Does your SaaS need active selling?
So, you've built a SaaS; and got early customers. The product is validated. But does it need active selling? That is do you still have to -
- Identify clients
- Reach out to them
- Get on phone call and pitch your product
- Handle their objections, offer deals/discounts etc
OR
Does your SaaS gets customers on autopilot (through referrals, organic traffic etc.)?
When I hear stories of people making $5K MRR - I wonder how much effort go behind the scenes every month?
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Until less than $2K MRR, you still need to push your product some way or the other. It could be via multiple product launches, ads, DMing, Cold outreach etc.
But once your product builds some credibility, it slows goes on Auto pilot mode with your SEO efforts kicking in, referrals coming in once the credibility is established.
It also depends on the kind of products too. For example products like Website builders have a link at the bottom under free plans and this drives traffic easier.
I think most people are doing cold-emails to find their first clients instead of hopping on the phone first. Cold phone calls don't work, unless you are selling an enterprise and even then they are just not appreciated.
Want to piss someone off? Give them a cold call.
Want to intrigue them? Send them an interesting email introducing yourself, your product, and what you want to do.
Cold calling can work, but you're right that many people will find it annoying. It might be worthwhile if you have qualified leads.
You are so wrong!
Agreed. Cold emails with a little bit of personalization and cold outreach on LinkedIn, Twitter still work.
Excellent post. As some outbound efforts are not as expensive as founders think. Inbound has gone up in cost quite a bit in the last five years. What does a inbound lead cost? How many convert to a freemium model? How many convert to a paid user? Look at the numbers, inbound is very expensive. Organic or not. And not every business model can use this.
I believe it's important to have a healthy mix for no-touch sales and active selling as you grow.
If you go all in with autopilot sales, then you might lose your connection with your customers. that'll result in a bad situation for you. because as market changes/evoles (it always does), you won't have much ideas about what's going on out there.
Close to 70% of our sales are no-touch, but we are constantly gathering with sales people to go over their notes about requests, comparisons, use cases from potential buyers. and with these insights, we are empowering no-touch channels and personalize our own user onboarding.
With PriceWell we have developed a system to approach leads:
Active Selling
Distribution Channels:
Talking with perspective customers, reinforces the conviction on their requests.
Meaning:
That not only aligns development with customer requests but provides topics for meeting their demands with SEO blog-posts and then materializing into features.
That's our approach and has worked pretty smoothly so far.
Would love to listen to others ofc!
P.S. I would not go with discounts/LTDs for the product (esp. early on).
Most probably you already underselling against competition.
Onboard a customer for the value of the product. Not the price you are giving it for.
Remember: Price is just a tool to materialize value
How are you using fiverr? I'm curious, please expand on this a bit :)
Sure! So what we do on our free Plan is integrating Stripe Checkout without coding.
Most of the users on Fiverr who search for Stripe Integration are either non-technical or technical that need speed up dev.
So they are exactly the customer persona we are looking for our free tier.
What we did was creating a gig, with PriceWell 's credentials, we let Fiverr users benefit from same-day delivery (if there was same hour delivery, we could do it) and they were able to monitor their pricing/ make changes whenever they need to/ add coupon codes and in general be flexible with their selling points.
We've seen ton of demand for that and it was a good entry point for our paid tiers later on.
Good question, one that I have as well (once there’s $2k/mo or more, like you said for example).
My target market is realtors in my area (Louisville, KY, USA), so I googled “Louisville Realtors” and started dialing them.
Right now that means I get to conduct customer discovery while still developing my product, and built a list at the same time.
Once it’s live, I will approach it the same way: “hi, I’ve got a question about real estate, do you have a few mins to chat?”
I feel like taking to leads/customers is something I’ll need to do on a regular basis, even if someone else is doing the coding later on.