4. Security is a big concern for SaaS buyers. They want to know how you're going to protect them from loss and litigation.
They're even checking out your privacy policy and GDPR terms! (Keep those things up-to-date.)
5. Your 'About Us' page matters.
Startups fail all the time. It’s not a secret.
Buyers want to know that the effort they put forth–convincing management, setting up and integrating your solution, convincing employees to use it–is going to be worth it in the long run.
Does your company have meaningful funding? Well-known investors? Is it profitable and self-sustaining? Does it have experienced leadership?
In your company’s About Us page, make sure you convey anything that can reassure buyers that the company is robust and set up to thrive.
enumjorge 1287 days ago [-]
Thanks for sharing. I get that as a business #2 and #3 provide marketing opportunities, but as a consumer this is part of the reason why the usefulness of search is slowly eroding. If I’m looking for something like “why[brand]” most of the time I want an independent review/opinion and not some sales copy by [brand] that has been SEO’d all the way to the top of the results.
jonathanlydall 1287 days ago [-]
Your concerns about "gaming" search results are very fair and valid. However, I feel that provided that sleazy SEO aren't being used, I don't think it's intrinsically bad.
I work for a small SaaS startup (still very early days) and this suggestion could solve one of the problems we have when it comes to marketing our product which very few people have heard of.
For us it's a little harder to get people to understand our product because there are no other well known products that are directly comparable to ours. However, there are well known products that are in the same problem space as ours.
The well known competing products tend to primarily focus on appealling to company "execs", but not so much the actual end users of them. The actual end users need to commit themselves and their skillsets into that particular proprietary technology, which smart ones may realize is not great for their long term career if they're planning on being able to move around the industry.
So our product is similar to these well known products in that it solves some of the same problems, but we differ greatly in that ours is geared towards end users who don't want any kind of platform lock-in.
After reading this website, I'm planning on making a page to compare ourselves to these particular "competing" products, but giving us the opportunity to show why even if you dislike those other products, you'll like ours because of its differences. This will also help people better understand the problem we're solving.
franciscassel 1287 days ago [-]
Fantastic, I'm glad to hear the insights in the piece were helpful to you, Jonathan.
franciscassel 1287 days ago [-]
Fair point! But as a business, it'd be negligent not to make your 'why' case, given that your consumers are looking for it.
Hopefully the business does it in a way that's transparent and forthright. I'm a big fan of making it really clear that a solution isn't going to be a perfect fit for everyone. No point in wasting anyone's time.
dhimes 1287 days ago [-]
It was a really excellent post. Thank you!
Fission 1286 days ago [-]
This is why we started Satchel (https://satchel.com/). It's like The Wirecutter or Consumer Reports for SaaS.
The goal is to provide an independent opinion and overview of different SaaS categories, as well as recommendations of the tools we think are best. The main downside is that writing high-quality opinions are difficult and time-consuming, but we've got some ideas on how to sidestep a lot of those challenges.
NumberWangMan 1286 days ago [-]
Nice, this looks really useful! By the way, the table of contents for your articles is cut off on the left, for me.
graeme 1287 days ago [-]
I’ve actually found this useful more often than not. To do it well you have to point to genuine differences and not just say “Product X sucks and we’re awesome!”
The ones that seem least useful are the aggregator sites making comparisons written by robots. But I’ve gotten genuine insight from competitor profiles.
wastedhours 1287 days ago [-]
I agree somewhat, but I also do appreciate reading why the company themselves think I should care. Often times it's the best way to get to the meat and potatoes of what their actual unique selling point is - you can get that from third parties, but it's also useful to get it from the company themselves.
tootie 1287 days ago [-]
This is all feels very obvious, but it's great to see it spelled out so clearly and backed by data. It's so perfectly succinct.
franciscassel 1286 days ago [-]
Excellent compliment, thank you.
rhizome 1287 days ago [-]
How did you access search terms used to find the site(s)?
franciscassel 1287 days ago [-]
ahrefs. The full methodology is described in the article.
