5 TRAPS YOU SHOULD AVOID BUILDING A SAAS BUSINESS

A Keynote presentet on SaaStock
by Dr. Ricco Deutscher

Trap #2: Wrong Mindset

Dr. Ricco Deutscher:

“I have two anecdotes for that. The first is — well I was pretty much a product guy. I had no clue about sales and marketing, to be honest. And in a previous company, we hired a senior CSO with a fantastic track record according to his CV and he built up a traditional software sales process, because this is what he did in the past, based on outbound cold calls. Okay. After a certain period of time, we figured out we got a lot of leads, but the leads were of poor quality and the costs per lead were extremely expensive. The reason for that was very easy. A customer selects a platform in a very small window of opportunity. Let’s say three months. And that window of opportunity appears once, maybe twice, along the whole company life-cycle. Let’s say 10 years. The likelihood to meet that or to hit that window of opportunity is very low if you don’t know where the window of opportunity is. This approach was very inefficient, but that person was used to it. And this was, obviously, the only technique and approach he knew.”

Dr. Ricco Deutscher:

“And therefore, we came to the conclusion that SaaS business is also a software business but has some fundamental changes, different paradigms compared to the license-based software business. And a CSO should have thought about it and adapt his approaches, how to do sales and marketing. A good track record matters when you recruit management members or team members, but the ability to adapt his approaches is even more important. So, recruit the right mindset in your team, especially management team.