Make Big Plays with These SaaS Sales Tips

Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, is increasingly the lay of the land. Customers love it for its easy trials and buying cycles, smoother deployments and lower support burdens, and vendors love it for its more predictable, recurring revenue potential and better margins.

As businesses are transforming their traditional software offerings into subscription- and license-based SaaS solutions, it’s vital that sales professionals stay on top of new best practices for landing those deals.

If you want to make big sales plays, check out these SaaS sales tips:

Solve Problems

It’s been said enough times that it’s approaching cliché status, but it’s still worth repeating: sell solutions to problems¸ not products. It’s your responsibility in this new, socially driven era of sales to really learn the ins and outs of your target company and buyer so that you can articulate exactly how your SaaS solution provides tangible business value.

If you launch into a stale pitch of features and functionality, you’re going to quickly be talking to a bored prospect. Your website already has all of that information. Your responsibility is to bring the human element to the table, and really intelligently speak to that ultimate question your prospect is going to have: “What’s really in this for me?”

Don’t Overcomplicate

Save the overly technical specs for later in the buying cycle. When initially presenting your offering, focus on the simple value it provides (going back to solving problems!) and the tangible ways it makes your prospect’s life better. Speeds and feeds don’t necessarily win the day anymore.

However, if it eventually does come down to tech specs, be prepared for the tough questions; bring in a sales engineer or work with marketing to create white papers or other collateral that dive deep into the technical questions that an IT buyer or similar prospect might have.

Be Prepared to Adapt

In keeping with our theme of really learning your customer’s needs, don’t go into any sales conversation with a preconceived notion of which SaaS solution they’re going to be interested in, or even which team within a target organization will benefit the most from your offering. Every team in every organization has unique needs, processes and workflows, and you should be prepared to adapt quickly as those needs come to light.

This is particularly true if you’re selling a diverse SaaS product portfolio. Be prepared, but be nimble.

Ready to make big plays of your own?

Put the above SaaS sales tips to work with PGi Partners. For the second half of 2015, we’re running an incentive program called Make Big Plays—you could win a luxury trip to the Big Game next February, along with a variety of other great prizes.

Not a PGi Partner yet? Not a problem—reach out today for more information on how you can join our industry-leading partner program and put those razor-sharp SaaS sales skills to the test!