"Stop selling. Start helping." — Zig Ziglar
I started selling my first SaaS service in 1993 by going office to office in downtown Austin. The term "SaaS" hadn't been coined yet. I was lugging a laptop and plugging it into fax machine phone lines at each prospect's desk to demo our product over a 54Kb dial-up connection. I sold almost as much AOL in those days as I sold legislative tracking subscriptions.
What I did learn was that salespeople knew the pulse of the market better than anyone. First-hand, you heard why a prospect would never buy this product — or why they just might. The criticisms and insights our sales team brought back built GalleryWatch into a company that would one day raise $8 million in investment capital and ultimately be acquired by a Fortune 500 company.
When assessing the pros and cons of a SaaS service's viability and refining its value proposition, it is crucial to get the perspective of your sales team. One of your first steps is to sit down with sales team members and flush out what problems the end user is actually trying to solve. What is their pain? How are they managing it currently? Where does the current solution fall short? And what would cause them to leave for something better?
It is critical to distinguish sales feedback from support feedback. Sales feedback reveals the pains of prospective buyers — it should never be conflated with customer support, which is a post-sale concern. One focuses on what will get a prospect to become a subscriber; the other is about delivering on the value you promised once they are.
A defining example occurred when GalleryWatch opened its Washington, D.C. office in 1997. I was interviewing candidates the same week a leading competitor — a Washington Post subsidiary — had folded. I immediately began interviewing their displaced sales, marketing, and customer support staff. That's when I met three-martini Arnie.
Arnie had run customer support and had previously been the lead salesman for our soon-defunct competitor. The most buttoned-up individual I had ever encountered — and I say that having spent a year in London, where rigidity was practically a cultural currency — Arnie's prim exterior concealed a very cunning mind. He helped me understand exactly what kind of sales team we needed to build.
His caution was against seasoned veterans who were too invested in the legacy technology to hear what the market was demanding. Instead, he recommended we seek people who genuinely embraced emerging technology and had connections with prospects who were apt to adopt SaaS-based solutions early.
In the end, GalleryWatch gained its foothold in the federal market because we listened to what prospective clients were telling our sales team. It turned out some of our least successful state-market features were the strongest draw at the federal level. We adjusted our marketing and our development roadmap accordingly.
The same dynamics apply when transitioning from on-premise software to the cloud. Those who will be selling your platform must be genuine advocates of it — or they will offer more excuses than constructive insights.
Roadmap Considerations
◆ Are the people you are hiring to sell genuine advocates of your service? ◆ Does your sales team sell the software — or do they sell a solution to the prospect's actual problem? ◆ Are sales team members included in DevOps conversations about new features? ◆ Consider pulling outside sales hires from your customer support team — they already know the product and the customer. ◆ Train your customer support team to identify and act on upsell opportunities.