SaaS managers know that it is vital to impress your clients from day one when you are a small SaaS startup. Still, with all the pressure of a competitive environment, it is easy to get distracted and blow your chances.
However, there are things you can do to keep this from happening. In this article, you’ll read the best tips for impressing your clients right off the bat as a SaaS startup.
1. Do Your Homework and Research Your Clients
If you want to land a terrific first impression, it is critical to do thorough research on your new clients.
By doing so, you are showing that you are invested in your relationship with them. You are devoting your employees’ time and effort to understanding their business better.
As a result, your SaaS startup will appear professional from day one. More importantly, your new clients will feel like they’ve made the right decision by signing up for your services.
It is crucial to conduct constructive and cohesive meetings with your clients. Researching them will make sure you’ll come to those meetings better prepared.
Research allows you to understand their problems clearly and offer new, informed solutions to fix them. If you are not used to heavily researching your clients, make that a habit.
Here is how to get started:
Pore over every inch of your client’s website. You should pay special attention to their recent projects. Studying their past work is critical for understanding your clients.
You’ll see how your solution can improve them and fit their success story.
Next, look them up on LinkedIn. Their LinkedIn profile will tell you who their employees are. You’ll also see their connections, partnerships, and projects.
2. Have a Plan Drafted
It is essential to show your clients that there is a plan ready from day one.
Showing up without a plan is severely unimpressive. When your partner doesn’t put in the effort to plan your next move together, you start second-guessing your connection.
SaaS business relationships are similar in that regard. Mapping things out will foster your client’s confidence in your SaaS startup. Since your business relationship has just begun, you’ll have to put in the effort to build trust.
When you show new clients that you already have a succession plan ready, they’ll be impressed with you. They’ll trust your judgment from the word go.
If you want to draft an impressive plan for your clients, consider the following tips:
Define the goals in a measurable way. Writing what you want to happen is not enough. Your plan must include quantifiable metrics that you can track and review.
For example, if you are offering a SaaS solution for finding leads, define the number of leads you expect to find your clients.
A plan is not a wishlist. It is a roadmap that shows what you will achieve, how you’ll get there, and how to measure if you are successful.
Set a time frame for your plan. Even though it is the first draft of your plan, it is helpful to develop an initial timeline for achieving objectives. Let’s talk more about great impressions and customer success.
3. Introduce Them to Customer Success Management
Customer Success Management is an ace for impressing your new clients. The role of CSM is to ensure your clients achieve their desired outcomes while using your solution.
From the first meeting, a CSM will assure your new client that they are a dedicated professional that can be entrusted with guiding their success.
Your small SaaS startup will leave the impression of an established industry name. Let’s look at the statistics.
According to a 2021 study by Zippia, the most common industries that employ customer success managers are tech firms (51 percent) and startups (21 percent). Startups even surpass Fortune 500 companies, who hire CSM experts at 5 percent.
Technology companies and startups heavily rely on customer success management. If you want to achieve an excellent first impression, your SaaS should hire one as well.
Have your customer success manager report directly to the CEO of your client company.
Customer success management is essential. Instead of communicating with other team members, reach out to the CEO directly to make the best impression possible.
In case the CEO is too busy with other things, talk frequently with the project manager.
Your CSM and support should work together side by side. Customer support is a reactive service, while customer success is always proactive.
Look at them as two integral parts that will enable your client to succeed. If you want to have an impressive customer CSM, these two departments have to work in unison.
That way, the CSM is always aware of the clients’ problems and can impress them when they solve them.
4. Encourage Collaboration With the Client
It is critical to start your business relationship with a new client by encouraging collaboration.
Client collaboration is essential to understanding their needs better. When you are open towards your client, they’ll express their needs and concerns without hesitation.
That way, you’ll understand what the client needs from your service from their perspective. Once they know how client-centered you are, you’ll impress them.
If you want to get the most out of every project, you’ll encourage your clients to reach out to you. A collaborative environment brings people of different backgrounds and works experiences together. Your chances of impressing clients with a job well done will be far more likely.
So what can you do to encourage your clients to collaborate with you more often?
For starters, you can be consistent and quick in replying to them. When you communicate with your clients often, you’ll boost their confidence. If they have a question or a suggestion, you want to respond as soon as possible.
