Ask HN: As a new Saas startup how many leads should I be approaching daily? Hi guys, Thinking of starting a new Saas startup and wanted to get an idea, from anyone who has experience, on how many leads I should be approaching a day? I know this will depend on the type of service but I want to set some targets and want to know if I should be targeting 1, 10, 100 customers a day? Finally, what is an acceptable conversion rate - i.e. new lead to paying customer? thanks! |
If you are targeting SMB's with your service then you will need to approach a lot of them. If you are using ads then you can expect likely around a 2-4% conversion on average for a decently targeted campaign, 10% if you are highly targeted. Remarketing/retargeting can help bring those numbers up too.
As for where I get my numbers, we run our own SaaS platform as well as we have developed a number of platforms for other people and in some cases are still maintaining.
You can read about the slow ramp for SaaS businesses a number of places, I believe patio11 has also published some information on it even and he's always a good resource.
In the end you have to test and market to see what works best for you. In the beginning expect to be much more high touch and to do personal sales, as you can ramp up and get more word of mouth it helps snowball new signups and reduces the amount of time you spend on the phone personally signing people up.
For my 2 cents, talk to as many people as you can everyday and try to sign them up on the spot where possible (if even for a free trial). If you aren't doing free trials then try to find the key thing that helps sell your product and do demonstrations on it, and make a video of it (less than 90 seconds) and send it to everyone that won't sit with you for an online demo. You get the idea. Also, if you are still the one writing code and trying to do sales, pick 2-3 days a week where you focus on sales, the other on development/support. Or split your day where you write code/fix things part of the day and spend at least 2-4 hours on sales efforts initially per day.
As for myself, when I talk to people one on one, I can generally get a very high conversion rate > 50%, but when you rely on marketing only that drops considerably. However, the more targeted your audience the better your results will be.
It depends too much on price range, customer base, value created, etc.
With my SaaS App and method called TimeBlock I have a user price of $49, at an average user count of around 10 I do not need to contact more than a few new leads a day to grow the business.
I have around a 50% conversion rate from lead to "using the method" in some way, currently my sample base is not big enough to know the conversion rate to paying customer.
Read more about TimeBlock here: http://timeblock.com
Unless your Saas requires high-touch sales, the number of leads you are able to reach will increase as your business grows. In the beginning you might be talking to 10 people per day personally, and down the road - your blog/integrations/PR/referrals may bring in dozens or hundreds of leads per day. It's rare for the number of leads to be constant across a lifetime of your business. Similar to a rolling snowball, all your lead-gathering efforts will build up and hopefully produce growing results.