ponker 1286 days ago [-]
Talking about competitors only makes sense in narrow circumstances. The fact is, a lot of people who find you don't know who your competitors are, and it's better to keep things that way! Let them Google for alternatives -- half they time they won't find any, and if they do, when they see that other page, they don't know how legitimate that other company is -- yours is already the "standard" in their mind. The others are implicitly on the defensive and it's better not to legitimize them on your own page.
jacquesm 1287 days ago [-]
B2B SaaS. Lots of SaaS is B2C nowadays as well.
franciscassel 1287 days ago [-]
That's a good point. I'll clarify this in the post.
bobwall 1286 days ago [-]
Great call on #2. We will be adding that onto our site. Thanks.
dazc 1287 days ago [-]
'#1 .....Have a pricing page! If you can't share exact pricing for some reason, try one of these alternative approaches...'
If there is some reason why you're coy about pricing then I assume you are making things up as you go along. I also assume you'll make promises you can not deliver on.
If it really is the most sought after info, by a long way, then one would be a fool to omit it.
gk1 1287 days ago [-]
> If it really is the most sought after info, by a long way, then one would be a fool to omit it.
And yet most enterprise software companies do omit it. Perhaps there is a good reason to omit it, and you're the one who's not seeing something?
qppo 1287 days ago [-]
It's so we can charge people exactly what they're willing to pay instead of creating an average that is a discount for the people willing to spend more and locking out people not able to pay it.
It's also a really good filter for bad customers. Partly because "if you have to ask you can't afford it" and partly because SaaS is sold to execs, not users within the organization. Most people coming to ask about price first are the users that just want something for themselves or a small team, which is not an ideal customer.
Basically if you move on from the site because you can't find the price, that's by design.
jariel 1286 days ago [-]
"we can charge people exactly what they're willing to pay instead of creating an average that is a discount for the people willing to spend more and locking out people not able to pay it."
The "reason" is that such companies do all their actual sales closing through individual agents, and their sales strategy is very heavily dependent on price discrimination. Most customers will get "discounts", because the really valuable thing is having your time and contact info to upsell you on stuff you don't need.
rchaud 1287 days ago [-]
Enterprise companies aren't using SEO to source leads. SEO is for quick wins, like signing people up for a trial account, or getting them into the sales funnel, such as with an an 'insdustry research' ebook offer that requires an email signup.
Enterprise companies are established entities that already have good name recognition. They can pay big money to salespeople with deep industry networks, because the deals they make are low-volume, high-value. Once the product is past the point where you have to acquire users at $15/month, it makes sense to upscale to 'enterprise' plans that charge a lot more for things like uptime guarantees and issue escalation.
dazc 1286 days ago [-]
Since we're throwing around the word 'most' without backing it up, 'most' successful enterprise software companies have transparent pricing.
franciscassel 1287 days ago [-]
Sometimes there's no good reason to leave pricing off the site. But there are some legit reasons. E.g., every sale is custom-priced based on more than a few different variables.
GordonS 1287 days ago [-]
Couldn't agree more, this kind of thing drives me nuts - if I see "call us for pricing" or whatever, I just move on.
Drdrdrq 1286 days ago [-]
As do I. But we are not the target customers.
GordonS 1286 days ago [-]
I work in the enterprise space, so often I actually am the target customer. But I still can't stand this behaviour - I don't want to waste my time in a call with a sales bod, I just want the price so I can add it to the spreadsheet of competitors.
emilecantin 1287 days ago [-]
I've recently adopted a new personal policy: If I can't find pricing info easily on your website, I _will_ contact you to ask for the information.
If you want to make me lose my time hunting for that info, I'll make damn sure you're losing yours as well.
(P.S. I'm talking to the general "you", not @dazc specifically)
marcosdumay 1287 days ago [-]
The companies that don't show prices are not trying to sell to the people that search for prices. They are applying a huge filter on their inbox, removing a lot of candidate customers that they don't think are worth the bother.
Of course, whether they are correct or not varies a lot.
creaghpatr 1287 days ago [-]
I'm a SaaS buyer, and you correctly made Pricing the #1 thing. You don't even need to put the price, just the ballpark helps understand if a solution makes sense, especially for smaller companies with tight budgets.
