Are you struggling to get enough and quality leads for your SaaS marketing team? Well, there is a lot that any business should do if it wants to make an impression on prospects and increase conversion rates.
If you want to convert more leads into deals as a SaaS company, you will need the right sales funnel, sales model, and strategy, for that matter. You also have you improve the quality of your marketing and customer outreach.
This article focuses more on creating the best sales funnel for selling SaaS products and services.
What is a SaaS Sales Funnel?
This is the simplest definition of sales funnels for SaaS: It is a visual representation of the customer journey from knowing about your business to that point when they make a purchase. A typical sales funnel consists of marketing and sales. It comprises the journey of attracting new customers to closing deals.
Your marketing and sales team can understand how and when deals or drop-offs happen once you have the right sales funnel in place. They will also know when it is okay to follow up on prospects. That is having the metrics and skills to determine which of your prospects are more interested in the products you are offering.
In most cases, the SaaS sales funnel looks like an inverted pyramid. It represents the conversion rate at each of the stages. The sales funnel tends to narrow more as users discontinue their journey and are disqualified.
Related: B2B SaaS Business Model: Complete Guide
How To Build The Right SaaS Sales Funnel
Having the right SaaS sales funnel is one of the easiest ways to improve how users can access your app and, in so doing, increase your sales. If your company is offering a SaaS app, then having a trackable, repeatable, and scalable sales funnel is a step that you should consider taking.
It may sound easy for you, but that is not the case. Creating the right sales funnel is where most SaaS companies fail. It has a direct impact on revenue, making it even tricky to design an ideal one for your business.
Therefore, you must consider where your company is in app development when creating a sales funnel.
Related: Best B2B SaaS KPIs & Metrics
These are some of the steps you should take when you’re building a sales funnel for your SaaS Company:
Stage #1: Understand What Your Ideal Customers Want
Today customers are more informed than before – they are bombarded with a lot of info. They have limitless options to choose from when buying a SaaS product or service. Therefore, when choosing a sales funnel, you should realize that you will not sell to anybody out there but those who’ve shown interest in your product.
In a recent study, it’s been shown that 75% of B2B find it difficult to choose a marketing tactic that can drive growth. In most cases, users will get turned away when they see irrelevant information like ads, promotions, and articles.
When you have ineffective marketing and sales strategy, you are likely to turn off most prospects. With ineffective customer targeting, your business will be wasting resources and pushing away customers. This leads to reputational damage in the long run.
Related: B2B SaaS Content Marketing Strategy Guide
Stage #2: Choosing The Right Funnel Stage
The second step to creating the right sales funnel is identifying and choosing the right funnel stages. Make it a top priority to establish a user base.
Most of your customers must be paying for the product or service you are offering if you want your recurring revenue business model to be effective. Lay a clear path to conversion for any sales lead, which means having the right sales funnel in place.
At the heart of reliable and effective customer acquisition is a good sales funnel. You have to master customer acquisition as a business.
You also have to master the art of reducing your business churn rate and create sustainable sales growth. The following are some of the stages you may want to implement in your business, although they differ according to your business size.
- Appointment: This step involves making an introductory call. You have to ensure the prospects your marketing team is engaged with have shown interest in your products. Find out if the people your teams engage with are a good fit for your business.
- Qualified to buy: This point involves ascertaining if the business goals and the operational needs align with the product’s functionalities. The lead is considered a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) if this is the case.
- Pitch and demos: Once you confirm that your product is the right fit for your prospect, ensure the prospects are informed about that. You can achieve this by sending prospects a demo or pitch with relevant educational content. The demo and pitch should focus more on offering clear solutions to the prospects’ problems.
- Proposal: At this point, the contract and proposal content prepared to the customer or prospect can undertake the trial. It may be a paid trial allowing the prospect or user to see how the product you are offering functions.
- Closed won: the prospect now has a full understanding of the product you are offering. They are more informed about your brand and are willing to convert. It is now the responsibility of the sales professional to close the deal and make the prospect a customer or user.
- Close lost: Sometimes, a customer may decide that the product you are offering is not ideal for them. In this case, they pursue other options, and that means they become closed lost.
Related: Best B2B SaaS SEO Tools
Stage #3: Choosing a CRM That Suits Your Business
This stage involves choosing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that works better for your business. It is not easy to keep track of all leads if you have a marketing team consistently directing leads to you. You will need software that can do that work for you automatically.
The CRM should ascertain which leads have been closed and which ones are yet to be contacted. It should also establish the roadmaps and sales pipeline. This saves time for the sales teams and ensures the continuity of users. In most cases, people don’t like to repeat themselves, which sounds even worse for the case of sales professionals.
