Streamline Your B2B SaaS Sales by Reducing Friction

A Startup Challenge:  Accelerating the Path to Revenue

In my CEO Peer Groups and advisory work, one of the most common challenges raised by B2B SaaS founders is how to increase the results and speed of their enterprise sales.  Consider a recent dialogue with a founder who reached out for feedback on her SaaS company’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

This promising startup has developed an AI-based service that compiles and references public and confidential internal company information to deliver specific and complete answers to complex questions.  The primary users are engineers, and the value proposition is better answers faster.

They enable enterprise users to access their service through integration into internal company messaging platforms like Teams and Slack. Priced at $35 per user per month, they target multi-user engagements with enterprise clients that can go into the six figures.  Unfortunately, six-figure agreements generally imply complex and lengthy sales cycles, and the only way for users to try their service beforehand is through a pilot or limited engagement, which requires – you guessed it – a sales cycle and integration.

The founder’s challenge?  How to scale her company’s sales more quickly and cost-effectively.

Breaking the Sales Catch-22

The good news?  They are doing several things well.  They have a high-value offering with a clear ROI that integrates well into existing enterprise workflows and systems.

However, they are in a catch-22: How do they get their service into users’ hands without a sale, and how do they get that enterprise sale without user validation and endorsement?

Reducing the inherent friction in their adoption cycle is one fundamental way to overcome this challenge. Instead of pushing over one big block, they can try setting up smaller blocks that can be knocked over easily. These, in turn, will help knock over the larger ones.

Using this approach, we discussed introducing two anticipatory stages – User and Pro. The anonymous, limited-functionality User version enables visitors to try the service immediately at no charge.  Critically, this version would be available to the target users on the web, where they would already be researching, and SEO-optimized based on the highly credible set of materials those users would be referencing.  The company can also reach out to these users directly through LinkedIn to invite them to try the service, and the users can easily refer their peers.

As the users try out and gain confidence in the quality of the service, they can upgrade to the Pro version at the aforementioned $35 per user per month fee to gain access to additional value-adding and time-saving capabilities such as storing their queries, access to a broader set of reference information, and potentially sharing with guests.  And if they want the enhanced capabilities of access to company information, team collaboration, and direct integration into their messaging platforms?  That’s where the Enterprise version comes in.

A bonus?  Collecting feedback becomes invaluable as users transition from the User to Pro versions. It helps you refine your product, identify new use cases, and may also open the opportunity to create a community where users can interact with others experiencing similar challenges.

The key to this strategy?  Optimizing the benefit-to-friction ratio at each stage of the adoption and sales process, with a bias to quick and easy in the early stages (i.e. low friction) and valuable in the later ones (i.e. high benefit) after a greater degree of familiarity and trust has been established.

Tactics for Optimizing Your Adoption and Sales Cycle

How can you go about optimizing the benefit-to-friction ratio of your offering?  Some possibilities to consider include:

• Free Samples: Like those food giveaway stands in grocery stores, give customers a small free sample of your service to experience.  Allowing potential users to ‘taste’ your service can pique their interest and lead to a purchase.
• Quick and Easy: We are all pressed for time, always.  Minimize the time and effort for users to try out your product.
• Product-led Growth: Supplement your direct sales effort to companies (push) with internally generated user demand (pull).  Make it easy for users to share with others directly in the app or via word of mouth.  Track users by company and prioritize sales processes at companies with many users.
• Price to Budget: Learn what amounts users can spend without going through bureaucratic approval chains.  Price your product accordingly.
• Land, Expand, Scale: The amount your customers will spend with you is directly related to how much they trust your offering and organization.  Play the long game by getting in small, over-delivering on your promises, and gaining customer trust for expanding the relationship.

Engineering Your GTM Strategy for Startup Success

Many startups focus primarily on engineering their product.  Successful startups invest at least as much time in engineering their go-to-market strategy and sales process.

If you have product-market fit, strategize your GTM by mapping out your entire adoption cycle from a single user trying the product for their benefit to an enterprise-wide adoption.  At every cycle stage, ask yourself: How am I optimizing the benefit-to-friction ratio?

The answer to that question might be the game-changer you’re looking for.