SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SaaS Storytelling: How I generated 50+ demo requests from a single story
08 May 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm very excited to share this recording with you guys, which happened at our conference, sasopen.com, with over 100 speakers, all founders of B2B SaaS companies. We have a very high bar for what speakers share on stage, so you're going to enjoy this episode where we dive deep into revenue graphs, real tactics, and real growth metrics.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. My name is Charles.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of storytelling in SaaS marketing?
I'm one of the co-founders of BizUp. BizUp is a business process documentation and automation software. We launched something about one and a half years ago. I am particularly responsible for products marketing and sales.
We recently launched, so we're still at the stage where I'm doing quite a lot of work, speaking with a lot of customers, trying to understand how best to communicate the value that we offer. In this, I'm just going to be sharing how I was able to generate 50 demo requests from a single story. And I'm looking forward to sharing that information.
I'm going to be talking about just some basics of storytelling, how we actually launched BizUp with a story, and some of the results that we got. This is really where it starts from, from my agency business. I'm going to share a bit of background. Then I'm going to go a bit deeper into what actually makes a good SaaS product story and some of my favorite examples. All right.
So about five years ago, I woke up one morning and decided to just share a story about how I started business. I shared a story on LinkedIn about how I fell in love with website design, how I got an internship, how I started doing website design as a sort of side hustle. how we started getting clients, how we started getting more people to join our team.
And long story short, we got to a point where we had over 300, we had done over 350 projects for clients all over our country. And this particular story resonated with a lot of people on LinkedIn. And it got over 40,000 views. We got quite a number of customers from just this particular story. And this was how I saw the power of storytelling, especially for a business.
But we're here to talk about SaaS, and I will just share some of the things that actually make a good SaaS story. One is it has to be true. Number two, it has to be simple. People reading the story need to understand without having to think what this product is about. It also has to be relatable.
A good story is one where when people watch or listen to what you're doing, they kind of see themselves in the story that you're sharing. And then as a SaaS product, it has to sell the product. By reading the story, they need to understand exactly what the product does, how it solves their problems. And last but not the least is it should not be salesy.
While you want people to understand the product, you want them to understand, you want them to take an action, you don't want to come across like you're actually selling to them. So these are some of the examples that I really like in terms of SaaS storytelling. One is from Basecamp. On Basecamp's
About Us page, there's a whole story about how they created the company, about the problem that they had that made them decide to build Basecamp. Next is Barnabeer. Barnabeer is an API SaaS company. They have a full blog that is dedicated to their journey. So I, as a person, I became emotionally invested in Barnard Beer because of how open they were with their storytelling.
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Chapter 3: How did the guest generate 50 demo requests from a single story?
It's pretty long, but I hope you can follow through. So it all began when I started a website design company as a solo founder. I worked hard to deliver high-quality work to my clients, and as a result, I kept getting more clients. At one point, I couldn't handle the demand all by myself and started hiring people to join the company. It felt good to have a team.
The company felt solid, but not for long. I realized that even as I hired people, my workload didn't seem to reduce. You see, because I cared about the quality of our work, I micromanaged a lot. And I found myself repeating, explaining the same things over and over again. It took too long for people to fully understand how things should be done.
And when they finally did, I relied on them so much that when they resigned, work scattered. Things got frustrating as I kept asking myself these questions. One, how do I avoid repeating myself over and over again? How can I delegate without fear? How can I get new employees to quickly understand how we work? And how do I build a business that doesn't scatter when a key employee leaves?
This was the story, the problem side of the story, really drilled down on the problem that I experienced that made me start BizUp. So you also notice that the problem side of things is in a lot of detail so that when people are reading it, if they have that problem, they can easily connect. Now, the next part is the idea. And this was the idea.
So one day, my friend Marianne, a business consultant, reached out to me. She said she had noticed some problems that a lot of our consulting clients faced. She wanted to work on a software tool to solve the problem. She explained the problems, and they were the same ones I had been experiencing. So next, the product. We decided to work together to solve this problem.
And along the way, we reached out to Hope to join us as our CTO. That's the story of how BizUp was born.
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Chapter 4: What are the essential elements of a compelling SaaS story?
The result. Remember that website design company? Well, all those problems have been solved. We have documented all our processes with BizUp. Everybody now knows how things should be done. With BizUp's step-by-step format, new employees understand our processes quickly. I no longer repeat myself unnecessarily, and it's now easy to delegate work. Now, the call to action.
Now, Marianne, Hope, and I are committed to making BizUp the best tool for our customers.
Chapter 5: How did personal experiences shape the guest's storytelling approach?
If you relate to the problems that we're solving, let me show you how BizUp will help. Request a demo at bizup.com. And finally, please share. Now, this is exactly what I posted on LinkedIn. And honestly, what I posted is I didn't have too much expectations. I just wanted to let it out, to say, OK, you know what? This is what we are doing at BizUp.
This is how we started solving this particular problem. Well, here's the result. It got 66,000 views on LinkedIn organically, about 1,300 likes on six comments, 57 reports, which is very important because that helped a lot of more people find out about what we were doing. Within the span of two days, we got about 1,000 plus visits to our website.
And the demo request I had flooded in, we had 57 demo requests within just a couple of days. On this particular day, we were fully booked. And when I say we, I mean me. I was fully booked, doing all the demo sessions back to back. Some of the results that I got from that was
After that story, the people that read the story, when they got in touch for the demo sessions, I didn't have to explain what BizUp did. They had full understanding of what BizUp was doing, the problem that it was solving, and already understood how it could solve their own problems. So they came saying, oh, I... saw your post on LinkedIn.
This is the particular problem I'm also having in my company. Can you just show me exactly how BizUp solves that particular problem? And it made our sales conversations a lot easier and we've been able to close some customers already. Now, potential team members also already had a good understanding of our mission. It was clear to them the problem that we're solving.
Some of them were able to connect with us on an emotional level, like, OK, I understand the problem that you're trying to solve, and I want to be a part of that. And I got three podcast invites just as a result of sharing that story. And I got an invitation to speak here at SAS Open also as a result of sharing that particular story. Some of the things I learned. One, LinkedIn users love stories.
The posts that go viral on LinkedIn most of the time are stories. A lot of people do it the wrong way. There's a lot of exaggeration and lies. But storytelling works on LinkedIn. Now, stories don't need to be short. They just need to be interesting. So put as much content as you absolutely need to to get the point across.
There's a lot of people that say that the attention span is like that of a goldfish. But the truth is we consume content that's interesting to us. Third thing I learned is that people will share your story if you actually ask them to. So even if it's a product or company post, write that people should share the story. Because sometimes if you don't put that, some people will just not share.
Then storytelling is also an effective way to share, to explain what your product does, like I explained, right? For potential customers. And then storytelling opens amazing doors, and it definitely works for SaaS.
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