6 ms·

How to Sell – a guide for SaaS startups

303 points by jhchen 8y ago

rohamg 8y ago
i've worked with Tyler and Entrepid across multiple of our portfolio companies at Axiom Zen and been super impressed every time ZenHub wouldnt be where it is today without Tyler (we have dozens of Fortune 500 companies as customers) Tyler is a close friend so at this point i am biased, but Entrepid has built a team of humble, holistic thinkers with deep expertise in sales and high-touch growth strategy
sparrish 8y ago
Nice guide for high-touch sales. I'd love to see something similar for low-touch/no-touch sales SaaS.
- goatherders 8y ago
  "Low touch / no touch" sales is also known as "marketing." I don't know you or your intentions so this may not be directed at you, but I've found that most people looking to develop a low-touch sales engine are really saying "Ew...sales...I don't want to have to do that. Maybe if I blog enough and my site looks good I won't have to actually, you know, TALK to potential customers." I also find that anything above about $70/month MRR is going to require talking to the person. $70 is a limit that most companies will allow to be expensed without much question. MAYBE you can get that number to $100 in the right market. Above $100? Good luck. And if you are selling a $100+ product with no-touch then you are really missing out on TONS of business that could come your way if you just put in some actual sales effort.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    If I could offer some perspective from someone in the sales trenches: Cold calling does not work. No matter how good your script is, your email, your personality, your talk track, your data sources, your persistence, cold calling does not work. It is a poor ROI. All real sales are made either through the customer opting in to communicate (response to an email blast, inbound lead from the company phone, a referral etc)... or through nepotism and cronyism and ivy league networks of multi millionaires. Hint: this is how Oracle is alive to this day. If I was in charge of selling a product over $100, I would create the most awesome, viral content you would ever see about our product. I would release a free version to 99% of the world that is truly usable and awesome. This is what join.me did to compete with Webex and Skype for Business and GoToMeeting. Remember: if you don't have an existing network, you don't have any business. Start marketing before you start selling.
    - bharris315 8y ago
      Bryan from Entrepid Partners here... we find that highly targetted, outbound cold emails are actually the best place to start prospecting. In our experience, if you do the extra work to personalize the email and focus in on why your product/service is relevant to the buyer's pain points, we've seen response rates as high as 30% with the majority of those replies turning into an intro call with the buyer.
      - anoncoward111 8y ago
        Hi Bryan :) >highly targeted, outbound cold emails... ...are neither scalable nor calls, in my mind. Here's my opinions: 1) I am currently manually building my own unsolicited email list for the purpose of marketing my b2b service. I have good, quality data sources with no bounce rates and right personas, but it is neither cheap nor simple to enter this data manually 2) even if I send these people highly targeted and well-crafted emails that are friendly and insightful and pithy, it is a slow process with diminishing returns... 3)... because most people add me to their spam filter these days. It is trivial to do so. I would infinitely prefer to invest my time in creating excellent, viral content and offering users a free entry level service with few restrictions. I would then spend all my time obsessively devoting myself to those users who have a big budget and greatly desire to receive communication from me. Lastly, I dare say that someone who responds to a cold email will probably just end up kicking tires. Tire kicking is automated away with my free demo.
        goatherders 8y ago
        Certainly more than one way to do this, but I agree with Bryan. Highly targeted email lists are scaleable enough and there is plenty of tech to make them more personal than ever. I disagree a great deal with the idea that cold respondents "end up kicking tires." 100% of my marketing is cold email. 100% of the marketing I do for clients is cold email. I'm happy with my ROI and so are they.
not_that_noob 8y ago
Excellent guide - rings true.
vincentmarle 8y ago
> Common mistakes made by salespeople and founders: > - Thinking their goal is to close a prospect on the first call > - Giving a full demo and presenting pricing on the first call > - Prematurely trying to shorten the sales process These are mistakes? Having been on the receiving end of many "sales processes" I would say the shorter the sales process, the better. I often feel like companies who are too deep into doing high touch sales don't really respect my time and are shocked when I tell them to cut to the chase and yes, I do expect to hear about pricing on the first call, otherwise there won't be another call. Disclaimer: I have zero patience for abundant sales processes.
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  Another data point to support your view: I'm the same way. In fact, I want to hear about pricing in the first email you send me before we do a sales call, and maybe a short demo video. If I need help, then we can do a full demo. Otherwise, just take my damn money 'cause I desperately want you to solve my hairy problem.
