Marketing Your SaaS With A Self Liquidating Offer (Funded Proposal)

Iszuddin Ismail

Have you considered the Self Liquidating Offer (also known as Funded Proposal) approach to marketing your SaaS?

If you are thinking, "Will Self Liquidating Offer work for SaaS?" -- I will later show a brilliant example that works really well for this particular SaaS owner. It works so well that it rivals other competitors in the field all with better funding and investors, when he's mostly bootstrapped, and only received one time $1 million funding. In comparison, his competitors received funding in the 8-figure range.

I graduated with Computer Science degree. And I dabbled with internet marketing in my early career days. One concept that I was introduced to was this self liquidating offer or the funded proposal.

Before I tell you what it is, let me tell you what it will do for you, as a bootstrapped SaaS owner :

  • If you lack funds and marketing budget -- this will solve that.
  • If you need to generate leads for your business -- this will solve that too.

What if you have unlimited funds for marketing, to generate new fresh leads for your SaaS business? And with each leads that you generate, you know that X% will convert into a paying subscriber. If you have that, how long will run that? That is what a Self Liquidating Offer can do for you.

If you read this until the end, I will give you a real live example of SaaS that is killing it using the Self Liquidating Offer strategy.

So what is a Self Liquidating Offer?

Let's consider your situation. You have built an awesome SaaS product. The next step is marketing and getting clients to use it. The challenge is that you don't have the money for marketing and sales people. 

At this point, you should already know who your potential customers are and perhaps developed some user personas. Based on that, you should know what drives them, their interests, and what their buttons are. Perhaps you also have some knowledge on how to help your prospects in their business or career. 

With that in mind, and your knowledge, you offer that information in the form of an info-product. This can be a book, an ebook, an online video course, a cheatsheet, or anything else like that.

And in that info-product, you can relate it back to your SaaS to further help with gain faster results.

But you don't giveaway this product for free -- you sell it.

Let me give you some examples :

If your SaaS is a CRM for tailors, maybe you can create a video course that helps tailors get more clients and organize their business operations. And for best result, they need to use a CRM software -- and you introduce them yours.

If your SaaS is an image creation automation tool for online advertising agency, you can create an online course on how they can increase productivity with some business organization tips, marketing strategy and using online software. This way they can handle more clients with lesser employees. And the would increase their profit margin, that would directly effect their bottom line. Of course, you introduce them your SaaS where they can create banner ads, graphics, social media content faster compared to manually creating them one by one using Photoshop.

How do you get traffic to this offer? You advertise.

Now your product has to be so good, and priced so low, it would almost feels stupid if your prospects did not buy it. This would increase your conversion drastically. And you should be at least breaking even, or better yet, see profits in this product sale.

But the goal doesn't end here. The sale of your product is so that you generate enough sales to continue advertising the product.

And your info-product will then convince your prospects that your SaaS is the best solution if they want the result that you were talking about.

If you think about it in another way -- consider your info-product like a really long sales copy for your SaaS. But this time, instead of paying (advertising for leads) people to read it, they pay you to read your sales copy.

Infinite Advertising Budget for Qualified, Laser-Targeted Leads for Your SaaS

But let's step back for a while here -- what have you created?

You have created a sales funnel that generates qualified, targeted leads for your SaaS business.

Everyone of those customers that bought your info-product is the exact customer that should be using your SaaS. And because they bought your info-product, they have shown :

  • They are working in your targeted industry
  • They are willing to spend money
  • They are a great lead for your software

And what's more is this -- they are not your cold, stranger leads or some random email addresses that you bought off the Internet. These are hot leads that has warmed up to you. They know who you are. They know your story, and to some level has trusted your recommendations. So why not recommend them your SaaS.

Let's work out the math. Let say you spent $1000 to send 1000 visitors to info-product website. And because it is such a good offer, and priced so low, just $19, you get 200 new customers there. Remember, the offer has to be so great that it is a no-brainer. With 200 sales at $19, that is $3,800. And from that 200 customers, 50 of them becomes your SaaS clients.

What is 50 SaaS customers worth to you? Let's just put a number. Maybe all of them signed up for your annual package at $200 per year. You just made $10,000 right there.

Don't forget that you still made another $3,800 through your info-product.

Let's just put all that back into the advertising budget. That would probably bring in another 3,800 visitors. And then, 760 info-product customers with $14,440 in sales. And then that 760 info-product customers turn into 190 SaaS customers. Another $38,000 in sale.

Now, how long can you keep doing this?

Indefinitely -- that's right!

OK, you spent $1,000 and got your $10,000 in SaaS subscription.

If you think that is too good to be true, then maybe consider these. You spent $1,000 in advertising :

  • if it was only 50% effective, you still made $5,000 in SaaS subscription
  • if it was only 25% effective, you still made $2,500 in SaaS subscription
  • even if it was 10% effective, you still made $1,000 in SaaS subscription, but you would probably still have made some money from your info-product sales to put back into your advertising budget

Tweaking & Optimizing for More Profits

If you are making sales on the info-product and the SaaS subscription, no matter how big or how small -- you know that it works.

The next step is about tweaking and optimizing for more profits.

First identify where your conversion could have probably been better.

  • Are people clicking on your ads?
  • Are they buying the info-product?
  • Are they consuming your info-product?
  • Are they converting to become your SaaS customers after consuming your info-product?

If you track these conversions well, you know the places where you need to improve on.

  • Are you targeting the right audience for your ads?
  • Do you probably need better ad creatives?
  • Is the copywriting and offer on your info-product landing page good enough?
  • Are you recommending your SaaS in the right way? Can it be better?
  • Or is it the your SaaS landing page itself? Design? Copywriting?

Checking out all these will definitely convert more traffic into customers.

Example of SaaS Adopting Self Liquidating Offer in Their Marketing

I get it if you are still not convinced.

Let me tell you about a SaaS that grew its revenue to $160 million in 2022 alone using this strategy. And they only received a seed funding of $1 million when they started back in 2019. To put that into perspective, their competitors raised over $10 millions in funding and is no where near $100 million in annual revenue.

The SaaS that pulled of self liquidating offer so eloquently is none other than Clickfunnels.com founded by Russell Brunson. 

If you pay a close attention to Clickfunnels and their marketing, you almost never see Russell promote Clickfunnels. But Russell launched a series of self-liquidating offers by offering free books (pay for shipping model) like Traffic Secrets, Expert Secrets, Dotcom Secrets and more.

Each of these books has valuable marketing wisdom in them. And each one will indoctrinate you with the importance of building a funnel for your online business. And coming for Russell himself, he will tell you that Clickfunnels is the best way to build online sales funnels.

So... is it time to take another look at Self Liquidating Offer?

 

 

 

You should also read: