By Arko Chandra Published on : Sep 19, 2022
Starting a venture can be as exhilarating as it can be frightful. Today, the technology market is saturated (over-saturated, to be honest) with innumerable brands and startups, and midsize businesses face extreme challenges just to survive in this crowd, let alone thrive.
The SaaS industry is no exception either. Big giants in this space have immense power and resources and don’t give an iota of the throne they are sitting on. So, it’s not worth mentioning how critical it is for SaaS SMBs to learn the tactics to give a tough fight to the big brands and succeed in the market. Let’s explore the same moves.
Let’s face it – even if you’ve crafted an out-of-the-box CRM, you are not going to gain the popularity of Salesforce overnight. It’s best to pitch yourself as the CRM provider for a particular vertical and a specific audience instead of addressing the entire market.
Once you study the market inside out, understand your buyer personas, identify their challenges, and receive feedback, you can build a solution that puts you in the limelight. And all of these take a hell of a time. So, it’s recommended to focus only on your core audience and play safe until it’s time to play rough.
The one thing that big SaaS brands cannot beat you in is age. Established companies are “old” and are likely much less innovative than you. Also, change in these bulky brands takes time as it has to go through an extensive hierarchy. On the contrary, you, as a smaller brand, have the advantage of making critical decisions much faster.
You can be as agile and adaptive as you want. Offer personal and hyper-customized experiences to your customers and connect with them on an emotional level. That way, you’d get unfiltered feedback on your offerings and use it to improve your products/services. Big companies aren’t that accustomed to providing such levels of personalization as of now.
As a small or midsize business, you cannot afford the risk of non-alignment of your sales and marketing. Marketing and sales members should work hand in hand so that your marketing strategies aren’t only good on paper but actually improve output at the bottom of the funnel. Inculcate the norm where your marketing people collaborate with the sales team regularly (even join the sales calls too). Your sales team, too, should report back things such as quality and poor leads and areas where marketing efforts are moving the needle.
Spending days and months copying the moves of your competitors and big brands will do you no good - you will neither create your unique identity nor be able to successfully surpass your rivals. Instead, try to focus on your offerings, ways to improve them, your customers’ needs, and constant and unmatched value addition.
All these may need you to be determined and turn down some tempting opportunities or partnerships. The bottom line is you should only invest in something that elevates your brand identity and offerings, not in alliances guaranteeing millions of customers or in-trend (but of no use to your customers) app features.
Believe in your product/service before you want your customers to believe in it. You cannot compete against the SaaS giants in terms of capital and resources; you need to bring them into your game and play by your rules. And that can be done with product-led growth, where you compete on product value and spread awareness about your unique features and solutions. That way, you won’t have to offer your product/service at rates cheaper than its original price, still make customers buy it, and spread positive word of mouth about your brand.
The SaaS world is expanding more than ever, and it’s futile to complain about the challenges in this space. However, learning the tricks of the trade and effectively applying them can help you sail in rough waters.
By Arko Chandra
Published on 19th, Sep, 2022
Starting a venture can be as exhilarating as it can be frightful. Today, the technology market is saturated (over-saturated, to be honest) with innumerable brands and startups, and midsize businesses face extreme challenges just to survive in this crowd, let alone thrive.
The SaaS industry is no exception either. Big giants in this space have immense power and resources and don’t give an iota of the throne they are sitting on. So, it’s not worth mentioning how critical it is for SaaS SMBs to learn the tactics to give a tough fight to the big brands and succeed in the market. Let’s explore the same moves.
Let’s face it – even if you’ve crafted an out-of-the-box CRM, you are not going to gain the popularity of Salesforce overnight. It’s best to pitch yourself as the CRM provider for a particular vertical and a specific audience instead of addressing the entire market.
Once you study the market inside out, understand your buyer personas, identify their challenges, and receive feedback, you can build a solution that puts you in the limelight. And all of these take a hell of a time. So, it’s recommended to focus only on your core audience and play safe until it’s time to play rough.
The one thing that big SaaS brands cannot beat you in is age. Established companies are “old” and are likely much less innovative than you. Also, change in these bulky brands takes time as it has to go through an extensive hierarchy. On the contrary, you, as a smaller brand, have the advantage of making critical decisions much faster.
You can be as agile and adaptive as you want. Offer personal and hyper-customized experiences to your customers and connect with them on an emotional level. That way, you’d get unfiltered feedback on your offerings and use it to improve your products/services. Big companies aren’t that accustomed to providing such levels of personalization as of now.
As a small or midsize business, you cannot afford the risk of non-alignment of your sales and marketing. Marketing and sales members should work hand in hand so that your marketing strategies aren’t only good on paper but actually improve output at the bottom of the funnel. Inculcate the norm where your marketing people collaborate with the sales team regularly (even join the sales calls too). Your sales team, too, should report back things such as quality and poor leads and areas where marketing efforts are moving the needle.
Spending days and months copying the moves of your competitors and big brands will do you no good - you will neither create your unique identity nor be able to successfully surpass your rivals. Instead, try to focus on your offerings, ways to improve them, your customers’ needs, and constant and unmatched value addition.
All these may need you to be determined and turn down some tempting opportunities or partnerships. The bottom line is you should only invest in something that elevates your brand identity and offerings, not in alliances guaranteeing millions of customers or in-trend (but of no use to your customers) app features.
Believe in your product/service before you want your customers to believe in it. You cannot compete against the SaaS giants in terms of capital and resources; you need to bring them into your game and play by your rules. And that can be done with product-led growth, where you compete on product value and spread awareness about your unique features and solutions. That way, you won’t have to offer your product/service at rates cheaper than its original price, still make customers buy it, and spread positive word of mouth about your brand.
The SaaS world is expanding more than ever, and it’s futile to complain about the challenges in this space. However, learning the tricks of the trade and effectively applying them can help you sail in rough waters.
