Selling SaaS on Coud Marketplaces involves a wide range of activities that go beyond having an impressive product to sell. Once you have published your offer in the cloud marketplaces as a part of selling B2B SaaS software, the next step is to generate and convert leads. A robust Go-To-Market strategy that focuses on effective marketing efforts will take care of attracting traffic to your listing. However, the key transition point for business growth with selling B2B SaaS software is the ability to convert the traffic or your visitors into prospects who will buy your SaaS solution. This B2B SaaS sales guide will help you in understanding how you can accelerate your B2B sales in the cloud marketplaces.
How to Sell SaaS on Cloud marketplace effectively
As mentioned above, selling SaaS on cloud marketplaces requires intense efforts to attract your potential leads and convert them to prospects. You can’t expect visitors to turn into customers simply because your product is good. Chances are that many similar solutions are available in the market already and your visitors need something else to become prospects. You may have most of your customers coming in from other channels and may not need to focus energy for such activities. However, there will be new visitors who can bring in extra business for you. Here, it is important to focus on the overall experience of customers when they reach your listing. If they don’t have a pleasant experience on your listing, chances are they will not be convinced about your solution. Thus, for selling B2B SaaS software, you need to optimize the experience of your listing from a customer lens.How to convert your visitors into prospects for selling B2B SaaS software?
ISVs across the globe who are selling B2B SaaS software in the cloud marketplaces have shared many practices that can help you convert your visitors into prospects. Based on our experience and the most sought-after practices, we have created a list of top 5 ways which can help you achieve the same.Provide transparency
Once a visitor lands on your listing, they would want to know more about your solution which requires transparency. You cannot have an option to contact you for every feature or word that you have on your listing. Make sure you have some information there to help the visitor understand your offer better. Here, having a combination of brochures, videos, etc. can really help. They can give your visitors the transparency and comfort of a solution which is robust and not hollow. Furthermore, it creates credibility when you are transparent about some of your terms upfront, to ensure that there is nothing hidden which can make the prospect feel trapped later.Offer free trial
This is one of the most important practices that can help you in converting your visitors to prospects for selling B2B SaaS software. It goes without saying that your customers would want to experience the solution before actually making a monetary and long term commitment to ensure it makes business sense for them and meets their needs. Depending on the cloud marketplace you have listed your offer on, you may have different options to give your customers a firsthand experience.Free trial
A free trial is enabling your customers to use the offer in their set up, the way it is meant to be used, without any charge for a specific duration. You may want to restrict some functions from the free trial, depending on your solution. If there are multiple tiers of your solution, your customers can toggle between them, but the duration will not be reset. A free trial will help the visitors gauge the efficacy of your solution for their requirements and help you convert them into prospects who can eventually become paid customers.Test drive
This is a slightly different version of a free trial, where the customers can try a solution in a pre-configured set up. Instead of giving them a trial offer in their business environment, you can create a sample environment based on your target persona and encourage the visitors to test the solution within it. Test drive allows the visitors to test the solution without actually using their machines or infrastructure.Stimulated or interactive demo
An interactive demo enables you to take the visitor through your solution and share information that they may not be able to gauge while just looking at the offer listing. It enables you to share use cases and success stories for different features and learn about the customers to adapt your pitch. However, an interactive demo, while giving an expansive view of the solution, doesn’t give your customers a chance to try the product for themselves. Invariably, it is a good way to convert your visitors to prospects by giving them more than marketing collateral.How to make your offers transactable for selling B2B SaaS Software?
One other very important way to convert your visitors to prospects is to make your offers transactable. You may lose out on visitors who do not want to wait for you to get in touch with them for the next steps. Such visitors generally believe in immediate gratification and would want to transact your offer without the wait time. Thus, if you make your offers transactable, it will definitely pique the interest for your visitors as they will now have a self service option to buy the offer with minimum dependencies. They may not buy the offer in the first instance, but will definitely become a strong prospect, because it gives them more power over how they transact with you.Keep it simple
The third practice for selling B2B SaaS software by converting your visitors to prospects involves keeping your listing simple and easy to comprehend. Be very clear about the messaging you want to communicate. Stay aware from using too much jargon or words which are too technical in nature. Ensure that you have a clear value proposition which talks about the differentiators, benefits to the customers, etc. Having simple and clear communication will help your visitors understand your offering better, leading them to become prospects.How to engage and convert your visitors to prospects for selling B2B SaaS software?
Converting your visitors to prospects is not only about what you do when they land on your offer listing, it also includes the next steps. After the free trial or the interactive demo, your visitors might be interested in your solution more than before. However, if you don’t follow up, and engage them well, you will lose out on the interest. Thus, it is very important to have the next steps in place for each action. If your visitor opted for a free trial, send them a gratitude email with next steps to avail the same. Even during the trial, communicate with them to learn more about their experience. It is very important to ensure that you don’t burden them with excessive communication. Make sure each follow up has some value add, which increases their level of interest and facilitate selling B2B SaaS software.How to sell SaaS with zero engineering efforts?
Optimizing the experience with clear and transparent communication, option to try the product before purchase and a robust follow up strategy can collectively help you in converting your visitors to prospects and facilitate selling B2B SaaS software. To give your visitors an optimized experience and reasons to become prospects, you need to have a robust listing and features. Here, collaborating with SaaSify can help significantly. With SaaSify, you can:- Use the zero engineering platform to take your product live in the cloud marketplaces in a matter of days
- Create transactable offers to get revenue driving prospects
- Help your customers understand how they can utilize their pre-committed spends with cloud providers to procure your solution
- Create a custom brand experience for your visitors to create recall value
- Provide them the option to bill their usage as they want with smart metering
- Offer smooth onboarding and listing support
