I always remember when Dynamax decided to go down the SaaS route rather than where we had come from which was the Out Of Home Advertising sector. In our old markets (we we still serve today by the way) a typical deal size could be massive as it could include software, consultancy, a rather large; rather expensive LED screen, building surveys, and after sales support. So all in all rather a healthy deal size, but not many deals.
But now take a look at the SaaS market, low deal, but many more of them.
So does this matter, hell yes. The all important metric here is …
The cost of customer acquisition
In other words if your deal size is large, then it probably has a long sales cycle and you can afford to lavish salespeople, pre sales support personnel etc on the opportunity. But if the deal is a couple of hundred pounds with a sales cycle of day what can you afford?
In other words if it costs you £300 to acquire a £200 customer then you can save a £100 by simply giving the software away !!
In this new world of cost of customer acquisition it is not just the sales process that has to be reengineered, but also the marketing strategy. Can you afford to spend £200k a year on exhibitions when your software is £12 a month? Can you afford all that magazine advertising?
Maybe you need to do a different type of marketing, like all the small startups are doing.
All sounds great but where do you start?, and how do you start?, and what is all this social media outreach, blogging, and google keywords malarky?
Anyone wanting a good grounding on how to do this could do worse than read the following book…
This book does a great job of explaining all the ins and outs of doing inbound marketing.
Inbound Marketing is all about being found by your customers, rather than the traditional and more expensive way of going and finding your customers.
I am not advocating one type over another as here at Dynamax we do a hybrid of both, but for anyone wishing to get their heads around internet marketing this is a great choice.
You can get the book here