Selling SaaS to Enterprises distilled
Once a customer realizes the value of the SaaS product, it should sell itself. Until then you need sales people. But sales isn’t a static process you set and forget. Great sales organizations are constantly evolving to best meet customers where they are. I will break out how best to sell enterprise SaaS using the Everett Rogers technology adoption curve.
Getting a customer to the value cliff where a sale is inevitable is dependent on a number of variables, the most important being their familiarity with the technology category. Every new tech category goes through a similar customer adoption/familiarity trajectory. Because customer familiarity to the technology is changing dramatically in each phase, the sales process should also evolve accordingly.
Innovators phase:
When a technology is first introduced, it’s value proposition needs to be presented by an apt sales person to an intrigued prospect, who will champion, understand, and build an internal business case for it. Note this doesn’t apply to an application that replicates an existing technology with a sleeker design, new gtm or cheaper pricing. The first sales people are inevitably founders of the company or sales folks who chose to join early stage businesses.
This prospect often identifies themselves as an innovator within their business. Because the technology is new, the customer is required to sell it internally to stakeholders, figure how to pay for it, support it etc. This is a top-down sales process. Typically the target customer persona should be at Director/VP level (depending on customer size) that has the influence to successfully introduce risk to their business. The sales process is largely to buddy up with this person and drive them close.
Early Adopters phase
By this point, the technology category should have multiple startups vying for customer attention. Each startup’s touch point pushes familiarity among customers. Prospects are subjected to webinars, videos, collateral, cold calls, emails, events, social posts etc educating them on the value proposition. At this point, the business case for a customer is more clear.
In this phase, many of the businesses will structure sales as a land grab. Many startups raise capital and try to manufacture an insurmountable lead by ignoring unit economics and just acquiring customers.
Depending on the complexity of installation and overall deal size, the sales process should be moving to a structured inside sales process.
Early Majority
This phase is a battleground for long term dominance. At this point, many of customers have been exposed to the technology. Their businesses may have already tried it and are now formalizing budget for longer term adoption.
It’s in the early part of this curve that sales process should be down to a science. Businesses know their type of customer, how to get them to the value cliff, in how much time, and have been able to expand that customer. The majority of accounts will not be fully penetrated and some sales focus will shift to expansion. The ability to expand accounts predictably is the single biggest growth lever by middle of this cycle.
Businesses will look for some customer data advantage that will allow sales teams to outperform their competitors. Advantages might be through content thought leadership, a must attend event for industry folks, effective customer list scraping, or some other marketing ops strategy. Inevitably this data advantage gives way to a freemium product that allows prospect self qualification.
By the middle of this curve businesses will require fewer sales people to “close” and more customer success or process staff supporting customers through the acquisition funnel.
Towards the end of this curve, the best case scenario is an automated interface where customers sign-up, onboard, and get to a value cliff, whereupon they make a purchase. No human touches. An automated system such as this is the ideal go to market for a SaaS product that replicates an existing process or tool, where the customer has familiarity, and the product improves user experience, and is cheaper. In situations where customers are learning it for the first time it’s necessary to deploy people to nudge them through the acquisition funnel.
Late Majority
Early in this cycle many new customers should be coming in through a self serve or automated portal. Customers should be able to get to a value cliff with no human touches. CS and Sales are primarily focused on increasing the LTV of customers through cross-sells or upsells. Dashboards have been built out to allow sales folks to see which customers are near a pricing cliff to drive them over.
Laggards
The laggards are the hardest customers to convert. They’ve held out for so long which means there is a very compelling reason that they have not converted. Once a business hits this phase, it’s back to relationship sales as the barriers to adoption for this segment is likely very high. Of course they should only be pursued if the dollars associated are also outsized.
Enduring SaaS businesses should have multiple product acts. Once the initial product is reaching mid-early majority, a new product or feature prices is introduced to the early adopter phase. This might be within the customer base, or maybe in an adjacent market. The point is that sales should be a never ending cycle. Businesses will always have customers at different points of familiarity with different products, and enterprise sales is all about matching them with the right process to get them to the value cliff in the most efficient way possible.
