SaaS sales problems can quickly kill Software-as-a-Service businesses.
Take two of the most common:
- My prospects aren't Internet savvy
- My prospects don’t have enough time or interest to talk to my sales staff.
These issues have been hanging around for a decade or more. And when you combine them, you see results like former Boost CEO Amit Mehta encountered...such as 85% of people who download your app never installing the thing. Pretty serious SaaS sales problems, right?
His solution, detailed in a recent article about the meteoric rise and fall of Boost, was to have a lightbox pop up explaining in three simple images how to install the app.
This change doubled his user base, and had a considerable impact on sales in his freemium model.
The Importance of Your Audience In Fixing SaaS Sales Problems
You can see why it's so important to consider your audience when it comes to SaaS.
If your target market is made up of business techs who regularly get into the nuts and bolts of desktop operations, and know what a registry is, that's one thing.
And if your market is regular public who, as they do with televisions and microwave ovens, use the technology typically have zero idea of how it actually works, that's quite another.
In Amit's case early on, the fact that different browsers have different processes for installing apps consistently blocked all but 1 or 2 in 10 of his "Joe Public" proto-users from installing it.
The problem I find with a lot of web-based SaaS apps is that they don’t properly onboard users on how to use the app. You need to hold your users by the hand and show them EXACTLY what to do. ~Amit Mehta
Boost got to #646 on the Inc. Top 5000 by fixing these SaaS sales problems, so this is good advice to take.
SaaS Sales Problems Are Often a Result of the Curse of Knowledge
A lot of this is the Curse of Knowledge striking again. You and your staff, as the developers, are embedded into that world. You know the terminology. You know the processes. You know the Whats and the Whys.
But your customer?
Do they know these things?
Or are they embedded into a different world, a world where those things don't matter much to their daily lives? Are they completely unaware of the concepts, beliefs and technologies you are so familiar with and casually work with ever day?
In that case, there's quite a gap to bridge, isn't there.
And what else does Amit say?
Validate that you have an app that people actually want to use and pay for! ~Amit Mehta
Well well, what a surprise.
>> If you have a problem anywhere along your conversion process—from attracting customers to delivering your product or service—talk to Jason Kanigan. He is a process improvement expert, copywriter and sales force developer. And he's been working in the IT field with VARs, SaaS developers, and network security firms for a decade. <<