If you want to move smoothly through your sales funnel and keep track of all leads, you need a CRM designed for that work. Some of the best CRMs in the market at the moment include Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk Sell, and HubSpot.
Related: Native Advertising For B2B SaaS Businesses
Stage #4: What Metrics Are You Going To Track?
The fourth stage should involve choosing or determining the metrics you want to track. Essential metrics you should track in your business include closed deals and the revenue from each deal.
However, there are other metrics you should also equip yourself with. Some of these metrics include:
- Average deal size: How much are you looking forward to making in every closed deal? Do not overestimate the figure. Be realistic because this will help you keep all the other metrics in place.
- Revenue target: What is your target revenue in this financial year? You can estimate the amount you would like to make before the end of this year as a business.
- Conversion rate: What are your prospects’ conversion rates? That is how many leads you can convert. You can choose a different conversion rate optimization (CRO) if you feel like your conversions are low.
- Number of leads: You should determine the number of leads your marketing and sales team will need to get at the top of the sales funnel by the end of this financial year.
Stage #5: Set Clear Goals For Moving Leads To Customer Acquisition
Once you’ve determined the metrics to track, you can leverage the right data for setting those targets. You can do your math to determine how many sales your team expects to make and how many pitches and demos they will need to achieve their goals.
It is easy for everyone in your business to move leads through the funnel efficiently if the teams and individuals can differentiate between personal and organizational goals.
When you outline an individual’s target and organization goals, it is much easier for everyone to pull together, move leads through the funnel efficiently, and get the right acquisitions that your business needs to grow.
Related: Marketing Agency Directories To Get You The Best Leads
Stage #6: Align Sales And Marketing
The last stage in developing a SaaS sales funnel should involve aligning sales and marketing departments in your organization. When individuals and teams in your business are working on their own KPIs without knowing how they affect other departments, it’s not easy to achieve your goals as a company.
All teams in your organization should understand the KIPs they are dealing with and focus on ensuring alignment between sales and marketing. For instance, if the sales team has set a metric that needs 10 SQLs in a week, the marketing team should know what they can do to generate those leads.
To improve the overall quality of the sales funnel, the sales team needs to feed quality leads to the marketing department. It is easy to accomplish this if the sales and marketing team are collaborating and communicating regularly.
Related: Best B2B SaaS Content Marketing Tools
Why Do SaaS Companies Need B2B Sales To Funnel?
A sales and marketing funnel is one of the most critical assets for any SaaS company. It combines sales and marketing, which are central to driving and acquiring new customers to any business. Marketing drives prospects to the industry while sales help to convert them to customers.
Without a marketing strategy, it is almost impossible to drive customers to your business. You won’t be able to inform customers of how your business can solve their problems. While marketing seeks to educate prospects on how the product fits their problems, sales will mainly focus on nurturing them and closing the sales process.
Companies that nurture their leads with the right sales funnel generate 50% more sales and incur 33% lower costs. A business can reach leads at every point of the decision-making process when it has the right sales funnel in place.
How To Optimize Your Sales Funnel
A sales funnel has three basic parts; the top, middle, and bottom. These distinct parts of the sales funnel require different actions if you want to achieve growth in sales. Here is what you should do to optimize your sales funnel:
Top Of The Funnel (TOFU)
At this point of your sales funnel, you should only use content related to your customers’ problems. Some of the content you can use to optimize your sales funnel include explainer videos, blog posts, lead magnets, and how-to guides.
At this stage, the prospect is still learning more about your business, and educating them should be your focus.
Middle Of The Funnel (MOFU)
At this level, the prospect begins to evaluate their specific solutions based on what they learn at the top stage. You can use content like demos, case studies, and presentations to win the prospects and convert them easily.
The prospect is not likely to engage with your sales team at this stage because they are still researching more about the product and consulting with other departments in the organization.
Bottom Of Funnel
This is the last part of any sales funnel. If you want to optimize your sales funnel at this point, you should use content like comparison tables, testimonials, and reviews.
Offer a strong CTA at this point because some prospects may now be willing to buy the product you are selling.
Final Thoughts
If you want to understand what is working and what is not ideal for your business, you need a sales funnel. You can see where the leads drop out of the sales funnel; you can choose the ideal time to follow up on leads and the best strategy to convert prospects to customers.
Creating the right sales funnel should not be that difficult if you have this guide at your reach. Follow the tips outlined here and make the marketing and sales funnel an asset in your business for growth.
