How To Sell Software As A Service?

SaaS is profitable for many entrepreneurs since it is in its infancy of a potentially unending lifetime, with its prime period yet far in the future.

However, SaaS is the exact opposite of making money quickly.

How can one hop on this bandwagon that has just left the station and is headed to many interesting places while achieving profitability as quickly and with as few resources as possible?

Check out the following list of empirically-supported time-saving and money-saving techniques to reclaim your time and save money.

What Is Software As A Service?

What exactly is Saas? First, it should be understood that SaaS is an abbreviation for Software as a Service.

Second, it is helpful to move to instances of SaaS you must have used in order to connect the dots as quickly as possible: Dropbox, Gmail, and Slack are all instances of SaaS.

Now, the essential distinction is the final portion before the definition: Cloud-based SaaS requires no work from the user for creation, management, storage, or maintenance. Pay the monthly fee and enjoy the service.

1. Keep Your Trials Short

A lengthy trial may seem like a wonderful approach to grab a buyer, but it’s really detrimental to your firm. The duration of trials for 99 percent of companies should not exceed fourteen days. This is why.

The majority of consumers do not utilize free trials throughout their entirety. If you examine your data, you’ll notice that the great majority of trial consumers abandon your service after three days.

Users are more committed to a brief trial. Your prospects will delay, and when they delay, they will forget. With a shorter trial time, people are more inclined to instantly try your goods.

Reduce customer acquisition expenses. When you reduce the duration of your trial, you also reduce your sales cycle. If you can compress your sales cycle from six weeks to three, your client acquisition expenses will be drastically reduced.

2. Optimize Your Email Campaign

Unless you have an exceptional email marketing strategy, the majority of your trial participants will forget you exist within hours. Here are three ways to maximize the effectiveness of your drip email campaign.

Use “human” email addresses. Departmental emails should never be sent. Use “[email protected]” instead of “[email protected].”

Send several emails. Christoph Janz, one of the most successful SaaS investors of all time, advised SaaS companies, “If nobody is calling your emails’spam,’ you may not be sending enough.”

Send emails depending on activities. Your drip campaign should automatically email your leads in a variety of conditions, such as when they sign up if they visit the account or cancellation page, and when their trial is due to expire.

Our sales platform, Close, can interact with a variety of robust automation solutions that make it much simpler to run drip campaigns. Try it out yourself with our free 14-day trial.

3. Give Short, Value-focused Demos

The most frequent error I saw startups make when presenting demos is approaching the presentation as a training session. Your lead does not need (or even want) to view each and every feature of your product. They want to know how it will improve their chances of success. Here are three ways for doing effective product demonstrations.

Obtain qualifications first. Demos should not be used as a qualifying tool. Always qualify leads before giving a demonstration.

Keep it brief. 30–60 minutes is simply too long. If you are unable to describe how your product benefits your prospect within 15 minutes, you do not understand your product or your prospect.

Prioritize the advantages above features. Your customers do not care about each and every button on your interface. Tell them what your product does for them rather than what it does.

A successful product demonstration is not a training course but rather a demonstration of value. Treat it like such, and you will be far more effective.

4. Set Your Prices (really) High

SaaS firms that rely on pricing to remain competitive lack product confidence. They believe that the only way to make their answer feasible is to devalue it.

Value, not price, should make your product competitive.

Learn from CloudSponge and conduct price experiments. You’ll know you’ve achieved success when:

• 30% of your prospects respond, “You’re insane, I’d never pay that!”
• 30% of your prospects state, “Your product is really affordable.”
• 40% of your prospects remark, “Your product is pricey but well worth the cost.”

It is acceptable to be excessively pricey for some possibilities. If you never lose business due to cost, then your SaaS solution is too inexpensive.

5. Sell Prepaid Annual Plans

Startups adore SaaS goods because of their consistent monthly income. These schemes may provide continuous money, but at a trickle.

When expanding your SaaS firm, you need a revenue cascade, not a trickle. Consider providing lower prices for prospects who purchase prepaid yearly plans.

Although this may temporarily reduce total income, it provides rapid access to considerable cash flow. This flood of income might be used to recruit a sales force, enter new markets, or enhance your product.

6. Don’t Give Discounts

Discounts may appear to be a terrific method to attract hesitant customers but often end up doing more damage than good. This is not how SaaS is sold. This is why:

Discounts cause salesmen to become lax. It is difficult to sell prospects on value, but simply to reduce the price. When discounts are available, sellers will likely abuse them.

Discounts make it hard to anticipate income. When each new consumer pays a different price, it is impossible to predict your income next week, let alone next year.

Discounts are detrimental to branding. Customers will get dissatisfied when they find that their competitors are purchasing the identical thing at a lower price.

You must have a tight discount policy and adhere to it. Outside of prepaid yearly agreements, we advise against giving any discounts.

Get Out There And Crush It

SaaS sales are difficult, but not impossible. If you implement these tools and methods into your sales cycle, your chances of success will rise dramatically.

Share this post with your network, ensure that everyone on your team understands how to market SaaS, and then begin selling.