(2022) B2B SaaS Sales A Complete Guide
Denis Shatalin
Founder of Saas Camp
SaaS has revolutionized the way businesses operate. I work closely with founders who have transformed their SaaS startups into global brands, by helping them understand how to provide value to their clients.
I use a scalable system that questions and defines all the things your SaaS brand needs to start working with large corporations and industry leaders. Better yet, I’m going to share that exact system with you below.
If you want to grow your SaaS brand with a simple sales strategy and scalable systems, follow this complete guide on B2B SaaS sales based on years of experience, failure, testing, and success.
I use a scalable system that questions and defines all the things your SaaS brand needs to start working with large corporations and industry leaders. Better yet, I’m going to share that exact system with you below.
If you want to grow your SaaS brand with a simple sales strategy and scalable systems, follow this complete guide on B2B SaaS sales based on years of experience, failure, testing, and success.
Define your SaaS offering
Identifying exactly what your solution is, who your target customer is, and how your offering can help this customer is key to any successful SaaS sales strategy.
B2B SaaS sales is a buyers market, competition is high and business owners are bombarded with digital solutions for their business.
Understanding what your SaaS provides from the point of view of your user will allow you to clearly and concisely display your value proposition.
Any incongruity between your offering and your real-life solution will hamper your strategy, processes, onboarding, and user retention further down the line.
B2B SaaS sales is a buyers market, competition is high and business owners are bombarded with digital solutions for their business.
Understanding what your SaaS provides from the point of view of your user will allow you to clearly and concisely display your value proposition.
Any incongruity between your offering and your real-life solution will hamper your strategy, processes, onboarding, and user retention further down the line.
Perfect your value proposition
Once you’ve defined your offering you need to translate exactly how your SaaS can help businesses grow their sales.
You’ll need to use empathy and have a deep understanding of your customer's problems to refine your value proposition.
I recommend using a professional copywriter and feedback from your target market to ensure your value proposition clearly communicates what your SaaS does and how it helps the user.
This example of a B2B SaaS landing page from Churnkey shows exactly what it can offer its users. Striking headline, clear explanation, and even a statistic to emphasize the value it provides.
If you need help perfecting your landing pages check out my guide on building SaaS landing pages that convert.
You’ll need to use empathy and have a deep understanding of your customer's problems to refine your value proposition.
I recommend using a professional copywriter and feedback from your target market to ensure your value proposition clearly communicates what your SaaS does and how it helps the user.
This example of a B2B SaaS landing page from Churnkey shows exactly what it can offer its users. Striking headline, clear explanation, and even a statistic to emphasize the value it provides.
If you need help perfecting your landing pages check out my guide on building SaaS landing pages that convert.
How to create a B2B SaaS Sales strategy
With your value proposition defined you’re ready to start generating B2B leads for your SaaS.
A B2B SaaS sales strategy consists of campaigns across different marketing channels, all with the aim of generating awareness and leads for your SaaS brand.
By defining your sales strategy at an early stage you can set clear goals and targets to monitor the success of individual campaigns.
Choose Your Marketing Channels
Your sales strategy should include some if not all of the following marketing channels.
Networking and events
Going out and meeting potential customers in the real world at industry events and gatherings. Often overlooked by SaaS brands, this is a great opportunity.
But, to be good at B2B SaaS sales networking you need to define who you want to be talking to right away. If you’re going to events and talking to everyone, there is a strong likelihood you’ll waste time speaking to people who aren’t qualified. So, always define your ideal customer before venturing into the networking space.
Also, sharpen up your networking skills if you can. Books like "How to Win Friends and Influence People" are great starting points to develop your interpersonal toolkit.
If you can’t seem to find the time to go to the necessary events, you can always utilize someone else’s network by creating a SaaS affiliate program.
Cold outreach
Sending carefully crafted email campaigns to your target customers with a sales team retargeting with calls or follow-up emails can produce great results in a short time span. This is ideal if you’re trying to get your first users.
