The Biggest Decision Your Self-Service SaaS Needs to Make
The self-serve model has been an invaluable launchpad for several SaaS startups. Companies like Dropbox hit viral growth and made tons of money by creating great products and letting them sell themselves.
Sounds great, but here’s the tough part: to get there, you need a sales team. The self-serve model can’t account for the complexity of enterprise deals.
Steli Efti of Close.io expands on three common characteristics of companies ready to make the jump to sales-supported self-service.
Always Be Closing Sales
Lincoln Murphy of 16Ventures explains why customer success is imperative for sales, not simply post-sales or for some other department down the hall in “Episode #36: “Why Customer Success Is a Great Fit for Sales” (podcast)
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures outlines four key innovations in SaaS sales strategies he’s observed, so far in “When To Innovate With Your Sales Process”
Dailius Wilson of TrustRadius introduces SNIPER as a methodology for salespeople to demonstrate the ability to research, select and close customers in a reliable way in “How I Transform My Salespeople from Spear Throwers Into SNIPERs”
Expand Your Marketing Funnel
Sonja Jacob of DocSend describes how the right long-term approach to leveraging sales content, sales teams can make sense of the increasingly non-linear buyer’s journey, and build a highly efficient sales process in “Why You Should Track the Performance of Sales Content”
David Skok of Matrix Partners demonstrates how to drive traffic to your site by thinking like your customers, identifying concerns and motivations, and improving your customer’s journey to increase conversions in “Improving Your Sales Funnel”
Grow Up and To The Right
Dave Nevogt of Hubstaff incorporates the story of the Nasty Gal brand and their recent filing for bankruptcy as an example of why business growth should be led by informed decisions, in order to avoid surprise pitfalls that compromise profits in “Want to Grow Your Business? You Need a Growth Strategy”
Lindsay Pettingill of Airbnb summarizes four key principles that underlie their work and have led to step changes in the impact of experimentation at Airbnb in “4 Principles for Making (Growth) Experimentation Count”
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Also published on Medium.