11 Best and Effective Ways to Sell Your SaaS Product

Running a company that provides software as a service (SaaS) products can be challenging. For one, there are many moving parts in managing a business. It may also require you to wear many hats when starting small.

You also need to come up with marketing campaigns that can set your SaaS company apart. Otherwise, your target market will never know that your product exists.

This explains why you need a more thoughtful approach when it comes to selling your SaaS product.

What is SaaS Marketing?

SaaS marketing is the process of employing marketing practices to promote and generate sales for your SaaS products. Some examples of SaaS products are Google Suite, Salesforce, Mailchimp, and Slack.

There are many reasons people and businesses would opt for SaaS products. Here are some of them:

• Affordable Upfront Cost. Some SaaS products require zero installation and are easy to use. Hence, you only need to pay for a monthly subscription.

• Scalability. Since most SaaS products are subscription-based, \you can upgrade or downgrade depending on your budget or the size of your team.

• Mobility. What’s fantastic about SaaS is that you can use it anytime, anywhere. Take the Google Suite, for example. As long as you have your Gmail log-in access and are connected to the Internet, you can use various Google products.

Now that you understand SaaS marketing in-depth, we have listed down 11 tips that you can apply to promote your SaaS products and company:

1. Offer Free Trials

At Voy Media Saas Marketing Agency, we always tell our clients to provide a free trial of their product. Doing so gives your customers a feel of how they can maximize the software.

However, your free trial shouldn’t last longer than 14 days. Here’s why: 

• Most people won’t be using free trials for the full duration: Look through your data and see that most users leave for about three days.  

• Users tend to take trials more seriously: People tend to procrastinate, and once they do, they tend to forget. If they’re given a shorter period to try out your product, they’re more likely to try it out immediately. 

• Decreases customer acquisition cost: When you shorten your trials, you also shorten your sales cycle. You’ll significantly reduce your customer acquisition costs if you shorten your sales cycle from six down to three weeks. 

2. Build a Sales Team

If you don’t have a sales team yet, it is about time that you build one for your SaaS company. Having one frees up a lot of your time trying to sell your software instead of focusing on your business’s vital activities.

During the hiring process, you should not lowball a potential member of your sales team. Meaning, you shouldn’t hire just anybody. You have to hire the right people.

For instance, a great virtual assistant doesn’t necessarily mean that they are equipped with the skills to close down a sale. If you hire the wrong people, then you might be doing your business harm than good. 

3. Offer Solutions

You would not want to throw in a whole catalog of features to your prospects, letting them choose what you think they need. This will quickly overwhelm them and might even scare off prospective customers. 

That’s why you should always take time to listen. Know what their business workflow is, and understand their pain points. You can ask questions to gain a better understanding of their problems and build a steady rapport. 

Similarly, you can also provide them with customized questions specific to their business’ needs. You can also offer solutions which you think can help them solve their problems. 

Through this method, your leads might feel that they are getting a concierge service. They’ll also get to develop a strong relationship with you, leading to more revenue.

4. Use the Pull Marketing Method

There are two basic lead generation methods that you can use:

• Pushing information to prospects hoping they visit.

• Providing potential clients with content that can resonate with them. 

“Push marketing” is like advertising. Its core objective is to build awareness, but it can also effectively generate leads as any company pays the bill for advertising costs. 

No wonder the “pull marketing” method is popular among various businesses.

That’s because it provides them with an opportunity to pull in buyers to their site or social media and offer content. This can be in ebooks, whitepapers, blog papers, or any content or topic they wanted to know more about. 

Push marketing is effective in attracting prospects, especially during the early buying stage. It also allows higher engagement since your prospects have already shown interest in your products. 

5. Provide a Well-crafted SaaS Product Demo

Your customers wanted to know what they’ll be investing in the first place. 

Take your time in creating a precise yet highly informative product demo. Try to keep things under 20 minutes, and make sure it gets to explain the value of what you have to offer. 

If you find it challenging to create a short demo for your product, you might have to rethink your target audience and your product value.  Ensure that your product is unique and you are conveying this properly to your audience. 

6. Have a Killer Email Campaign

Unless you have a killer email campaign, chances are, your prospects will forget that you exist just hours after enrolling in your trial.

Here are some email marketing tips that allow you to maximize your campaign:

• Use email addresses that are “human.” Don’t send emails coming from a department. Rather than using “[email protected],” you can use “[email protected].”

• Send in a lot of emails. If you are not getting enough leads, then maybe you aren’t sending your prospects enough emails. 

• Send activity-based emails. Send your prospects activity-based emails after sign up or when the trial is about to end. 

7. Try to Master the Onboarding Process

While you should focus on upgrading your customers’ current plans, you also need to know how to handle clients better. 

Don’t let your clients figure out your SaaS products themselves. Although some software is relatively easy to figure out, some can be quite complicated. Consider how much intervention you and your team will have for the first couple of weeks or months of your new client. 

Failing to set an effective onboarding process will eventually lead to higher cancellation rates. See to it that your client will stick around. You can show them the ins and outs of your software and be ready to assist them whenever needed. 

8. Use Referral Marketing for Your SaaS Products

Many research supports the fact that referrals are the most effective types of leads. However, there is still a lot of debate on whether or not one should incentivize referrals. 

One belief is that you won’t generate as many referrals even without incentives. Meanwhile, the opposing view is that if you incentivize too much, you’ll be getting referrals that are low-quality. 

Ideally, you need to test out what works for your SaaS business. Then optimize for that.

To ensure that you get quality referrals, you need first to know what makes a good referral. For example, you need to say how or when people will get incentivized clearly. 

9. Highlight Client Testimonials

Both reviews and testimonials are some of the most effective forms of social proof. If people or other businesses are saying great things about your product, many people will likely consider you the right candidate. 

So, spread the word about your business through positive reviews from customers on social media or Google pages. You can also post customer reviews (before asking them, of course!) or request these reviews directly from your customers. 

Let’s say a customer sent an email saying how happy there were with your product. You can ask them if they could provide a positive review, then link them to your primary review page. 

10. Get a Reliable Customer Support Team

Many businesses might have to rely on your software to help them conduct daily operations. 

Early on, you might run on across these functional problems, and you should handle them smoothly. How you’ll deal with these issues will say a lot about your professionalism as a company. 

You have to be transparent with clients as much as possible. Don’t try to delay fixing technical issues either. The last thing that you need is for them to be caught up in issues that they’ll never want to revisit. 

11. Offer Annual Prepaid Plans

Offer annual prepaid plans instead so that you’ll have a more reliable monthly revenue. You might also want to give out discounted rates to prospects when they avail of an annual prepaid plan from you. 

Although offering a discount might affect your revenue, it also provides you with some substantial cash flow. You can use this money to hire a new sales team, expand your market, and think of ways to improve your product. 

Keep these SaaS marketing strategies in mind if you want to generate potential leads and drive your products’ sales. From there, unleash your creativity and build campaigns that can set your business apart. That way, more and more people can discover your SaaS products, give them a try, and eventually subscribe.