Make Buyers Want to Pay
gkogan.co
gkogan.co
That is just not true in most cases.
We all know these products with elaborate dashboards, too much reporting, too many data points. Those are created simply to appeal for the decision makers.
You sell to developers by a better UX/UI and workflow, you sell to decision makers by telling them how they will get a better view of things and manage teams better.
You have to build both ends, and you have to sell the decision making end much better and much more aggressively.
Edit: typos
storytime:
We had a demo scheduled with a company. We were shopping for a security auditing system for dependencies across all GitHub repositories.
The person going through the demo did an absolutely terrible job at reading the room and understanding who they sell to (right now). Focused a lot on reporting, compliance while we cared more about the mechanics.
If so, I’d love to hear you feedback on our demo, if not I’d love to offer you a demo.
kevin@fossa.io
But I am now actively looking at it.
But the funny thing is that a slightly different pronunciation of "Xi Zhao" changes the meaning from (roughly) "western prosperity" to "morning bath".
The other might help get you a renewal after the initial contract is up, but on the other hand, once something is in the budget and established, it has to be really, really awful to get kicked out and go through the process of finding a replacement. Voila, enterprise software!
Slack, for example, a lot of the requests came from engineers to work with it.
The product has to be REALLY good though, for most, this is a very hard sell
So you end up talking on Slack about an issue someone's noticed, and then trying to decide whether it's "worth" the bother of creating a ticket for, or if someone's aware of a ticket already for it, or or or.
My struggle with writing is I start out wanting to share an idea, but then I get caught up in the details and before long I'm writing and editing--or, realistically, procrastinating--a 2,000-word article that overshadows the main point.
Lately I've challenged myself to say just enough to express the idea, and nothing else. Maybe I'll write about the execution details later, but for now I just hope to get people thinking.
I am struggling as well with a similar problems and the more I am educated about it the better!
[edit] This would allow you to say just enough to get the point across, while still doing a deep enough dive on points that need more tactical information. [/edit]
They try something for a week, it doesn't work, and they move on.
OP here, for example, has an article about selling through Quora. It might not be up your alley, that's fine; If you decide to do it in your company, have someone actively work on it on a weekly basis, develop a strategy for the point you are trying to get across and nail down the message. Don't answer a single question and look at your Google analytics trying to see how much traffic you got from it. Do it consistently until you either figure out it works (or not, of course).
If you decide to sell to decision makes, this should be your strategy, you can't decide today you are selling to X and tomorrow you are selling to Y.
When you make a decision like this, inform the product managers, they now need to build different things. Be honest and be vigilant about it.
Meanwhile other software just is being organically, underground until everybody uses it and it cannot hidden anymore. As an example, Git took years and years to be accepted. Now everybody wants to get on board.
The bigger cost is not to buy shitty software. The bigger cost is failing to acknowledge it and move on.
Over the years I've had a regular stream of people who want me to agree to 30 pages of conditions or offer credit terms for a $99 sale. The reality is you can't afford to engage with Big Co's purchasing department with sub $10K price points.
(search for "option one" if you want to skip right to the relevant part, though the whole article is worth reading, IMO.)
So, I would advise SAAS providers to keep a close an eye on their existing users. We are looking to control our expenses and will leave for higher impact, lower priced alternatives. I recognize this is tough to do when growth and other acquisition/IPO metrics are pressed by your investors.
My overwhelming sense: if you're not marketing, enhancing and listening to your existing users, your falloff risk is mounting. Surveys and polls aren't enough. Pay attention to your superusers. Add a client or two to your board.
Keep new users close, but your existing users closer.
We were paying a few K$ a month for DataDog. The value we were getting from it was quantified. We evaluated how long it will take to build the features we are using from DD ourselves. It took about a month and we cut them off completely from our stack.
If you take the AWS approach, you have to keep providing value and you have to keep getting your users to buy-in.
I don't know if there's a very good way to actually communicate with all of your users, emails you get seem to mechanical and artificial. "What can we do better?" type of emails don't really work.
On your "manage the saas", did you see https://toriihq.com/ ?
Lucrative! Not what we want to build.
That’s one of my favorite aspects of being self-funded and profitable.