Optimizing Inside Sales for Early-Stage SaaS: The Timing Factor (Part 1)
Imagine that you’re the owner of a thriving local business, Dave’s Daycare, with ambitions to expand. You’ve developed a targeting strategy to identify potential clients — parents who might need quality childcare services — and initiated outreach through calls and emails to your carefully curated prospect list.
Since I’m on your list, you call and leave me a voicemail. Let’s say that I have kids (your targeting worked) and that I listen to your voicemail and find your pitch compelling. BUT — and here’s the important part — my partner and I already have a reliable (and free) source of daycare: my mother-in-law.
Am I going to call you back? No. Am I going to pick up the next time that you call? Negatory. Will I stop by to visit your facility? No chance. Will I reply to an email? Highly unlikely. If I need daycare next year, will I remember the name “Dave’s Daycare” or be able to find an email from you in my overflowing inbox? Absolutely not; I’d much rather search Google Maps for “childcare.”
What am I getting at here? Timing. I don’t need what you’re offering right now or in the foreseeable future… so I don’t respond.
In the first installment of this series, I’m going to talk about the importance of TIMING as it applies to Inside Sales. This crucial factor frequently goes unrecognized across departments throughout the company hierarchy -largely because we are operating under an incorrect assumption.
That assumption is that our products are unique; that our products are singular in value delivery; that they are superior to everything else on the market. The truth is that there are a dozen other products that are just as good as ours (if not better), and they’re being offered at a more competitive price, with better branding, and a more impressive list of real-client testimonials and case studies. Our product is NOT as unique as we think it is, and until we (and the rest of our organization -at all levels) internalize this fact, we will underestimate the criticality of timing.
Now, don't get me wrong... we absolutely should strive to create unique products that provide highly differentiated and irreplicable value to our end-users. Moreover, our Marketing and Sales collateral should draw attention to the features and functionality that make our product stand out. But, this article is about early-stage SaaS, when the maturity of our product does not yet match our long-term vision. It's about optimizing our go-to-market strategy given our current product development stage.
Overall, in this series of articles, I’ll explore how to maximize the effectiveness of Inside Sales approaches by addressing key success factors — beginning with timing — even when you already have a brilliant, competent, and experienced Sales team in place.
The good news is that there are simple improvements that can be made. All are logical. All work. But you have to understand what the issues are and be willing to change your mindset. All of this is going to seem obvious after you’ve read it. Inside Sales CAN be very successful for growing B2B SaaS if you do it the right way AND if/when certain conditions are met in advance of launching campaigns. But I’ll start with a more detailed treatment of the timing issue.
Timing
I’ll start with an anti-pattern which I think will demonstrate why we [incorrectly] EXPECT Inside Sales to work based on our past experience…
Let’s say that we have a new product whose value proposition is based on the confluence of Applied Science (ML & AI) and Bioinformatics (via genomic sequencing and resulting processed/refined data). If we send a hundred InMails or emails to targeted leads, and our content/messaging does a great job of conveying our value proposition, WHO REPLIES?
People that have a complex problem that they can’t economically solve themselves.
The people that we want to respond do NOT. Why? Because most companies and functional roles already have PRODUCTS in place that enable all of the things that they have to do and provide all of the data & information that they need on a day-to-day basis. We overlook this because, as I mentioned earlier, we mistakenly believe that our products are so unique.
So, our respondents will be those that have a big problem that’s been driving them nuts for years, and they’re lacking one or more of the following: budget, qualified personnel, technological sophistication, or stakeholder buy-in.
What solves a big hairy problem? A “Solution” does. A Product doesn’t.
This is why Inside Sales works well for “Solutions” providers and consultancies, e.g. pre-SaaS companies that are scraping by and scrambling to grow revenue by selling Solutions rather than products, and by frenetically responding to every RFP that has some tangential relation to their “core competencies.” Most companies fail at this. They can’t “Cross the Chasm,” and there are tons of books that address it so I won’t belabor the point. But, you need to understand the difference between Products and Solutions in order to follow the rest of this article.
Solutions
One-offs, customer-specific, client-provided datasets, bespoke models, tons of customization, dedicated support (AEs), low margin (if you’re diligent in tracking costs), high dollar contracts, 1-year or longer lock-ins, “renewals” (and associated KPIs) at the forefront of everybody’s mind, Inside Sales prioritized over Product Marketing, etc. In a nutshell, Solutions are a technology implementation that can’t be resold as-is to a broader audience.
