Are you a first time SaaS entrepreneur targeting the US market? Learn it from the masters through the Jump Start Guide to Desk Marketing and Selling for SaaS put together by Krish Subramaniam (Chargebee), Niraj Ranjan Rout (GrexIt), Sahil Parikh (Brightpod), and Suresh Sambandam (KiSSFLOW). Aaron Ross launched the guide during the first SaaSx event in Chennai put together by iSPIRT, attended by more than 100 SaaS entrepreneurs.
The following are the take-aways. Use the guide to understand in-depth and develop your strategy to hit $100 million in sales. All the very best!
Marketing
- There are four different strategies employed by Indian entrepreneurs for customer acquisition: Learn from Wingify, KiSSFLOW, GrexIt, Freshdesk.
- Free trials don’t work for higher sales value. And prices are not listed publicly by most companies.
- What is the right pricing? There is no one sutra to it. But get it right before you push your sales pitch. Learn strategies from the hackers who did it before.
- Have a team in place to handle marketing efforts with clear segmentation of the team: marketing/product/sales. Have clear-cut roles as they often blur.
- Understand the 10 recommended activities before you start marketing.
- Focus on building the trust of the customer visiting your product website for the first time. To make it attractive, for example, think of a “Benefits” page instead of listing “Features.”
- Learn how to build content around long tail keywords for effective SEO.
- Marketing based on content generation (content marketing) has many dimensions to it. Use all of them for maximum benefits.
- Social channels ensure better outreach. Make your presence felt on social pages.
- Retarget your customers who just dropped by your website.
- You can innovatively market using your product itself.
- Get a marketing team in place.
- There are some sales channels you must ignore before starting the SaaS company.
Selling
- Learn what catching, coaching, and closing mean.
- Winning the first few customers is the founder’s job.
- Learn what tools to use for customer development.
- Develop an effective funnel.
- Facilitate self-selection and build engagement with the customers.
- Collect key information during the engagement process.
- Post-trial offers work for closing the customer.
- Learn the customer closure techniques to use.
- Structure your sales team clearly.
- Doing a great customer service after sales is essential to retaining the customers. Learn the tips.