- lhh 8y ago
  I agree if what the person is selling is solving a well understood problem. But what if it's something that you hadn't really thought much about before and need to take some time to wrap your head around? In sales, I think it's generally a mistake to talk about pricing until you've established the value of what you're offering first, which is where I think this advice is coming from.
- jwdunne 8y ago
  These rules only apply for higher-cost products and / or enterprise clients (in which the latter implies the former, anyway). Your sales team can only spend as long on the customer as the ROI of having salespeople allows. If you're selling £19.99/pm software to individuals, you probably don't even need a sales team. But if you're selling enterprise software to Fortune 500, you'll need a dedicated salesperson, or account manager, to look after and nurture prospects over months or years. So yeah, there are products and price points where if you're not closing first call you're probably wasting money.
goatherders 8y ago
Kudos to you guys. Please report back in a few weeks with the metrics on the number of leads this created for you. I'm in the same space and this content marketing is golden.
ministrator 8y ago
I'd recommend also reading this: https://medium.com/@fairpixelsco/b2b-growth-strategies-by-indiehackers-8ab87ed66d0d https://medium.com/@fairpixelsco/b2b-growth-strategies-by-in... It's an analysis of successful growth strategies used by B2B SaaS Startups that are listed on Indiehackers.com As well as the Saastr podcast. Full of gems on how to sell.
throwawayosiu1 8y ago
This actually scares me. I want to bootstrap an SaaS company focused on enterprise / b2b soon and being bootstraped I can't afford to hire an sales rep/ account manager (or be one myself while working on the product) for what looks like a long process. This is definitely a scary thought in my opinion. Fingers crossed, I hope that's a good problem to have.
- consumer451 8y ago
  We are exactly at this stage right now. Bootstrapped, enterprise SaaS, ready for initial sales. This post could not have been more timely for me. I'm not sure if this is possible in your niche, but we are partnering with a consulting company which provides services in the same industry/niche. We will give them a cut from the sales to do this exact process. Many leads will come from them as well. I could not imagine doing this any other way at the moment. Eventually we will certainly hire a full time salesperson. edit: we got really lucky that this consulting company had some biz dev people who used to do SaaS sales at a previous employer.
  - goatherders 8y ago
    You have to make time for sales. You HAVE to. To say there is no time because you are busy developing is dangerous. Even one hour per week can be meaningful. But you have to do it. No one knows your product, service or vision the way you do. One of my companies builds the sales funnel for SAAS and digital agencies. We handle the entire top of the funnel (lead gen and nurturing) so by the time it's a qualified opp it's actually a prospect that has an identified pain, time line and budget to go with an understanding of our clients solution to their problem. But we dont ever close the business precisely because in digital and SAAS the results are so much better from the heartbeat then the hired gun.
  - bharris315 8y ago
    In our experience, the founder should close the first 3-10 enterprise deals on their own. When you chose to outsource, you may close some deals, but you lose out on the early customer product feedback. The relationships with your early customers are key. You need to make your early customers your biggest fans to show how your product changed their business through references and/or mini-case studies.
gurglz 8y ago
This is super helpful!
akulbe 8y ago
I do Chef and Ansible development. I'd love to know how to sell and find more good customers. I have a long-term customer who's had me on what amounts to a staff augmentation project for 3 years. I know it won't last forever. How would you go about finding more projects like this?
- goatherders 8y ago
  Email me and I would be glad to have a back and forth for free. Good sales process comes down to patience and persistence and I can coach you through both if you dont mind the sometimes-slowness of email.
Bromskloss 8y ago
Direct link: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd400b/t/5b0b4dc68a922dbfa263b389/1527467516482/Entrepid_How+To+Sell.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd4...
DeanWormer 8y ago
I found this ~20 page guide Fog Creek put out a few years ago and it got me excited about switching from a technical role into sales. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a high level understanding of Enterprise sales. https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-company-needs-to-know-about-sales.pdf https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-co...
vinceguidry 8y ago
Is there an awesome list for business that this can be added to? --edit nevermind, here it is: https://github.com/cameronroe/awesome-marketing https://github.com/cameronroe/awesome-marketing it's not added to the main awesome list, so I'm making a pull req for that too.

