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Making $20 million a year SaaS companies into $22 million a year SaaS companies. If you have reasonable expectation that I can actually deliver on that, then y
by patio11 12y ago
Making $20 million a year SaaS companies into $22 million a year SaaS companies. If you have reasonable expectation that I can actually deliver on that, then you're pretty much willing to say yes to any rate I quote.
If you're curious "How does one turn a $20 million a year SaaS company into a $22 million a year SaaS company?", there exist many options depending on the specifics of the company and virtually all of them are doable. For example, if you increase the rate at which the SaaS company closes deals by a modest amount, that could reasonably hit that by itself. You could do that by some combination of A/B testing, better email marketing, tweaking sales processes, etc, alone or in combination. I've blogged pretty extensively on all those topics if you're curious.
These are not necessarily all that technically complicated. If you can figure out ActionMailer, an if statement, and a for loop, you have every technical capability you need to be an engineer in charge of email marketing. The interesting bits are "What emails do I decide to send?", "What words go in those emails?", and "What goes in the if statement?"
The actual work is exactly as dominated by meat-and-potatoes execution ability as you think it is.
- robinhoode 12y agoWhat books can I read to, at the very least, attempt address the questions in your 3rd paragraph, given how unique every business is? Isn't anything you find a book on sales or marketing so abstract that it's 2 or 3 layers of assumptions before you can talk about projections? How does one begin a career in SaaS sales / marketing? What makes for a good "portfolio piece" in that domain?
- kasey_junk 12y agoOne of the things that has made Patrick a "tech. celebrity" is that he has written extensively and openly about this very topic. In particular his brand of uniqueness was to take a lot of things that engineers don't like and then turn it into an engineering problem. He didn't guess, he tested. Here is the amazing thing, he also did all of us a huge service and wrote it up and put it on the internet for everyone to find! If you haven't yet, spend as much time as you can diving in his blog. Every post he's written is worth the price of admission, but you could definitely limit your search to the ones that focus on the SaaS sales and marketing aspects.
- galfarragem 12y agoI wouldn't call Patrick a 'tech celebrity', I would call him a 'marketing celebrity' in tech. His writings on how to market yourself are without doubt the best essays I've ever read on the subject.
- tptacek 12y agoSee you guys only put it like this because you haven't heard him sing along to TLC. He's really just a straight-up celebrity.
- cpach 12y agoSome starting points: http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ http://www.hyperink.com/Sell-More-Software-Website-Conversion-Optimization-For-Software-Developers-b9B393B465B http://www.hyperink.com/Sell-More-Software-Website-Conversio...
- bcg1 12y agoOk, fair enough. Will take a look at your blog, thanks.
- hnrem 12y agoThose are the standard skills of marketing people I've worked with, getting paid around £30000/year. I find this very peculiar, maybe the companies particularly dysfunctional, but there seems to be a missing variable.
- ky3 12y agopatio11 sells progress. Your folks sell motion. There is a difference.