here's my problem if anyone is willing to lend a helping hand: i'm building an enterprise saas product that involves some cool buzzwords and potentially really adds value in the space i'm targeting but i'm getting no traction.
i have an mvp (phone app and webapp) to demo to customers. i have the decks and sales pitch. i'm a reasonably smart and articulate person and communicate well (able to "speak sales"). yet because i have no company history, no clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i can't get any traction. at least i think this is the reason i'm not getting any bites? i had leads (through my FFF investors) - i've had probably 10-15 sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where (the latest one fizzled out yesterday). pricing isn't the issue because i've floated several different pricing schemes to customers and while some are more attractive than others it's never been the deal breaker. maybe i have poor product/market fit but i've experimented with adjusted the product offering too and no significant change in reception there either.
now supposedly i should be learning something about my market segment but the problem is i constantly get contradictory signals - one customers says it's a great product but too early, another says it's not a useful product maybe i'd like to consider building such and such product, one customer says price is too high, another doesn't even mention it.
i'm really at a complete loss for how to turn this thing around and i'm burning through cash (although i'm not above taking cost cutting measures - fired one of us three 3 weeks ago and cut my own pay this month).
Do you have to target enterprise customers rather than small businesses? Enterprises have very complicated decision-making processes that can be hard to navigate if you're not experienced, and even harder if you don't already have traction.
Small businesses on the other hand will normally try out a demo of the product and decide on the spot if they like it or not. They aren't all that way, but if you talk to 50 10-person businesses, at least a couple of them will probably be willing to buy on the spot if your product solves a problem for them at a reasonable price.
Go get some of those tiny customers even if they're not profitable for you, and then later move upmarket to the enterprise clients you really want. Or do what I do and just stay focused on small customers indefinitely because they're so much better to work with.
it's true that one of the difficulties has been finding who exactly in the larger organizations to pitch the product to. early on we figured out that it should be people with a budget (i.e. those directly in charge of p&l) rather than executives or product teams but we've actually been "gatekept" from getting access to those people.
but this is a good idea. i've tried cold outreach but to larger organizations. i'll try reaching out to smaller (tiny) customers. thank you
I had success with pitching to consultancies. They have the right contacts and are probably interested in re-selling your cool and innovative product. Contact details of the right managers are usually published on their website because they want new customers to call them (but no one is stopping you to contact them for pitching :)).
In general I've realized over the years that you are much better off if you can somehow get the customer to come to you, asking for your product or service (vs trying to "sell" to them). Of course easier said than done, but this is the essence of marketing -- perhaps make some noise in the right places so interested customers become aware of you.
It's hard to give advice without knowing more details, but this sounds like there is really no need for what you're offering.
How did you come up with the idea? How do you know it's something people want in the first place?
To me, this sounds more like a fundamental product problem as opposed to a sales/marketing problem.
Try talking to (potential) users and find out what version of the general idea you want to build they could use and why.
Even if they say something like "too early", ask "why". Ask it 5 times, like a small child. "Too early" is just an excuse because they don't have the balls to say no. Find out what the underlying reason is.
I ran into this problem with my previous startup. We had cool tech, but it didn't solve something that was a major active problem for them.
OP - you may want to examine if you're offering a solution in search of a problem. Problems are harder to find and drill into than solutions. (And enterprise sales are hard, so make sure you're aware of the software valley of death and are in the mid 5 figure annual contract if you've got a long sales cycle).
> are in the mid 5 figure annual contract if you've got a long sales cycle
our initial price was there but we've scaled it down exactly because of the long sales cycle (which honestly i could tolerate if i knew that i was actually in a cycle rather than circling the drain).
> It's hard to give advice without knowing more details, but this sounds like there is really no need for what you're offering.
this has occurred to me of course but i just don't think it's true. without giving too much away it's a simple app that makes distribution of content at tradeshows much easier, personalized, and trackable (lead gen/capture for the content producer). if that's not a thing that tradeshows dearly need then i don't know what is.
