The SaaS Sales world is getting more competitive every day, and some companies are struggling to keep up with it. How do you stand out in a market that has so much to offer? We are here to show you 5 steps for SaaS Sales success, including personalising your care, keeping your clients in the loop, keeping them interested, and much more. What are you waiting for? Take some notes and start implementing these in your business today!
1. Make your SaaS Sales clients feel special (personalised care)
This is the most underrated item on this list: making your clients feel special is probably the most important key to having success in SaaS Sales. In a world that is beginning to revolve around softwares as services, what separates a good company from a great company is the customer service. Take FreshBooks for example; they are an online invoicing service which is very well known for their customer service. Specifically, they got famous for their “random acts of cake,” a campaign in which they randomly send out cake to new and loyal customers, as well as to customers on their birthday. This keeps the relationship feeling personal, and increases the chances of success.
Another thing you can do to keep clients feeling like they are getting personalised attention is to have your customer service providers always use their own name when contacting the clients (as opposed to your company’s name). A good way to incorporate this is by using “human” email addresses (think “YourName@Business.com” instead of “sales@Business.com”).
2. Keep your SaaS clients in the loop (healthy spam)
The second thing you should be doing to ensure SaaS Sales success is to get (and keep) your clients in the loop as often and for as long as possible. This means one thing: get them on your email list/follower list.
The first way you can keep clients (both current and prospective) in the loop with regarding what your company is doing is to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletter or follow your social media channels. You can do this by offering incentives (but read Point 5 for more information on this) or genuinely making your content creative and interesting (like on Instagram or Twitter). Make sure to use your newsletter as an opportunity to show clients your successes as well as to remind them of how your service is benefitting them. You’ll want to find the perfect balance between “constant friendly-like reminders” and “pure spam”. You can read more about how to create a killer e-mail campaign here.
3. Keep your SaaS clients wanting more (short trials)
At first glance it may seem like a good idea to offer long trial periods to your SaaS customers: get them hooked and they’ll want more right? Actually, wrong. Keeping your free trials short is key to SaaS Sales success. It can actually have the opposite effect. By keeping your clients wanting more, especially early on in the phase where they are excited about your product, will increase the chances of retention. Giving them too much time (a full month) to think about it as opposed to just enough (two weeks) will make it more likely that they pay for your product in case they want to keep thinking about it/procrastinating (which means profit for you).
It also adds a sense of urgency to the sale which has proven to work very well as a marketing strategy (victims of “One Day Only” sale purchases, we get you). Besides, people tend to take shorter trials a lot more seriously than longer ones, as well as taking advantage of longer ones more often (it is easier to create a new free trial using a new e-mail account once a month as opposed to once every two weeks).
4. Keep your SaaS clients interested (short and concise contact)
There are two keys to this: 1) contact potential SaaS clients directly as soon as possible and 2) keep your demos short.
One of the biggest sales mistakes some companies are still making is to only directly contact potential customers (by phone) in the final stages of concluding the relationship. The best thing you can do (especially as a start-up) to increase your chances of SaaS Sales success is to contact potential costumers as soon as possible (preferably, minutes after they sign up for your newsletter because it means they are actively thinking about it). Contacting potentials immediately and charming them with your personalised care could ensure immediate retention, as clients may not feel the need to keep looking anymore seeing as you will be there to answer all their questions.
Having said this, you need to charm them in order to keep them. Make sure your sales pitches are short, creative, and concise. If you bore them immediately with your textbook sales talk, you can be sure they will be making excuses to hang up the phone in no time. Make sure you keep the focus on the benefits, particularly the ones that may interest them directly. Find out more about their client, and then show them what your product can do for them, specifically.
5. Keep your standards high (with high prices)
Making your prices competitive in this very competitive SaaS sales world can feel very tempting. However, the only way you will succeed is if your product is truly valuable, and one of the best ways to show it is by pricing it correctly. Get what your product is truly worth. It shouldn’t be the price that makes the product stand out, it should be the value.
A great example of this is the Cloudsponge experiment, where they created a formula for success: 30% of your prospects should be saying “You’re crazy, I would never pay that!”, 30% of your prospects should be saying “Your product is really cheap!”, and 40% of your prospects should be saying “Your product is expensive, but worth the price.”
Other mistakes some companies make are giving out too many discounts and not selling prepaid annual plans. Giving out discounts to attract new clients may sound appealing, but don’t forget that in order to make profit you have to be meeting certain price points. An extra free month may be a good option, but a reoccurring discount for an undetermined amount of time could seriously hurt your income. Another thing to keep in mind is that whilst a slow monthly flow of money may sound nice, an upfront bigger payment is even better. Allow companies to prepay full years at a time not only to make your revenue estimations easier, but their life easier as well.
And don’t forget: sometimes no deal at all is a way better outcome than a crappy/easy deal.
Which steps are you going to implement in your company to increase your SaaS Sales success? Let us know.
