Successful SMB SaaS Sales

I’ve learned that sales processes for SMB SaaS customers have different requirements than do CapEx, on premises, software sales. 

• Create compelling offering (value)
• Position that to high quality prospective customers-campaigns, channels, Social Media.
• A+B= web traffic

Once to the site-the give and get look like this (inform, educate, trial) in exchange for add’l information from prospect. Immediacy is key for SaaS. Not old school immediate like call back within 4 hours. Four hours may as well be four days. Live Chat & Call Me Now are key elements for immediacy as well as powerful tools allowing sales to learn when a customer is logging in- first time and how many times during a trial.

Score carding is a minimum sales requirement. Old school is driven by FIFO metrics and, as such,  pretty worthless for SMB SaaS. Scorecarding is a product of assigning values to profile driven answers to questions provided by prospects when they decide to try or to learn more about the offering. Those values are the numerator while their actual behaviors (# education sessions attended, completed, reviewed and logins to the site) are the denominator.  Start with a stake in the ground and as business closes analyze the scores for those closed new customers and adjust the scorecard to reflect reality (tuning the scorecard).

 Successful SMB SaaS Sales people are:

• Digital Natives- immediately “get it” on the technology side
• Spend 4-5  hours each day on the phone and equal amount Chatting and emailing.
• Generate significant leads from their own SocNWs.
• Blog relentlessly
• Highly motivated- this never changes
• Intensely led

Channel Partners

Today’s SaaS Channel Partners look a lot less like computer VARs and Software Business Partners than we might expect. Traditional IT channel partners are looking for (and can’t be blamed for this) either no brainer add on sales (decent reward, little sales effort or upfront investment) or products that drive services revenues and have appeal to significant percentage of their existing customer base.  Of course they need leads. I’ve found success with Channel Partners as varied as athletic shoe distribution and real estate coaching.

Future Channel Partners will quite possibly look like Healthcare or HR software publishers, Insurance companies with agents, (people with access to large populations of small businesses each feeling increased regulatory pressure) but each, on their own difficult to reach on a cost effective basis.