Selling SaaS Smarter
Some thoughts from a growth engineer on how to understand businesses and sell SaaS marketing technology more efficiently.
As the first sales engineer at Segment(.io), it’s been a wild ride and I want to share some insights I’ve had after 3 months of meeting day in and day out with some top marketing and engineering managers and companies looking at adopting new technology.
Since Segment helps anyone who needs to track user behavior, there is a massive set of potential customers in the market. We have tremendous brand equity and a lot of inbound traffic. So our main challenge is quickly finding the most qualified customers and getting them on board as efficiently as possible.
The Problem Is
2000ish tools in the marketing tech ecosystem. http://chiefmartec.com/
So many marketing tools
In a world of ever expanding diversity when it comes to SaaS marketing tech solutions you need to be hyper relevant to your prospects. They’re being bombarded daily by vendors seeking their time and money.
Reducing time to close
To get the revenue ball rolling in your favor you need to quickly identify the well qualified businesses, close them and continue expanding. Traction is king and is fuel for the fire.
Company Profiling
Due to the nature of the web much of the activity that businesses engage in to collect user data is public. Client-side javascript libraries are loaded and companies like Ghostery expose the services being used. The types of tools a company uses tells you a lot about their team dynamics, decision making processes and budget.
For instance Buzzfeed as a media company is obviously going to use a lot of ad tech for segmenting and targeting users. They have Google Analytics — most likely GA premium at their volume which costs around $150k / year and Adobe Site Catalyst / Omniture which will likely be much more.
The fact they are using Omniture most likely means they have someone who pushed for standardization to a suite based tool and now they do most of their marketing activities around Omniture and a likely have a fairly large engineering team to manage the integration as well as have some dissatisfied marketers who would like to try some new tools. They are going to be a hard company to sell a new marketing tech product to.
In comparison, Bonobos is much more open to being an early adopter and trying new tools.
They’re using Convertro for attribution analytics, Bronto for targetted email campaigns, Mixpanel for analytics with Google Analytics likely for all data to compensate for Mixpanels cost, Olark for live customer chat and Rollbar for error tracking and performance monitoring. These guys are investing in trying out new tools and aren’t afraid of being an early adopter. Additionally they’re doing the usual social tools and retargetting for ads.
Once you have identified the type of company that converts the best use some automated tools to filter and find more similar companies like:
Business Model
Combining knowledge of the brands and types of tools a company adopts with an understanding of the companies business model adds another layer of depth to your qualification process.
Companies value new tech to the extent that it can move the needle for their business. Publishers want more readers and pageviews— to sell ads against their audience they need to efficiently segment their audience. Ecommerce and SaaS companies have a high customer lifetime value so they need to optimize conversions through better UX, personalization, recommendations, remarketing, etc. Gaming companies need to find and target the “whales” who spend money in app. There is a spectrum of new to old tools that are helping these companies address these problems.
$$$
So with that in mind, a preemptive look at our customers web page can tell me how likely the company is to adopt new technology and what types of tech they might value. Segment already helps companies that are looking at evaluating new tech but the types of companies that are already using new tech are going to have an easier time adopting our technology to improve their next phase of marketing iterations.
Hope that’s useful for you. Let me know if you have thoughts or questions at c@segment.com.
