“We had a great product but we shut down because of low revenues or growth.” - A Founder
This is the story of many founders including me. I started an ed-tech company to teach concepts of Mechanics and Probability for 8th-grade students using mobile games. We designed a great game story. Broke-down the concepts into 50+ levels for the game, and developed the prototype for 10 levels. But shut it down in 8 months. We never had revenue.
No revenue = Death for businesses.
As founders, we were super proud of the product. We fell in love with the game and everywhere we went, we spent time talking about the design process of the game. We had answers for most of the questions except for one - what is the revenue?
We winded up the start-up and parted ways later to join Almabase.
Most founders make the same mistake that I did. Building a cool product and believing it will take off is like playing Russian Roulette. A product without sales is like a race car without tires. The product will either become a shiny display object like the one below or thrown in a trash bin.
Avoiding sales while building the product will only lead your company to DEATH.
What should a founder do?
Make Sales function the centerpiece of everything in building the company. It has a multi-fold impact. Below is the new way to look at sales.
When you are building a product, you are building it with your unique insight about the problem. You never know whether that is something people want. You need to validate it. Sales empower you to put the product in front of real users (potential paying customers). Forget about landing page, forget about positioning, and all the jargon out there. Write down what is the ONE pain point your product is solving. Solving that ONE pain point is your value proposition. If there are existing solutions, then speak about how you are solving the pain point better than the existing solutions. Here is a simple template for the founders or sales folks to reach out to potential customers.
Email Outreach template:
Hey {{first_name}},
<Who are you><build rapport>
<why are you reaching out><what is the pain point you are solving (value for them)><why should they take action now (show them what they are losing out because of inaction)>
<have one clear call to action>
Best
Sandiep
Most of the time you wouldn’t see replies coming in for the first email. Usually, you should have 7 email cadence before giving up.
This outreach will help you validate your product, get those first paying customers, and give your race car the necessary tires.
In the early days of building the company, Sales and Support are the same. One of the founders does both these activities. Both these functions feed each other. I have often seen that the language or the level of transparency the customer displays before (evaluating the tool) and after (becoming a customer) is different. Being in support or onboarding the customer will help you understand why they choose you, and what does success mean for them. These insights will help you sell better.
There is a lot of buzz around growth hacking and most of the founders spend a lot of time reading about it. But one of the key aspects to figure out even before growth hacking is “positioning” of the product. Positioning is tricky and it is always a work in progress. It takes quite some time to get the positioning right. Positioning is key for building a brand using marketing. The inputs to build positioning will come from sales.
April Dunford, Author of Obviously Awesome says -
If you have enough customer traction positioning could be as fast as a couple days.
During the sales process, you should ask prospects - where do you search for solutions to solve your problems, where do you hang out most of the time to discuss your problems, who else in your networking are facing similar problems and who are some thought leaders I should follow. In this process, you will find the potential marketing channels, the language they are using to describe their problem (this will become your website copy), and the kind of conversations they are having.
One common mistake we did is to build features that we thought would make sense for customers. Every time we pushed a new feature we only saw that there is insignificant usage of it. Later we tweaked the process of building new features or product improvements. We prioritized product improvements based on the inputs from prospects during the sales calls. The continuous feedback from sales calls will help you build the product roadmap.
Sudheesh Nair, early sales team member of Nutanix (a public company) and currently CEO of ThoughtSpot says -
The sales function is no longer about just sales, this function is a centerpiece to make the product better. Selling-understanding customers-improving the product-Selling again. Different motion altogether.
How to sell SaaS?
Anyone can learn sales. Unfortunately, no B-school or University has a course. I did a search on platforms like Lamda School, Upgrad, etc but even they don’t have any courses. For the starters in sales, be it a founder or someone trying to sell SaaS here are some key pointers:
Write as you speak & concise emails
Focus & follow-up are key to win 80% of the sales
Get comfortable on the phone or talking to strangers
Learn and iterate from every interaction
Listen as much as you speak
Talking to users is sales
I started the SeSaMint project to help founders/aspiring salespeople sell SaaS. As a part of the project, I spoke to 15 global SaaS leaders, referred books, spoke to 40+ founders, and reflected on all my learnings in the last 6 years.
SeSaMint - Guide to Selling SaaS is available online. This is the first of the many things I’m doing to help people sell SaaS. For all my newsletter subscribers I’m giving a copy at a discounted price.
The book has thousands of dollars worth of frameworks and distilled insights from SaaS leaders that will help you sell SaaS. Also, you will receive an assessment report that every B2B SaaS company uses for assessing entry-level sales candidates. Even better, the first 25 buyers also get an extra 30 min 1-1 coaching call with me.
Here is what some readers are saying:
Shubham Sharma says - "SeSaMint is a resourceful guide to anybody out there planning to switch and getting aboard this rocket ship called SaaS. As an entrant in this ecosystem, you often look out for advice, guidance, and mentorship, and your search ends here!
SeSaMint states the basic aspects of SaaS selling, understanding them and religiously following this guide is enough to make you self-sufficient and confident to excel at your first in selling SaaS."
If you have any questions regarding selling SaaS, just write to me. Always happy to help you sell SaaS!