Products
Technology that delivers value or resolves the pain points of one or more well-defined personas that perform very similar tasks and have similar goals or outcomes in mind. In order to achieve growth after launch, products ALWAYS start by targeting a specific industry, type of company, job function, and persona. Products CAN be highly customizable (e.g. Posthog and Amplitude), they CAN include mountains of customer data (GitHub, Attio, and Slack), and they CAN provide large amounts of Annual Recurring Revenue(e.g. Stripe, DocuSign, and Zendesk). BUT, for B2B SaaS products (NOT Enterprise software like SAP, Oracle, or ServiceNow), customization is done by the customer (not us), and the product that we build has the ability to scale value to many other similar customers without having to refactor the entire tech stack, UI, API, or data lake.
Circling back to our InMail campaign… the people that respond have a big hairy problem that needs solving — something that IS ideal for BCG, Quantum Black, ACRE, Bain, Deloitte, PwC, Ernst & Young, etc. NOT something that’s generally improved or resolved by a well-defined Product.
To repeat: The people that we want to respond do NOT. Why? Because most companies and functional roles already have PRODUCTS in place that enable all of the things that they have to do and provide all of the data & information that they need on a day-to-day basis.
They may not be completely satisfied with what they currently have, BUT responding to an email, scheduling a call for a demo with a Salesperson, justifying the expense, finding the budget, and learning a new application is WAY too burdensome given that everybody is overwhelmed at work and has a huge list of to-dos and more obligations than time.
So, how do you sell Products?
I’ll give you a concrete real-life example. For over a year, our application relied on an IAM (Identity and Access Management) framework that our prior company’s Platform team had built leveraging Auth0 as an IdP (Identity Provider). It worked. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked, and given that we had bigger fish to fry (i.e. offload what doesn’t make our beer taste better), we stuck with it.
If a Salesperson had approached me about a new IdP or IAM during that time, I would NOT have responded. At best (and only if I had the time), I’d check out their Product website, and (only if it was compelling, targeted, and offered a free trial) might have bookmarked it. The point here is that any/all outreach from an Inside Sales team for any/all new IdP products would have been a waste of time and money.
The same is true for all SaaS products. Engineering and Product teams don’t sit around waiting for an IdP or a Payment Gateway or an API dev framework or an IDE or a Transactional Mail Service to call us. We can’t wait. We search for what we need, evaluate our options in real-time, try two or three top contenders (via free trial or free tier), and settle on the best. Then, once we prove the value to ourselves, we start paying for it.
Back to my example… due to a realignment of strategic initiatives, the IAM that we were using was going to be deprecated in the near future. We had an urgent need for a new product to replace it.
Our Lead Engineer is a rockstar and keeps up with just about every new technical product that’s launched that could be useful to us. Clerk was on his list. They have a great Product Marketing website, an incredible product, comprehensive documentation, quick-start guides, frontend & backend SDKs for all modern languages, transparent feature-tiered and usage-tiered pricing model, and NO barriers to entry — you can get started and try it out right now.
The importance of having a self-serve model (i.e. no barriers to entry) is often overlooked by executive-level management because they don’t understand that if an engineer has to go through rounds of approvals to justify the use of a new piece of technology to managers, executives, stakeholders, Product Owners, etc. it stops them dead in their tracks, and progress screeches to a halt.
In three days, our Engineer had stripped-out the old IAM framework and fully integrated Clerk. At this point we were using their free version, and found that it met all of our needs; however, we had a few questions about best practices for multi-tenant support and how our costs would scale. So, quite naturally, I REACHED OUT TO THEM. One of their Sales Engineers replied and we scheduled a call.
What I want to emphasize here is that, even after only three days of being involved with their product:
- We were already Clerk customers. It was fully integrated with our app and we had no intention of abandoning it.
- Their only customer acquisition cost was the fixed and shared cost (across leads & clients) of developing and maintaining their Product website.
- Aside from automated “Welcome” and “Onboarding” emails, they never had to contact us to sell their product. The consequence of this is huge because it means that they don’t have to burn through (via obscure and un-trackable activities) huge sums of SG&A cash every month developing “Sales Collateral,” tweaking pitch decks, performing product demos, and tying-up countless resources with “Sales Enablement” and “Product Readiness” activities. They also don’t need a massive marketing budget that gets wasted on ineffective retargeting campaigns aimed at leads that won’t/can’t buy right now due to a timing mismatch (the subject of this article).
