Engineering as Marketing with Examples

Hello SaaStronauts!

In this issue:

• Identifying and Measuring SaaS Product-Market Fit
• Engineering as Marketing with Examples
• The Nicest Way to Decline Meetings
• 5 Steps for an Effective Sales Strategy
• Building an Onboarding Strategy That Hooks Users

🚀 Let's blastoff!

🧩 Identifying and Measuring SaaS Product-Market Fit

• Product-market fit (sometimes abbreviated as PMF or P/M fit) is how well your SaaS solves one or more needs within the market you chose.
• Identify your market before building your product. Talk to your customers directly and figure out what their real problems are.
• Measure product-market fit by surveying your early customers.
• Failing and experimenting with new ideas is usually necessary to find a good product-market fit.
• Pivot to a new idea when necessary to stay within your market.
• There are often sub-markets within the market for your SaaS. Each will have its own unique problems you need to solve.
• You will need to update your product over time as the market you chose evolves.

Our takeaways from "How to find, measure, and maintain product-market fit for your SaaS company". Read this article.

🛠️ Engineering as Marketing with Examples

• "Engineering as marketing" is when you come up with a useful tool, usually in the form of a website or web app, to give away free to your target customer as a way of introducing them to your product.
• This also builds your domain authority for your market.
• This technique is especially useful in SaaS.
• A few examples:

1. Hubspot's website ranking site
2. Turo's car value estimator
3. Botanie Soap's calculator for helping soap-makers

Our takeaways from "How Engineering as Marketing Can Increase Your Website's Authority". Read this article.

😇 The Nicest Way to Decline Meetings

📞 5 Steps for an Effective Sales Strategy

1. Lead generation: This could be cold calling, cold emailing, social networks, ads, etc. Find at least one method that works for you. Look at what your competitors are doing.
2. Qualification: In this stage, you are making sure the customer is a good fit. You are not selling quite yet. What is the customer's problem? Can your SaaS solve it, and are they willing to pay for it? Once qualified, move into...
3. The Pitch: This can be a presentation or demo. Use visuals of your SaaS in action. Tailor the pitch to them. If they didn't talk about some of the pains mentioned in your pitch, don't talk about it when pitching to them.
4. Close: Understand what the next step is, and push towards it. You can't always close on the spot, since they may need approval from others at their company to be able to purchase. Ask if it would help for you to be involved with any meetings they may have to have for purchase approval, in order to answer everyone's questions.
5. Follow up: Keep setting up future dates with the client to follow up to make sure the lead never goes cold. You may have to do this a few times before they purchase.

Our takeaways from "SaaS Sales Funnel - 5 Strategies To Selling SaaS". Watch this video.

🪝 Building an Onboarding Strategy That Hooks Users

• Onboarding works best when you get straight to the point. Ignore the bells and whistles.
• Onboarding should continue until you have a metric that suggests the customer got value out of your SaaS.
• Give the user a few "aha!" moments throughout the process. This forms a natural habit while using your product.
• You should first understand the needs of your target audience before building the right onboarding path.

Our takeaways from "Growth marketing expert Ramli John on why you’re getting user onboarding wrong". Listen to this podcast.

‍