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Why do SaaS companies need sales?
- laserlight 4y agoAnswer: SaaS products don't sell themselves.
- senttoschool 4y agoWho said SaaS products sell themselves?
- m12k 4y agoI believe the latest term is "product led growth"
- phillipcarter 4y agoI would say that anyone doing PLG who thinks sales isn't involved probably wouldn't get very far (at least certainly as a B2B product).
- senttoschool 4y agoYou have to have a product good enough to sell. That's how I interpret "product led growth".
- c_o_n_v_e_x 4y agoSales led growth = implement any feature that a sales guy runs up to you with so he can close his deal
- kbos87 4y agoProduct led growth is absolutely a valuable practice but it almost always is tightly coupled with a sales team for anything B2B and/or considered purchase.
- simultsop 4y agoSales intriguing :D
- Lukesys 4y agoBecause humans will always be able to rip-off consumers/businesses more than computers do in terms of renewals.
- asah 4y agoAnswer: because competition
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago"Well, I’m going to give you one chance, because you obviously missed it in training, and if you ever come back and tell me that again, you’re not going to be working here.” Is sales culture usually this bad?
- cardosof 4y agoHistorically, yes* - I'm not sure how things are today. * https://youtu.be/GrhSLf0I-HM https://youtu.be/GrhSLf0I-HM
- cdf 4y agoI was a sales engineer and I can assure you if your product is sufficiently innovative, nobody will have a budget for it, so this is an expected objection and every sales person would be trained to address it and they either were not paying attention during training or failed to qualify the lead, eg trying to sell Oracle DB to Larry and Sergey while they were still in a garage... of course they have no budget... not yet.
- ralfd 4y agoSure. But if a manager would go "If you have such a stupid excuse/question again you are out" all they would ensure is that I would dread and avoid communication with them.
- that_guy_iain 4y agoFrom my experience, sales is reasonably cut throat. These people aren't there to be friends, they are there solely to sell and make money. If you're not selling you're out the door. If you can't ramp up quick enough, you're out the door. Having a slump? Out the door. Sure there are lots of friendly normal sales people. Especially, on b2b. But there is still a major culture in a lot of places where it's just people trying to sell and if someone is affecting their ability to sell they need to be gone.
- darkerside 4y agoSalesperson's job is to listen. It's like a programmer having trouble reading and applying basic documentation. Huge red flag.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoI have saas ideas that I’m actively building, one is a high cost low volume product, and another is the opposite. How can I effectively sell these products, I know nothing about sales, feel like any sales people would try and take a substantial clip of any ongoing business, and don’t expect that having an ongoing full time sales rep would have long term value. My options are to learn sales myself or hire someone, but I don’t really know what to do in either route. I’m interested in either approach, or both, my budget would be low 6 figures out outlay if required.
- test6554 4y agoFind leads, market your products to them, set low expectations for yourself, listen to their feedback, close the deal, support and retain the customer.
- butthatsit 4y agoSorry but this sounds like "now draw the rest of the owl" to me... How do you find leads? How do you market products to them? How do you get them to say a word of feedback? How do you close the deal? How do you retain the customer? I am trying hard for the past decade but all of these still go right around my head.
- tylerrobinson 4y ago> I am trying hard for the past decade but all of these still go right around my head. What have you tried so far? There is plenty of information available (even in these comments) about how to find customers.
- laserlight 4y agoIn early stage, there's no sales. There's talking to customers and solving their problems. Sales comes after product-market fit.
- sofixa 4y ago
- tobiasbischoff 4y agoNothing in the worlds sells itself. If it does, it could sell 10x more with good sales.
- menaerus 4y agoIs a good sales pitch what makes you go into the store and buy an iPhone or macbook or <insert-some-other-tech>?
- matwood 4y agoAdvertising falls under sales...
- menaerus 4y agoPerhaps in some broader sense of view I would agree but I don't see traditional sales position shaped around marketing skills. These are usually different positions.
- sure_about_that 4y ago
- sokoloff 4y agoI think tap water, electric utility service, sewer service pretty much sell themselves at this point in human history. I can’t recall ever been “sold” these things and don’t think I’d use 10x as much of any of them after a sales visit.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoYou've never seen an advertisement for electricity? The point isn't that any particular residential customer will use 10x, but that any given retailer could Xx their customer base. And enterprise-scale customers can be great sakes opportunities.
- isatty 4y agoI’m struggling to think why I’d click on this clickbait title. SaaS products don’t sell themselves so this must be one of those “say something obviously wrong so people on the internet _have_ correct me” things.
- mk89 4y agoAhaha, I wish I could prove you wrong, but I am not gonna click for the exact same reasons. :)
- magicalhippo 4y agoWe've been close. For years we only had one guy partially doing sales. Most sales were from existing customers spreading the word. We got a solid number of new customers this way each month that we didn't have to do any marketing and barely any sales. Then we got some extra backing and could hire several sales people. And they definitely accelerated things a lot. So yeah... organic sales can work, but it'll probably help having sales people.