Cold outreach is still and will always be an effective B2B Saas sales strategy regardless of who your customers are. It’s not uncommon to believe cold outreach is dead, but it’s far from that. You just need to be strategic.
Follow-up is king with cold outreach, especially when your first touchpoint is an email. This means you need to have your sales team immediately following-up with any leads that interact with your campaigns. Never leave a potential lead lingering for too long.
Once you have them in a conversation, you can start pushing them further down your sales funnel all the way to the close.
PPC campaigns
PPC (pay per click) campaigns let you hone down on your audience. They’re expensive but they give clear measurable data.
The great thing about adding PPC campaigns to your B2B SaaS sales strategy is you can capture attention at the perfect time. This is particularly true with Google Ads.
As Google is an intent-driven platform, there’ll be potential customers searching for your product or investigating topics around the problem you solve. This allows you to place an ad in front of them that can provide an instant solution. Makes sense doesn’t it?
And when you combine PPC with content marketing and SEO, you create a deadly SaaS sales strategy that covers multiple angles. As you’ll be capturing attention across multiple digital channels.
Content marketing
SaaS content marketing involves solving problems with carefully curated content that fits users perfectly into your sales process. In the world of B2B Saas sales, it is a tried and tested mechanism for pulling in new customers.
With the large number of platforms that exist, you need to be creating targeted content that speaks to your ideal customer. This could be through several different media types, such as videos, blogs, or podcasts.
The real trouble with content marketing is it takes a while to create. If you’re a SaaS founder trying to get the wheels turning, you might lack the time needed to produce content. But, you can use repurposing to create one piece of content and have it chopped and changed to suit multiple platforms at once. Which can save you and your team time and resources.
A great example of a SaaS company utilizing content marketing is Hubspot. They pioneered the approach and now have a huge number of content assets that generate leads every month like clockwork.
A B2B SaaS sales strategy consists of campaigns across different marketing channels, all with the aim of generating awareness and leads for your SaaS brand.
By defining your sales strategy at an early stage you can set clear goals and targets to monitor the success of individual campaigns.
Choose Your Marketing Channels
Your sales strategy should include some if not all of the following marketing channels.
Networking and events
Going out and meeting potential customers in the real world at industry events and gatherings. Often overlooked by SaaS brands, this is a great opportunity.
But, to be good at B2B SaaS sales networking you need to define who you want to be talking to right away. If you’re going to events and talking to everyone, there is a strong likelihood you’ll waste time speaking to people who aren’t qualified. So, always define your ideal customer before venturing into the networking space.
Also, sharpen up your networking skills if you can. Books like "How to Win Friends and Influence People" are great starting points to develop your interpersonal toolkit.
If you can’t seem to find the time to go to the necessary events, you can always utilize someone else’s network by creating a SaaS affiliate program.
Cold outreach
Sending carefully crafted email campaigns to your target customers with a sales team retargeting with calls or follow-up emails can produce great results in a short time span. This is ideal if you’re trying to get your first users.
Cold outreach is still and will always be an effective B2B Saas sales strategy regardless of who your customers are. It’s not uncommon to believe cold outreach is dead, but it’s far from that. You just need to be strategic.
Follow-up is king with cold outreach, especially when your first touchpoint is an email. This means you need to have your sales team immediately following-up with any leads that interact with your campaigns. Never leave a potential lead lingering for too long.
Once you have them in a conversation, you can start pushing them further down your sales funnel all the way to the close.
PPC campaigns
PPC (pay per click) campaigns let you hone down on your audience. They’re expensive but they give clear measurable data.
The great thing about adding PPC campaigns to your B2B SaaS sales strategy is you can capture attention at the perfect time. This is particularly true with Google Ads.
As Google is an intent-driven platform, there’ll be potential customers searching for your product or investigating topics around the problem you solve. This allows you to place an ad in front of them that can provide an instant solution. Makes sense doesn’t it?
