SaaS Sales Funnel - 5 Strategies To Selling SaaS (Software as a Service)

in this video i'm gonna walk you through five simple steps to sell sas software as a service and you wanna make sure you watch this video all the way through because these strategies are gonna be applicable if you are selling a sas idea that's not quite built yet and you wanna pre-sell it and it's also going to work even if you are working at a company selling an established sas product what's going on everybody it's patrick and here before we get started make sure to give this video a like subscribe and turn on notifications if

you want to see more sales training videos like this and let's go ahead and dive right in now to understand from a high level perspective the sas sales funnel essentially what we want to be thinking about is thinking our sales process as a funnel almost like a triangle right so at the top of the funnel is your first step where you're gonna obviously have more people and you try to get as many people in your funnel as possible and as you walk them through every step right there's gonna be five steps for this video well

you know you're gonna filter out more and more people until you get to the end of the funnel where people are actually qualified to buy and they end up purchasing your products and services and so this video is all about how to walk your prospects your potential customers through every step of the funnel so that you can turn a total stranger into a paying customer now at the top of the funnel right the top of this triangle is going to be lead generation so lead generation in my opinion is probably the most overlooked aspect of

sales because you know if you think about a funnel if you don't have the beginning of the funnel meaning people are not coming in as it leads you can't even walk them through any of the steps to actually do the selling process talk on the phone do a presentation close the deal negotiate you cannot do any of that without lead generation so whether you are already a proven enterprise selling an established software or if you're a startup and you're just really starting out and you haven't built anything yet you have to generate leads now for

your industry for whatever you are selling it's gonna vary a little different right for example real estate in that industry it might be easier to cold call you know real estate brokerages and real estate agents to try to sell them that way for other industries it might be better to do a cold email right in other industries like let's say if you're selling consulting services if you're installing any software or integrating anything um using linkedin and social selling might be more effective so whatever it is you are selling just know that each channel is going

to vary depending on what you're selling and who you're selling it to but what's most important is you find at least one effective form of outreach and communication to start generating those leads once you get one down you can expand but if you don't have one way to generate leads whether it's cold email linkedin or whatever well you got nothing so definitely find one that works for you first and my recommendation is to look at you know other people in your industry maybe your competitors or people who are much larger than you and see how

they're doing it chances are if it's working for them in their industry it probably can work for you too if you just kind of follow a similar route now the next step of the sas selling process is you want to qualify your prospects right because not everyone is going to be a fit to buy for example if you're sending 100 emails how do you know for sure that these people are actually going to buy from you you don't and that's why you have to get on the phone right you basically send them an email say

do you want to have a meeting you get on the phone and you qualify them before you start selling anything right so qualification is extremely important because you are basically asking a bunch of questions understanding the customer and seeing if they are a good fit to buy i'm not saying you have to force anything i'm just saying is there a fit do they have a problem that you can solve with your sas product so from a tactical level how it's going to work is you get on the phone with a prospect and you have you

know a little building report chat a little bit like oh how's the wedding over there oh where you from then you say something like hey i want to be respectful or your time so how about we go ahead and get started is that okay with you and they're going to say sure let's go ahead and get started right and that's how you start a sales meeting you just ask permission hey do you mind if we go ahead and get started obviously they're on the phone with you they're going to say yes and as you qualify

the prospect the main things you are looking for from a high level is you want to look for a couple things do they have a pain that you can solve is that pain bad enough that they're going to pay money to you to solve it okay if that's true then you want to talk about okay do they even have the budget to buy whatever it is you're offering when do they want to buy and who is going to buy meaning who are the other decision makers involved in this process and you want to get all

these questions answered during the qualification process and some people also call it the discovery phase you can kind of mix the two together where you're just learning about the prospect getting as much information as possible and by the end of the meeting your only goal is to understand hey is this person someone that should buy my product and service you're not even quite selling them quite yet you're actually just gathering information to see if they are worthy right qualified to move to the next step which moves us to step number three which is your presentations

