The 3 Questions in Enterprise SaaS Sales

Why Change? Why Now? Why You?

From the outside, it probably looks very easy.

Ceiling-shattering growth numbers. Massive industry hype. Office spaces that look like

something Bruce Wayne would have drawn up.

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry is indeed coming on strong, and if you'd like

some numbers to back that up, here's a sentence full of eye-popping figures from a May

2014 Forbes article:

"The worldwide CRM market grew 13.7% from $18B in 2012 to $20.4B in 2013, with

41% of all systems sold in 2013 being SaaS-based." (Emphasis mine).

With seemingly everyone and their mother climbing over each other to get a piece of

some SaaS products, it goes without saying that most SaaS account executives have a

pretty enjoyable gig going on right now, right?

Wrong. SaaS sales come with a degree of difficulty, especially for those selling into a

large organization.

As such, SaaS companies are looking for experience, as indicated by the 2012 SaaS

Inside Sales Report's finding that 2.5 years was the average experience-level of a newly

hired Sales Rep, with only 8 percent of all new hires having than a year of experience.

There's a reason SaaS companies aren't recruiting just anybody to help sell their

products -- the Enterprise SaaS sales process ranks among the most demanding of any

technology sale on the planet. Let's start by taking a broadview look at the process

itself.

Getting From -3 to +3

What's so hard about closing a SaaS sale? The answer is best exemplified in breaking

down the mantra of the SaaS Sales Process: Getting from -3 to +3.

Negative 3 is the mentality, "I don't have a problem, or, I don't need to change." 0 is, "I

want your product but I don't need it now." Positive 3 is, "I want to change, the answer is

your product, and I need it now."

As you can see, this process hasn't so much replaced AIDA (Attention. Interest.

Demand. Action.) as adapted it to fit the main challenge of closing a SaaS deal.

Namely, getting not just one person, but an organization of people to commit to your

product and stay committed over time.

The -3 to +3 spectrum is the path that every SaaS sales deal must follow, and it is

traversed via answering three pivotal questions:

Why Change? Why You? Why Now?

Let's take this trip ourselves by drilling down into each question, one-by-one.

Why Change?

Resistance to change is the initial mortal enemy of a prospective SaaS deal. And the

first step toward conquering it is to figure out exactly what is going to drive a customer

to change in the first place. Or as Mark Cranney describes it: "Seek first to understand

and then to be understood."

Remember when you were in high school and you told your mom you wanted new

clothes for Christmas, but gave no further instructions?

Chances are, come Christmas morning you were opening a packages that contained

cardigan sweaters, Tech Vests, or some other godawful crime against fashion that your

mom thought would look better on you than your current wardrobe? (Mine sure did).

It's the same with SaaS sales.

As Cranney elaborates, "the problem with telling a potential customer what you think

they need before you understand what they think they need is: You’re basing your

position on a known set of requirements from a broad base of companies instead of

unknown specific opportunities."

The result: You position yourself as "more of a commodity or just a vendor — as

opposed to a partner that can help transform the way they conduct their business."

Only once you have discovered the needs of the prospect that will compel them to

change can you effectively begin communicating your product's value. You do so by

finding a pain point that you can cure, then you make the prospect see how much it

hurts.

Bear in mind, the bigger the organization's potential user base and the greater the

amount of change required, the more resistant the organization will likely be to

embracing the change that your product offers.

Hubspot VP of Sales Mark Roberge glibly explained the challenge at hand for his sales

team: "In HubSpot sales, we need to educate people over the phone and literally

convince them to turn their sales and marketing process on its head."

Sounds fun, right? And yet, the fact is that SaaS sales reps really are asking

organizations to do the two things they hate most: change and spend money.

In order for that to happen, finding out where the prospect hurts and how much it is

hurting is an absolute pre-requisite on the part of the Sales Rep.

Why You?

Not only are SaaS sales reps charged with persuading an organization to go through

the rigor of overhauling a major business process or processes, and spend money to do

it.