303 points by jhchen 8y ago

i've worked with Tyler and Entrepid across multiple of our portfolio companies at Axiom Zen and been super impressed every time ZenHub wouldnt be where it is today without Tyler (we have dozens of Fortune 500 companies as customers) Tyler is a close friend so at this point i am biased, but Entrepid has built a team of humble, holistic thinkers with deep expertise in sales and high-touch growth strategy

sparrish 8y ago

Nice guide for high-touch sales. I'd love to see something similar for low-touch/no-touch sales SaaS.

goatherders 8y ago
"Low touch / no touch" sales is also known as "marketing." I don't know you or your intentions so this may not be directed at you, but I've found that most people looking to develop a low-touch sales engine are really saying "Ew...sales...I don't want to have to do that. Maybe if I blog enough and my site looks good I won't have to actually, you know, TALK to potential customers." I also find that anything above about $70/month MRR is going to require talking to the person. $70 is a limit that most companies will allow to be expensed without much question. MAYBE you can get that number to $100 in the right market. Above $100? Good luck. And if you are selling a $100+ product with no-touch then you are really missing out on TONS of business that could come your way if you just put in some actual sales effort.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  If I could offer some perspective from someone in the sales trenches: Cold calling does not work. No matter how good your script is, your email, your personality, your talk track, your data sources, your persistence, cold calling does not work. It is a poor ROI. All real sales are made either through the customer opting in to communicate (response to an email blast, inbound lead from the company phone, a referral etc)... or through nepotism and cronyism and ivy league networks of multi millionaires. Hint: this is how Oracle is alive to this day. If I was in charge of selling a product over $100, I would create the most awesome, viral content you would ever see about our product. I would release a free version to 99% of the world that is truly usable and awesome. This is what join.me did to compete with Webex and Skype for Business and GoToMeeting. Remember: if you don't have an existing network, you don't have any business. Start marketing before you start selling.
  - bharris315 8y ago
    Bryan from Entrepid Partners here... we find that highly targetted, outbound cold emails are actually the best place to start prospecting. In our experience, if you do the extra work to personalize the email and focus in on why your product/service is relevant to the buyer's pain points, we've seen response rates as high as 30% with the majority of those replies turning into an intro call with the buyer.
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      Hi Bryan :) >highly targeted, outbound cold emails... ...are neither scalable nor calls, in my mind. Here's my opinions: 1) I am currently manually building my own unsolicited email list for the purpose of marketing my b2b service. I have good, quality data sources with no bounce rates and right personas, but it is neither cheap nor simple to enter this data manually 2) even if I send these people highly targeted and well-crafted emails that are friendly and insightful and pithy, it is a slow process with diminishing returns... 3)... because most people add me to their spam filter these days. It is trivial to do so. I would infinitely prefer to invest my time in creating excellent, viral content and offering users a free entry level service with few restrictions. I would then spend all my time obsessively devoting myself to those users who have a big budget and greatly desire to receive communication from me. Lastly, I dare say that someone who responds to a cold email will probably just end up kicking tires. Tire kicking is automated away with my free demo.
      - goatherders 8y ago
        Certainly more than one way to do this, but I agree with Bryan. Highly targeted email lists are scaleable enough and there is plenty of tech to make them more personal than ever. I disagree a great deal with the idea that cold respondents "end up kicking tires." 100% of my marketing is cold email. 100% of the marketing I do for clients is cold email. I'm happy with my ROI and so are they.

not_that_noob 8y ago

Excellent guide - rings true.

vincentmarle 8y ago

> Common mistakes made by salespeople and founders: > - Thinking their goal is to close a prospect on the first call > - Giving a full demo and presenting pricing on the first call > - Prematurely trying to shorten the sales process These are mistakes? Having been on the receiving end of many "sales processes" I would say the shorter the sales process, the better. I often feel like companies who are too deep into doing high touch sales don't really respect my time and are shocked when I tell them to cut to the chase and yes, I do expect to hear about pricing on the first call, otherwise there won't be another call. Disclaimer: I have zero patience for abundant sales processes.