- jhoelzel 4y agoI think the hardest part about a SaaS Product is to get people interested in the first place right? If a Server goes offline when noone was using it in years, is it really offline?` So I guess it comes down to: if you are innovative nobody knows you exists at first And if you are not, there is always competition to squash
- maccard 4y agoYou should have a customer ready to pay you before you write a line of code. Preferably multiple customers. If you can sell to your target market without a product you can sell to them with one!
- jhoelzel 4y agoisnt that called being an Agency? I mean writing code for single customer that is ready to pay? How many SaaS out there can actually bootstrap on 1 let alone 100 customers? On the other side I have heard the "we built x for y but y didnt end up buying" quite a lot of times.
- maccard 4y ago> isnt that called being an Agency? I don't think agency is the right term. You're not writing code _for a single customer_, you're not writing code _until you've verified a single customer will pay for it_. I wouldn't expect an agency to contact me and say "hey we have this solution to a problem we think you have, and we'll charge you $99/month for it", I would expect them to say "sure we can build it if you tell us what you want" > How many SaaS out there can actually bootstrap on 1 let alone 100 customers? Probably more than can bootstrap on 0. The reason for this advice is to find out as early on as possible whether people will pay you for it. If no-one will pay you for it, you should ask yourself why. If one person will pay you for it, there's probably more people out there that will also pay you for it. > I mean writing code for single customer that is ready to pay? Coming back to this question for a moment, the code is not the focus if you're trying to run a SAAS, the product is. And unless you see it as product first, you're going to have a hard time selling it.
- the_arun 4y agoIf the product is excellent for its customers, sure it can. May be we need sales for all other cases.
- 0xferruccio 4y agoThis is a great read! Mark Cranney the author is the sales leader Ben Horowitz talks about in his book "The hard thing about hard things". He was known even at the time for being very aggressive sales leader
- monkeydust 4y agoMy thoughts from many years running product for a very successful financial SaaS. - Roughly 80% of value comes from 20% of the salesforce. Value function is of course heavily weighted to $ revenue but not (from product perspective) 100%. For example, I got huge amount of value from some salespeople who were not the rainmakers but could create connections with my clients to help in product development or they could articulate clearly how the product needed to be improved, unsurprisingly a number of these folk ended up in Product. - Focus 10% of your best (the 20% above) on the 'whale' prospects. Each industry has these, once you know who they are you want your best people on them. Take the others 10% who are more inclined to lead and get them to run the the 80% to try to raise the overall average quality and find the next generation of superstars. Keep repeating this process every few years. - Always be looking to automate sales interactions with non-whale prospects, if you have a huge long-tail of prospects then get creative on how to work the pipeline using low-touch sales techniques. - Some of your best prospects will be people who loved using your product and moved to other firms. Make sure you target and nurture this group. - Get your salesforce to log all their interactions with clients. No exceptions. Make it easy for this to happen. Valuable as sales churn but also to Product.
- akrymski 4y agoEvery company needs sales. Just look at Google's or FB's giant sales teams.
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoMy company makes mid five figures per month and doesn't need sales
- pid-1 4y agoHere's a few tips for SaaS vendors: - Don't hide SSO behind a talk to sales button. I will not talk to sales and will never try your product. - Allow monthly payments, but give "generous discounts" for yearly commitments. Many only offer anual payment options, which is a huge risk for buyers. GitLab is the only anual payment I ever accepted and that was after using their platform for free for about 3 years. - Having a YouTube video demoing your platform >>> meeting with sales
- utdiscant 4y agoI am like you, but most of our customers seems to have different preferences than me and you.
- pif 4y agoIt would be interesting to know the preferences of your potential customers that are not yet your customers!
- mickael-kerjean 4y agoThat's exactly what I was trying to do without realising it could cause issues but once you lay it out like this, it makes a lot of sense
- monkeydust 4y agoCant recall the SaaS site but I found it on HN. On their front page they clearly said - how would you like to engage with us: [ Setup a Meeting ] [ Watch a Product Demo ] [ Join a live Webinar ] I think that's definitely a good path to follow
- NineStarPoint 4y agoI personally agree with all of this, but the article touches on the reason why some companies basically force talks to sales. If a product is targeting small and mid sized companies, then technical people who want what you listed are going to have a large effect on the outcome. When you’re targeting large enterprises though, getting in conversations with people to try and work on getting the whole enterprise to adopt your product becomes more important. I think those targeting enterprise customers are accepting losing mid sized sales to increase their odds at capturing massive enterprise contracts. As always, know your target and have a strategy to match.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoUnless your platform writes its own proposal content and can burp out pricing and put it in a document with that content ad hoc, then you need sales operations at minimum. Otherwise you will likely scale but have so many fires to put out through bad sales process issues that you’ll wonder how it happened.
- giorgioz 4y agointercom.com and mailchimp.com are two of the most famous SaaS and they are not sales driven. The articles ties together things that do not need to be tied: 1) Enterprise SaaS is only a part of SaaS Sales work better for Enterprise (big fishes) than for freelancer/small/medium businesses. I heard this concept explained as "Hunt whales with spears and hunt small fishes with nets" in other words, Sales for enterprise and marketing scalable channels for small clients. 2) Sales !== Marketing channels The book Traction talks about the many acquisition channels. Some channels are historically considered Marketing (example Content Marketing) and they are a way to acquire large quantities of customer cheaply