> How did you come up with the idea? How do you know it's something people want in the first place?
everyone on the "advisory board" has decades of experience in the industry. it was one particular advisor's idea and i've run with it.
> Try talking to (potential) users and find out what version of the general idea you want to build they could use and why.
I had the same experience (an expert of an industry had an idea about a industry problem that "desperately needed to be solved", so I got excited and then built a solution).
After the solution is built, the expert decided she's "too busy" to return emails.
It happens all the time. Experts have ideas because their 9-5 job requires them to have ideas. They have to push hard for ideas so they will be taken seriously at meetings at work. That's why they are "experts". It's natural for an expert to "push" for her own ideas--otherwise she can't get buy-in from the rest of the organization for their ideas/initiatives and won't thrive.
The quality of the idea is not ass important as the act of pushing for it. Because if an idea does not get support, it's useless, regardless of if it was good or bad.
The moment you ask them to be use your product, they cease to be an "expert" and is now a "user", or even a "paid customer". Suddenly, they don't find the problem so "major" anymore. So you have to really qualify them before diving into the problem. Really make sure they are committed as a user before you start building anything.
I don't really understand this attitude. Why are you keeping this a secret? Aren't you trying to sell your app/service? That seems hard if you're not willing to tell people what it is/does.
Are you running free trials? Giving potential customers an adequate period of time to evaluate your product can be a good way to get them past some of those early hang-ups, especially if you're there to hold their hand.
Edit: I see in your other comment that it's related to lead gen at trade shows, so see if you can convince customers to use a free trial at a trade show so they can actually see the value (and have invested in the platform with real leads by the time you come knocking with a bill).
I wouldnt necessarily call it a class but John barrows is pretty good. He can be found on YouTube. Taught me a bunch watching over the course of a few days.
Did you guys pick this product out of the blue, or do you have industry experience? If you have industry experience, reach out to your network. Both for trying to get actual leads and for simply soliciting their feedback, even if they won't be a customer themselves. The feedback in and of itself will be valuable, and after you've exposed it to them, they may know of someone to connect you with, and eventually you'll land on someone that's willing to bite.
> i have no company history, no clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i can't get any traction.
The above piggybacks off your past experiences and working experience to try to force some initial social proof. If you can't do that, it does get harder and is more of a raw numbers game to try to have conversations with as many people as possible.
> i've had probably 10-15 sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where
That's less than one a week. Your number should at least be an order of magnitude higher than that. Especially with Enterprise clients, the deal rate is going to be really low and you counter that by a high volume of outreach. Even if it's just cold contacting, rather than leads from investors, you should be reaching out to several people per day, and following up with a regular cadence (which can be automated). Rarely do you hear back on first contact, and multiple touch points, which works even if it sounds skeezy to non-sales people (including me, I work for a demand/lead generation firm and know sales pipeline figures from an analytics perspective, but hate doing sales myself). Or even just one new person a day. But definitely not one person a week.
> an enterprise saas product that involves some cool buzzwords and potentially really adds value in the space i'm targeting but i'm getting no traction.
Is the added value worth the headache of integrating your tool? Is your product replacing an industry-standard in the space or augmenting it? Introducing change is hard and every change introduced simultaneously introduces a level of operational risk (from the change management process itself to the added dependency of your product in their work chain). Most organizations resist change, and your product either has to be seamless enough to be perceived as low friction to introduce or have a large enough upside to be worth the hassle/headache of introducing it.
> (able to "speak sales")
In enterprise sales, you need to speak sales and dance politics. Depending on the level of decision maker you're targeting, they'll have different levers they can pull, different politics they have to play, and different constraints on what they can do. Your pitch needs to account for the concerns of the decision maker you're speaking to. A middle manager will have different concerns than a division director than a C-level individual. You also need to make sure the person you're speaking with can actually make a decision related to your. Are you BANT qualifying them[1]?
> one customer says price is too high, another doesn't even mention it.
