Are you a business owner or entrepreneur seeking ways to make a profit from your SaaS business? Look no further! All you need to do is learn how to sell your SaaS product like a pro, and you can do that by reading our detailed guide.
Selling SaaS products is really important for your business growth and sustainability. However, the process isn’t an easy one. So, to help you, we’ve put together all you need to know about selling a SaaS product.
In this article, we’ll define SaaS sales and provide 7 tips on how to successfully sell and market your SaaS product. Sounds good? Let’s get started!
What Is SaaS Sales?
SaaS sales involves the selling of cloud-based software to customers through a subscription-based model. This process is usually handled by the sales team who focus on acquiring new customers and also retaining current ones.
A typical SaaS cycle can take one to six months to be completed. However, this depends on your product’s complexity, pricing model, and the market’s competitiveness.
How Is Selling SaaS Products Different?
Selling traditional software just requires convincing the prospect, negotiating terms, signing the contract, and once the deal is signed, you’ve moved on. But that’s not the same for SaaS products.
When selling SaaS product, the major aim is to keep making money from the product. This means you’re not going to focus on short-term wins but long-term wins.
In order for you to do this, you’ll have to understand your customers’ business and pain points. This will help you to constantly provide value and solve their problems.
Because once they stop receiving value or getting their problems solved, they are ready to churn. What’s more, when selling SaaS product, you’ll need to build a good customer relationship.
You’ll have to get your customers to trust your product and how will they do that if you don’t tell them what they need to know? During the sales process, you’ll have to show them that you care and you’re willing to always help.
How To Sell A SaaS Product: 7 Tips To Sell SaaS Products Successfully
Selling a SaaS product takes longer than selling other products. You might see this as a disadvantage, but it isn’t. The lengthy SaaS cycle gives you an opportunity to keep convincing your prospect about your product, especially if you are a sales rep.
In order to successfully sell your SaaS product, you’ll need to make use of the right tips:
1. Provide Value-focused Demos
According to Steli Efti, the co-founder and CEO of Close, the most common mistake startups make when giving demos is wanting to educate prospects on everything about the product.
But this isn’t right. When prospects go through your demo, all they want to see is how the SaaS product can help their business succeed rather than an explanation of your features.
You can follow these tips to create a valuable demo for your clients.
- Find out your prospect’s pain points and values
- Introduce features that can help solve their problems
- Talk about how they can use the features to their advantage
- Include a success story of how another client made use of your product and achieved a reasonable result
- Keep your demo within 10-15 minutes. Within this time, let your prospects need to see your value
2. Create Reasonable Free Trials
This is a great tip for selling SaaS product. Free trials are a way of capturing new clients and building trust. With a free trial, customers will be able to see how various features can meet their needs.
Furthermore, there’s no exact amount of time your trials should last, but we advise that your trial period should be short. Here’s why we say so:
- Prospects take a short trial period more seriously. This is because they know that if they don’t try out your product during that period, they’ll miss the trial
- Some customers don’t use the free trials till it expires
- Shortening your free trial shortens your SaaS sales cycle
Below are the trial periods you can try out:
- 7-day Trial Period: This is suitable for you if you offer a low-cost product and don’t want to add extra days to your SaaS cycle instead, you want to keep it short.
- 14-day Trial Period: This trial period is commonly used among SaaS companies that sell SaaS B2B products. It’s suitable for companies that offer multiple tiers and complex features.
- 30-day Trial Period: A longer trial period is best for companies where stakeholders have a say in their products. Additionally, this period is good for companies that use the enterprise approach to selling SaaS products.
3. Stay In Contact With Your Users During The Free Trial
Once your prospects sign up for your free trial, it’s important that you remain in contact with them. Never wait till the last day of the trial before reaching out to them because it can reduce your conversion rate.
Furthermore, when you stay in contact with your trial users, you’ll be able to gather the necessary feedback on your product.
Additionally, staying in contact with your prospects during the trial period keeps them interested in your product.
4. Offer Annual Plans
As a SaaS company looking to constantly earn money from the business, rather than stick to a subscription-based model, offer an annual plan to your users.
Doing this may reduce your revenue at the beginning but subsequently, it will become your source of constant cash flow. Additionally, it will improve customer retention and reduce churn rate.
Furthermore, you can offer customers a discount to show that you appreciate their commitment to your product. However, this should be done strategically and not constantly.
5. Upsell And Cross-sell
If you run a B2B SaaS business, this is suitable for you. Upselling and cross-selling help increase revenue and provide value for your customers.
Furthermore, when upselling to your prospects, you’ll need to tailor your pitch to suit them. For your old customers on a low subscription plan, you can ask them to upgrade to a high plan in order to get access to other available features.
6. Monitor Your Performance
After implementing all the tips above, it’s important that you monitor how your sales are performing. Doing this will help you know if your product resonates with your audience or not.
How To Sell Your B2B SaaS Product: SaaS Sales Proven Strategies
You’re probably wondering what the difference is between SaaS sales strategies and tips for selling SaaS products.