And when you combine PPC with content marketing and SEO, you create a deadly SaaS sales strategy that covers multiple angles. As you’ll be capturing attention across multiple digital channels.
Content marketing
SaaS content marketing involves solving problems with carefully curated content that fits users perfectly into your sales process. In the world of B2B Saas sales, it is a tried and tested mechanism for pulling in new customers.
With the large number of platforms that exist, you need to be creating targeted content that speaks to your ideal customer. This could be through several different media types, such as videos, blogs, or podcasts.
The real trouble with content marketing is it takes a while to create. If you’re a SaaS founder trying to get the wheels turning, you might lack the time needed to produce content. But, you can use repurposing to create one piece of content and have it chopped and changed to suit multiple platforms at once. Which can save you and your team time and resources.
A great example of a SaaS company utilizing content marketing is Hubspot. They pioneered the approach and now have a huge number of content assets that generate leads every month like clockwork.
SEO
SEO involves using search engine optimization to increase your visibility on search engines for keywords relevant to your SaaS.
SEO is a slow burner but can be an invaluable marketing channel to add early in your SaaS sales strategy. The sooner you start producing keyword-targeted content on your website, the more time you give search engines to index it and start showing it for searches.
One excellent aspect of SEO is that once you have a good ranking, you won’t have to pay for any of the traffic and leads you get from it. It’s all organic. So, you can rank once and reap the benefits for as long as you hold that position.
Better yet, SEO involves targeting terms that your target customers are already searching. This allows you to place your SaaS company right in front of potential customers when they need a solution to a problem.
Social media
This involves marketing your B2B SaaS on social media platforms. Often referred to as ‘social selling’, it’s less effective for B2B but still a powerful tool.
If you do want to use social selling as a B2B SaaS company, LinkedIn is going to be the perfect platform. The trouble is it’s expensive to advertise and it can be difficult to go viral due to how the platform restricts reach depending on your network size.
Use the Network You Already Have
If you’re just starting out, work backwards, starting from what you already have. If potential customers are already within your network, reach out to them about your new tool.
In fact, reaching out to existing customers is usually cheaper and yields better conversion rates. Think about it, these people have already bought from you, so they trust you enough to hand over their money. If you have something new to offer them, send them a message or give them a call.
Saying that, if you’re following-up with customers and have a clear strategy for managing customer success, these should be easy closes.
Focus on One Sales Channel At the Start
Despite all the options when it comes to marketing and lead gen channels, it can be overwhelming trying to juggle them all at once.
With this in mind, focus on one sales channel until you gain enough traction to start focusing on a new one. Otherwise, a scattershot approach can look clumsy and amateurish. You don’t want to look like a headless chicken running around, not knowing what to do next.
Implement a Feedback System for Lost Leads
The truth is, you’re not going to have a 100% close rate throughout the entire sales process - some people are going to drop off. But, these lost leads shouldnt be forgotten, they should be followed-up for feedback.
Lost leads can provide valuable insights into why people fall through the cracks in your cycle. These could include:
When leads start becoming unresponsive to your marketing and sales, reach out asking why they didn’t call you back or why they didn’t want to follow-through with a purchase. Although some won’t reply, others will and you’ll receive eye-opening feedback on how you can tighten up your b2b sales process.
Always be Optimizing
An effective strategy will drive qualified leads directly into different stages of your sales cycle. By optimizing and reducing your acquisition costs throughout your sales strategy you drive up your ROI on marketing.
The best way to start optimizing your B2B SaaS sales strategy is by understanding your KPIs. These include metrics like click-through rate (CTR), cost per mille (CPM), and cost per lead (CPL). What these metrics will do is tell you what sections in your sales cycle are leaking customers so you can start patching the holes.
Comb through your B2B sale strategy and identify where KPIs aren’t looking too great and start performing A/B tests on landing pages or marketing material. You can change the messaging, the layout, or the offer. Just make sure to focus on one change at a time so you can reliably attribute the results.
