Big B2B SaaS sales and marketing teams have to do marketing and sales that can scale. There is literally no alternative. Their market is hundreds of thousands if not millions of businesses. Even the biggest, most efficient sales team can’t consistently contact and nurture that kind of audience without the help of technology that allows one person to talk to a lot of people at once.
In other words, they have no choice.
Smaller B2B SaaS companies? We do.
And that ability to do the stuff that doesn’t scale and work on a one-to-one basis? In my experience, that’s where a lot of opportunity is found.
For example, right now I’m exploring getting SendView embedded into other platforms. Specifically email marketing platforms of which there are about 300 in the world and about 100-125 in English. When I email these ESPs, I’m not copy/pasting a generic message over and over because I’d burn through that list in a couple days, only get a few responses, and…then what? It’s not like there are 10,000 more ESPs out there to move on to. This is all I’ve got.
So I’m putting their logo into mockups, I’m recording personal videos, I’m sending them credentials to a fictional ESP demo of the embed functionality they can play with, I’m doing things that a Fortune 500 probably can’t do.
And, as a result, my response rate is 10x what I usually see with cold email.
A couple years ago at Inntopia we uncovered a group of roughly 250 new prospects we had never engaged with. Instead of just an email intro, we put together custom packets for each one using their assets showing exactly what our booking engine and marketing technology would look like if they were using it. Inside each packet was also a hand-written note. We tracked each one and follow up with an email shortly after it arrived.
And the result? A 5x increase in response rate over other outreach we’ve done to similar brands.
Yes, having a small market is a constraint. And it can be a tough one. If you don’t sign at least a few of those 10 deals in the pipeline there aren’t thousands more out there you can hammer to try to fill things up going into Q4. But that, I guess, is also the reason why doing stuff that doesn’t scale is so important. If you only have 1,000 potential customers, doing the campaign that gets a 20% response rate is probably a lot smarter than doing the stuff that only gets a 2% response rate.
And if you’re competing against big Fortune 500 companies like I occasionally have? Their inability to match that type of connection is yet another point on the board for doing the stuff that doesn’t scale.
Small SaaS markets absolutely present a challenge. But they also feel a lot like an opportunity.
