Answers
Nov 20, 2018 - 02:35 PM
You absolutely can grow fast as SAAS without using an "Enterprise Sales" model but your price point would need to be low, ideally under $100 per month.
HotJar is an example of a company that grew from 0 to $10 million in sales in about three years through online marketing. Here's their story:
https://www.hotjar.com/blog/hotjar-story-3-growing-team-product-business
I believe Moz in its early days also grew this way but they had the advantage of a community that tuned in every Friday for Rand Fishkin's Whiteboard Fridays. He delivered free SEO training and the community embraced him by buying his software.
That said, you do need to do a couple of things well for this to work:
1. Needless to day, a great, self explanatory product and a few videos.
2. Offer full featured free trial
3. Invest in excellent support. I know software engineers don't like to deal with people and would rather have software automate everything but if you don't have great support, you'll get a lot cancellations and bad reviews.
You may also need a lower level sales associate to follow up on warm leads. This a lot cheaper than hiring a true enterprise sales person. The best ones command $200k+ salaries.
Joel Spolsky wrote a piece explaining this topic and there are basically two price tiers for B2B software: Self-serve and low price (HotJar model) or entrerpise-sales-driven and high price (Oracle model).
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/
The reason I bring this up is because software is priced three ways: free, cheap, and dear.
- Free. Open source, etc. Not relevant to the current discussion. Nothing to see here. Move along.
- Cheap. $10 – $1000, sold to a very large number of people at a low price without a salesforce. Most shrinkwrapped consumer and small business software falls into this category.
- Dear. $75,000 – $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale. The Oracle model.
So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his airfare, golf course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the Ritz Carlton. And with all this, the cost of making one successful sale is going to average about $50,000. If you’re sending salespeople out to customers and charging less than $75,000, you’re losing money.
There is a no-man's land in between where it is very tough to make money because buyers don't feel comfortable buying without talking to or receiving a visit from an enterprise sales person yet the price isn't high enough to justify employing armies of enterprise sales people.
Nov 22, 2018 - 10:47 AM
Wauw, really good answer! Thanks a lot for the insights!
I think we have a chance since our pricing is similar to what you mention (https://morningscore.io/pricing/)
I am looking into adding voluntary onboarding where the users get 7 days extra trial if they go through a 10 minute call with us.
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