Vendite SaaS: I fondamenti
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 6:44 am
The most distinctive aspect is that you sell software and subscriptions.
The fact that you are selling software means that it can get a little technical at usa phone number list times, although this very much depends on the complexity and ease of use of the software.
The fact that you sell subscriptions means that you are inherently committed to your customers for the long term. Customers who subscribe and then quickly cancel (no, we are not talking about buttering, but canceling; we will get into the jargon later) are not what you are looking for.
3-5 diversi modelli di vendita SaaS
Now, are all SaaS sales the same? Definitely not.
Nota Here we will focus only on B2B sales, as B2C SaaS sales almost never involve a sales team.
There are huge differences between the different SaaS sales models:
Vendite self-service : Customers purchase software largely without any help
Transactional Sales : Customers get help from the sales team, but buy quickly and don't need many different sales interactions.
Corporate Sales : Il purchasing process is quite lengthy and requires multiple interactions with different stakeholders of the company.
And ultimately it depends on the size of the "animal" you are selling to.
Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in SaaS, distinguishes five different animals with increasing size: mice, rabbits, deer, elephants and whales.
Five Ways to Build a $100 Million SaaS Company
The type of company largely defines the sales and business strategy in SaaS.
If you sell to rats you can't hire a sales team. It would be too expensive. The entire sales process has to be autonomous . And the product has to have some kind of virality built in, because you can't even spend a lot to attract customers.
If you sell to rabbits there is not much budget for sales yet. Most of the process still has to be autonomous , even if you can put a little effort into closing a deal, but you cannot go beyond transactional sales . Essentially, sales have to be closed in one phone call. Contacts have to come inbound, through marketing dei contenuti or ads.
If you are hunting deer ou are in transactional sales territory . An inside sales force can close deals and, to some extent, help generate them. However, you need a lot of leads, so marketing will play a very important role in generazione di lead .
If you're chasing elephants it's when you sell expensive subscriptions to large companies. You're doing enterprise sales . With the margins you're generating per customer, there's no problem in going to them, so you can do a bit more classic field sales.
Finally, if you're looking for whales probably not exclusively), you better get strategic about your enterprise sales approach .
Average SaaS Sales Cycle Length
Based on the classification of SaaS sales customers into different animals, it is probably safe to say that some average sales cycles will be longer than others.
The best data we've found on this topic comes from Matt Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group on Quora :
The fact that you are selling software means that it can get a little technical at usa phone number list times, although this very much depends on the complexity and ease of use of the software.
The fact that you sell subscriptions means that you are inherently committed to your customers for the long term. Customers who subscribe and then quickly cancel (no, we are not talking about buttering, but canceling; we will get into the jargon later) are not what you are looking for.
3-5 diversi modelli di vendita SaaS
Now, are all SaaS sales the same? Definitely not.
Nota Here we will focus only on B2B sales, as B2C SaaS sales almost never involve a sales team.
There are huge differences between the different SaaS sales models:
Vendite self-service : Customers purchase software largely without any help
Transactional Sales : Customers get help from the sales team, but buy quickly and don't need many different sales interactions.
Corporate Sales : Il purchasing process is quite lengthy and requires multiple interactions with different stakeholders of the company.
And ultimately it depends on the size of the "animal" you are selling to.
Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in SaaS, distinguishes five different animals with increasing size: mice, rabbits, deer, elephants and whales.
Five Ways to Build a $100 Million SaaS Company
The type of company largely defines the sales and business strategy in SaaS.
If you sell to rats you can't hire a sales team. It would be too expensive. The entire sales process has to be autonomous . And the product has to have some kind of virality built in, because you can't even spend a lot to attract customers.
If you sell to rabbits there is not much budget for sales yet. Most of the process still has to be autonomous , even if you can put a little effort into closing a deal, but you cannot go beyond transactional sales . Essentially, sales have to be closed in one phone call. Contacts have to come inbound, through marketing dei contenuti or ads.
If you are hunting deer ou are in transactional sales territory . An inside sales force can close deals and, to some extent, help generate them. However, you need a lot of leads, so marketing will play a very important role in generazione di lead .
If you're chasing elephants it's when you sell expensive subscriptions to large companies. You're doing enterprise sales . With the margins you're generating per customer, there's no problem in going to them, so you can do a bit more classic field sales.
Finally, if you're looking for whales probably not exclusively), you better get strategic about your enterprise sales approach .
Average SaaS Sales Cycle Length
Based on the classification of SaaS sales customers into different animals, it is probably safe to say that some average sales cycles will be longer than others.
The best data we've found on this topic comes from Matt Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group on Quora :