Does anyone have any advice on getting commitment from a potential client to purchase a SAAS product without running a free trial?

Scaling with paid/cold traffic is a very different kind of beast. Depending on your paid traffic source their motivations and behavior is different than that of a house list or affiliate / JV traffic. Usually paid (cold) traffic is more difficult to convert with a $47 initial offer. I've had success warming up this type of traffic, with clients of mine, before asking for that level of sale. There are some exceptions to the rule depending on how rabid your market is to buy, but the fitness niche is usually more skeptical. You can warm them up by starting with an email opt in to a lead magnet then present them with your $47 sales offer, theres a side benefit to this as well. The other way to warm them up is to start with a survey leading them into a customized VSL to your $47 product. There's also some major benefits here if you segment your traffic right. As far as after the initial sale in regards to the backend funnel itself my typical flow looks like this: Sales page > Up Sell #1 > Down Sell #1 > Up Sell #2 > Thank you page. However some of my clients have much more than 2 up sells in place in some funnels. The trick is that your up sells should flow logically to each other. Meaning make your first up sell a product that gets your target market to their desired solution faster and easier with the up sell. For your down sell, you can keep the same product / offer but lower the price or offer a payment plan. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.

What an awesome question! Businesses are running into this issue more frequently that ever, good news is, it can be done. Having worked on projects with oDesk, Fox Television and Wikipedia and having a very very small staff, it's certainly possible. Here's how I say it in our pitches to larger organizations: "Tractive West provides tailored video production services to organizations of all sizes. We have developed a distributed workflow using the latest digital tools. We leverage our small creative and management team with a world wide network of creative professionals, that means we can rapidly scale to meet the demands of any project while keeping our infrastructure and overhead lightweight and sustainable." Cheers and best of luck.

This is not my specialty, however, I have been in your position many many times -- maybe this will help. If the product is in-tangible, then look for JV partners on the Internet. Try to find an expert that deals with these JV opportunities (like me). If the product is physical, then look for sales organizations that have networks of sales people across the country. You do the deal with the organization and the independent network of sales people sells your product. It's a sweet setup if you can negotiate a margin that works for everyone. Hope that helps - Cheers - Nick

Generally bootstrapped startups should avoid salespeople, for a few reasons: a. they typically can't afford the base and overall comp required to attract sales people who can actually sell / or afford to support them with marketing, management, etc b. it will be very difficult to find the rare person with the right mix of sales and startup DNA along with the critical domain knowledge, consequently the startup is likely to settle c. the founders need to be very involved in the selling and customers will demand it That said, if the plan is still to hire a salesperson, find someone who has demonstrated sales success in startups and is excited by the early stage in company building. Create a comp plan heavily leveraged on sales results (unless you are in an industry where 100% commission is a common practice, would recommend against $0 base as this creates the false impression that your hire isn't passing time with one company while looking for another job with a richer comp plan - you want your rep focussed). Sell the vision and opportunity to be part of a growth story. I have written a several blog posts on hiring sales people into start-ups. You might find these useful: http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/ceo-question-should-i-learn-to-sell-or-hire-a-sales-person/ http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/start-up-sales-and-hiring-advice-dont-stop-selling-once-you-hire-your-first-sales-rep/ http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/hiring-start-up-sales-reps/ http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/startups-and-salespeople/ Good luck!

Are you the manufacturer or reseller? If you are the reseller, typically about 40-50% above cost. Use the MSRP as an indicator.