AznHisoka 8y ago
Another data point to support your view: I'm the same way. In fact, I want to hear about pricing in the first email you send me before we do a sales call, and maybe a short demo video. If I need help, then we can do a full demo. Otherwise, just take my damn money 'cause I desperately want you to solve my hairy problem.
lhh 8y ago
I agree if what the person is selling is solving a well understood problem. But what if it's something that you hadn't really thought much about before and need to take some time to wrap your head around? In sales, I think it's generally a mistake to talk about pricing until you've established the value of what you're offering first, which is where I think this advice is coming from.
jwdunne 8y ago
These rules only apply for higher-cost products and / or enterprise clients (in which the latter implies the former, anyway). Your sales team can only spend as long on the customer as the ROI of having salespeople allows. If you're selling £19.99/pm software to individuals, you probably don't even need a sales team. But if you're selling enterprise software to Fortune 500, you'll need a dedicated salesperson, or account manager, to look after and nurture prospects over months or years. So yeah, there are products and price points where if you're not closing first call you're probably wasting money.

goatherders 8y ago

Kudos to you guys. Please report back in a few weeks with the metrics on the number of leads this created for you. I'm in the same space and this content marketing is golden.

ministrator 8y ago

I'd recommend also reading this: https://medium.com/@fairpixelsco/b2b-growth-strategies-by-indiehackers-8ab87ed66d0d https://medium.com/@fairpixelsco/b2b-growth-strategies-by-in... It's an analysis of successful growth strategies used by B2B SaaS Startups that are listed on Indiehackers.com As well as the Saastr podcast. Full of gems on how to sell.

throwawayosiu1 8y ago

This actually scares me. I want to bootstrap an SaaS company focused on enterprise / b2b soon and being bootstraped I can't afford to hire an sales rep/ account manager (or be one myself while working on the product) for what looks like a long process. This is definitely a scary thought in my opinion. Fingers crossed, I hope that's a good problem to have.

consumer451 8y ago
We are exactly at this stage right now. Bootstrapped, enterprise SaaS, ready for initial sales. This post could not have been more timely for me. I'm not sure if this is possible in your niche, but we are partnering with a consulting company which provides services in the same industry/niche. We will give them a cut from the sales to do this exact process. Many leads will come from them as well. I could not imagine doing this any other way at the moment. Eventually we will certainly hire a full time salesperson. edit: we got really lucky that this consulting company had some biz dev people who used to do SaaS sales at a previous employer.
- goatherders 8y ago
  You have to make time for sales. You HAVE to. To say there is no time because you are busy developing is dangerous. Even one hour per week can be meaningful. But you have to do it. No one knows your product, service or vision the way you do. One of my companies builds the sales funnel for SAAS and digital agencies. We handle the entire top of the funnel (lead gen and nurturing) so by the time it's a qualified opp it's actually a prospect that has an identified pain, time line and budget to go with an understanding of our clients solution to their problem. But we dont ever close the business precisely because in digital and SAAS the results are so much better from the heartbeat then the hired gun.
- bharris315 8y ago
  In our experience, the founder should close the first 3-10 enterprise deals on their own. When you chose to outsource, you may close some deals, but you lose out on the early customer product feedback. The relationships with your early customers are key. You need to make your early customers your biggest fans to show how your product changed their business through references and/or mini-case studies.

gurglz 8y ago

This is super helpful!

akulbe 8y ago

I do Chef and Ansible development. I'd love to know how to sell and find more good customers. I have a long-term customer who's had me on what amounts to a staff augmentation project for 3 years. I know it won't last forever. How would you go about finding more projects like this?

goatherders 8y ago
Email me and I would be glad to have a back and forth for free. Good sales process comes down to patience and persistence and I can coach you through both if you dont mind the sometimes-slowness of email.

Bromskloss 8y ago

Direct link: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd400b/t/5b0b4dc68a922dbfa263b389/1527467516482/Entrepid_How+To+Sell.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd4...

DeanWormer 8y ago

I found this ~20 page guide Fog Creek put out a few years ago and it got me excited about switching from a technical role into sales. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a high level understanding of Enterprise sales. https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-company-needs-to-know-about-sales.pdf https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-co...

vinceguidry 8y ago

Is there an awesome list for business that this can be added to? --edit nevermind, here it is: https://github.com/cameronroe/awesome-marketing https://github.com/cameronroe/awesome-marketing it's not added to the main awesome list, so I'm making a pull req for that too.