5 founders share 5 sales strategies for SaaS startups

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Priyanka is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

Disclosure: The author is not affiliated with any of the entities mentioned in the article.

In 2011, the famous investor Marc Andreessen wrote an essay titled “Why Software is Eating the World.”

Seven years later, SaaS is a billion-dollar industry.

But to lead the pack in SaaS, founders and startup teams should master sales. So, I spoke with five founders on how to sell a SaaS product based on their experience over the years.

1. Growth hack using Quora and SEMrush

With over 12,000 users, Funnel CRM is a sales tool helping businesses, agencies, and freelancers.

According to the company’s CEO Muhammad Gohar Shafique, Quora is one of the most useful resources to understand customer pain points. 

Whenever Shafique maps out a new content strategy, he usually goes through Quora to find the problems that his prospective buyers are asking. From there, he thinks of solutions to the problem and answers them on the site.

The opportunity is simple: getting traffic to your content by commenting on questions that your content actually answers.

Here’s the hack they use:

• Step 1:  Log in to SEMrush and do a search on Quora.
  
• Step 2: Navigate to the “Organic Research” tab under “Domain Analytics.” You’ll now have a list of top-ranking questions on Quora.
  
• Step 3: Run a search for a keyword related to your content (e.g. “SaaS”).
  
• Step 4: Sort the results in descending order by search volume.

Another simple hack is paying attention to customer support. “We provide 24-hour support and trained our support team to respond to messages within two minutes,” says Shafique. This approach led to a 43 percent increase in leads.

The company also makes it a rule that engineers and founders have to spend at least six hours per week as a support agent. “Why?” Shafique asks. “To understand customer pain points and then iterate the product faster to stay relevant and avoid being just another bloated SaaS product.”

2. Onboard the biggest players in the industry

3. Don’t focus just on your product

4. Focus on acquiring customers who are the right fit

5. Use personalized video introductions