Unlock the Potential of a SaaS Inside Sales Model for Purchasing

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hey again and welcome to the channel today we will talk about how to sell a software product more specifically how to sell a new software product we will talk about software as a service product types sas sales models b2 visa sales process and such now on this channel as you might already know we focus mostly on tech businesses i.t businesses online businesses and outsourcing businesses but what unites all of them is that they are all service based businesses today however i've decided to focus on product type businesses because this is what you requested in our monthly questionnaires so beat now if you're ready show me that by hitting the like button and let's begin now i'll be 100 transparent with you i don't have a successful experience of bringing a product to the market i mean a successful experience in terms of it blowing the market and us becoming like extremely successful and becoming an overnight success now i don't have that experience however i do have experience in building a product from scratch like based on a mere idea of mine and bringing it to the market as well is just they didn't perform as well as we hoped and the second type of experience i have is that i've worked as a business development manager in a couple of product-based companies and one of them was a startup so i do have an experience of that and i was responsible for bringing their new line of products to the market which we did with that said i'll be only sharing my experience with you practical advice only what worked for us what didn't like no generic google's advice so hopefully you will be able to apply that to your case let's go i'll start with a product that was more of an online service where users pad per usage when they needed something fixed they used our service they paid they went away so let's start with a one-time purchase product i mean hopefully you can see it because the sun is beaming straight into the whiteboard but let's continue with this one so one time purchase product means that like users pay per usage or they buy it like one time for example a license or anything truth be said that was a pretty crappy business model but our management was unwilling to change anything in our approach so we went just with what we had since we weren't allowed to make any major changes neither in our business model nor in our approach to serving customers so we focused on the simplest tactics possible the first one was seo investing into the seo of our website and this tactic like proved to be extremely effective because before we started like the traffic from our website was zero percent and within like the first months of our um you know playing with the tags on the website playing with the content we increased our traffic up to 25 which was pretty good i mean a pretty good result in the first month of what we tried in terms of seal now the second type how we tried to sell our product our online service was by stealth advertising and i have mentioned this type of sales previously in my videos somewhere and how we did that we went on different forums on quora and other platforms and places where some tech geek were gathered because our online service was used primarily by people who were like test savvy and who needed something specific to be fixed so our online service was not like a mass market service it was a tool for professionals of video editing so it was a pretty specific thing so we knew where our target audience was so we went there and we tried to leave useful comments on the forums when someone asks do you know how to fix that and we were like yes we do here's how it can be done and oh by the way here's link to the service that can get it done professionally and this is where we found that youtube comments worked as a charm we didn't throw links everywhere we tried to be useful so when someone asked in the comments do you know how to fix this and that and we answered to those comments like yes you can do that by doing this this and that and oh you can also use this service and if we spoke about youtube comments we can speak about other social media that we used to promote our service and what we did we posted on our competitors social media pages and we did provide the same advice as we provided on quora on reddit by the way reddit yes reddit is a great place to advertise however they don't like any spammers there so you should be really careful there so yes as soon as we realized that it worked for youtube channels on in the youtube comment sections we turned to other social media and again we posted on our competitors web pages and competitors social media pages so that to provide value to their clients and hopefully to make them turn to ourselves and it worked as well now there was another tactics that we used and that didn't work for us and i'll explain why and that was building an email list we wanted to make some sort of a sales promotions etc etc however it didn't work well because as i mentioned in the beginning that was a one time product one time pad service where users pad for our service and just they went away they didn't really need to purchase anything unless they had some other things damaged and unless they needed something else fixed but you cannot predict when someone gets something like corrupted or something that needs to be repaired there was like almost zero chance of up sales and money cannot upsell honestly you cannot scale so this tactics really works for for scalable businesses actually and if you want to make any upsells so this one didn't work for us what worked sort of worked for us was bad youtube promotions as soon as we realized that youtube comments work great for us i mean in terms of people noticing us people starting to reply to our comments we turned to people who had like more followers on their youtube channels so that they made like review videos and sort of advertised our products and that worked as well and we also started to like grow our own youtube channel where we advertise our product by showing how it actually works and by presenting different cases where you might need it and it works as well like youtube