Steering clear of empty homilies and vague hyperboles - The SaaS Menu Card!

This is a SaaS series and I want to start out with what I think is pivotal from a GTM perspective. The OGs in the software space identified clonable opportunities and conceived SaaS, a concept that has taken the form and shape of a global phenomenon, an industry that is here to stay.?

While most founders have obsessed on perfecting their product and delayed their GTM focus, here is a skeletal framework that triages your product motion and sales motion.?

Think about the most common service that we engage with in our daily lives - walking into a restaurant and walking out with permeated replete. Enter Menu card - a simple, yet powerful tool that helped achieve this tummy treat. It enabled choice making, and yet compiled the limited combination of ingredients.

Extrapolate this to a SaaS scenario: A good sales pitch is like a complete story. A bunch of common mistakes can deliver a less than satisfactory experience. Some of these include:

1. Leaving a lot of narrative to imagination and not penning this down or showcasing it on the product.?
2. Not creating a trajectory - a customer wants to know how you will be a part of their growth journey. More on this in the days to come
3. Lack of insights? - where is the market headed and what your product means for the industry it caters to (specifically in a horizontal SaaS layout)
4. No justified ROI - a major missed opportunity to build confidence that needs a whole article to itself.
5. Unclear pricing, bundling - This needs to be baked into your story from day 1.Delaying the price reveal is a costly mistake.?
6. Unpalatable experience - no POC. Eliminating dichotomy by building your PLG strategy into SLG is a must. I’ve written on this and will be sharing my POV shortly.?

Similarly, a relentlessly working product team is often highly burnt out. This could be a result of

1. Non - availability of a roadmap
2. Feature driven approach
3. No access to market appetite
4. Prioritisation and prioritisation driven by ad-hoc requests

Sums up a good amount of SaaS company problems? We know that there is no one size that fits all. What if there was one tool that can halve your problems and quadruple your success? A tool that helps you steer clear of empty homilies and vague hyperboles. What would that mean for your customer?

1. Give your customer the choice to order what he/she likes. The customer could be shopping for a salad, for all that matters, but let them scroll through the menu card just to know that? they can get a platter when they need one
2. Every product in your company has many components and modules to it. Make a list of all the components and group it to form platters. Treat this like a checklist.?
3. The customer is looking to cross out a few checkboxes and curate a meal. You can hand out a list of items, or better still a few 3/4/5/6 course-meal that serves delight (Pre packaged).?

>> Enter SaaS Menu card <<

1. It serves as an internal roadmap of items. Some items are built and are ready to consume out of the box, some are in the making and some are to be put together as soon as a customer is willing to pay for it. Add this insight to your list - this serves as a product roadmap with defined phases of development. Solves most of your product problems.?
2. It gives the customer a holistic view of what your company is capable of. The customer defines what he/she wants to start with, what he/she will add on as they grow. Boom! You have become a part of his success story. It helps create bundles and price them. You can iterate and bake market insights into this, thereby trying out newer bundles. This warrants a separate article - parking it for now.?
3. Component level ROI is easier to define and is definitely better digested by customers. It helps articulate ROI levers, anchors your product’s worth and talks dollar value. Stay tuned for more on this!?
4. You do not boil the ocean. It is indelibly etched in the minds of your customers that you are an e2e platform and here to stay. The customer is consuming in byte size portions today, knowing that your company has his cravings covered for eternity.?

What do you mean by a checklist and how do you go about creating one? Every seemingly large problem out there is a consortium of a bunch of smaller problems, glued together and cemented in hidden layers. At a fundamental level, think of every end problem that your product is solving. Solutions can be clubbed together to form modules, thereby addressing a larger problem statement. In this case, you are easing out the job of one individual which then rolls up to a team’s problem statement and further a department, organisation. List these down and group common problems together. This is your menu card.?

Use the menu card to diagnose your client’s problem statement (the MEDDIC way) and run a discovery process. I usually lay out a bunch of problems that are specific to a client’s industry and encourage the client to solve for the most critical problem immediately. Now, we have the customer know that you can solve for any of his potential problems, while at the same time judiciously allocating his budget to the most critical one immediately.??

Categorise problems as those that require immediate attention and those that can be solved a few months later, or farther in the future. This way you have built a trajectory for your customer. Money spent on the most important problem instills confidence and translates to direct ROI. This is achieved in the shortest span of time. A puissant seller always scrolls through the entire menu card. This plants a thought in the customer’s mind who perceives your solution to be holistic.This is the power of recall.?

Create a repository of picks from your customer. Once there is sufficient data, consolidate it to analyse patterns in picks. These form your bundles with better resonance. I hope some of these resonate with you. Looking forward to more menu cards, your secret sauce to SaaS it up!?

Note to the reader

SuccSaaS is a space where I look to express my POV based on my learnings in the SaaS space. Being an ardent fan of this space, I have read and formulated my learnings by reading multiple articles on successful SaaS companies. In this space, we refrain from quoting examples, as it defies the POV logic . Feel free to reach out and? discuss your POV, success story or anything SaaS.