They're charged with convincing the organization that it's their product, and not their

competitors, that is worthy of these undertakings.

The complexity of SaaS sales comes into focus here. It's not enough to have the best

product, or offer the cheapest price.

The deck is stacked to the point where SaaS sales reps all but have to engender

something many mistakenly believe is absent from Business-to-Business sales:

emotional resonance.

As the Andreesen Horowitz blog explains:

"Because SaaS usage is at the departmental level, there are often many more users in

a company than there have historically been from traditional software products, making

switching costs even higher."

Complicating matters further is the reality that it’s "very difficult to switch SaaS vendors

once they’re embedded into business workflow."

You can see why SaaS sales trainer John Barrows declared definitively in his interview

with Ambition, "The days of adding value are here."

And yet, in many cases, there comes a point where the last remaining competitors over

a prospect are all promising a similar return on ROI, showing similar stats and figures to

compel change, and promising the usual "highest level of customer support" and

"commitment to ensuring success."

So if you present a compelling case guaranteeing your product's abiltiy to provide an

immediate, significant strategic advantage or mitigate a strategic disadvantage --

congratulations, you've made it to the hard part.

This is the point in the sale where knowing why you do your job, truly believing in your

product and understanding its values becomes so pivotal.

You should compel the prospect to feel that the value your product will add will go

beyond the tangible and impact the ephemereal.

Adding your product into the prospect organization's will create a positive, new level of

nuance within its organizational culture -- more high tech, innovative, employee friendly,

youthful, cooperative -- and so on.

Why Now?

The final hurdle in the SaaS Sales cycle presents the most formidable challenge of all:

instilling a sense of urgency in the prospect organization that induces immediate

purchase.

Mark Cranney succinctly sets forth the SaaS sales rep's final task: "Once you’ve

eliminated the competition and are on the path to technical validation, you have to turn

the value proposition into a quantifiable business case."

In other words, when ushering a prospect through the final stage of the decision-making

process, you better be prepared to eliminate any relevant unknowns and assuage any

lingering concerns that may impede the purchase.

Again, here is another stage where industry practices are trending against sales reps.

The Bridge Groups's 2012 SaaS Inside Sales Report found that: "Decision makers are

requiring not only more information, but the support of a cadre of other stakeholders.

Rarely is a decision made by just one person, this includes the CEO."

Here is where SaaS sales reps must truly put on their Consultant hats and work with the

prospect to set up a concrete implementation and onboarding plan moving forward.

Make no mistake, this will be a collaborative process where closing occurs not with one

person, but many. The 2012 SaaS Inside Sales Report reiterated the tendency for "'risk

averse decision makers [to] buy on consensus.'"

As such, the ability to communicate and coordinate with precision becomes a moral

imperative for the deal to close successfully.

Understanding the Challenge

SaaS sales mean getting your customers to marry you. That is, agree to a long-term

commitment toward one another, with recurring payments. (For sales reps, the stress,

uncertainty and length of the sales process can often more closely resemble a divorce).

Ultimately, we're only scratching the surface of the tremendous volume of training, pre-

planning, strategizing, information gathering and marketing alignment that goes into

SaaS sales.

SaaS companies fight for territory in a highly competitive jungle, which is why it is so

imperative to have the right people, processes & product. Fall short in one of these key

areas, and your company will soon be going the way of the Dodo bird.

There's a lot of money out there that's ready to be spent, but only on companies that

have properly equipped themselves to survive the SaaS sales gauntlet.

For more information on how Ambition can assist your Enterprise SaaS Sales Team in

its quest to dominate the market, download our free e-book, The Ambition Guide to

Predictable Revenue, and check out our Access America case study.

Jeremy Boudinet is the voice of Ambition and has written about the topics of

Gamification, Millennials, Career Development, Sales, Sales Force Management, SaaS,

Content Marketing and Leadership for the Ambition Blog, Time, Inc., Information Age,

Blindfold Magazine, and Social Media Today.