works wonders in terms of promoting a product now all of this seo youtube comments social media developing our own social media channels like youtube and stealth advertising on different technical forums quora reddit etc did its jobs however still we could not scale because users only paid us when we when they needed something to get fixed now let's switch on to the sas product types and i'll switch to my experience when i worked as a business development manager and i was responsible for bringing a new line of products to the market and i'll speak about both b2b and b2c line of products can you actually see it but first what is so different about sales sales so sales are really different from like regular sales because you have to sell your product time and over again to the same customers so you have to sort of work in two directions you have to gain new customers you have to make new customers buy your product and at the same time you have to retain your current customers and to protect your current revenue so you have to sell them time and over again your product for example if they bought like one month of your service you have to sell them free month you have to sell them one year you have to retain your current customers you have to retain your current revenue and at the same time you have to acquire new customers because you can't rely on your current client base because sooner or later it will like wear out because sooner or later you have to sell them like lifetime subscription or several years of subscription and then what they won't pay you for another like several years so you have to gain new subscribers as well so this is how they are different and this is how they are like more difficult in terms of you having to make more commitment to your clients by the way if you want to learn more about product sales and more about metrics and analytics that you need in order to attract your sales and your growth let me know in the comments if you're interested more in the product type businesses and i'll try to dig out all of my records from the time when i've been selling and developing products now for the sas seals we did several directions and these are that worked the best so the first one was again seo of our website optimizing our website and for each product we build a separate website even though uh we had like a general domain website of the company where all of the products were presented and at the same time we built a separate website for each product because you have to advertise them differently and you have to put different keywords that was what our marketing manager advised so we did it there was one website that performed the best and on that website we put the ads and the hyperlinks that led to other products so you can do this way so you can play around with your websites and to track the performance of the websites and to understand which performed better and maybe to use that website at the gateway to your other products and that's what we did and that would worked for us and the next one what we did was building an email list and making regular promotions now email list and regular promotions did work well because this was not a one-time purchase that was a sas software this service and we had a client base we had our email list of subscribers of our clients and to that list we sold new subscriptions and new deals like we provided extreme discounts like lifetime discounts or three years discounts or one year discount to each categories we send a separate email sequence and that works great i mean for example if we had people who used our trial like free trial we sent them uh a proposal an email sequence that promoted like three months of subscriptions to the person who already bought one here we send emails that offered them to buy like a lifetime subscription and so on so we had um divided our audience into segments and sent a separate email sequence to each of those segments and that's where the next comes from and that is strategic trial periods now many sas providers do have trials like free periods of time when a user can use their service or a product however in order for those trials to actually work for you and to bring your sales you have to make those trials strategic and trials are extremely important because when a client a customer has an opportunity to use your products they will understand it better and if they like it they might want to keep it and while there are no one-size-fits-all approach there are different tactics and different approaches that work like more or less for all sas providers so now there are seven day trial so seven day trials work best for straightforward products that are like easy to understand and easy to use because people in this case don't really need much time in order to understand what your product actually does for example if it's say a vpn service like everybody knows what a vpn is and if a person uh looks for a vpn like they probably already know what they are looking for or if you offer say a product that has a low price for example like the same vpn or some marketing tool like tube body people don't really need much time to investigate this product they either like it and then they buy or don't so that's where you use 7d trials now there are also 14 days trials now again i hope you can see both the whiteboard that myself but okay i hope you can see the whiteboard now 14 days trials are used mostly for more like complicated products where users have to investigate different features where they have like multiple features not like in vpns or marketing tools or if this is a complicated marketing tool again they need more time to investigate a product and whilst 14 days trial is nothing like close to one month it's like more on the short side still but if your product has more features this truck this is the trial that you might want to try and then there is a one month trial one month's trials are recommended for b2b sas uh products because if you're selling to enterprises and if you're selling to businesses this is where they have like more decision makers in order to either buy a product or not so yes of course you want to give them a lengthier trial period and also if your product like is