SaaS Acquisition Model Showdown

About this talk

Which SaaS acquisition model is best for you?

The first touch with your SaaS can be a booster or a blocker and it can shift your approach to lead gen, onboarding, pricing, hiring, and product. Let’s discuss the decision criteria for choosing the right model for your SaaS and weigh the implications of that choice.

Here are some notes from the showdown:

• Giving too much away? Be careful: If they don’t pay for it, they don’t value it
• Price vs Ability to Scale: Lower price points require higher volumes—scale is critical

Sales vs. marketing vs. product led growth?

• Price: $3k above/yr? You needs sales.
• Consider the role of sales as outbound acquisition vs closing in evaluating their role relative to others.
• How much can you invest/how strong are you in product to be a true self serve product? How much do you need a helping hand?
• Target market matters (relates back to price and sales) but also to procurement policies and practices.
• People are expensive. People don’t scale. Evaluate when to scale with people vs invest in product. There is a perfect point but it’s impossible to get perfect.
• Be mindful of how you incentives sales to create the customer behavior and retention that you want.
• Service led growth is not a thing! That is just an agency with software.

Education led growth (courtesy of Dani Hart)

You can close the gap between revenue and customer behavior by tweaking pricing or behavior. How can you use education to create profitable behavior and retention?