Marketing Your Own SaaS Products (13)
Hi gang. I'd love to get some advice regarding marketing your own SaaS product. For the past year, I've been developing a tool that helps marketers and salespeople discover new leads, and uncover hidden context that makes building rapport with a cold prospect easy. I hired a sales guy, and just landed my first two enterprise accounts (Adobe and Google).
I'd really like to do my own demand generation for this product, but am unsure which route would lead to the best outcomes. I'm considering focusing my efforts on two of the following categories:
1) Partnerships
2) Advertising
- Retargeting (non-customer visitors to make us look bigger than we are)
- Google Display (Doubleclick)
- Facebook (Sales manager groups membership targeting & Scraped FBID targeting [pulled from Ceqoo] of identified target prospects
- LinkedIn / Ceqoo targeting (Title and Seniority)
- Google Paid Search (Customer Match audience targeting & Selective keyword targeting [to test and refine messaging of core product and its offerings])
3) Intercom (one to one -- provide a means of nurturing users deeper into lifecycle & provide easy communication mechanism to ask questions or give feedback)
4) Google Analytics (aggregate)
- Identify channels/referral sources associated with leads/prospects/sales,
- Identify common user journeys prior to deal close
- Identify common (user/account/company) traits of closed deals
- Identify app usage behaviors (in aggregate) of heaviest users to understand features to trumpet or refine
- Identify content which is getting visitors to engage (micro-conversion)
5) Content Marketing
- Content syndication (Guest blogging & Influencer engagement)
- Blog (Ghost writers)
- Social media (Promotion of: blog content, syndicated content, partnerships, big deals)
- Webinars ("Prospecting secrets which can grow your business 500%")
- “Gated” content (Use good content to collect email addresses & drip email campaign to nurture emails)
6) Customer Empowerment
- Every account is automatically enrolled in an affiliate-like program to reward customers who refer other people which become customers
- Community forums provide a means for “birds of a feather” to network, share tips/tricks, and brag
- Provide overwhelmingly-personal customer service to most important customers to build loyalty, understand friction points, and identify areas for potential improvement
I'd recommend adding a category there - conventional PR.
Particularly with client accounts like those, the SV press, and wider business press, should be interested in your product. TechCrunch et al for sure, Business Insider, and I'd try pitching to mainstream media too - WSJ, Financial Times, etc for starters.
Often mentions in major press are more social proof than they are direct lead funnels, but they're pretty powerful social proof. And the lead generation from an article in a daily newspaper ain't nothing, either.
I'd also recommend listening to Ryan Holiday's most recent talk from the Affiliate World conferences. He talks about a bunch of media techniques in that which could be of a lot of use to you.
Excellent suggestion, Caurmen! In SV (and as an investor myself), we usually discount customers gained from PR, as it isn't often scalable to continue to acquire that way. However, it's easy for me to say that about other companies -- when it is MY company, I want all the business I can get. 
Let me see if I can engage a PR firm, as I don't have that expertise personally.
Would absolutely love ANY input on this. I want to make sure we get enough traction right away to really matter.
Just to clarify here for others who might be waiting to chime in: is the SaaS exclusively enterprise-level, or are you also targeting smaller companies?
Obviously there's a very different sales approach for each.
I'm guessing you've read Traction, btw? There's nothing earth-shattering in there, but I found it a useful read with a decent methodology for marketing non-enterprise SaaS in particular.
My thoughts:
1. Track everything -- Google Analytics, FB and so on. Even if you don't plan to use it much yet, just make sure you have it for later.
2. Intercom on sales page - YES. If this product is quite high cost or has significant resistance to starting (e.g. learning how to use it, complex etc.), then 1-on-1 discussion with prospects (and making this easy) will be well worth it.
3. I would try out Facebook and Adwords advertising just to see initial results, but don't invest too much in this just yet, especially if you don't have a thorough understanding of your market, what customers want/need, etc. Definitely have some basic FB retargeting to chase people around the internet (usually these cost very little due to the low reach and they tend to give very attractive CPAs for conversions).
4. Be sure to survey your initial customers to figure out what they most like/dislike and what they want more of.
5. I would try to partner with relevant people in the field to promote your product. It will be a lot easier to convince one person of the value of this tool and have them promote it to an audience that already trusts them than to try and sell it yourself to everyone. Sensible JVs here are probably your best ticket to rapid growth/exposure since you will leverage authority/credibility that you generally cannot buy or compensate for with ads.
