B2B Saas sales and distribution

If you are looking for a good place to find your target market I would highly recommend finding Facebook groups for your target market. They are a great place to interact with your target market and mention your solution as they complain about the problem it solves! But more importantly just learn more about them by reading about their problems and how they think. This has single handily been the way I pivoted my B2B SaaS company into a solution that they will actually pay for and land all my customers. It has got to the point to where they mention my solution when some posts about the problem it solves.

You would be surprised how many Facebook groups there are for your target market. For example, I target accountants and I am in 10 different groups with 3k plus members in each one

I'm not sure if this will work for you but most companies have some sort of reputation management, meaning they are monitoring sources to see if they are mentioned. One hack that I've used quite successfully, in enterprise sales, that surprisingly has worked really well is I would write an article/blog post with a click-bait(ish) title. They would get notified and I would some sort of response but it has to been meaningful and thoughtful. I would usually wait until i found an interesting article or they posted some news. I landed 2 Fortune 100 clients this way. It doesn't happen over night and not everyone responded but I landed 2 significant clients in the course of 8 months.

You're assuming that:

1. More than one firm has the same specific problem
2. Your product solves it in a meaningful* way
   /* They care enough about it to pay

They're safe assumptions, but need to be validated. The validation process will give you the information you need to sell effectively. The most efficient way of doing that, imo, is cold emails to book discovery meetings with people outside of your network. Happy to go into further detail on that process if you'd like, but it sounds like you're looking for avenues other that cold outreach.

For lead gen, I use Apollo. It also has a built in tool to manage campaigns and the paid version has a/b testing. Here's my referral link: https://www.apollo.io/explorer/?referral_code=7X9J6eiRZf_Z1P_cMzrC3g

I also assume that because they're licensed professionals there are databases (for purchase) and sites that list them (for scraping).

Looks like you just missed the CIPD's HR tech expo. Which means you don't have to be a vendor and it's fresh enough on their minds that they'd be open to talking about it.

I'd reach out to attendees, vendors and speakers to get feedback on how it went and if they'd talk with you about the problem you're looking to validate.

Check out the FestivalofWork hashtag on Twitter.

we built an open source B2C tool but now switch to a B2B SAAS tool on API data governance and monitoring. I didn't reach out to any of my former colleagues for promoting, yet, as it's quite early stage and I want to have real industry feedback. But I attended a lot of security/data privacy related events in the Bay area, connected with people and showed them a prototype to get feedback. I was not trying to sell but the process was very meaningful as it allowed to validate the idea and figure out if it's a common issue or just for a few. Eventually I got some companies who are interested in testing out our beta.

I'm building and infosec product and I've been heavily tapping my network of programmers I've worked with before (it was bigger than I thought) to put me in touch with their heads of infosec for an intro if they have one, and I take over from there. I'm still researching viability and infosec people have been intrigued with being a part of research up to now.

Getting an intro from a previous colleague or contract to their HR department seems like it might be an easy ask of a prior colleague.