The SaaS website content you need to close sales
mikesonders.com
mikesonders.com
These are the top five highlights from what I learned:
1. The most sought-after (and often 1st) piece of info sought by SaaS buyers is pricing -- by a large margin.
Have a pricing page! If you can't share exact pricing for some reason, try one of these alternative approaches (created by an acquaintance of mine): https://businesscasualcopywriting.com/show-pricing-on-websit...
2. '[brand] alternatives' is the 2nd most-frequent search pattern.
It seems obvious to have a page on your website targeting '[your_brand] alternatives] that positions your offering against your competitors.
But only 2 of the 50 biggest SaaS companies do this!
Ex: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/comparison
3. SaaS buyers literally search for 'why [brand]'.
This is another under-leveraged opportunity.
Buyers want someone to spell out for them why they should spend money on your solution.
Make it easy for them!
Ex: https://www.hubspot.com/why-go-hubspot
4. Security is a big concern for SaaS buyers. They want to know how you're going to protect them from loss and litigation.
They're even checking out your privacy policy and GDPR terms! (Keep those things up-to-date.)
5. Your 'About Us' page matters.
Startups fail all the time. It’s not a secret.
Buyers want to know that the effort they put forth–convincing management, setting up and integrating your solution, convincing employees to use it–is going to be worth it in the long run.
Does your company have meaningful funding? Well-known investors? Is it profitable and self-sustaining? Does it have experienced leadership?
In your company’s About Us page, make sure you convey anything that can reassure buyers that the company is robust and set up to thrive.
Hopefully the business does it in a way that's transparent and forthright. I'm a big fan of making it really clear that a solution isn't going to be a perfect fit for everyone. No point in wasting anyone's time.
I work for a small SaaS startup (still very early days) and this suggestion could solve one of the problems we have when it comes to marketing our product which very few people have heard of.
For us it's a little harder to get people to understand our product because there are no other well known products that are directly comparable to ours. However, there are well known products that are in the same problem space as ours.
The well known competing products tend to primarily focus on appealling to company "execs", but not so much the actual end users of them. The actual end users need to commit themselves and their skillsets into that particular proprietary technology, which smart ones may realize is not great for their long term career if they're planning on being able to move around the industry.
So our product is similar to these well known products in that it solves some of the same problems, but we differ greatly in that ours is geared towards end users who don't want any kind of platform lock-in.
After reading this website, I'm planning on making a page to compare ourselves to these particular "competing" products, but giving us the opportunity to show why even if you dislike those other products, you'll like ours because of its differences. This will also help people better understand the problem we're solving.
The ones that seem least useful are the aggregator sites making comparisons written by robots. But I’ve gotten genuine insight from competitor profiles.
The goal is to provide an independent opinion and overview of different SaaS categories, as well as recommendations of the tools we think are best. The main downside is that writing high-quality opinions are difficult and time-consuming, but we've got some ideas on how to sidestep a lot of those challenges.
If there is some reason why you're coy about pricing then I assume you are making things up as you go along. I also assume you'll make promises you can not deliver on.
If it really is the most sought after info, by a long way, then one would be a fool to omit it.
And yet most enterprise software companies do omit it. Perhaps there is a good reason to omit it, and you're the one who's not seeing something?
It's also a really good filter for bad customers. Partly because "if you have to ask you can't afford it" and partly because SaaS is sold to execs, not users within the organization. Most people coming to ask about price first are the users that just want something for themselves or a small team, which is not an ideal customer.
Basically if you move on from the site because you can't find the price, that's by design.
The term is 'price discrimination'. [1]
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as...
Enterprise companies are established entities that already have good name recognition. They can pay big money to salespeople with deep industry networks, because the deals they make are low-volume, high-value. Once the product is past the point where you have to acquire users at $15/month, it makes sense to upscale to 'enterprise' plans that charge a lot more for things like uptime guarantees and issue escalation.
Of course, whether they are correct or not varies a lot.
If you want to make me lose my time hunting for that info, I'll make damn sure you're losing yours as well.
(P.S. I'm talking to the general "you", not @dazc specifically)
So much time I've wasted on demos and at the end the price is so far apart from expectation we could have saved the time. Even if something is too expensive, knowing the general price tag allows you to keep the project in your back pocket in case there's a cash/budget surplus and you get asked to put those dollars to work quickly.
Sometimes it's not even because of budget: if an employee can't experiment with the service using some free tier (not time limited, because other projects can urgently get in the way), they can't request whoever has the company credit card to subscribe even to the lowest paid tier, so they'll just try one of your competitors because blindly recommending a service that might be a bad fit is too high a risk for the employee's career.
Such companies don't want to talk with potential users, because the end users themselves generally don't get a vote or veto or choice of what the enterprise (i.e. not a small company with a tight budget) will buy, they want to talk with high-level managers who have the authority to buy something on behalf of thousands of users.
To that regard, the analysis performed by the OP is probably irrelevant, as it's about "online searches of thousands of B2B SaaS buyers", but come on, the target audience of high-touch B2B companies does not go out making online searches for such services; those decisionmakers either choose from one of the companies whose sales teams have been courting them for years before the sale, or perhaps they look up the Gartner report for "category leaders", or perhaps they ask their consulting partners for recommendations, they don't just go on google to start researching from scratch - and if they needed that research, they would not visit the site personally, they'd get a team of assistants to gather such info and get quotes tailored for their specific needs; if there was standard pricing listed on the site, that would/should get ignored anyway, they'd expect custom discounts for their volume. Of course, there are many B2B SaaS "buyers" who do such online searches, but they're all the the small scale non-enterprise people with tight budgets, the kind of people to whom the company does not want to talk in the first place.
> ...prospective buyers are going to discover your competitors, anyway.
I haven't run into this a lot with my clients -- they've generally been on-board with the idea of creating vs./alternatives content -- but some folks do have that mental block. Talking about competitors feels risky to them.
One of my favorite examples of this is Bitrix24, which made maybe a hundred such pages: https://www.bitrix24.com/alternatives/
For most startups you don't need to go that far... Just making an "alternative" page for your biggest competitor could start bringing you people who are eager to switch.
Funny enough, I know that Bitrix alternatives page, because they're a competitor of one of my clients in the workflow automation space. :)
-Mike
Nothing worse than sitting through some vendor demo in order to answer the simple question of price.
If price isn’t simple, then the problem is your ability to communicate.
I don’t need to “Contact Us” for a simple price. If you hide the price it makes me feel like you are either ashamed of it, or just make it up as you go along.
We know. We're ok with this. Your support cost would likely outweigh your account fees. Please do indeed go elsewhere! :)
Are these sites actually reliable? They have an A+ SEO game because I find them on Google all the time, I just don't really put much stock in their data.
You just have to remember that they're just like any other online review: you mostly hear from the very happy or very unhappy customers OR the ones that got asked by the company to leave a review (perhaps in return for an incentive).