The seventh rule in Bessemer Venture Partners’ Top 10 Rules of Cloud Computing and SaaS says that to successfully scale and grow a SaaS business you need to “Make online sales and marketing a core competency.”
“You’re a cloud business, so by definition, your sales prospects are all online. Savvy online sales and marketing is a core competence (sometimes the only one) of every successful cloud business.”
The reason for this is that online marketing is a very cost effective way to increase brand exposure and reduce the overall Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC). More and more research is being done online in advance of purchase decisions. While that does not negate the need for an outbound effort, if your competition can be found and you can’t, or if your competition has a wealth of good content and you don’t, it puts you at a distinct disadvantage.
Building a sales and marketing engine, however, takes time and resources that many SaaS companies do not have the luxury to spend. Because the true monetary value of the customer is measured in LTV (lifetime value) and MRR (monthly recurring revenue) instead of in large infusions of cash each time a deal is closed it is critical to the health of the business to be able to sell and to sell fast.
As Joel York so eloquently put it in his blog post, SaaS Sales Tips, Scale Profitably:
“The challenge of the SaaS sales executive is more subtle than that of the traditional enterprise counterpart. While large up-front enterprise license deals support an expenses-be-damned all out attack on revenue, the SaaS model requires a more measured approach that maintains a lock on acquisition expenses, high capital efficiency and a relentless drive toward profitability.”
How then, to become that savvy sales and marketing machine, generate new business, and repeatable new business, and still keep a lock on acquisition expenses?
Take another tip from the Bessemer playbook and “Drink Your Own Champagne”
“Your cost of capital is also likely very high, making upfront hardware and license costs unnecessarily expensive for a young company. By pushing as much as possible into the cloud, you avoid management headaches and make these expenses variable.”
While Bessemer was specifically suggesting that you leverage as many other cloud based computing services as possible, at NuGrowth, we contend that this suggestion can and should extend to sales and marketing as well.
A fully-built Sales and Marketing as a Service (SMaaS) model, like we offer at NuGrowth, is a fully-loaded demand and revenue generating engine comprised of:
- A complete sales management organization that includes hiring, training, coaching, mentoring, performance awards and more.
- A metrics-focused marketing team that works in tandem with sales to seed the territory, build brand awareness and generate and nurture leads through both inbound and outbound channels.
- Sales force automation tools, implementation and expertise
- Marketing automation tools, implementation and expertise
- Content Marketing expertise in both strategy and execution
With SMaaS, not only are the upfront costs lower, and more manageable in terms of forecasting, but because the engine is already in place, it is built to hit the ground running far more quickly than it would be if you were to try to build the same engine from scratch.
For more information on how to leverage SMaaS for SaaS, or to find out if it is right for your business, please contact us at 800-966-3051.
