Shining in the SaaS World: Sales and Growth Tips for B2B Platforms

You've founded a startup, and the entire team has undoubtedly set out to create a fantastic product. You've determined why this product is needed, why customers should use it, and whether it meets a real need by conducting feedback meetings with potential users. I assume you've even developed a custom corporate identity, perhaps even created your logo. You've designed pages, built frameworks, written code, and even managed your project in an agile manner, crossing sprints one by one. But wait... Has there been any discussion about a roadmap for growth and sales?

Many startups lose sight of how they're meeting their end-users' needs by focusing solely on the product, and as MVP timelines extend, they realize they're far from where they started. Today, especially in the B2B sector, if you were to have a startup offering SaaS solutions, what strategies could you have from day one, and what should you pay attention to in your growth journey? Let's talk about that.

While there are many approaches to sales and growth, two paths have sharply diverged for me in recent times: PLG (Product-Led Growth) Product-Centric Growth and Traditional Sales and Growth Strategies. Of course, Traditional Sales Growth strategies are evolving and moving into a new realm as they fully utilize the possibilities of technology.

**Traditional Sales and Growth Strategies**

Traditional approaches still yield good results, particularly in physical industries like fashion and electronics sales. It's fair to say that a modern touch has been added to B2B SaaS solutions with the impact of evolving technology and perspectives. At the core of this new approach, companies:

- Focus on providing personalized experiences to customers and building relationships with them.

- Tailor their products, messages, special offers, and experiences to each potential customer.

- Include educational elements to help potential customers understand the value of their solution.

- Maintain constant communication with their customers, creating personalized content and interactions to make them feel part of their products.

- Work on making it easy for users to sign up, retain them within the product, and upgrade them to higher tiers.

- Analyze potential and existing customer data thoroughly to stay ahead in acquiring new customers.

- Place emphasis on retaining customers for long-term success and ensuring their experiences progress optimally.

**PLG (Product-Led Growth) Strategies**

 This approach, which has become the favorite of many B2B SaaS startups (Slack, Figma) in Europe and around the world, focuses on product-led development and directs all sales growth strategies accordingly. With the belief that sales will result from marketing activities, this approach provides companies with an end-to-end product-centric growth strategy through the following methodology:

1. Customer Acquisition: Create a robust content pool to reach relevant users in digital channels and successfully implement word-of-mouth tactics.

2. Articulate the Core Problem: Show your customers the problem-solving aspect first on your website, where they first come to you.

3. Reduce Friction: Your customers' belief in your ability to solve their problems can be very short-lived, so you need to onboard them quickly. Your onboarding process should be fast, easy, and require minimal effort.

4. Activate Them: You've brought your users inside; now you must definitely show them how your product solves problems by offering certain features for free and imposing time limits to offer all services for free. Let your users feel free and comfortable.

5. Retention: We've come to the most important and thought-provoking process. Here, for users in the trial period, you need to convince them of what you can do with good training, meaningful guides within the application, and improvements obtained from insights of existing users.

6. Monetization: You can tell your users that they need to make additional payments for more users or convince them to upgrade to a higher tier to use the system in multiple projects.

7. Expansion: Let's turn your users from passive to active. In this way, when your users are in the editor and content creator position, they can promote your products and services to larger audiences. This way, your product will spread to a wider audience and attract new users, which is a very good option for attracting new users. When you want to announce your new features, there will be many people who want to do it for you and earn income from it. You'll be the star of YouTube content :)

8. Be a Big Wheel: When you proceed in this way, the number of people using your platform will increase, naturally increasing the value of your product and services. The more users you reach, the more data you produce, and with the network effect, you can attract more users. As always, attracting more users makes your platform or application more attractive, which increases your company's value in proportion to your user base, creating a cycle. This cycle is a happiness-inducing wheel that shows that value increases as usage increases.

Many major companies are using a product-centric approach, and we've seen that when it's managed correctly, and when it becomes a company strategy and perspective, it delivers successful results repeatedly.