How to Use Product Analytics for More Effective SaaS Sales Pitches

Imagine you are preparing to approach a prospective client. You have done all the market research needed to understand the edge your product or service has over your competitors. You have identified your niche for higher profitability and you have profiled the key decision-makers that will be targeted by your outreach campaign. Would you like your pitch to fall flat just because you did not dazzle the prospect?

With the help of the right product analytics tools, you can identify your prospects faster, see what they like about you the most, sell them the tools they have loved so far, and go the extra mile to give them what they did not know they wanted.

Do Your Research

Give them the best you’ve got. But first, know what they need!

As you build your sales pipeline and start seriously considering particular prospects, there is usually a large amount of research involved. From market trend analysis to demand forecasting, getting as much information as possible about your prospect’s product or service, their current tech stack, and the health of their customers’ journey among many other indicators will take up a big proportion of the background intel before any sort of solid proposal.

In the meantime, you will also try to understand who the person you will deliver such a pitch to is: is it the CTO, the Head of Marketing, the Product Manager, the CEO…? Allocating the time and effort to try to understand how much your person of interest qualifies as the decision-maker you need will let you customize the tone and the type of results that your product will get them.

Up until here, everything is very business as usual: the salesperson does the research needed with data that is either publicly available and derived from, say, a paid lead-gen tool. However, applying analytics in this process would help you not only refine your search but also know exactly what about you has spiked the interest of your prospects the most, and develop your whole pitch around your strongest suit to take the conversion home.

Unlocking Analytics

You have what they need. Now give your product the wow factor it deserves!

Most likely, your product or service’s presence is made up of a website, plus web and/or mobile applications and a client-facing help center. The data obtained in each of the three gives you strategic leverage during pitch development, because:

• your website is the business card that a prospect will look at when starting to consider you as a possible vendor, and where you can identify what in your site gets the most attention and by whom;
• your applications are the source of plenty, current data about your business and your customers; and
• your help center or any front-facing customer support lets you clearly see the patterns in your product’s pain points, so you can anticipate those that may impact your lead.

The data obtained from these multiple touchpoints will basically be broken down into two groups:

• The demographic data of your unique users and their devices, including country, age, organization, language, or subscription status. So, for example, you may determine which geographical region and language have a higher concentration of users that are in your top-tier subscription.
• The data derived from their actions or behavior while on your website or applications. Continuing with the previous example, you can filter your users even further by checking which of the areas in your website or application they viewed the most, and for how long, before they decided to click on an action button.

Note that in both cases, this information can come from known users, such as those that are already registered — such as signed up for a demo or trial, subscribed to a newsletter, etc. — and from unknown users, information that will stay anonymous and compliant with data privacy regulations.

Tl;dr: You can consolidate both behavioral and demographic data collected and tracked from these touchpoints in a single platform like Countly. With it, you can start customizing the way you will approach and shape your pitch.

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Customizing Your Pitch

Obviously, what you have to offer your client is probably a much more complex solution than what they will be able to grasp in one discovery call. So you will focus on the features that your product offers that not only will have the highest value-for-money but that will wow them with a completely unexpected usage of their own data that may have gone completely untapped by them.

Finding that sweet spot will look completely different depending on what your business has to offer other businesses. So let’s run through a couple of scenarios:

Scenario 1: Healthcare Technology App Pitched to a Product Manager

You represent a health and wellness technology app and your lead is a Product Manager in a healthcare business trying to automate the interaction with customers/patients and foster their engagement with their health plans. The prospect has recently secured funding and will be trying to expand to Germany, where your own organization already has clients in the same industry.

• To gather information on how your current clients use your product in that market you can create a cohort to filter only users from Germany who have contacted the help center using a particular word (for example, “privacy” or “appointment”). You can also know which mobile operators tend to impact negatively on the performance of your client’s apps.
• You can run queries on your own website to understand which parts of the website get the most attention from all visitors located in Germany — whether known to you because they are registered users, or anonymous visitors. And then, for registered users from any region, you may see which ones of your features concentrated the most views from users who are Product Managers.

Scenario 2: Authentication Software Pitched to a Banking VP

You are trying to sell an adaptive customer identity authentication software to a traditional bank, which is transitioning to a digital-first approach for its customers, and you secured a discovery call with their VP. Before this point though, a mid-level manager has already agreed to use a demo of your product.

• Similar to the scenario above, you need to know which features attracted their attention. You can even compare the usage this manager had with other demo users, including those that match similar criteria like being in the banking industry of the country of your prospect.
• Additionally, you can explore in detail what this particular user did during the demo period: how many sessions, for how long, which feature that you know might be useful to them did they not explore?

The Rundown

No two sales pitches are ever the same, and the variables will change a lot depending on who, when, and why you are talking to a prospect. Above, we have listed a very limited way in which adding product analytics into the mix while creating a sales pipeline may give you an edge in your approach. The more you know how your next customer is thinking, the more you can tailor your pitch to give them even more than what they expected.

Because of all the data you may need for your pitch, the more expansive the list of customizable product analytics tools you have, the more you can continuously tweak the metrics you will use, no matter who or where the prospect is. And, as your data needs grow, the most cost-efficient choice is to consolidate it all under one roof without having to pay more.

Crafting the perfect pitch may be hard but with product analytics, it does not have to be. Reach out to us or book your demo with us to discover how effective the sales pitch with your next prospect can be.