So much time I've wasted on demos and at the end the price is so far apart from expectation we could have saved the time. Even if something is too expensive, knowing the general price tag allows you to keep the project in your back pocket in case there's a cash/budget surplus and you get asked to put those dollars to work quickly.
PeterisP 1287 days ago [-]
That's kind the whole point, there are B2B providers who simply intentionally don't want to talk with smaller companies with tight budgets. Are you willing to discuss an eight figure custom offer? The company will fly out a sales team to you next week to negotiate the details. Do you want to haggle about details since mere 100k/year is stretching your budget? Nope, this is not worth the time and effort of the high-touch sales process. You could get a free trial, but if and only if you're likely to buy something significantly large in the end, if the person wanting the trial has the influence and authority to sign off a multimillion purchase instead of someone just looking for a service for their department of a couple dozen employees.
Such companies don't want to talk with potential users, because the end users themselves generally don't get a vote or veto or choice of what the enterprise (i.e. not a small company with a tight budget) will buy, they want to talk with high-level managers who have the authority to buy something on behalf of thousands of users.
To that regard, the analysis performed by the OP is probably irrelevant, as it's about "online searches of thousands of B2B SaaS buyers", but come on, the target audience of high-touch B2B companies does not go out making online searches for such services; those decisionmakers either choose from one of the companies whose sales teams have been courting them for years before the sale, or perhaps they look up the Gartner report for "category leaders", or perhaps they ask their consulting partners for recommendations, they don't just go on google to start researching from scratch - and if they needed that research, they would not visit the site personally, they'd get a team of assistants to gather such info and get quotes tailored for their specific needs; if there was standard pricing listed on the site, that would/should get ignored anyway, they'd expect custom discounts for their volume. Of course, there are many B2B SaaS "buyers" who do such online searches, but they're all the the small scale non-enterprise people with tight budgets, the kind of people to whom the company does not want to talk in the first place.
wildpeaks 1287 days ago [-]
I agree that lack of clear pricing is a huge red flag.
Sometimes it's not even because of budget: if an employee can't experiment with the service using some free tier (not time limited, because other projects can urgently get in the way), they can't request whoever has the company credit card to subscribe even to the lowest paid tier, so they'll just try one of your competitors because blindly recommending a service that might be a bad fit is too high a risk for the employee's career.
cbisnett 1287 days ago [-]
Really solid article. I enjoyed the examples of known successful companies embracing, instead of ignoring, the comparisons to competition.
> ...prospective buyers are going to discover your competitors, anyway.
franciscassel 1287 days ago [-]
I appreciate it -- glad you got something out of it.
I haven't run into this a lot with my clients -- they've generally been on-board with the idea of creating vs./alternatives content -- but some folks do have that mental block. Talking about competitors feels risky to them.
gk1 1287 days ago [-]
The "X Alternative" is such an effective tactic, even today. I stumbled onto it, tried it myself (successfully), and wrote about it way back in 2015: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/alternative-pages/
For most startups you don't need to go that far... Just making an "alternative" page for your biggest competitor could start bringing you people who are eager to switch.
franciscassel 1287 days ago [-]
Hey, Greg, I started following your work this year -- good to see you.
Funny enough, I know that Bitrix alternatives page, because they're a competitor of one of my clients in the workflow automation space. :)
-Mike
gk1 1287 days ago [-]
From the looks of their alternative pages, they're everyone's competitor! ;)
franciscassel 1287 days ago [-]
Haha!
briandear 1286 days ago [-]
Dear SaaS companies. Don’t make me call or dig for pricing. If you do, I’ll go elsewhere even if your product is better.
Nothing worse than sitting through some vendor demo in order to answer the simple question of price.
If price isn’t simple, then the problem is your ability to communicate.
I don’t need to “Contact Us” for a simple price. If you hide the price it makes me feel like you are either ashamed of it, or just make it up as you go along.
corobo 1286 days ago [-]
Dear not a big enough fish,
We know. We're ok with this. Your support cost would likely outweigh your account fees. Please do indeed go elsewhere! :)
pier25 1286 days ago [-]
Pricing is first thing I check whenever I'm visiting a SaaS website, even before I've understood what the thing does.
tootie 1287 days ago [-]
"In the SaaS world, the search results for these queries tend to be dominated by listicles from the software comparison sites like Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius."
