Thoughts from my journey

As promised, here is the second tip from Chris Yeh, VP Marketing of PBWorks about freemium sales models for b2b and SaaS.

Knowing of the advantages of free trial / freemium models, I agree that companies that are making the adjustments towards those sales models have an advantage in today’s online market where users can pick their products without a moderator (sales person) and pay for it only it it’s valuable for them

Similarly, Chris believes that the way to business success is establishing a trial for its product. This way customers feel they’re not taking a risk by buying a product but they test it first and understand how the product works before paying for it and this is tremendously important for building up a Successful contemporary business.

In his blog post: Bought vs. Sold (Why Jive is a dinosaur & Dropbox is the future), Chris compares 2 types of companies that have similar revenues achieved it in very different ways. The first company is Jive software and the other is Dropbox.
Jive is a 10 years old traditional enterprise company who spent millions of dollars in marketing and still not profitable and on the other hand there’s the 5 years old Dropbox, who has 40 employees already and a hundred millions in revenue.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

Video Transcription:
I’m Chris Yeh. I’m the VP of Marketing for PBworks, which is a SaaS company that does collaboration software for various markets like advertising agencies, law firms and, of course, general business.

Well, it just so happens that I wrote an extensive blog post about this, comparing Jive Software with Dropbox, two companies which, interestingly enough, have almost the same revenues, but have achieved them in very different ways. Jive is a traditional enterprise company that was started almost 10 years ago and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing to get to where they are today and are still not profitable.

On the other hand, we have Dropbox which was started in 2007, has something like forty employees in a hundred million in revenues and so where I really see this going is that you know, certainly the tradition enterprise world still applies to large complex products but the ability to get a trial going, the ability to get people to say, okay I’m not taking a risk by buying this product, I know that it can deliver for me, is tremendously important for building up the business, so somebody like Dropbox or somebody like PBworks who offers the ability for people to really understand how the product works before they have to make a six figure commitment I think and that’s the way to go.

So you have a product! you’ve worked so hard on making it the way you want (iteratively of course) and now you want to sell it – so how do you do that? The answer, as strange as it might sound, is that you don’t!

As I wrote in my previous post, two very common sales models which have recently evolved are the zero-touch and the low-touch models where there are no sales teams or a very small sales team respectively. Why have these models evolved? because they were needed! in the SaaS reality, where the Internet is flooded with information, customers prefer being the active searchers and find solutions for their specific problems. They tend to rely less on non-objective sales people to convince them why their product is good for them – they prefer to simply read or hear about a solution from someone else and if they feel a solution might help them, they can simply sign-up to it’s free trial period or free account (freemium) and try it themselves!

Come to think of it, it’s kind of a revolutionary state of mind where your customers want to be able to choose their products based on its true value! After choosing it, they’ll evaluate it and only then, if they find it really helpful for their needs, they’ll convert to paid users.

The key is not to sell the product but to give away value – if you honestly & utterly try to gain customer success and help other people with their existing needs, they will feel your pure intentions and stay for more. Once trying to sell, the whole focus will go in that direction and you risk loosing the audience loyalty.

This very much like Google organic search: if your website truly provides relevant and valuable content, it will be ranked high in Google and attract prospects. Similarly, if your product is truly relevant and provides value to customers, prospects will try it and convert into paying customers.  Your solution should of course solve a very common problem and preferably have a unique answer (and that is a subject to a whole different post).