So, how does Clerk make money? How do products make money and grow ARR over time? Well, in our call with their Sales Engineer, Karthik, WE decided that paying $25/month for their Pro plan provided access to some additional functionality that was worth every penny. Within minutes of hanging up, I had added a credit card and we were on a paid plan for a valuable software product that is inherently sticky and likely has an extremely low churn rate (i.e. no hand-wringing about the upcoming “renewal”). This week, I upped our plan to $35/month so that we could add two new engineers as Admins on our account. They also have some very useful features and add-ons that will make sense for us to pay for as our product scales and grows. If we’re successful, I can imagine us shelling out a few hundred bucks a month for their additional features and usage without batting an eyelash.
The best thing about Products like Clerk is that they have a latent built-in and often understated growth model….
- Everybody on our team loves it.
- Engineers and Product Managers don’t stay at the same tech company forever; they move on.
- Many products have shared needs (e.g. IdP). We therefore adopt, and re-use products like Clerk, Postman, Mixpanel, Twilio/SendGrid, New Relic, Figma, Moqups, Datadog, etc. wherever we go in the future… all without having to be sold on it.
What I’m describing — the model that Clerk and many Products employ with great success — is a Product-Led Growth Model dovetailed with a Customer Success Sales paradigm, and for many of the aforementioned products, they’re also engineering-centric (tech-first) and highly targeted in their marketing. It’s effective, it keeps customer acquisition costs low, and even though most C-Levels would balk at the entry price, it has a built-in growth model that scales ARR far more than you’d ever expect. Important note: Clerk is (appropriately) an engineering-centric product, but this same model has been proven to work for myriad industries and functions.
Strategic Timing: The Key to Inside Sales Success
Understanding and leveraging timing is the cornerstone of effective outreach. By aligning your Inside Sales team with Product Management and Product Marketing, you can transform potential misalignment into a strategic advantage. This alignment enables you to deploy your talented Inside Sales team more effectively through complementary approaches like the Customer Success model described above.
When you master the timing element, you position your team to engage prospects precisely when they’re most receptive, dramatically increasing conversion rates and ultimately driving more efficient revenue growth.
Before I call it a day, I want to set the context for the next article that I’ll write in this series…
Going back to my opening example: Dave’s Daycare. Let’s say that, by some fortuitous miracle, Dave gets the timing just right. Our inlaws are moving to Florida for warmer weather and they’ll no longer be able to help with our kids.
What’s the first thing that I do after receiving Dave’s voicemail or email? I Google “Dave’s Daycare” or I search for it on Google Maps (because it’s a local business and I know that if it’s legit, there’ll be a link to Dave’s website when I click on the pin in Maps).
Note: if this were a SaaS product that I was interested in, I wouldn’t Google it. Instead, I’d go straight to Perplexity and ask about it (and competitors).
I would EXPECT that my search for Dave’s Daycare would yield a legitimate website, with photos of his daycare facility, policies, testimonials, detailed information, an address, a phone number, an email address, and information about Dave’s personnel. But, what if it didn’t? What if I couldn’t find anything about Dave’s Daycare; rather, the closest thing that I found was a personal website about Dave, which detailed his education, described multiple current ventures (sharing no common thread), enumerated his personal interests (of which there were many), and discussed his academic background in Adolescent Psychology.
Would I call Dave back? Would I stop by his home address after work? Would I take my kids there? Would I even consider using Dave’s Daycare regardless of how safe and legitimate the business might be? I don’t think so.
What I’m setting up with this example is the importance of and need for effective Product Marketing, product-specific brand identity, online presence, content history, and overall depth of product-related discoverable content, which I’ll discuss in Part 2 of this series. This is becoming more important on a daily basis given that users are shifting their searches away from traditional superficial search and more toward AI-powered engines and agents, which are much more discerning and provide deeper contextual results than Google or Bing.
Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Ross and Lemkin's "From Impossible to Inevitable" is an excellent book on growing revenue for SaaS products.
Check out Part 2: How Product Marketing Drives Inside Sales Success for Early-Stage SaaS Products
Credit to Carlos Muza on Unsplash for the cover photo of this article.