Well, we’ll explain that. SaaS sales strategies involve the necessary things to be done before you think about selling your SaaS product.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
You can do this by creating a buyer persona and outlining their problems. This will help you know who to target when selling your SaaS product.
You can create a buyer persona by answering questions like:
- Whom does my product serve?
- What problems do they face?
- How can your SaaS product solve the problem?
- What value can they get from your product?
2. Choose A SaaS Sales Model
You may be wondering about the various SaaS sales models you should choose from. The next section of this article explains them.
When choosing a SaaS model for your business, you’ll have to consider the nature of your product. For example, new SaaS small businesses will have to use a customer self-service model.
As your business grows, you can either choose the enterprise or transactional sales model.
3. Define Customer Qualification Criteria
Identifying your target audience is important to avoid focusing on various prospects. Trust me, your product might be able to help various prospects, but focusing on your buyer persona is best.
To confirm that your target audience is the best fit for your product, you or your sales team can develop qualification questions. This will help remove prospects who don’t align with your goals.
4. Create A SaaS Sales Playbook
This book will contain all your sales team needs to nurture a client in order to successfully close a deal. It will include a cheat sheet that has the characteristics of your target audience, techniques for closing a deal, email templates, call scripts, and so on.
Having all this information will make it easier to sell your SaaS product to a client. At least your sales team doesn’t need to spend time thinking about how to convince the prospect.
5. Define Your Objectives And Goals
Defining your business goals will give the sales team an idea of the milestone you wish to reach in a quota. It will also give them a sense of responsibility to ensure that the goals are met.
6. Create A Strong Customer Support Program
Having strong customer support is very important when selling a SaaS product. According to Nextiva, 68% of customers are willing to stay committed to a brand due to a good customer support program.
This means that if you don’t offer good customer support, some customers won’t be willing to commit to your brand.
Furthermore, having a good support program would help you identify the issues your customers are facing. This in turn will help you know the necessary improvements to make on your product.
3 Most Common SaaS Sales Model
Now that you have an idea of the necessary tips and strategies you need to successfully sell your SaaS product, it’s time to find out the right SaaS sales model to use.
Below are three SaaS models you can choose from:
1. Customer Self-service Model
This SaaS sales model is best for SaaS small businesses selling their product at a low price but in a high volume.
The customer self-service model makes use of a freemium plan or free trial to attract customers when selling their SaaS product. This model doesn’t require a full SaaS team; customers can sign up without assistance.
2. Transactional Model
The transactional model is the most scalable model when compared to the other SaaS models. The software being sold here is for small to medium-sized businesses and it is usually done over the phone.
If you wish to make use of this model to sell your SaaS product, you’ll have to ensure that you offer a personalized service. As this is the only way a prospect can make a purchase.
Furthermore, this model operates on a tiered pricing model and it requires a sales and marketing team with in-depth training to be able to convert leads.
3. Enterprise Model
This is the most expensive model among the three, and it requires more customization and sales support. If you’re planning to adopt this sales model to sell your SaaS product, you must know that it has a longer sales cycle.
Furthermore, the enterprise sales model is commonly used by niche SaaS products that target larger companies that have the budget to support the solution.
Additionally, sales departments typically structure their teams based on geographical regions, allowing them to concentrate on specific groups of potential clients. If you’ll be making use of this model, you’ll need a full RevOps team to successfully sell your SaaS product.
How Do I Get Into SaaS Sales?
If you’re looking to get into SaaS sales, having previous sales experience will keep you ahead of other job seekers. But if you don’t have experience, you can apply for entry-level positions.
Some SaaS leaders are looking for individuals who are passionate about learning and growing to join their team. You can always find these opportunities within startup SaaS companies.
Additionally, SaaS leaders always pay attention to those who have a formal education but what happens if you don’t have one? You don’t need to worry.
There are various informal online courses you can take to gain an experience in SaaS sales. This can give you an advantage when applying for a role.
Now, depending on the experience you’ve gathered while taking the course, you can apply for the following roles:
- Account executive/manager
- Sales manager/VP
- Sales development representative
What Technology Can Help With SaaS Sales?
Sales technology can greatly improve how you sell SaaS product. It can help streamline the sales process, maximize productivity, and improve prospecting.
Furthermore, this technology can be used by the sales team at every stage of the sales funnel, thereby improving their communication with prospects.
The best technology you can invest in to help sell SaaS product effectively is CRM software like Pipedrive or HubSpot.
You can also invest in sales intelligence tools like Cognism or ZoomInfo to help connect with the right leads.
Wrapping Up!
Selling SaaS product can be challenging, but it isn’t impossible. All you need is the right sales models and strategies to increase your success rate.
This is an important decision to make before you think of launching your SaaS product as you wouldn’t want to experience a high churn rate. From the tips and strategies we’ve mentioned above, starting a SaaS sales career should not be an issue anymore for you.
Additionally, if you wish to build a SaaS product for your business, you don’t need to worry about not generating revenue as our guide will help you sell your product successfully.
