What’s this?
A guide to thinking about the sales, marketing and operational needs of a SaaS greenfield.
How does it work?
By breaking your SaaS idea into market segments, and then building sales, marketing and operational needs from these segments.
How do I know it’s any good?
We’ve worked with leading SaaS brands delivering managed services and support. Plus, we’ve based our thinking here on AWS’s SaaS Journey Framework, developed from their extensive work building up SaaS businesses through the AWS SaaS Factory.
Can anyone use it?
This guide works best for early stage ideas and greenfields – but it can also be useful for spotting holes in an existing business plan.
How to sell SaaS: identify market segments and build from there
The first section of this guide deals with effectively identifying market segments. These are the groups of customers you’ll be targeting. After that, we’ll look at how each segment guides us on sales, marketing and operations.
Step 1 – break your SaaS idea into market segments
Essentially, we’re asking you to think about each and every group of customers your product targets.
If, for example, you have a piece of MarTech with a focus on SEO, your market segments might look like:
- Digital agencies
- In-house marketing teams
- Freelancers
- Individual blog owners
It can be tricky to split out segments – as sometimes who goes in which box can be a bit of a grey area, so here are some questions you can ask yourself to make the process a bit simpler:
- Who are you not targeting?
- What is unique about each segment – does every segment have at least one need, barrier or cost that none of the others do? If not – it might not be a separate segment.
Example
For users of our MarTech product, both in-house teams and agencies will use many of the same features, but agencies will need multiple project views (for each client) and in-house teams will only need one.
Likewise, agencies and freelancers will both need multiple projects, as they both work with clients, but while an agency will need multiple user profiles (for each employee) a freelancer will only need one.
Step 2 – assess the viability
Now that you’ve got your segments, you need to assess their viability.
You might have already done this – but if you discovered a new segment, or switched up an old one through step one, then this is still important.
The best way to assess viability is to tackle it via data and differentiators.
Data includes things like:
- Acceptance rates and saturation for solutions in that segment
- Prices and pricing models
- Market segment size
- Competitor offerings
Key differentiators are things which, in each segment, separate you from competitors.
Example
You might be the only SEO-focussed MarTech solution to offer all functionalities on your basic package, the only one with a pay per month option, the only one to offer unlimited user profiles at no extra cost – or you may even have a totally unique functionality.
Quick-tip: this doesn’t have to be a linear process. Many find that step 2 helps them drill down into their segments – so if you want to hop back to step 1, and get more specific, you’re not doing anything wrong!
Step 3 – marketing and selling your SaaS product
By now, you should have clearly defined segments, an idea of the market for each, and the things you bring to those markets which makes you unique.
So now, you can build out sales and marketing ideas from each!
How to market SaaS
For each segment, ask yourself:
- What are the key messages that will be used to target this segment
- Which channels are the most appropriate space for this message?
- What people do you need to make this happen?
Quick-tip: Channels can be approached creatively.
One of the best SaaS marketing campaigns from GitHub tackled the problem of the company’s luke-warm social media presence by creating a whole new platform. This ‘Facebook for Developers’ grew at a tremendous rate, and spread GitHub’s message like wildfire.
Once you have the answers, you can draw up a profile, complete with segment, message, channels, and staffing needs.
Example
Segment: Freelance SEOs working for local companies.
Message: The only local search platform to offer stop-whenever premium packages – we work when you do.
Channels: LinkedIn, Facebook, freelancer job sites.
Staffing requirements: Social media executive.
How to sell SaaS
Just as for marketing, you can now build out the specifics of sales.
This is a little more complex as SaaS is consumed and sold less traditionally compared to how it’s marketed.
When making a SaaS sales profile for a new or existing team, some helpful questions are:
- What’s different about selling SaaS – does it differ for each segment?
- How will your compensation model change in-line with a SaaS delivery model?
- What skills align with the SaaS model?
- What incremental tooling and automation will be needed to support your sales strategy?
- What are your staffing needs, looking at the above?
Quick-tip: for SaaS companies, one of the most crucial elements of the sales process is on-boarding – and building a process that strikes the balance between automating for efficiency vs providing a personal experience for customers.
Again, thinking creatively pays off.
SaaS workflow product Box figured out a way to gamify their onboarding process by extending users’ trials by a set number of days for each onboarding task completed.
This positively reinforced each step to adoption, and gave users more time to figure the tool out.
Step 4 – use your market segments to jumpstart your tenancy debate
If you’re building a SaaS product, you’re almost always going to be building multi-tenancy, i.e serving multiple users from the same instance of your application. It’s simply the best way to build most SaaS products.
But the market segments you’ve already worked on can be a great way to jumpstart your thinking.
If you didn’t already know, a tenancy profile is the needs and focuses of a particular group of tenants.
Example
For our Martech product, our enterprise agency users will be tenants with a higher need for compute and security, since they’ll be storing a lot of sensitive data, and performing a higher volume of complex tasks.
Our in-house teams, on the other hand, probably won’t.
Considering your market segments as tenants with distinct needs will help you when you get to actually building your application.
So ask yourself questions like:
- What security and compliance needs will apply to each segment?
- Are there make-or-break SLA or performance goals for some segments?
- Will some segments require customisation of your products key features?
Your tenant profiles and operational requirements in general will be fed into by other things, but using market segments to segue into tenant ideas is a valid way of approaching the problem.
Quick-tip: when you do get to building your solution, deciding on a tenant architecture – and the rest of your operations, getting things right from the off is key.
Choosing a partner with an AWS Well-Architected accreditation means you’ll have access to the best cloud can offer – and even better if they have a track record with SaaS.
But even this isn’t the whole story. Because modern SaaS applications are increasingly distributed in line with cloud-native practice, you need a partner who can support and manage your cloud infrastructure, application layer and any third-party integrations.
For this, look for true full-stack 24/7 support – again with a track record supporting SaaS applications.
How we can help
We’ve supported complex SaaS stacks for companies in LegalTech, digital HR and more. We design, build and optimise cloud infrastructures for SaaS products, and we’re always ready to partner with SaaS companies looking to work with the latest MACH technologies (microservices, API-first, containers, headless).
However, if you have an existing application, we modernise and migrate, too.
So, if you’re looking to support a new SaaS product, or for anything else, just get in touch.
