"Sales" is sometimes perceived with an aura of mystery. As a developer, it's something I always assumed was reserved for a "real salesperson" and even though I was selling our products, I thought it was because the customer had come to us directly. Whilst there is an aspect of "sales" that involves cold calling and making visits to prospects, I actually recently realised that many of the things I'm doing on a daily basis are all part of what might be called "sales".
What sales activities consist of will differ depending on what you're selling, who you're selling to (consumers, smaller businesses or enterprise) and how large your organisation is, but there are a few things that can be used universally and to great effect. Here are a few that I use with my own SaaS product.
1. Signup followups
Getting a customer to sign up is a major step but it's not the end of the process - you need to make sure they're actually using the product. E-mail them the next day to remind them of a few of the cool features or recommend things to try. Being smart about it helps - you can easily track whether they have logged in and performed various tasks so include those in an e-mail.
In our case, the e-mail subject is "Have you tried our iPhone app?" and the e-mail highlights the advantages of the free app, with a link to the iTunes Store, plus a reminder of the web UI URL for their account.
In the early days, I used to phone every one of my signups to see how they were doing. We don't collect the phone number as part of the signup process but many customers add it because our product allows for SMS alerts. This helped get early feedback and users were often surprised to get a call before they'd even paid anything.
2. Trial followups
All our users sign up to a 2 week trial before they have to pay. An e-mail is sent to remind them the trial is expiring 2 days before, and we e-mail them again on the day of expiry. The key thing here is to ensure the user has time to upgrade, sometimes requiring internal approval. All our trials are set to expire on a Thursday i.e. mid-week. This means expiry notifications go out on a Tuesday. This avoids being lost in the Monday e-mail overload from the weekend and avoids Fridays when people just want to go home.
And because most of our users are in Europe or the US, we time the e-mails to arrive during the afternoon/late morning rather than overnight. Users will clear out their inbox in the morning so this leaves them clear to receive our e-mails!
3. Mixing automation with real people
I think you're more likely to look at an e-mail that's from a real person than one obviously from a machine "From: David Mytton" vs "From: Boxed Ice Mailer". I mix these up so the day after signup followup comes from "me", is written in a casual style and signed off by me. It also comes from my company e-mail so replies go directly to me and because I'm asking a question about using our iPhone app, I often get replies with feedback or questions.
But our trial reminder e-mails come from the system. You'd expect these to be automated whereas an e-mail asking how things are going is more personal.
4. Making automation interesting
Our signup e-mail with the user's login details and the trial e-mails are sent by the "Boxed Ice Robot Llama". This makes it a little different from other automated systems and we've had some good feedback from users enjoying this differentiation. It all goes towards making the service a little more friendly and has been used to good effect by the guys at Moo, who use "Little Moo" as their order processor.
5. Highlighting the higher value customers
Our product is a server monitoring service so the more servers you monitor, the more you pay. We run a script to highlight users on the trial with more than 3 servers and add a task to our customer system to get in touch with them directly before their trial ends. This will be a phone call if they have provided their details, or we'll e-mail them. This comes directly from me as a real person, asks how they've been getting on, whether they're going to upgrade and includes volume
discount pricing.
I've found that some users do plan to upgrade their accounts but haven't had time to, or have a few questions first. Often these will get pushed to the end of the todo list so getting in touch directly allows you to speed up the sale. You can also be flexible with your
pricing to offer discounts if the customer agrees to a minimum number to get access to the volume discounts in anticipation of future growth, or if they're willing to pay in advance for a discount.
6. Convert With Newsletters
All our signups get subscribed to our monthly newsletter which contains not just product news but interesting links from our blog, Twitter and around the web. We've had many cases where the user has not converted from the trial immediately, but months later they come back when a feature they wanted has been implemented having found out from the newsletter.
Wrap-Up
Although this doesn't fit with the stereotype of the hard sell from the sales guy who just won't give up, these are all legitimate "sales" activities that can be done by any software startup and can easily scale as the customer base grows. We've only recently started highlighting the higher value trial users but this has already proven to be worthwhile. So let me know what you think and what's worked for you in the comments.