Are these sites actually reliable? They have an A+ SEO game because I find them on Google all the time, I just don't really put much stock in their data.
franciscassel 1286 days ago [-]
The most useful insights come from the user reviews shared to those sites.
You just have to remember that they're just like any other online review: you mostly hear from the very happy or very unhappy customers OR the ones that got asked by the company to leave a review (perhaps in return for an incentive).
creaghpatr 1286 days ago [-]
I wouldn't use it for comparison between competitors but for vetting the service and UI/UX and implementation process I would say they are useful, if not 100% accurate. You just have to calibrate knowing that usually the most enthusiastic customers are the ones leaving reviews.
exolymph 1286 days ago [-]
They're useful for finding out who the main providers are for a given thing.
wowhow 1286 days ago [-]
Great post and fantastic collection. While most of it is obvious, there are some insightful suggestions as well. Love that these are backed up by data.
franciscassel 1286 days ago [-]
Thank you! Glad it was compelling.
pkrumins 1286 days ago [-]
Wow! I nominate this as the must read article for all SaaS companies.
franciscassel 1286 days ago [-]
Very kind!
goatherders 1287 days ago [-]
This is absolutely sensational. Thank you for writing and sharing.
franciscassel 1287 days ago [-]
Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed it.
Rendered at 07:55:49 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
These are the top five highlights from what I learned:
1. The most sought-after (and often 1st) piece of info sought by SaaS buyers is pricing -- by a large margin.
Have a pricing page! If you can't share exact pricing for some reason, try one of these alternative approaches (created by an acquaintance of mine): https://businesscasualcopywriting.com/show-pricing-on-websit...
2. '[brand] alternatives' is the 2nd most-frequent search pattern.
It seems obvious to have a page on your website targeting '[your_brand] alternatives] that positions your offering against your competitors.
But only 2 of the 50 biggest SaaS companies do this!
Ex: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/comparison
3. SaaS buyers literally search for 'why [brand]'.
This is another under-leveraged opportunity.
Buyers want someone to spell out for them why they should spend money on your solution.
Make it easy for them!
Ex: https://www.hubspot.com/why-go-hubspot
4. Security is a big concern for SaaS buyers. They want to know how you're going to protect them from loss and litigation.
They're even checking out your privacy policy and GDPR terms! (Keep those things up-to-date.)
5. Your 'About Us' page matters.
Startups fail all the time. It’s not a secret.
Buyers want to know that the effort they put forth–convincing management, setting up and integrating your solution, convincing employees to use it–is going to be worth it in the long run.
Does your company have meaningful funding? Well-known investors? Is it profitable and self-sustaining? Does it have experienced leadership?
In your company’s About Us page, make sure you convey anything that can reassure buyers that the company is robust and set up to thrive.
I work for a small SaaS startup (still very early days) and this suggestion could solve one of the problems we have when it comes to marketing our product which very few people have heard of.
For us it's a little harder to get people to understand our product because there are no other well known products that are directly comparable to ours. However, there are well known products that are in the same problem space as ours.
The well known competing products tend to primarily focus on appealling to company "execs", but not so much the actual end users of them. The actual end users need to commit themselves and their skillsets into that particular proprietary technology, which smart ones may realize is not great for their long term career if they're planning on being able to move around the industry.
So our product is similar to these well known products in that it solves some of the same problems, but we differ greatly in that ours is geared towards end users who don't want any kind of platform lock-in.
After reading this website, I'm planning on making a page to compare ourselves to these particular "competing" products, but giving us the opportunity to show why even if you dislike those other products, you'll like ours because of its differences. This will also help people better understand the problem we're solving.
Hopefully the business does it in a way that's transparent and forthright. I'm a big fan of making it really clear that a solution isn't going to be a perfect fit for everyone. No point in wasting anyone's time.
The goal is to provide an independent opinion and overview of different SaaS categories, as well as recommendations of the tools we think are best. The main downside is that writing high-quality opinions are difficult and time-consuming, but we've got some ideas on how to sidestep a lot of those challenges.
