sales, affiliate-marketingI’m brainstorming ways that will grow my customer base for my new product. I have sufficient reasons to believe that I’ll have 50-100 customers in a relatively short time, based on the growth of my existing product, migration of users from it onto my new-gen product, and the overall market needs.
Unfortunately, 50-100 customers (these are primarely IT shops) is not enough to support my development team (4 devs), myself, and my part time marketing consultant, let alone hire someone to do purely sales.
Can affiliate networks help bring inbound IT professionals, or are they mostly reserved for the “coupon” crowds? If so, which ones would be good to research? Alternatively, are there services that help one with a partner-sales network/channel management?
I have other plans to bring in customers, but was wondering if some sort of commission-based service could bring a nice flow of signups?
Yes there are affiliate networks focussed on IT businesses. Check out ShareASale and Commission Junction. You can see the live affiliate page of FreshDesk Inc to see how it looks like here.
In addition you can also think about creating a partners program that shares some of the SaaS revenue. As an example, take a look at the FixNix’s partner program here.
I think having a look at Grow Sumo and Refferal SaaSquatch could help you get started for your SaaS's affiliate program.
Networks won’t help you much, I’m a former affiliate and I can say that SaaS companies use networks more for the tracking part, not as a way to find more partners simply because the quality of those who came from those networks is extremely low.
You have 2 choices:
1) Launch a partner program and start growing it by building relationships with influencers in your space, consultants, bloggers and other companies which target the same audience as you
2) Launch a referral program for customers only, but this works more in B2C where number of customers is high
As affiliate/referral tracking/management for SaaS, you can try out https://firstpromoter.com, has same features as other competitors, but 5-8x lower price
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