Be Honest: How Easy Is It To Really Switch to Your App?

The longer you do SaaS, the more you realize you really can get folks to switch from the competition to you. 

At first, you see it around critical 10x features.  The Bigger Guy may be more established, but you launch some critical integration, some critical workflow, and customers switch to you to get it.

After those initial wins, ripping out the competition, it often gets harder.  

Why?  

Even if your app is “better” than the existing vendor a prospect is using, it’s too much work to switch.  It’s just not worth it.  It might seem worth it in theory.  

The discovery calls, the demos, even a tiny pilot.  But the work is just too much for many customers to switch from one vendor to another.

But if you get great at this .. magic can happen.  And it takes magic.  You generally have to invest a lot to make switching from one competitor to another as easy as one click.

Be wary of some of the advice you hear.

The goal is not to get a “coffee”, or just to “learn”.

A VC intro call is a sales call. Your job — if you want funding now, or later — is to move the opportunity down the pipeline.  You’re in sales as a founder CEO.  In stock sales. 

Unless you have a very strong hand — do not play games.

So IMHE at least:

• Spit it out. Get to the point — fast. Make the VC want to invest in the first 120 seconds of the Zoom.  That’s your goal.  You’ve got maybe 5 minutes max to make a strong impression as a good investment candidate, and 20 minutes to get them deeply interested.   That doesn’t mean be overly simplistic.  It means make the pitch tight.  And run it by a few friendlies.  Ask them if, 5 minutes in, they’d likely invest?  If not, get to the point faster.
• Lead with your best metrics — and/but speak with data.  Share the metrics that matter.  Don’t try to hide your ARR, or your growth rate, or when you were founded.  But do lead with your best metrics by all means.
• Send over the deck ahead of time. The best investors will do their homework and read it before the call.  Being coy here does not help, 9+ times out of 10.  Saying “I prefer to send the deck after our call” will simply turn off a lot of investors that actually want to put in the work.

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Theoretically, the relationship between sales and marketing should be easy –– after all, these teams are responsible for pulling in more business and increasing revenue. However, it is often the case that relationships are complicated between these teams, and sometimes they can even butt heads.

Unfortunately, this type of tension is all too common and plagues many companies.

But there is hope. Greenhouse CMO, Carin Van Vuuren, and VP of Enterprise Revenue, Ankur Passi, share their approach to bridging the communication gap to bring the traditional frenemies together.

I know these days we’re all talking about Unicorns, but not too long ago, the talk was all about Rockstars. That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. The very best of the best.  As if that was some sort of profound insight.

But it’s true. A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier.  

And a Rockstar VP is really what you need in every position.

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one.

And yet … is it worth waiting 6-9 months to hire a VP that’s a true Rockstar, if you’ve struggled to make the hire?  Or can you compromise?  And if, so, where and when?

There are no perfect answers, but let me throw out a few thoughts for each of the major SaaS VP positions.

“My App Stack” is a new series where we dig in with top CMOs, CROs, CTOs and CEOs on just what apps they’re really using to run their business.  I always learn a lot from these — they are in essence a best practices list from each leader.  Last week we had a great one with Sarah Scharf, VP of Marketing of Vanta, check it out here.

This week we have Jessica Gilmartin, Chief Marketing Officer of Calendly!

This edition of the SaaStr Daily is sponsored in part by SAP

Win customers by creating compelling offers with flexible pricing, billing, and bundling options with end-to-end automation.

So first a caveat: I know just enough about financial accounting to be dangerous.  Second caveat: I’m way, way oversimplifying things.

But with that out of the way, let’s talk just enough about financial accounting to explain why Big Tech Companies both acquire smaller ones — and do corporate VC investment.

Because in the short-term, it often costs basically close to nothing to acquire a smaller startup with cash on hand, or do a corporate VC investment.

What do I mean?  Let’s take Salesforce as an example.  It has basically $12.5 Billion in cash in the bank (cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities) — and much more to come in accounts receivable, another $10.75 Billion.

Up Next: Wednesday, September 27th @ 10AM

Topic: Ways to Align and Execute an Enterprise B2B Team Selling Motion For Repeatable Growth

Speaker: Bo Borland, Founder and CEO @ Playbuilt

Workshop Wednesdays is new series where we’ll be bringing some of the best SaaStr speakers to you LIVE, every Wednesday. 

Each workshop will be hosted in a live, interactive 30-minute format at 10am Pacific each and every Wednesday. This workshop will be 100% LIVE, not pre-recorded, and will be hosted in an, interactive 30-minute format, including Q&A.

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