4 ms·

Many SaaS websites seem to try as hard as possible to hide the actual product from you, with no screenshots, no live demo, and sometimes even no free trial, and

• sly010 9y ago
  Selling is easier if you don't reveal your cards early in the game. Buying is much harder.
  • tertius 9y ago
    Elaborate please. Those not educated in sales may benefit.
    • tonyhb 9y ago
      This is what I take from it: by revealing your cards there's less room for manipulation. The buyer already has preconceptions that could range from: - This will not work; I didn't see this in the screenshots - I don't understand what I saw and now I have irrelevant questions If the buyer tells you the pain points, and only the pain points, as a seller you can focus on _those_ and cut out the bullshit. It makes manipulating easier as a seller, and as a buyer you're left to trust the seller that everything will work out in the end. Haven't got the experience to say whether or not this is a good thing.
      • tertius 9y ago
        > It makes manipulating easier as a seller You mean manipulating the pitch in a way to only focus on the benefits to their problems? Or in a bad way?
• moduspwnens14 9y ago
  It's got to be that they're not multi-tenant. I'm with you--I would only bother building for SaaS if the cost of a minimal new customer is insignificant. Then while your competitors are saying, "Give us your phone number and we'll call you," you can be saying, "Click here and try right now with no credit card." I think a lot of these companies, though, are more-or-less selling hosted versions of the stuff they've been selling for decades... which is very much not multi-tenant, but it's what they've got.
• kesselvon 9y ago
  the conversion from a trial to a sale for enterprise software is super low for two reasons: - software only really works when you commit to it by importing all your data and your daily workflow within it - no one wants to put that much effort in a trial companies are also super paranoid about competitors getting a hold of your product and ripping the good features
  • solatic 9y ago
    It's only super low because people expect to sell to enterprises with relatively low-touch sales methods. If you want to sell to enterprise, with no prior customers, you need to be setting meetings with several stakeholders (engineering, financial, legal, infosec, upper-management if possible...) within that company, demonstrating to each how your software fits their specific burning need, and helping them adapt the evaluation instance to their specific needs until it becomes indispensable. In short, as a founder, you ought to be expecting to practically work out of your customer's offices, at least in the beginning of the sales process. If the feedback you're getting from an enterprise sales meeting is "we need solution X which isn't part of your product," then either a) you're still doing market research or b) the enterprise is asking for something that doesn't fit your cost/benefit curves.
    • mattmanser 9y ago
      I worked for what is now a £10 million p/a turnover that didn't do this, so it really does depend on what you're selling. They sold a document/project management system, extensible like salesforce that was generally used by the whole company. AFAIK, they targeted CEOs and IT heads, but they targeted SMEs and gave up on larger customers because they believed it simply wasn't worth the effort for those customers, they just got mucked around too much and closing sales took far too long.