It is helpful to invite clients as guests on your project communication dashboard.
Use collaborative software to get a hold of your client and keep them present. They’ll get the insider’s look on how you are helping them. You are actively encouraging them to collaborate.
Don’t forget to share progress reports with your clients. When clients see the exact numbers on how you are doing, they’ll comment and start adding their ideas.
The next important step for landing a great impression is to onboard your clients efficiently.
5. Give Them a Terrific Onboarding
Your client’s impression of you heavily depends on your onboarding process.
Your solution can’t impress your clients if they don’t know how to use it! An excellent onboarding experience will educate your clients on all the features of your SaaS. Then they can truly see the value of your solution.
On the other hand, if clients don’t know how to use your SaaS, they’ll grow frustrated. If that happens, they are more likely to abandon it.
According to a 2020 customer onboarding report by Wyzowl, 55 percent of surveyed users returned the product because they didn’t know how to use it properly. That is the mirror opposite of impressing your clients.
Clients will also appreciate the effort you’ve put in onboarding them properly. It is like giving somebody a tour of your company. Once they see how much you care to educate them, they are more likely to be impressed.
Therefore, if you want a terrific onboarding experience that will dazzle your clients, you need an effective onboarding strategy.
Begin by designing your onboarding journey in steps, as below:
Think thoroughly about every step of your client onboarding. Gradually move your clients from the simplest interactions with your SaaS, like logging in and receiving the welcome email, to more complex ones.
At the end of the onboarding journey, they should be able to use your solution and its features independently.
Add milestones through the onboarding process to give your users a sense of accomplishment.
Mailchimp does an excellent job of this, by handing out high fives to users when they make their first email campaigns.
Finally, it is great advice to track your user’s onboarding. Monitor carefully how many users complete the entire process. If you notice users are abandoning their onboarding halfway through, you have to improve it.
6. Don’t Forget to Ask For Feedback
To impress your clients, you need to show you are open to constructive criticism.
When you are receptive to feedback, your clients will see that your startup is dedicated to improving itself with every customer. As a SaaS provider, your solution must constantly be growing and becoming better. That shows care, persistence, and professionalism.
Not asking for client feedback is a trait of startups uninterested in becoming better. If you want to show your clients their experience with your SaaS matters, you’ll ask them for feedback.
They’ll notice that you genuinely care about them getting the most out of your solution. Clients will feel inclined to share detail-rich feedback that will improve your SaaS.
There are many ways to solicit feedback nowadays. For example, look at Airtable.
They are sending out a simple form via email, which you can complete in less than a minute.
You are free to create your forms where you can ask your users for more detailed feedback. Keep in mind that you have to make it quick and easy for your users.
If you want to, you can email the client company’s CEO directly and ask them to quickly evaluate your SaaS.
It is essential that you don’t sound indifferent and uninterested. After all, clients are spending their time giving you valuable feedback.
7. Don’t Try to Oversell
Overselling to your clients is a trap that many SaaS startups fall into.
If you want to impress your clients, you need to give them excellent service. When you oversell, you are not serving your clients; only yourself.
Clients will pick up on this as soon as they notice they’ve paid for a more extensive service pack than they need. This can be weeks into their subscription. In any case, they’ll feel disappointed instead of impressed.
You’ll effectively show them you don’t truly understand their business needs. You’ll also undo all your hard work with onboarding your clients and getting them to sign up.
Don’t act unprofessional and oversell no matter what. Instead, focus on understanding the client’s particular needs. For example, if your client is a business with a small staff, recommend the service pack that fits their size best.
If you try to oversell, you’ll succeed only in making them feel like they’ve paid too much.
Instead, it will be easier for you to upsell your clients if you do your job well. Your solution will help them succeed. They’ll trust your recommendation and scale up with no resistance.
Conclusion: Tips for SaaS startups to impress new clients
Landing a stellar impression with your new clients is difficult, especially when you are a SaaS startup eager to prove itself to the market.
Let these simple tips sink in. Think about how you usually interact with your new clients and see which of these you can apply to your SaaS startup. You’ll see great results in no time.
Ashley Wilson is a digital nomad writing about business and tech. She workes remotely as a content creator for various SMBs. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking homemade treats and trying out new flavors. You can get in touch with Ashley via Twitter.
