What I Learnt In 13 Years Of Selling To Global SaaS

Sales is not what it used to be. A decade ago, sales was all about revenue and how times have changed! The SaaS industry, in particular, needs a radical new approach since you are doing it from India to the global market. Gone are the times when sales team performance was gauged based on revenue generated. Check out the previous article in this series to find out how number of leads consumed for target revenue is the only stat that matters now.

When operating from India, the major benefit is minimising the cost of operation to a great extent. You can have bigger teams and get a lot more things done at a fraction of the cost for carrying out the same operations elsewhere. However, with larger teams comes the problem of inter-team interactions.

Your product team will know best how the market will react to a feature, while the marketing team will be best at packaging it. While the goal of marketing will be to understand the target audience and bring in leads, they can also give valuable insights on making the product irresistible.

The sales team will be able to give inputs on how to make this product better through insights received during sales calls. They will know what’s missing and what people wish they had in your product. The product team will be able to fix these pain points and turn it into an advantage for you in the ever-competitive market.

A closed-loop feedback system between the Product, Marketing and Sales teams is imperative for product excellence which will drive more sales.

Always Tinker With Your Product

Sales is not an easy job. However, it becomes a lot simpler if your product is the best in the industry. If your potential customers cannot point out a single missed opportunity in your product or glaring flaws, consider the sale done!

Ensure your sales and product teams have a free-flowing communication channel and there is knowledge sharing meetings setup on a regular basis. This will help your product team tinker the product to meet the market expectations.

Let Marketing Do The Heavy-lifting

For cracking global sales using an Indian sales team, your marketing needs to do all the heavy-lifting. Paint a fancy picture of your product and the job is half done for sales! Most of the better examples that do great sales globally are ones with good marketing.

Do not enter non-english markets without personalisation and, if your product is personalised for a particular locale, make sure your marketing leverages every bit of the localisation to squeeze out maximum benefits.

The focus for every SaaS entrepreneur should be to not only build a great company but also one where a feedback culture between teams is strongly built right from day one. When teams interact and collaborate with each other and feed upon information gained from each vertical, a strong ecosystem is built.

[This article is the second part of a series co-authored by Arvind Parthiban and Arunkumar J of Zarget. Arvind, Zarget’s CEO & Co-Founder is a Marketing and Pre-Sales person and Arunkumar is the COO & Sales Head of this SaaS firm that is making waves.]

Check out the first part here. Stay tuned to Inc42 for the next and final part of this series on Sales and Marketing of SaaS products and how to sell SaaS products to the global market.  

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