Disruption Interruption podcast host and veteran communications disruptor KJ Helms interviews Software as a Service innovator Jesse Woodbury, who explains how SaaS can help providers close more than 7 figures in Annual Recurring Revenue.
In the IT caveman era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, if you needed a computer program to help you, for example, with inventory, you had to buy an expensive program, have someone install it for you—which took hours, if not days—then your company was responsible for maintaining the program. The end result was spending lots of money and wasting lots of production time. For better or worse, that was the modus operandi… until the cloud arrived. And with this innovative concept came a most disruptive tool Software as a Service (SaaS). The ability to receive the software enterprises need over the internet as a service became de rigueur way of doing business. SaaS is now a $152 billion industry expected to grow to $208 billion by the end of 2023.(1)
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Enter Jesse Woodbury, an SaaS expert who routinely helps customers close 6- and 7-figure deals. Jesse sat down with Karla Jo Helms, host of the Disruption/Interruption podcast, to discuss how high-dollar SaaS sales tend to involve at least a half-dozen stakeholders with crazy competition and how they have to be educated about the industry if they want to reach 7 figures in Annual Recurring Revenue in sales.
“With people now working from home more and more, SaaS has become vital in the ability for an enterprise to not only continue doing business as usual remotely, but, in fact, grow in ways they could not have imagined before,” says Helms.
Jesse takes it one step further. To be successful, Jesse says, SaaS salespeople should read and compile relevant articles about the industry and take snippets that might be relevant to their buyers—package and share them with the potential buyers, even in the middle of buying/deal cycles. This helps, he adds, to build credibility and value, and positions the salesperson as a partner in the client’s business.
Jesse Woodbury explains:
- The main ingredient for disruption is being a thought leader while creating and putting out content regularly which roughly equates to making 100 cold calls or sending 100 emails a day. The way to become a thought leader is by repurposing and packaging content for your buyers.
- The SaaS market is currently growing by 18% each year and is expected to grow to 22% by the end of 2022. SaaS adaptation in the healthcare industry is growing at a rate of 20% per year. SaaS is being considered to transform the IT industry from a cost center to a value center.
- With a lot of market automation techniques and more than 20,000 SaaS companies trying to sell their services, there is a lot of noise. Executives aren’t sure which tool is valuable and if it supports their business.
- Being in SaaS sales can be an incredibly lucrative venture, if you play the game right. The best sellers have been figured from implementing content. The role is to create valuable content for the buyers. It can be specific about which one tackles/handles a problem.
- With the current status quo, the average tenure for a Sales VP in SaaS companies is 18 months and an even shorter tenure for frontline reps. This results in huge financial losses and potential revenue.
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“If you’re not playing the game effectively, sales can be the highest- and lowest-paying job in the planet. Sales is very much what you kill and if you can’t do that because you’re sticking to the status quo, then how do you continue hitting your numbers and continue on with the profession? That’s been the challenge and that is why the shift has to happen more broadly,” says Jesse.
Jesse’s Advice to Salespeople
1. Find the medium, platform or channel that works best for you. For some people it is tweeting, for others, it is LinkedIn. As for me, I like recording podcasts. I know a lot of reps who have found success with video content.
2. The status quo was to update your name and numbers in the sales force and inform your manager about the next steps to close a deal. Now, make the deal more conversational and collaborative—that’s how you know to make your deals more predictable and have more span of control.
3. Even a small subset of reps posting relevant content for buyers will get noticed and word gets around that they are available to partner with a business and solve problems.
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