SaaS Marketing Plan: 5 Ways to Get your B2B App to Sell Itself

SaaS Marketing Plan: 5
Ways to Get your App to
Sell Itself
A guide by SaaS Marketing expert and Growth
Hacker Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures

The Aim of Marketing...
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the
customer so well the product or service ﬁts him and
sells itself.” – Peter Drucker
What Drucker says is even more powerful when you
consider your product to be part of your SaaS
marketing plan.
And in SaaS, your marketing / promotion / customer
acquisition methods must extend into the product in
order to get the product to “sell itself.”
Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved.

SaaS Marketing Requires Different Thinking
When creating your SaaS marketing plan, you must
understand that your business model of choice is a
fully-integrated architecture where all aspects of the
business – product, support, revenue model, and
marketing – are tightly-coupled.
Deviation from that model and understanding will affect
growth, and most deviation occurs as a rift between
marketing and product.

Your Goal: Effeciently Scale Your Sales Process
Whether you have a $10/mo product where the
economic buyer is also the end user… or you have a
product that is $500 per user per month, is a complex
sale with multiple buyer types, and your average deal
size is 1,000 users, you need to work toward this goal.
Getting your product to “sell itself” will allow you to
scale your sales process efﬁciently no matter what that
sales process looks like!

The Inconvienient Truth of SaaS Marketing
To get your SaaS product to sell itself, you have to
spend as much time, energy, resources, and/or money
on the Customer Acquisition, Retention, and Viral
Expansion processes as you do on the core
functionality of your product.
Sorry. :-(

Presentation Source
This presentation is based on my popular “SaaS
Marketing Plan: 5 Ways to Get your App to Sell Itself”
post... you can ﬁnd a lot more detail on the techniques
and ideas presented here:
http://sixteenventures.com/sell-itself

First, Attract the Right Audience
It’s pretty simple, really… nothing else you do matters
(conversion rate optimization, Free Trial optimization,
better sales people, etc.) if you fail to attract the right
audience in the ﬁrst place.
Make sure you know who you need to be targeting (if
you’re going to say “but everyone is a potential
customer” save it for the bankruptcy judge) and use
this to formulate your advertising and promotion
campaigns, your overall look and feel, and even the
way your product is designed.
Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com

Second, Properly Manage Expectations
This couldn’t be simpler but so many SaaS providers
fail miserably at this.
If you have a non-refundable setup fee… say that. If
you require a credit card to start your trial (but bury that
in step 3…), say “valid credit card required” up front.
If you’re going to ask for their phone number because
you’re going to call… tell ‘em that Steve, their Account
Success Rep, is going to call tomorrow around 10AM.
Be bold but be honest.

Third, Remove Barriers to Sign-up
People like to think that the more hoops someone has
to jump through to sign-up for your product, the more
likely they are to become a paying customer.
NO! Supposed “qualification barriers”, artificial friction,
even requiring Credit Cards to sign-up for a Free Trial
do nothing but keep potential customers out.
The evidence – the data – clearly shows that reducing
the number of fields on your sign-up form can have a
dramatic effect on getting people in the door.

Still talking about removing barriers
Whatever you do, my advice is
to spend your time and energy
getting people into your app
and using the service…
…not looking for ways to keep
people out or from getting
engaged with the service as
fast as possible.
http://sixteenventures.com

Fourth, Aggressively Drive Engagement
This is the opposite of letting people kick the tires and
fend for themselves; or the “strategy” employed by far
too many SaaS providers.
In most cases, as soon as the potential customer –
who is now excited to try out the app – hits the sign-up
form… the momentum slows.
Your ﬁrst in-app experience shouldn’t cause your
potential customer or your new customer (if they
bought without trying ﬁrst) to go “I’m in… so, what do I
do now?”

First In-App Experience is Key to Engagement
You must engineer and design the
process to move them from sign-up
to ﬁrst in-app experience to
engaged user to invested user to
paying customer – the entire
process, not just part of it – if you
want to succeed at scale.

Fifth, Make it Easy to Buy
It is often easier in a SaaS Free Trial to submit a feature
request than it is to become a paying customer!
Unlike the old days of software, the sales process (or
funnel) isn’t decoupled from the app… with SaaS, they
are one in the same.
Conversion must be engineered into the product and
you have to be willing to ask for the sale. And don’t
forget… you don’t have to wait until the end of a Free
Trial to ask for the sale.
You have to sell how your customers buy so consider
that when making it “easy to buy” within the app!

Bonus! Make it Easy to Share
If you think viral expansion has no place in B2B SaaS
apps and they can’t “go viral” that’s ﬁne. Disagreeing
with me in this case doesn’t hurt me, it hurts you.
Need I point to super-successful companies like Box and
Yammer that have proven that internal, highly-
orchestrated virality is not just possible but the key to
inﬁltrating and locking-down Fortune 500 – very B2B –
customers?
Consider internal virality that can be orchestrated inside
of companies (peer to peer, up and down the chain of
command, etc.), between trading partners, from
customer to vendor and vice versa, etc. [Learn More]
http://sixteenventures.comCopyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved.

Let’s Optimize your SaaS Sales Funnel
Get your SaaS Sales Funnel Optimization
Review and I’ll help you start converting
more customers… fast!
http://sixteenventures.com/saas-sales-
funnel-optimization-review
http://sixteenventures.comCopyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved.

Thank You!
Lincoln Murphy
Sixteen Ventures
lincoln@sixteenventures.com
@lincolnmurphy

SaaS Marketing Plan: 5 Ways to Get your B2B App to Sell Itself

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