Your metrics
Way too many SaaS startups believe that they’re too small to worry about their metrics. Understanding the business metrics will help you figure out what decisions are costing your business too much money, even at a small scale, and help you figure out what choices are working well and which aren’t. Metrics could prove to be the difference between a manageable one and a surprise spike in churn. It is the difference between realizing which outreach approach is not working and which is.
- Qualitative and insightful data
Data is great, but it’s the insight you gain from the data that makes data great. So understanding how to use your metrics effectively becomes the key to being an effective sales leader. Whether it is finding out what landing pages are driving the most relevant leads or figuring out which outbound emails are being opened when you send them, the insights you gather from data is the key. Now, data isn’t only about the figures you see on the dashboard. Gather qualitative data by talking and surveying your users as well.
- It is not all about your content
Content does play a huge role in SaaS sales, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle. The amount of content out there is at an all-time high. Therefore, it’s more challenging than ever to create content that adds additional value. It’s not enough to create an ebook, publish a white paper or write a blog post, expecting the world to take notice.
Content creation is just a part of the puzzle when it comes to content marketing. Once the content is created, you have to distribute that content effectively. Make sure the content you’re building is aligned with both the goals of sales and marketing.
- Start selling as soon as possible
Start selling your SaaS product the day you sign up for the job. If you don’t have a product yet, start selling the vision, the solution, and the team. It’s easy to get carried away, spend tons of time testing the market and asking people what they think of your idea.
It’s more challenging and more rewarding to find someone who has faith in what you’re doing and willing to hand you a cheque to fill a need a few months in advance. Scout for these people, establish a relationship with them and turn them into your champions.
- Stop selling products and start selling solutions
People contact you or check your webpage when they have an issue they need solved. But, often, they don’t clearly understand what they need or want. You have to be the expert here. To make selling a conversation that is ongoing, involves user needs, you have to ask the right questions. Questions will also help you figure out how close they are to buying, making the entire journey easier to track in a CRM.
Understand what your customers want, and for this, you need to listen to them first.
- Create desire in potential customers
Selling has an emotional component, your customers never buy just your product, rather they buy an image. They understand their needs, and only when they believe your product will fulfill these will they buy. Explaining your product features without creating that desire in them won’t sell your SaaS product.
How to Handle Objections While Selling SaaS
Selling SaaS products is complex, and has a lot of involvements because organizations and multiple stakeholders are involved. This on its own creates friction, and friction generates objections.
The first objection you will encounter when selling your SaaS product is nearly always about price. By the time they raise this objection, you should have already a lengthy discussion with your customers about your product’s features. If they say that your price is too high then you either haven’t communicated the value of your product or they simply are not your target market.
As a word of note, you should only discuss price with customers only after they have fully understood the value of your product. Assuming you have arrived at the price after carefully building a well-researched pricing model, you should stick to the price you have quoted and do not waiver. Try to convince them that the price matches the value of the product.
The second objection is when customers want an additional feature. You need expert salespeople to handle this kind of conversation. Make sure you ask right questions to understand what customers really want.