Whether you are building a SaaS product or have a beta product, you might be wondering if you wanna offer a trial or a freemium model, the truth is… you might be looking at this from the wrong perspective.
In this post, I will walk you through the prerequisites you need to answer before getting to answer that question.
Product-Market-Fit
Before getting deep into optimizing or setting up your customer acquisition strategy, you must be sure of having a product-market fit in place, it’s pointless to think of sales if don’t have a viable, desirable & feasible product first.
Scalable Sales Motion Matrix
If really you don’t know how to sell to a customer based on the desired outcome that they are after, then it’s really hard to scale the model.
Dan Martell – an award-winning Canadian SaaS entrepreneur, investor, best-selling author, and coach to over 1000+ SaaS founders – has designed a really simple matrix to decide on your sales motion, and by simple I don’t promise you that it’s easy!
Are you going to sell to SMB via no-touch low-touch? Are you gonna use demos? or a PoC as you wanna land & expand kinda of a model designed for enterprise?
A sales motion is the channel you are going to use to acquire a customer in a specific type of market. You can call this a product-channel fit, which requires a prioritized list of experiments to decide. Such a decision can be different according to many factors, like product complexity and compliance, you can use Leslie Compass to scan through these factors as a start.
Here is how Dan Martell demonstrates how you should look at the scalable sales motion framework:
So you have a grid, three types of customer acquisition channels, and three segments of the market.
On the Y-axis, you’ve got inbound you’ve got outbound and you have partners, definitely there’s a few other channels but for simplicity, you are either doing content marketing or paid ads bringing people in, you’re doing outbound, you’re calling, sending messages over LinkedIn, you’re doing cold emails. Or you have partners like channel partners, distribution partners, or strategic affiliate partners that can bring you leads.
Then on the X-axis, you’ve got small & medium businesses, mid-market, and enterprises. these are the different types of customers you might have in your customer base.
There are three things that you need to make sure that you’ve got in each one of these segments, you want to make sure that you test these for each one of the the businesses:
- How much ARR you can produce from that segment?
- Your percentage of logo churn in that segment?
- Your CAC payback period in months?
Experimenting & analyzing your sales motion using this framework will tell you where the opportunity is and the reason why you do this.
So that you can tell the team maybe for the next six months these are the only channels that we’re gonna go after and we’re gonna stay away from these ones, and maybe we never do this one maybe the partner channel never makes sense.