
Ask HN: How do you pre-sell Saas subscriptions? - tixocloud
How do you pre-sell Saas subscriptions when your product is not entirely new? We&#x27;re looking to launch a new way to do email marketing but given that many companies already have a solution in place, how can we get them to switch?<p>For example, Close.io is great for sales but how do you get people off Salesforce and on to the Close.io platform?
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shostack
I researched several ESPs and negotiated our email contract with one of them.
To some degree, seeing that a company had established customers was important
when I was trusting something as critical as our companies email to them.

You need to find a way to reduce risk and the overhead of integration. Even
basic integration of a new ESP is a PITA, mostly because there is either
engineering work involved, or some degree of lockin because of marketing
automation that can't be easily exported.

You might in fact need to offer a free year or something to convince them to
invest in you and take a risk.

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tixocloud
Yeah, you're right. Most of the issues that people have revolve around
integration and trust.

We were thinking about using Zapier but seems like the cost might escalate
fairly quickly.

Trust-wise, maybe it would make sense to go after smaller companies who are
less technical and less brand-sensitive?

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sharemywin
I would focus on companies already in the market for new email software. Next,
focus on the pain point your software solves the others don't. run an ad or go
talk to companies about the problem. If it resonates you might have an actual
company. then 1 of 2 things will happen. if your new way is really hard to
duplicate or it completely cannibalizes the existing companies business you
could grow big. if not they will probably just add the feature when things
start to look good.

