Some key things to keep in mind while selling SaaS products

1. © Copyright 2013 Valuehire, All Rights Reserved.
by Abhishek Sharma
BEST PRACTICES IN
SELLING A SAAS
PRODUCT
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by Dhruv Gupta

2.  The number and degree of expertise of a sales team for
selling a Software as a Service (SaaS) product would
depend on the domain, nature of the product, and
market.
 In order to become totally self-service (ultimate target of
a SaaS product) you need to understand and hand-hold
your customers till you have figured out the secret recipe
of what works best.
 SaaS is only a delivery mechanism – any Enterprise
software would require selling and convincing.
INTRODUCTION
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3. SALES PROCESS
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Lead
Generation
Lead
Qualification
Demo Trial Customer
Rejected
Leads
Reusable
Leads
Upsell

4.  Pricing
 Be prepared with your own 3-year ROI and TCO
calculations
 Features and Usability
 Compatibility – hardware and software
 Ease of installation
 Support and training
BEST PRACTICE #1 – KNOW YOUR
COMPETITION
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5. Understand the nuances of your customer’s business and
help your product development team map their business
process correctly into your product.
Speak their language:
 Business pain areas
 Reports that the management requires
 Key metrics they need to capture
 IT budgets and yearly spend - how you can help them reduce
spending on Capex
 Address data security concerns
 Resources (time and money) spent on maintaining the IT
infrastructure
BEST PRACTICE #2 – KNOW YOUR
CUSTOMERS
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6. Advantages of SaaS What you can say
Pay as you go “Only pay for what you use. If your needs grow, only
then the bill would go up. In case business is slow you
have an option of bringing down your bill.”
Access from anywhere “You would be able to expand your business by
managing „Work from Home‟ teams or handling multi-
city operations.”
Zero capex “Compared to Product X, we are not asking you for a
huge upfront bill. And we handle all the IT needs.”
Zero compatibility issues
with OS or device
“You can continue using your current infrastructure –
be it Windows or Linux. We would not ask you to
upgrade your RAM or Operating System.”
BEST PRACTICE #3 – FOCUS ON BENEFITS
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7. Understand the market and segment on the basis of:
 Size
 Nature of business within the same domain
 Complexity of solution required
 Business processes
Targeting:
 Choose and focus on 1 or 2 segments at a time
 Create product versions (on the basis of features list), pricing
plans, and sales pitch in order to address each segment
BEST PRACTICE #4 – POSITIONING AND
TARGETING
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8. Sales team acts as the most important conduit of incoming
feedback and current market knowledge
 Track every feature request coming informally during discussions
 Create a channel for feature or change requests from customers
 Inform your potential customers once their requested features are in
place
 Learn to say ‘no’ - politely and convincingly of why you think this
feature may not be required or doable
Avoid your sales pitch around features, instead focus on
benefits.
BEST PRACTICE #5 – FEEDBACK MECHANISM
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9.  Valuehire is an Enterprise SaaS product for recruitment
automation.
 We help Agency and Corporate recruiters do their work
better, resulting in faster hires.
www.valuehire.com
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