your demonstrations and your pitches okay so i'm kind of bundling this all together now once you qualify the prospect the next step is to do some type of presentation a pitch or a demonstration to show them how you actually solve their problem what your product actually is what value you provide and to actually show them the software if you already have it built um what does it actually do what does it look like what does it feel is it easy to use right and this is where you're gonna start actually selling now the important part

to understand is before you even sell anything you have to first qualify the prospect right because if you start selling in the beginning you're not even sure if this person even cares about what you have to say but if you qualify the prospect first then suddenly everything you say in your demonstration is going to hit a lot harder because you're directly addressing the pains that you uncovered during the qualification step now in your presentation demonstration however you want to do it the main thing you want to remember is that you only want to talk about

the pain points the prospect already told you during the qualification phase if they didn't talk about those pains don't talk about it in your presentation because they actually don't care right don't talk about all the different features that you have and all the things you can do because that's not what they came for the meeting for they came to see how you can solve their problem now from my personal experience i find the best way to do a sas demonstration or presentation is actually if you're doing it remotely right whether you're like sharing your screen

and you you know talking to the person maybe with a zoom call i would share my screen and i would do a presentation probably using powerpoint or keynote and basically walk them through the pains that they had and how we solve their pains and you know why i prefer you know using a keynote or powerpoint is because uh you're using your audio using your voice and at the same time you're using visuals so you can clearly demonstrate you know the problems that you're solving it's a very simple thing right you just slide by slide and

you don't have to memorize too many things you're literally just going with the script and talking them through it now on top of that what i would also recommend and now if you have some kind of software that's very easy to use and it's fast and it's working i would use a combination of powerpoint and then also go into the software after you kind of finish your powerpoint to show them like hey you know this is how we do the thing i was talking about this is how you you know add people here and delete

people here and this and that you know depends on what you're selling right and i would show them how the software actually works so they can visualize oh this is how my life would look if i bought the software from patrick and again when you talk about the different features in your software whether it's through the powerpoint or actually going into your software and showing them live you're only going to want to talk about the things that they care about obviously you don't talk about all the different features that you have right especially if you're

working at an enterprise company and they have all these different type of features that nobody uses don't talk about those because they didn't ask for that they asked for the features that solve their problem right pain solution match it together and that's how you do your presentations now the next step of the sas selling process is you're going to want to go for the clothes or go for the next steps now typically when you're selling sas not everyone is going to buy on the spot and buy right after the demonstration right because a lot of

times if you're selling something more complicated especially if it's more enterprise or if it's quite expensive you're going to need multiple people involved in the prospect sides before they make a decision right maybe their cto cmo ceo all have to get together in the meeting to decide whether or not they should purchase a product service from you so that's why you can't always expect someone to close right there unless you're selling something that's fairly obvious very transactional and not very expensive then yeah maybe they'll buy after you do the presentation and do a demonstration however

if you're doing something very complicated it takes many people to integrate the software and things like that and they have to hire consultants and all these different things don't expect it to close because there's a lot of steps that need to happen before things actually do close so what you want to do instead is you want to understand what the next step is in the selling process for the prospect right so instead of saying like hey do you want to buy now you could say something like hey you know based on everything we're talking about

so far is there anything else you need to see before moving forward and if they have any objections you handle them right there if they say nope you know that's everything we need to see then you're like okay so it seems like you guys are interested well you know just curious to understand you know what exactly is the next step for you if you were to move forward with this now what's going to happen when you ask a question like this is the prospect is going to tell you exactly what needs to happen on their

side if they want to buy right and if they actually do want to buy they might want to buy right now but they cannot because maybe there's an approval process so they might say okay well patrick thanks for doing the presentation well usually our next step is i gotta talk to my boss about it and then we're gonna go to procurement and then we gotta talk to the tech guy to see if this is gonna work with this and that and then you know they're gonna tell you every sale is a little bit different so

