1/ How do you sell SaaS products to enterprise customers?
The hard way or the harder way :). There is no easy way.
There are two major approaches to enterprise that work today.
2/ First is the traditional enterprise sales model, today it might also be enhanced with Account Based Marketing support. This is the harder way. Folks have written tons of books about this.
3/ Second is land and expand, which works for horizontal, bottoms-up products, that can be adopted team by team within the org. The latter is more interesting especially for smaller startups who seek to play judo with a $100M competitor for an enterprise customer.
4/ To successfully follow Expensify, Yammer, Slack, and Atlassian, you must have
a. A beloved product, that can work at small scales to quickly show productivity improvements, and get deeply entrenched into common workflows
5/ b. A tiered pricing model that allows a single manager to buy for her team, within the team budget
c. The same pricing model should allow a department to adopt to use features such as reporting and user-roles.
6/ d. And a pricing/feature model that allows you to upsell to the CIO or the CxO, for SSO, logging, RBAC, etc.
e. A customer success team that ensures that each account is successful irrespective of their size
7/ f. An account management team that can farm these early opportunities, and hunt within the org for the next buyer
g. RoI calculators, marketing collateral tuned to the needs of different personas within the same organisation, for the AMs to use
8/ If you have these and follow the process, Land and expand will be the hard way to get enterprise sales.
1/ What is the best way to create and eventually sell a company for $25M or more?
First work for a company that regularly does $25M+ acquisitions. Say CSCO or Goog, or FB, or MSFT, or ….
Become a Principal Product Manager, or Principal Engineer.
2/ Build great relationships with founders and senior management.
Identify a hole in the companies' future roadmap that might be worth $100M+ in new revenue in 5 years. Or a hole that might lead to its untimely demise.
Ideally both.
3/ Leave.
Raise an angel round from the founders before you leave. Hire the best and brightest that would pass the bar at your original company. Build out the prototype to fill the hole, quick and dirty.
Ironies of 2021
- scientists slogged for 20+ years to create a vaccine
- SII failed to scale supply cos they didn't have capital for a new plant
- VC inv in India alone in Q1'21 was $11Bn
- India Govt failed to prepay for capacity to SII while asking them to supply at cost!
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Irony contd
Everyone thinks US manuf has all been offshored to China
But US has blocked exports - nano filters, virus bags, etc - reducing Covishield manuf capacity to 60Mn/mo
SII CEO @adarpoonawalla begs on Twitter for @POTUS to spare supplies for Covishield production
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Irony part 3
Pharma MNCs justify high prices citing investments in hard research?
But 25 yo research in mRNA was funded by NIH, sneered at by establishment, & saved the day.
Giant pharma comps scrambled to get tech from labs & startups - no patents of their own!
/3
Founders moving to SaaS from on-premise software products or services seem to confound a few differences that make SaaS distinct from traditional software sales.
1/
The most basic difference between the two is that in a traditional sale, it is a transfer of ownership whereas in SaaS, it's a rental
But since software is anyway an experiential good, this distinction is not easy to appreciate
2/
Personally, I would break down the modern SaaS movement into 3 distinct parts:
Deployment
Marketing
Pricing
One of these being most important for me to call it SaaS
3/
In SaaS, if you get it right with your first $1Mn of ARR, then you can grow much faster to your $10Mn. If you don't have the "right" $1Mn ARR, then it becomes impossible to grow thereafter, and harder to turn a moving ship.
1/
Assuming you have some initial PMF and some initial revenue (say ~$300K) 0. Know your customers. eg. @amitdmishra of @InterviewMocha spoke to 100+ of their customers and found that they had different use cases, and could be assigned to different segments.
2/
1. Reduce Churn (use ChargeBee/Profitwell/etc.). e.g. @jimit_ab of @socialpilot_co found immediate impact, and longer term deep understanding of monthly churn when they implemented these tools. In the first month they saved more than the cost of the tools!
3/
Step 1: Ensure you've built up a nest-egg to manage your finances for 2-3 yrs at a low burn-rate. Get your spouse to support you. It will take time to start getting serious cashflow. Until then you want to reinvest into the business.
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Step 1: Ensure you've built up a nest-egg to manage your finances for 2-3 yrs at a low burn-rate. Get your spouse to support you. It will take 3 yrs for you to start getting serious cashflow. Until then you want to reinvest into the business.
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How can I start up a SaaS company without any money?
B2B SaaS startups are the easiest among startups to start with very limited resources. 1/
The key ingredient for a B2B SaaS startup to succeed is deep domain knowledge. The most lucrative way to get deep domain knowledge is to build software via a services model for several companies in the same domain in roughly the same areas. 2/
Typically you will do this for mid-market, or enterprise customers, who you already know and who already trust you. Alternatively you can do complete workflow solutions for an SMB, that will deliver substantial value to the SMB. 3/