SEO involves using search engine optimization to increase your visibility on search engines for keywords relevant to your SaaS.
SEO is a slow burner but can be an invaluable marketing channel to add early in your SaaS sales strategy. The sooner you start producing keyword-targeted content on your website, the more time you give search engines to index it and start showing it for searches.
One excellent aspect of SEO is that once you have a good ranking, you won’t have to pay for any of the traffic and leads you get from it. It’s all organic. So, you can rank once and reap the benefits for as long as you hold that position.
Better yet, SEO involves targeting terms that your target customers are already searching. This allows you to place your SaaS company right in front of potential customers when they need a solution to a problem.
Social media
This involves marketing your B2B SaaS on social media platforms. Often referred to as ‘social selling’, it’s less effective for B2B but still a powerful tool.
If you do want to use social selling as a B2B SaaS company, LinkedIn is going to be the perfect platform. The trouble is it’s expensive to advertise and it can be difficult to go viral due to how the platform restricts reach depending on your network size.
Use the Network You Already Have
If you’re just starting out, work backwards, starting from what you already have. If potential customers are already within your network, reach out to them about your new tool.
In fact, reaching out to existing customers is usually cheaper and yields better conversion rates. Think about it, these people have already bought from you, so they trust you enough to hand over their money. If you have something new to offer them, send them a message or give them a call.
Saying that, if you’re following-up with customers and have a clear strategy for managing customer success, these should be easy closes.
Focus on One Sales Channel At the Start
Despite all the options when it comes to marketing and lead gen channels, it can be overwhelming trying to juggle them all at once.
With this in mind, focus on one sales channel until you gain enough traction to start focusing on a new one. Otherwise, a scattershot approach can look clumsy and amateurish. You don’t want to look like a headless chicken running around, not knowing what to do next.
Implement a Feedback System for Lost Leads
The truth is, you’re not going to have a 100% close rate throughout the entire sales process - some people are going to drop off. But, these lost leads shouldnt be forgotten, they should be followed-up for feedback.
Lost leads can provide valuable insights into why people fall through the cracks in your cycle. These could include:
- Lack of clarity on landing pages
- Poor objection handling
- Too much friction during the sales process
When leads start becoming unresponsive to your marketing and sales, reach out asking why they didn’t call you back or why they didn’t want to follow-through with a purchase. Although some won’t reply, others will and you’ll receive eye-opening feedback on how you can tighten up your b2b sales process.
Always be Optimizing
An effective strategy will drive qualified leads directly into different stages of your sales cycle. By optimizing and reducing your acquisition costs throughout your sales strategy you drive up your ROI on marketing.
The best way to start optimizing your B2B SaaS sales strategy is by understanding your KPIs. These include metrics like click-through rate (CTR), cost per mille (CPM), and cost per lead (CPL). What these metrics will do is tell you what sections in your sales cycle are leaking customers so you can start patching the holes.
Comb through your B2B sale strategy and identify where KPIs aren’t looking too great and start performing A/B tests on landing pages or marketing material. You can change the messaging, the layout, or the offer. Just make sure to focus on one change at a time so you can reliably attribute the results.
The B2B SaaS sales cycle
The sales cycle refers to the process by which a lead is turned into a customer. This can take much longer in B2B sales where purchases can require several decision makers.
A great B2B SaaS sales cycle should have the following:
I really can’t emphasize how important the close is here. Sales strategies cost money and B2B software sales is an expensive niche to operate in.
If you need help perfecting any stage of the SaaS sales cycle or unlocking a tested, proven closing method head over to SaaS Camp.
A great B2B SaaS sales cycle should have the following:
- Sales strategy driving consistent but measured leads - Your sales strategy should match your ability to sell. If the later stages of your sales cycle have limitations, ensure you don’t overload your sales team.
- Qualification processes - Great SaaS brands work with businesses they know they can help. Create a system to evaluate where leads fall into your ICP (ideal customer profile) and identify your tolerances outside it.