The ones that seem least useful are the aggregator sites making comparisons written by robots. But I’ve gotten genuine insight from competitor profiles.
If there is some reason why you're coy about pricing then I assume you are making things up as you go along. I also assume you'll make promises you can not deliver on.
If it really is the most sought after info, by a long way, then one would be a fool to omit it.
And yet most enterprise software companies do omit it. Perhaps there is a good reason to omit it, and you're the one who's not seeing something?
It's also a really good filter for bad customers. Partly because "if you have to ask you can't afford it" and partly because SaaS is sold to execs, not users within the organization. Most people coming to ask about price first are the users that just want something for themselves or a small team, which is not an ideal customer.
Basically if you move on from the site because you can't find the price, that's by design.
The term is 'price discrimination'. [1]
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as...
Enterprise companies are established entities that already have good name recognition. They can pay big money to salespeople with deep industry networks, because the deals they make are low-volume, high-value. Once the product is past the point where you have to acquire users at $15/month, it makes sense to upscale to 'enterprise' plans that charge a lot more for things like uptime guarantees and issue escalation.
If you want to make me lose my time hunting for that info, I'll make damn sure you're losing yours as well.
(P.S. I'm talking to the general "you", not @dazc specifically)
Of course, whether they are correct or not varies a lot.
So much time I've wasted on demos and at the end the price is so far apart from expectation we could have saved the time. Even if something is too expensive, knowing the general price tag allows you to keep the project in your back pocket in case there's a cash/budget surplus and you get asked to put those dollars to work quickly.
Such companies don't want to talk with potential users, because the end users themselves generally don't get a vote or veto or choice of what the enterprise (i.e. not a small company with a tight budget) will buy, they want to talk with high-level managers who have the authority to buy something on behalf of thousands of users.
To that regard, the analysis performed by the OP is probably irrelevant, as it's about "online searches of thousands of B2B SaaS buyers", but come on, the target audience of high-touch B2B companies does not go out making online searches for such services; those decisionmakers either choose from one of the companies whose sales teams have been courting them for years before the sale, or perhaps they look up the Gartner report for "category leaders", or perhaps they ask their consulting partners for recommendations, they don't just go on google to start researching from scratch - and if they needed that research, they would not visit the site personally, they'd get a team of assistants to gather such info and get quotes tailored for their specific needs; if there was standard pricing listed on the site, that would/should get ignored anyway, they'd expect custom discounts for their volume. Of course, there are many B2B SaaS "buyers" who do such online searches, but they're all the the small scale non-enterprise people with tight budgets, the kind of people to whom the company does not want to talk in the first place.
Sometimes it's not even because of budget: if an employee can't experiment with the service using some free tier (not time limited, because other projects can urgently get in the way), they can't request whoever has the company credit card to subscribe even to the lowest paid tier, so they'll just try one of your competitors because blindly recommending a service that might be a bad fit is too high a risk for the employee's career.
> ...prospective buyers are going to discover your competitors, anyway.
I haven't run into this a lot with my clients -- they've generally been on-board with the idea of creating vs./alternatives content -- but some folks do have that mental block. Talking about competitors feels risky to them.
One of my favorite examples of this is Bitrix24, which made maybe a hundred such pages: https://www.bitrix24.com/alternatives/
For most startups you don't need to go that far... Just making an "alternative" page for your biggest competitor could start bringing you people who are eager to switch.
Funny enough, I know that Bitrix alternatives page, because they're a competitor of one of my clients in the workflow automation space. :)
-Mike
Nothing worse than sitting through some vendor demo in order to answer the simple question of price.
If price isn’t simple, then the problem is your ability to communicate.
I don’t need to “Contact Us” for a simple price. If you hide the price it makes me feel like you are either ashamed of it, or just make it up as you go along.
We know. We're ok with this. Your support cost would likely outweigh your account fees. Please do indeed go elsewhere! :)
Are these sites actually reliable? They have an A+ SEO game because I find them on Google all the time, I just don't really put much stock in their data.
You just have to remember that they're just like any other online review: you mostly hear from the very happy or very unhappy customers OR the ones that got asked by the company to leave a review (perhaps in return for an incentive).