Aneto Okonkwo, co-founder and CEO of Chatdesk, explains at SaaS Open how enterprise sales teams should understand client buyer motivations.
Insight
Okonkwo: Multi-product SaaS footprint protects vendors from budget cuts
“In these current economic times, everyone's looking at their budgets, they're slashing, they're cutting their vendors, so the more solutions, the more footprint you have an organization with more solutions, the harder you are to kill, basically.”
Insight
Okonkwo: Never build requested features without budget and a signed contract
“The final thing is, people will tell you to solve all these things, But only solve the ones that they have budget for. Because I made all these mistakes where we said, oh, if we build this feature, then they'll buy, and they didn't buy. No. Pay me first. Sign …”
Insight
Okonkwo: Enterprise clients do not care if your service is manual
“Even if it's a person, a human doing it, the client doesn't know, and they don't care. They just want it solved. And that's a way for you to quickly upsell and, like, continue to grow those budgets.”
Disclosure
Okonkwo: Chatdesk does not charge for integrations, monetizing usage volume instead
“We don't charge for integrations because we know the volume is where we make the money, so we want as many integrations as possible, like, add everything, you know, and we'll figure out how to monetize it later.”
Insight
Okonkwo: Pre-contracting unbought solutions upfront removes friction for future upsells
“Even if we've only been negotiating and contracted on one of the solutions, we want to pre-contract ahead of time for all the other solutions, so that there's no future negotiation, and it's also a way to educate the customer.”
Insight
Okonkwo: Companies must stabilize customers before attempting upsells
“You kind of have to stabilize the customer, get them into a rhythm. They're good. Everyone's feeling good. Everyone's happy. The next couple of meetings, let's say a couple months down the line, hey, let's talk about upsell. So that you're in a good place. The…”