Case Study : ZenChef.
ZenChef - A SaaS Marketing Platform
In this artcile I will give most important notes from the original case study by Zima Venture in short and brief.
Original Article - Vertical SaaS Sales done right — from 0 to 2500 customer
Methodology and sales pitch: door-to-door and Excel sheets
Zenchef started its sales strategy in June 2012, without any marketing strategy to bring in leads, following the simple logic than the fastest trajectory to sign a client was to go out and meet them.
The sales pitch:
Explain there is a revolution under way: people search for restaurants online and publish comments.
Play on fear: show them they put their business at risk if they don’t jump on the bandwagon
Pitch your solution as the less expensive and the most qualitative
Describe the features
Tell them it costs them 1 coffee per day
Sales recruitment / management: following their will to build a young and dynamic team, the founders hired young graduates with no experience, and didn’t give them any sales pitch to practice.
Their main methodology were “Commando operations”: once a week, all sales reps were to go door-to-door, meet 60 restaurant owners and get 10 demos scheduled for the following week.
The results: with 3 sales reps, they went from 50 to 350 restaurants in Paris, in 6 months. With 8, they reached 650 clients.
New and Improved Go To market and sales pitch
Methodology: scripts & rationalised demos
The new, more accurate sales pitch:
First 10 min: present the diagnosis and ask a lot of questions in order to orientate your sales pitch afterwards. Build a real social relationship.
Show all the actions the prospects could take and what his competitors do, while explaining it’s not bad, they just need to know it.
15 min-demo of the product: only pitch the features you know will appeal to your lead, based on the conversation you just had.
If all goes well: your lead is buying, you are not selling.
The script is meticulous and constructed around 3 pillars:
explain the problem,
explain the story, and
explain the product in the most personalised way possible.
The number #1 rule for speaking time allocation is: 80% for the leads, 20% for the sales person. Every question entails 10 others which are can be all leveraged for your sales arguments.
The sales squad strategy
One business development team focused on cold calling
One sales team focused on demos
On customer success team, focused on on-boarding, support and up-sell.
Lessons learned from selling SaaS for a specific vertical:
Understand the business specificities of your target. Restaurant owners have exactly 0 time to dedicate to their online presence. Their business is highly brick-and-mortar, they spend a lot of time in the kitchen, with their clients, and certainly not behind a computer. They rarely read the press or watch TV, which reduces acquisition channels. On the plus side: they conviviality makes them very faithful clients: Zenchef gets less than 1% of churn!
Small businesses need a SaaS solution, not SaaS features.
They don’t need (nor can afford) many features or customisable software: they a need a simple solution, highly verticalized, where all features communicate with each other.
Be obsessed with your funnel. From lead generation to customer success: Zenchef’s team is obsessed on optimising every single step of their acquisition funnel. “Our obsession with quality is what makes us successful”. Zenchef.