In today’s SaaS landscape, salespeople have a hard path in front of them. Prospects are now in control of their buying process, as they have the resources to make decisions right at their fingers.

Picture this: You’re the founder of an early stage SaaS company. You’ve been prospecting and going after your first few clients, when all of a sudden, a massive enterprise company starts waving cash in front of you. They found you and they want to buy what you’re selling.

When you run a services business, it’s only natural to think, “You know, this would be a whole lot easier if we were a software company.”

Too many startups focus on the first S in SaaS, but they forget all about the second one. When software and service aren’t equal priorities, it’s impossible to build a successful company.

By 2018, the enterprise SaaS market is expected to increase five times over and be worth a whopping $50.8 billion in revenue, representing over a quarter of the entire worldwide enterprise application market. There’s no doubt about it: SaaS is the future of the software industry.

"When we let data drive our marketing, we all too often optimize for things that are easy to measure, not necessarily what matters most." — Ezra Fishman Too many startups focus on the numbers, rather than the people behind the numbers.

At Close, we know how to sell SaaS. We began as Elastic, Inc., an outsourced sales solution for Silicon Valley startups. After we developed Close for internal use, we pivoted and began to sell our inside sales software to SaaS sales teams.

MicroConf is the conference for self-funded startups and single founder software companies. That's why Steli gave a talk at MicroConf on how to build your own SaaS sales machine if you don't have piles of money from venture capitalists lying around.