- Live demos - Demos showcasing how your SaaS can help someone’s business in real-time are sales gold. Demonstrating your value proposition by physically or virtually demoing with decision-makers is often a deal closer.
- A strong close - Any sales cycle requires a strong close. Digital sales funnel or face-to-face meeting your close will make or break your whole business.
I really can’t emphasize how important the close is here. Sales strategies cost money and B2B software sales is an expensive niche to operate in.
If you need help perfecting any stage of the SaaS sales cycle or unlocking a tested, proven closing method head over to SaaS Camp.
Sometimes selling SaaS requires a human touch
The SaaS industry as a whole is notorious for leaning on landing pages, email campaigns, PPC, and digital marketing. The thought of talking to customers is daunting for some, but a real human connection can go a long way in B2B software sales.
As Paul Graham famously wrote, do things that don’t scale. Go out there and make sure you have a pulse on the market, including what your first SaaS customers want, the issues that people have with your direct competitors, and the positioning that can effectively lead you to your target customers.
Physical or virtual, the main goal of any customer communication should be to truly understand their problem and make it your goal to solve. As a new SaaS founder, you need to be on the ground and do the selling, until you can hire someone to do it better than you.
At the same time, I also recommend incentivizing your client base, friends, and fans of your work to refer your SaaS platform to everyone else. Offering them a generous commission rate might even encourage word-of-mouth referrals!
As Paul Graham famously wrote, do things that don’t scale. Go out there and make sure you have a pulse on the market, including what your first SaaS customers want, the issues that people have with your direct competitors, and the positioning that can effectively lead you to your target customers.
Physical or virtual, the main goal of any customer communication should be to truly understand their problem and make it your goal to solve. As a new SaaS founder, you need to be on the ground and do the selling, until you can hire someone to do it better than you.
At the same time, I also recommend incentivizing your client base, friends, and fans of your work to refer your SaaS platform to everyone else. Offering them a generous commission rate might even encourage word-of-mouth referrals!
Perfect your SaaS sales onboarding
Onboarding is key to any great sales cycle. The experience a user receives after becoming a customer should mirror or exceed the previous.
Migration is going to be a key factor and reducing any friction with day-to-day operations is paramount.
Provide 1-1 support for activation and configuration of your SaaS. Smooth uptake of your solution and applications will be key to maintaining customers in the future.
Understand your highest-paying customer segments and most lucrative onboarding flows. For instance, Ghost managed to increase their conversions by 1000% just by optimizing the flow for their highest-paying customers.
Migration is going to be a key factor and reducing any friction with day-to-day operations is paramount.
Provide 1-1 support for activation and configuration of your SaaS. Smooth uptake of your solution and applications will be key to maintaining customers in the future.
Understand your highest-paying customer segments and most lucrative onboarding flows. For instance, Ghost managed to increase their conversions by 1000% just by optimizing the flow for their highest-paying customers.
Focus on user retention and upselling
Hold on to your customers, they have untold value as ambassadors and provide you with invaluable data about the people that use your SaaS.
Your customers are the most valuable data you have, your sales strategy should be constantly molded to target characteristics displayed by your users.
At the same time, you also need to create a pricing model that encourages up/crossells without being too scummy. After all, if your customers want to 10x their product usage by using more of a tool, let them! LowFruits’s credit-based pricing model is a great example of this. If customers want to make more searches, they’ll just have to pay for more credits!
Your customers are the most valuable data you have, your sales strategy should be constantly molded to target characteristics displayed by your users.
At the same time, you also need to create a pricing model that encourages up/crossells without being too scummy. After all, if your customers want to 10x their product usage by using more of a tool, let them! LowFruits’s credit-based pricing model is a great example of this. If customers want to make more searches, they’ll just have to pay for more credits!
Focus on upselling to clients that are already happy with what you have to offer. Reply urgently to those that want to do more business with you. Create a sales script to systemize the process.
