How SaaS sales software can work for you and your business

Transcript: Hey guys this is steli efti with close i'll welcome you to the sass sales strategy webinar super excited to talk about a bunch of things that we've learned working with hundreds of startups in the SAS space helping them define their sales strategy see what works and doesn't and kind of share out of that broad pool of knowledge that we have the do's and don'ts and some really best practices the presentation is going to be around twenty to thirty minutes and then you know we're going to be able to go into Q&A mode make sure to write down any questions you have while we're going through the slides so that at the end of the presentation we can the time and answer all your questions all right so let's jump right into it first thing I wanted to talk about since this is SAS I'm assuming most all products are you know software as a service so self sign our products to some degree where your users can find you on your website and then sign up for a product or the service usually that comes with a trial period so most SAS products actually empower... See more →

Key quotes:

• "Monitoring the exact time spent on particular task might not be the best idea, ever but specific SaaS apps can help your team better organize their time (e.g."
• "seeing how much time a whole team spends on specific projects) and communicate with each other more effectively (e.g."
• "Monday Monday.com — customize the projects, depending on your needs Monday is an advanced project management application, letting its users plan and monitor the progress of the projects."
• "It’s an easily customizable application which lets you personalize your projects, depending on its type."
• "Salesflare Salesflare — manage your customers’ data and sales pipeline Salesflare is an intelligent, automated online CRM application, letting you share your contacts within your team in one place."
• "Stencil Stencil — design your social media posts with the simple drag&drop editor Stencil is an online design application, letting its users create graphical posts, simply by dragging and dropping particular elements."

Key quotes:

• "That’s true — software companies focused on maintenance of their SaaS products can outsource some of their work to software houses."
• "In my opinion, the most important benefit of working with a software house is not outsourcing itself — it’s making use of their know-how."
• "Collecting requirements will probably never become a walk in the park, but when a software house (having experience in establishing requirements) and a SaaS company (knowing their clients and processes) collaborate, it gets waaay easier."
• "In our field, an extra hour equals higher project costs and this is why good software houses tend to maximise the efficiency of their processes."
• "Of course, SaaS companies have their own methods of product development, but the key difference is that we can improve this process with every new project."
• "The number of new technologies keeps increasing, and software houses often have separate R&D departments researching them."

Transcript: Everyone stand myself and I think a panel is standing between you and lunch so I'm anticipating a lot of angry faces in the next half hour here but yep I'm Patrick Campbell I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called price intelligently and today what we're gonna talk about and we're gonna kind of unravel in the next thirty minutes is pretty big kind of finding that myself and our team discovered and sifting through just a ton of data and it's actually changed since I submitted the talk title to Alex we're actually now looking at over 3,000 companies at this point and that kind of shift that we're seeing in the market really comes down to this concept that we live in a world where acquisition as we know it is dead and the reason that acquisition is really kind of diminishing if not really kind of dying out as the main source of growth is because we live in a very very different product era and what I mean by that is if you look at the history of SAS in the entire world you know over the course of the past 20 to 30... See more →

Transcript: It's a real pleasure to be here it's a great city and it's interesting to see how web summit is impacting this city one of my portfolio companies a company called salsify just decided to relocate their European headquarters here to Lisbon and that's pretty different we used to see everybody going to Dublin before that so it's nice to see the the recognition of what the city has to bring so I have a great topic to talk to you about this morning the SAS business model and metrics and in case you're wondering why this is so important I love this quote from Lord Kelvin if you can't measure it you cannot improve it and clearly all of us want to improve our SAS businesses so understanding metrics is important for that but metrics also play another role which is once you start regularly measuring a series of numbers what you'll find is that your team will realize the importance of those numbers and start to work on improving them so they can act as a very powerful way to align your entire management team and company around a direction you wanted head in but that also makes... See more →

Transcript: I need to Shazam well it's that you know the song I'm singing like if I just sang that how to create the perfect SAS software business now I know that's a big promise but if you've ever struggled with trying to figure out what your roadmap should look like as you start your idea and kind of expand and add new features or you're currently have a start-up and you're trying to figure out the right next category to go into in regards to serving your customer this video is really gonna just talk about what I've seen supporting you know thousands of entrepreneurs building software companies personally building my own and investing in 30-plus others because there's a pattern there's there's a there's certain characteristics that all the best SAS and software companies have and there's really five I'm gonna share with you in these video and at the very end I'm gonna share a tip to help you get going cuz it's gonna be a little overwhelming and some of you gotta go well I don't have three and five what do I do at the end I'm gonna share with you guys had to overcome that... See more →

Key quotes:

• "Starting a venture, you don’t feel like sales is a separate business “discipline.” You just hustle, sell some of your products or service and simply close the deals."
• "Soon, spending time on sending emails and calling your customers becomes a massive job which needs to be well-managed before you move on to growing your business."
• "It’s crucial to have team members responsible for these two different sales processes.” Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue Approaching your prospects needs to be personal."
• "It’s very likely you have different ways your product or service can help them solve their problems."
• "Still, you can automate a few elements of your sales, so that you have more time to focus on what really matters to your customers and what’s important for growing their business."
• "Salesflare is a simple online CRM application, designed for small and medium businesses, focused on automating your daily sales activities."

Key quotes:

• "Here’s how I would set up a small business to run using software as a service (SaaS)."
• "I’ve seen it used well in government, in product teams and sales organisations."
• "Microsoft do offer their productivity suite as SaaS (Office 365) and it’s very good."
• "After having been punched in the face repeatedly by years of using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) products, from the likes of Oracle and SAP, it was a pleasure to use something designed for the user and not the needs of the bureaucracy."
• "There are a bunch of features (that I track in other productivity tools) for setting and managing goals and actions."
• "There’s a great mobile app and integrations with things like Slack… so you can share updates with your teams automatically."

Key quotes:

• "If your product solves a pain point for companies and customers, you’re in business."
• "So assuming you have a good product, how do we get you users, customers, and etc.? The higher the price, the more touchpoints you’ll need with prospective customers, and the harder it will be to get impulse buys or downloads."
• "There are a lot of ways to increase NPS — the most obvious are a great product and killer customer service."
• "However, giveaways with email options could work, but make sure the prize is relevant to the product or service you are offering."
• "For example, Slack-based companies need task management systems, email marketing, and a whole list of other tools."
• "If it’s a good product, you’ll start to get more reviews as you onboard users."

Transcript: Hi this is tech Finch the president of channel com I'm going to go through building a SAS channel a step by step approach within the material that I go through I'm going to talk about the channel I'm going to set up some definitions I'm going to talk about the channel in general but if you do happen to have a SAS product which are really popular right now there's several different differences and I'll go through some of those differences I'm also going to go through the three different phases of a reseller program which is defining the next stage is recruiting a channel phase 3 is enablement and then I'm going to go with ongoing channel management with which includes motivation Plus I'll give you some additional resources ok my particular background on them you know I've been doing channel marketing since 1989 you know I've helped build the channel for Microsoft IBM Adobe WordPerfect and tell you know all kinds of different companies Canon compact you know where they used to exist wrote the marketing plan for Netscape Navigator helped finance rates from entertainment with Tom Clancy Clancy and I was a former VP of Marketing... See more →