extremely like high priced this is where you might want to give them a one-month trial so that they understand whether they actually like your product speaking about annual plans this is another tactics that work for us annual plans because this is extremely important that you are strategic with both your child periods and your plans and it's no secret that all companies provide like huge discounts if you buy an annual plan from them and annual plans again works great for us and we offered one year plan three years and a lifetime people tend to buy something that saves them money so we played around with these annual plans we made them more or less and that brought different results so you can play with your prices and with your plans a little bit especially if when you're just figuring out how you should market your product how you should sell your product so this is where you might want to play around with your plans because this might bring you really different results so the next thing that worked great for us was pr now i wasn't responsible for the pr so i can only tell you from what i've seen they did we had an entire pr department who spoke to journalists to the presenters of different online magazines and offline magazines as well and they really did a great job and that's when the product begins to be heard by millions of people because they have wider audience and that's the direction you might want to try however many magazines do ask for money they do ask of for pad publications so just for you to be aware almost i presume all of our publications were done free but that's because we had a marvelous like pr manager and she like did wonders in terms of communication this is the direction that you might want to try however it takes a lot of time of like it might take years of pitching before you are published in some online magazine that you want to be featured in now another one is stealth advertising similar as to here this is what we did again we found forums where our target audience was crowded and quora did wonders for that and read it as well but on reddit again they don't like any promotions at all so it was mostly quora and other social media and some forums as well if you want to get more traffic from ground up this is where you might want to take your pass again it takes a lot of time so you might want to just hire like a person who would write posts on different platforms that person wouldn't cost you much but it would save you a lot of time now what really worked wonders for us was storing our product on platforms like appsumo and stack social storing your newly built sas product on platforms like appsomos techsocial and others would make wonders for you and this is exactly where the first boost of our sales came from you might want to use platforms where they already have tons of users who are ready to buy but for reduced prices so the flip side of such platforms is that first you will have to sell in lower prices because they sell in bunches like in bulks and second type you won't be able to collect emails of those users because uh they are considered to be clients of these platforms that you are not allowed to make any promotions to those users to propose them any deals because you will be punished for that so don't do that they are considered to be clients of these platforms however still this is where your primarily sales might come from because it's extremely hard to get your product from ground up optimize your website to drive traffic to that website to make those clients buy only then you will be able to propose them with better deals and so on so forth here the audience is already ready to buy but they are used to buying cheaply still when you're just in the beginning of your journey this will be a game changer for you so i strongly recommend that you check out these platforms if you're just starting out and now let me tell you what didn't work and that was webinars like we spent weeks of preparations for those webinars and even among those who attended nobody bought our products so webinars didn't work for us and webinars i presume don't work for newly built products at all the second method that didn't work for us was participating in different startup accelerators and in different startup shows and events and we spent several months of preparing for that and we paid a lot of money to buy a booth to buy some promotion materials to actually buy our participating tickets and all for nothing yes we did gather a lot of leads but out of those leads we only got like a couple of sales so it doesn't count at all i presume that all those stored up events are good for startups that are looking for investments and we weren't looking for any investments this is i presume good for networking but not in terms of sales there was several departments involved still we got zero sales from that so don't waste your money if you're not looking for connections and investments and another thing that didn't work really well for us was content publications even though we did have a blog and we had an entire content department that developed articles for those blogs still we didn't have much sales making from that so again if you're investing in your strategy better invest in things that actually bring your traffic now what we didn't do what we wanted to do but we weren't allowed to do by our management was doing pet promotions pet ads and collaborating with social media influencers that was what we all wanted to do the sales department the marketing department the pr department but our boss said no and we didn't do that before you go there is a business plan template in the description box below it's absolutely free and it's more suited for product type businesses so if you're interested in product type businesses this is exactly what you want to grab down below again it's absolutely free and it might be of great use to your product growth and positioning and i wish you that from my very heart now if you like this video give me a thumbs up if you didn't thumbs down and go and check out this video next where you will learn how to market your startup product and learn several marketing tactics that might work for your business as well see you there bye [Music]