How the hell does B2B marketing/sales work for SaaS businesses?

I have no experience selling Saas but I am a business owner so maybe I can help.

In my opinion the best way to sell a saas is to sell the service that the saas does first. I will do an example. Let's that you have a social media ads atuomation saas. At first, you sell me social media ads management and you give me good results. Then, you tell me that you have a saas that can do the same exact thing and save x dollars.

The main problem with a saas is the cost. I am not talking about money but about the fact that employees don't like to learn new tools and that in the short term I am probably losing productivity. If you sell a service first, I don't have these problems and if you are good, I will trust your reccomendation. I am talking about real trust, not internet trust.

If your Saas is cheap and fast to learn, then content marketing can help.

Another tip that I have is to be clear when you are selling. This is what I mean. People reach me out in private (email, private messages on communities/social) and make me compliments. Then give me "tips" for my business. After about ten messages, they try to sell. Not only it doesn't work, it wastes you time. My advice is to be direct and write short messages. A couple of paragraphs. Then redirect them to a landing page made for the audience. St best, the landing page will convert, at worst you didn't look fake and saved time.

The Zapier founders spent 8 months answering questions in forums before they got their first inbound customer.

Before that point, every customer came from providing one-on-one help in forums. The team had a presence in customer forums for companies like Basecamp, Salesforce, Dropbox and Evernote.

They tried to help anyone with questions about integrating tools.

I’d figure out where my customers hang and start helping individuals.

It’s not the sexy scalable side of SaaS but it helps you refine your way to product-market fit. Do enough of this and the flywheel may start to spin on it’s own.

The whole ‘do things that don’t scale’ ethos.

I did a full write-up of Zapier’s Marketing Playbook. They also do some unique things around content marketing.

I would say the following..

A customer usually does not purchase or commit until you had atleast 7 touch points. If you know the client or the customer then it becomes very easy.

Do not expect an unknown entity to become your customer at first encounter. This may not be true if you are established brand or celebrity. An established brand or celebrity is not "unknown" in that sense and the prospect has little resistance to purchase from them.

So what can we do if we are neither an established brand or celebrity?

We build trust, slowly and try to reach out to potential customer again and again and again..

How?

1. We collect the lead information through our website or any other landing page mechanism
2. We create a nice auto drip email campaign
3. Caution here is not to ever sell in the emails that are sent out
4. Just a brief intro and just talk one important feature or benefit that they could derive from your product or service
5. Then in the next week's email we talk about a different benefit or an angle
6. So on, we talk about different feature or benefit every time we send out an email
7. If you have customers then you could also include the testimonials or referrals in the email.
8. So after 7 weeks, you introduced your product to the potential customer in 7 different ways.
9. In every email you should include a call to action (like a calendly link to setup a 30 minute call) or just reply to setup a webmeeting demo or strategy session.
10. The idea is that we are breaking the ice between you and the customer slowly and give enough room in between.
11. If the prospect sees enough benefit they will contact or signup for the demo
12. All of these emails can be setup into a drip email campaign.
13. Our daily job then is to keep adding leads to this drip system and monitor the responses.

Slowly your leads will add up, traffic to your website increase, you will start receiving email responses ...

Responses could be

1. They setup a call with you
2. They signup for the demo

These two are great opportunities to convert them into customers and long term relationship.

Hope this is helpful

If your subscription is low-cost, try content marketing. It is not a fast strategy, but it's one of the best for SaaS.

My advice is to start slow and methodical. With that I mean by that is to try and learn (and document) as much as you can about your target audience.

1. Decide on the target audience. This should be the main target audience that you feel will be the easiest to identify, contact, and communicate with. Use criteria to flesh out the describe your audience.

2. Start collecting leads. With the information above, start looking at where you can find companies that fit that above criteria. It can be listings, business associations, meetups, etc. Start collecting company information, and who at the company would be a good first person to contact. Do some additional research such as trying to find out their revenue, plans they have, articles in media, etc.

3. Set goals for yourself. It can be very easy to google a few times, come up with 5 companies and then give up for the day. Set strict goals. For example, qualify 15 companies per day.

4. Start contacting. This one is sometimes harder than you think. I had to get over a hurdle where I was waiting until I "had enough leads" to start contacting. There's no such thing. Just start emailing or calling and testing your value prop. Again, set specific goals for yourself. Send 10 well-written and researched, personalized emails per day. Make calls to find the right contact person within 10 companies.

I'd say early on the most important thing is to focus on learning and depth, not volumes and scalability. From the first 20 potential customers you want to learn as much as possible. Why did they respond to your email? What was it that made them open it? Why did they want to have a second call? Why did they lose interest? Why did they decide to buy/not buy. Why from/not from you?

This deeper knowledge will help you iterate and perfect how you continue to reach out to potential customers, and then you can start to try and scale this.

My main advice is to avoid trying to scale sales too soon; before you know what actually drives a sale or drives a sale away.

I won’t repeat what others have said here but I’d focus on 3 things:

• what end of SaaS are you doing? I.e. low monthly cost or high, or both.
• who is your target audience and where are they likely to be?
• what benefits does your product bring? Forget about features and even services, how does it make your customers’ lives easier?

Quick example pulling all 3 of the above together. If it’s a low price SaaS aimed at small local businesses then you could try some Local Google ads and paid social (then just make sure your website is set up for easy conversion). And the message you’d want to get across is about saving them money or letting them get on with running their business. That’s just an example to bring it to life, it will very much depend on your product and audience though.

All the best!! :)

You'd probably get a lot out of my SalesForFounders.com course.

I can't really explain how B2B sales and marketing works in a single comment, but if you have any specific questions or challenges, my email is always open :)

Try to listen to ForgetTheFunnel workshops. They are experts at B2B SaaS marketing.