In fact, according to the Pacific Crest SaaS Survey, it costs 68% more to get $1 from a new customer than to upsell, and 9x more costly to acquire new customers than to retain current ones.
Feedback from your customers is the best way to improve your brand as a whole.
I’m guilty of not listening to user feedback and it nearly cost me my start-up. In the end, it was the personal relationships I’d built with my users that saved my brand. Learn from my mistakes and my success, listen to feedback, build relationships, and adapt your offering.
In fact, according to the Pacific Crest SaaS Survey, it costs 68% more to get $1 from a new customer than to upsell, and 9x more costly to acquire new customers than to retain current ones.
Feedback from your customers is the best way to improve your brand as a whole.
I’m guilty of not listening to user feedback and it nearly cost me my start-up. In the end, it was the personal relationships I’d built with my users that saved my brand. Learn from my mistakes and my success, listen to feedback, build relationships, and adapt your offering.
How to monitor your B2B SaaS sales from start to finish
Tracking the performance of your whole sales cycle will highlight potential weak spots and areas that can be improved.
I’ll give you a brief overview of some of the KPIs you should be tracking for the SaaS sales cycle stages.
Sales strategy
Depending on your marketing channels you’ll want to track some key pieces of data surrounding lead acquisition. PPC, social media, and SEO provide great data on how many people see and click on your ads or pages.
https://twitter.com/dagorenouf/status/1521510711331110914
Qualification, demos, closing
All of these stages should organically roll on to the next until the eventual close. I always monitor any loss of interest throughout this process. Leads going cold or consistent sticking points. Identify where you’re losing leads and plug the gap. Getting feedback from users who left during the sales cycle is hard but they normally hold the answer to your issues.
I’ll give you a brief overview of some of the KPIs you should be tracking for the SaaS sales cycle stages.
Sales strategy
Depending on your marketing channels you’ll want to track some key pieces of data surrounding lead acquisition. PPC, social media, and SEO provide great data on how many people see and click on your ads or pages.
- For PPC I like to track CPC (cost per click) and conversion rate when they reach my ad (how many people actually take action on my landing page). I focus on tracking particular keywords for SEO and monitoring my position on search engine pages for search terms that relate to my SaaS.
- For social, I like to track the number of prospects that have DM’ed me or found me online through search. Salesy content on Twitter or LinkedIn gets low engagement, so I recommend just having fun and providing value by building in public and sharing memes. Just follow Dagobert Renouf for a masterclass on meme marketing, which he utilized to grow Logoloy. It’s fun, silly, and, most importantly, damn lucrative.
https://twitter.com/dagorenouf/status/1521510711331110914
- For SEO, track your conversions for pages that get reliable traffic. As a starting SaaS founder, this isn’t a priority, but once you have enough customers, SEO can help you reliably get clients. Down the line, it’s worth measuring the number of inbound leads you get and conversion rate from your pages.
Qualification, demos, closing
All of these stages should organically roll on to the next until the eventual close. I always monitor any loss of interest throughout this process. Leads going cold or consistent sticking points. Identify where you’re losing leads and plug the gap. Getting feedback from users who left during the sales cycle is hard but they normally hold the answer to your issues.
B2B SaaS sales is a continuous process
The primary takeaway here is your B2B SaaS sales should be a fluid process that’s constantly being monitored, optimized, and improved at every step of the way.
I don’t believe any SaaS has ever launched with a perfect sales process but over time they look at their data and identify where they can improve until they have the best possible iteration of their original model.
I've already helped numerous SaaS founders fix their sales funnels such way that the whole week got booked with demo calls. If you want to get your SaaS to the next level, apply for SaaS Camp accelerator today.
I don’t believe any SaaS has ever launched with a perfect sales process but over time they look at their data and identify where they can improve until they have the best possible iteration of their original model.
I've already helped numerous SaaS founders fix their sales funnels such way that the whole week got booked with demo calls. If you want to get your SaaS to the next level, apply for SaaS Camp accelerator today.
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