Different customers will value your product's impact differently. You'll always get conflicting responses like this, and until you have a higher volume of responses you can't make much sense of this. But one thing to keep in mind is what I mentioned above - different level of decision makers will have different responses. A middle manager may have authority, but they're working off of a "what can I put on my procurement card" budget because they know your project will die if you have to actually get approved as a vendor and get billing set up with accounts payable. So your product can be perceived as too expensive, when it's really just too expensive for this individual to push through on their own. Don't take this response at face value, dig into the reasoning behind it. Creative payment terms can sometimes solve this. Other leads may know they have full authority to sign an annual contract and pay up front, and won't mention budget being an issue. Normalize your contradictory signals by the situation of the individual giving them, to get a better idea of what your target demographic is and what your true issues are.
Also, in the case where the customer says the price is too high, if that's their only hangup, discount the price significantly (or stretch an annual term into an 18 month term at the same rate, so they get a cheaper per-month rate but you lock them in for longer but renew at 12 months and the discount disappears without explicitly changing your rate on the client). Make sure you include language related to permission for a case study and testimonial as part of the discount terms. Chalk it up as a marketing expense to gain that first bit of social proof, and leverage it for other pitches.
[1] BANT - Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. A crude but effective sales qualification process which validates a lead is worth continuing with, and also helps you identify which points you need to work focus on. For example, if you qualify the person has a budget, need, and timeline, but no authority, you know the company is a potential client but need to figure out how to get a more authoritative person involved in the discussion. If it's timeline, then follow up later on. If it's Need, then convince them of their need (or give up). Etc
> If you have industry experience, reach out to your network. Both for trying to get actual leads and for simply soliciting their feedback, even if they won't be a customer themselves. The feedback in and of itself will be valuable, and after you've exposed it to them, they may know of someone to connect you with, and eventually you'll land on someone that's willing to bite.
i didn't have industry experience when i started but the rest of the team does (decades worth). we've been doing essentially this - leveraging their network to "solicit feedback", i.e. pitch the product.
> Is the added value worth the headache of integrating your tool?
this is probably the crux of the issue for me. there is too much operational cost in actually rolling out the product i think. a lot of it revolves around the customer essentially reselling this product. we've considered taking reseller sales in house (i.e. customer signs a contract with us and we resell our own product on their behalf) but that basically multiplies my problems ten fold.
> Are you BANT qualifying them
no and i should be for every call. thank you. i need to make a list of thing i'm trying to learn about each lead on each call.
It depends on your vertical. It can take years to get the first deal in the "Enterprise" space even with very strong industry connections. It took us a few years to ink the first deal and many enterprise deals we work on are multi-year courtship dances. Hopefully you have a very long runway for takeoff.
I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution, especially at the level of detail you provided. Marketing and selling anything is hard, but also highly domain specific.
im on the same boat as you, the problem is pretty much validated and I got 2 credit card before writing a single line of production code. Unfortunately, I am not able to grow from ONE paying customer (from the 2 credit cards), I am afraid that I have either built the wrong product or targeting the wrong demographic (CPAs/bookkeepers).
i have an mvp (phone app and webapp) to demo to customers. i have the decks and sales pitch. i'm a reasonably smart and articulate person and communicate well (able to "speak sales"). yet because i have no company history, no clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i can't get any traction. at least i think this is the reason i'm not getting any bites? i had leads (through my FFF investors) - i've had probably 10-15 sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where (the latest one fizzled out yesterday). pricing isn't the issue because i've floated several different pricing schemes to customers and while some are more attractive than others it's never been the deal breaker. maybe i have poor product/market fit but i've experimented with adjusted the product offering too and no significant change in reception there either.
now supposedly i should be learning something about my market segment but the problem is i constantly get contradictory signals - one customers says it's a great product but too early, another says it's not a useful product maybe i'd like to consider building such and such product, one customer says price is too high, another doesn't even mention it.
i'm really at a complete loss for how to turn this thing around and i'm burning through cash (although i'm not above taking cost cutting measures - fired one of us three 3 weeks ago and cut my own pay this month).