6. Don't spend too much time trying to build in new things like affiliate programmes, social referrals, etc. in your product -- if it is good, focus on how to get new users in to test it and grow the business a bit. When you have more revenue you have more scope to spend resources on further development/staffing.
Best of luck!
I don't think I really understand what the product does. Could you share more about it? That will also increase the likelihood others can chime in, perhaps that have more direct experience, or would be customers.
From what I understand now, it's a marketing and sales tool for marketing and sales people => a strategy around teaching people how to be better marketers and salespeople will gain you leads. That is very vague of course, that's why I asked if you could provide more details without spilling the beans on anything you want to keep secret.
LE: Also moved to another section, this is certainly not a Newbie Zone question 
SaaS means a lot of things to a lot of different people. It really is hard to give any meaningful advice without a better description of the product at the target audience.
Originally Posted by caurmen
This is exclusively enterprise-level, yes. Although non-enterprise users would definitely benefit from its usage, we made a very conscious choice to not absorb the support costs of customers without 50+ users (we charge per seat). We have now added Netflix and HP Enterprise to our clients, so we now have those two plus Adobe (in discounted beta now, full payment starts in June) and Google.
Originally Posted by zeno
YES to Intercom, holy cow did that make a BIG difference for us! Our marketing collateral wasn't telling the right story. When we saw what customers were asking, we changed our Marcom to help anticipate and explain these questions before they got to us. Requests for demos without talking to a rep first immediately increased.
Okay to Facebook and Adwords. Should I just throw $50k in there and see what happens? That way, we don't have a significant spend before we know if they're good platforms for us. I have a retargeting campaign running on Facebook right now that is showing early recapture results. It's interesting to watch it grow as more people stumble across us.
Part of our beta program includes an agreement for a VP level or up to chat with us for 30 minutes every two weeks, to discuss their KPIs and product evolution. Feedback is hugely important to us, and we did over 50 interviews with potential customers before we wrote a line of code. I highly recommend this.
Great idea on influencers; we are currently exploring this, but not enough. I will probably hire someone to do this as their job.
Good advice on the affiliate program model -- I just don't think that most people can introduce us to leads that are likely to convert. We haven't done "land and expand" -- rather, we are selling directly to executives so far.
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
From what I understand now, it's a marketing and sales tool for marketing and sales people => a strategy around teaching people how to be better marketers and salespeople will gain you leads. That is very vague of course, that's why I asked if you could provide more details without spilling the beans on anything you want to keep secret.
LE: Also moved to another section, this is certainly not a Newbie Zone question
The other side of our business takes salespeople who are in an SDR position and makes them into an MDR by adding context and prospecting expertise to the process. We essentially grow a low price resource into a high value employee. We add top-of-funnel opportunities to the pipeline without pushing them into something overwhelming like Salesforce. Adobe and Google were the early adopters of that technology.
Originally Posted by cmdeal
Cool, that sounds like a very interesting tool.
Is it affordable for smaller companies, or can lower seniority employees make the decision to pay for it? Thinking if startups can afford it or teams at big companies like Google, FB, Twitter have a relatively easy time getting on board - not having to jump through hoops.
If so, I would focus on educational content on the topic to gather leads, then nurture and try to convert over email. It reminds me of companies like Buffer and Close.io who seem to be doing a good job. In essence, becoming an authority in your space.
If it's unaffordable for small companies and you need senior management to give the green light on it, you probably won't have as much success with what I just said - unfortunately, I don't have any advice for such a SaaS. Never bought or sold one in this category
My previous company was probably the largest player in technology, digital and business consulting services ($32 billion of revenue) and we definitely had a very aggresive sales force, in addition to all the brand marketing, thought leadership, CRM, white papers, digital and print advertising, etc, which brought in the new accounts like there was no tomorrow.
Enterprise software is generally sold, not bought. This is generally why most of these players have quite strong sales teams.
I am also pretty sure that traditional "affiliate marketing" is not really worth pursuing.
A definite "no" to the smaller companies affording it. We actively try to only service Enterprise at this point, because of our small size. In the future, we will be better able to absorb the costs of servicing startups, etc. Our revenues have ramped quickly with the Enterprise model, but I am always hungry for more.
Agreed on thought leadership and aggressive sales -- this definitely seems to be the path forward. Thank you both!
PS, will be in Alaska without Internet today through May 20th. Looking forward to catching up on replies then.
Back from Alaska -- highly recommend you go if you haven't been!
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