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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

There are billions of individuals and millions of small businesses that can be reached without a sales team. If you don't want to do sales, then don't target enterprise customers. I make my living with SaaS products, and have never made a cold call or sent an unsolicited mail about it.

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Two things have to be taken into account here. Firstly the original post is from the point of a VC, and from the point of view of a VC, not hiring a sales team to actively pursue high value enterprise sales and partnerships in a market amenable to them represents the great evil of limiting traction and leaving money on the table. From the point of view of a micropreneur or small business not trying to win the entire market or go bust trying, it might be taking a massive business risk on something with far less predictable return than ramping up existing marketing spend.

The second is that there are millions of small businesses which aren't searching Google for software solutions to certain problems and yet are willing to part with cash if somebody shoves the solution in their face.

Agreed, small business have they own methods to hack, in a form of authenticity, sincerity or creativity?

Out of interest then, how do people hear about your SaaS? Word of mouth and Google searches only?

I run a low-budget (<$1000/mo) PPC and retargeting ad campaign which is where most of the first customers came from. Today, at least 80% of new signups are either referrals (word-of-mouth, or articles/blogs/tweets written by current and past customers) or from organic search. The #1 keyword in my paid PPC campaign is just the brand name.

It helps that the product is really great, too.

the pre, during and after service enhances the product and amplifies the experience

Good stuff. Assume Improvely is your Saas. You do realize that marketers/agencies are very active in social media, blogging, etc. I can think of over 100 blogs that would write about you: conversionxl.com, okdork.com, quicksprout.com, kissmetrics.com, etc, etc.

I'm sure if you created a SaaS for X, where X = farmers, or or home funeral owners, or home contractors, you would not have that luxury. So it definitely depends on the space, and for most people, your strategy simply would not suffice... not even close.

This is only true if you are selling a relatively low investment product.

I also work at a SaaS business and can tell you there is absolutely no way we could make sales on marketing alone (and we sell to primarily SMBs).

Whether or not you need a sales team depends greatly on what type of product you are selling.

I've seen this work too, but it depends. As with all things in this domain... it depends. There are no absolute laws in this space. If most of your (monetary, capturable) value is in enterprise, you need sales. Otherwise maybe you don't.

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