they're gonna tell you what the next steps are right and then you're basically gonna ask okay interesting well how long is it going to take for you to have those conversations right when will you have those conversations and then they're going to say oh probably sometime next week and then you're going to say okay do you need me to be on that conversation to make sure that everything goes smoothly and i can answer any of those questions and they might say okay yeah that sounds pretty good patrick it'd be easier for you to do it

than me to do it so then what i would do as a salesperson is i would make a recommendation i'll say hey do you mind if i make a recommendation they'll say sure well it seems like if you need to talk to this person talk to the i.t guy and talk to this person how about we go ahead and do this we schedule a meeting with everybody me you and everyone included and we have a conversation to see whether or not this is really a good fit for everyone and that way you know you don't

have to do it by yourself and i can help answer some of the questions that maybe your boss might have the it guy might have and it'll be a lot smoother quicker and it'll save a lot of time for both of us how does that sound and the other person might say okay that sounds pretty good patrick well let me go ahead and work on getting everyone on you know on the same page and will schedule a meeting and then from there you say okay how about i go ahead and put a tentative date for

now and you're trying to get everyone on how about next week wednesday 10 a.m does that sound good with you and they're gonna say yes and then that basically closes out the presentation and moves them to the next step right and so usually for like longer deals where you know it takes multiple steps before someone closes the deal you basically have to keep doing this over and over and over until you go through every step that a company needs to go through before buying right so after all that maybe they get on the call everything

sounds good and then you ask them the same thing you know to everyone say hey is there anything else you need to see before moving forward and they're gonna say okay well we need to do this and then you basically draw up a timeline make sure both sides know and then do the thing and have another meeting and then you keep doing that until you get to a point where they're ready to close you send them the contract and that's when they sign but it isn't always that easy which leads us to the final step

which is following up so any type of sales deals you know um whether you're selling sas and enterprise startup whatever it is you know not everything goes according to plan sometimes things get delayed sometimes people it's just not at the right time in the moment or maybe they had the budget then they lost the budget then they need to wait for the budget right there's so many different things that can happen and sometimes just totally out of blue and you don't expect it so what you want to do is you want to always be following

up if though things don't go the way you want and things get off track right and as you can see the way i'm selling is i'm always creating a timeline that i understand and they understand we're on the same page working together to close the deal but when things don't go according to plan well you want to make sure that you follow up right so if someone says okay you know everything sounds good patrick but um you know our company just pulled the budget we don't have any money to buy this it anymore then i

would say okay totally understand that happens all the time right nothing we can really do about that but now i'm just curious you know in the future is this something that your company wants to do in the future and create a budget for it or is it something that they just don't care about at all and the person might say yeah we want to do this but it's just that they need money for this other project and maybe six months from now we're gonna get the budget again so then you basically schedule another meeting or

basically you could say something like okay well that totally fine how about this six months from now i'll go ahead and follow up with you maybe i'll send you an email give you a call whatever works best for you and you know we can talk about whether if you got the budget or not if you did get the budget we can kind of start things over and resume the conversation but if not totally fine because i understand if you don't have money you can't buy is that right and they're gonna say okay it sounds totally

fine so you create an opportunity for you to follow up six months from now right and that's very different from let's say you say okay thanks bye and then six months from now you give them a call out of the blue because when you tell them ahead of time that you're going to follow up following up is a lot easier because they already expect you to call them or expect your email you're almost like friends but if you're just like not setting those expectations in the beginning and you try to follow up later they're not

going to pick up your calls they're not going to respond to your email because they don't feel like they need to they never agree to it right so that's why when you follow up make sure you you know set the expectations in the beginning for your follow-up if you can and then just keep following up until something changes on their side and then when they're ready to buy again they have the budget they're ready to go you're the first person they're gonna think of to move forward and so with that said that's gonna be the

five steps to selling sas whether you're working at a startup or a large company if you enjoyed this video make sure to give it a like subscribe and turn on notifications and if you want a free training on how to start accelerate your sales career and sell anything to anyone i got a free training link is in the description so that said my name is patrick deng and i'll see you guys in the next one