In this interview, Dan Morris shares his expertise on creating a repeatable sales engine for B2B SaaS companies. He identifies the most common pitfalls: random acts of marketing, treating every deal as unique, and making it hard for prospects to buy due to complex pricing and proposals. He stresses the importance of narrowing focus to a well‑defined niche and standardizing offerings, pricing, and sales stories. Morris advises founders to involve their team and advisors to keep decisions transparent and avoid founder‑centric drift. He introduces a practical benchmark—a 30% close rate from meeting to deal—as a barometer for a healthy sales process, noting that achieving this often leads to shorter sales cycles and higher average order values. The conversation covers qualification tactics, including the BANT framework (budget, authority, need, timing) and the trade‑off between detailed lead‑capture forms and conversion rates. Finally, Morris outlines reasons why a company might fall short of the 30% target, such as weak value proposition, insufficient storytelling fluency, and misaligned onboarding of new salespeople.
Chapters
So, you know, talking about that point, which you talked about, which was the, you know, maybe the core reason of your success around there was your sales engine of what you build and the sales process. So obviously the holy grail for every sales led B2B SaaS business is building a repeatable sales process. So as you, as a sales expert, with your experience, what are crucial mistakes you see and to avoid when building that repeatable sales process that you see when you're working with companies?
Yeah. So the most common things are random acts of marketing, just trying to sell to absolutely anybody, just trying to close a deal with absolutely anybody. And when you start a business, you've got to go through a phase of assuming who your customers going to be, and then going and proving it. But if you continue doing that for too long, you never get to a repeatable process. At some point, once you've got some clients to be able to look at the data and say— if you're thinking about SaaS businesses, what else do they buy? What other technologies are they using that could identify that they're at the right sort of maturity level, or the right sort of size, or the right sort of setup for us to also be a good— fit with them at that sort of stage. So people don't do that. They do random acts of marketing instead and wonder why they're just burning dollars. They also make every deal unique. So, you know, well, we'll do this deal for you. We'll do this other deal for another person. We'll do another deal for another person. How can you repeat something that is not by definition somewhat similar, very similar, right? And then also, some of them make it very difficult to do business with them. How can you make it easy to do business unless you've got simple pricing, simple proposals which make it simple for your prospect to make a decision to work with you?
Right.
And then also the final one is don't try and close a prospect who has a problem that you can't solve. Just because they've come to your website, they followed your marketing, whatever, you have a discussion with them and you recognize that they will give you money, But you haven't really got a solution for their problem, but you think you can work it out. A lot of founders are very tempted to do that because they're like, I know we can. And it's— they're curious to solve the problem. But actually, that's not repeatable. It uses a lot of resources that otherwise could be used on getting more clients who have a similar problem to the existing ones. And so keep it simple is the thing that people don't do.
Right. So what you're saying is part of that is, you know, obviously standardizing your options and your pricing and your service of what you're offering. And then second is, you know, really focus down on who your niche, who your industry, who you want to target, and don't target everybody. I guess that's difficult, right? Like you said, at the early stages, you want to take anybody, you would make those custom proposals, you'll do whatever and do things what you originally not set out to do to try to fill that gap. How do you stay strong through that and, you know, stay disciplined? Do you have any tips around that on You know, sticking to that and being able to say no effectively.
Yeah, don't do everything on your own. Yeah, if you're, if you're the founder and you're the sales engine and you're the, the marketing engine and you're doing everything yourself, you're making decisions in your own head or on your own whiteboard. But if you discuss it with your team and you discuss it with your advisors, they're going to give you context and perspective on, well, hang on a minute, aren't we supposed to be doing that instead of this? And you're just talking about deals out loud. Or if you've hired early salespeople, rather than just saying, go close everything, talk to them about their deals and understand the angle that they're expecting to use. Understand the problem they're trying to solve and help them realign with, hey, look, this is what we need to do here. So talk about it. Say it out loud. Get it out in the open is something that can really help. from just going off course one degree at a time.
And you've probably seen some kind of trend across, you know, businesses that you work with when you consult with them making these shifts and changes and trying to avoid these mistakes. Once they make this shift and start getting that focus down and building those processes and their standardized offering, what kind of expected conversion rates do you typically see increase there?
Well, of course, it depends how randomly the sales process was executed before. Right? The goal really should be always to achieve 30% or more close between meeting and deal. And if you're not using that as a reasonable barometer, then that's a reasonable place to start. If you can go further than that, that's great, but it probably indicates you don't have very high lead volume. If you're going much lower than that, then you've got an opportunity to improve your close rate. So that's a reasonable barometer on what close rates should look like if you're getting this sort of thing right.
Okay.
But the biggest benefit you're likely to see is a significant Significantly shorter sales cycle, the number of days it takes between the inquiry and closing the deal, and actually higher average order values as well. Because you're going to get less requirement for people demanding discounts or more from you for less because they just don't believe that they're your ideal customer.
Hmm.
If you can tell more stories about how we help people like you and these are the experiences that they've created, that they've had, and the value that they've got, it's easier to defend your price. So you will see your average order values increasing as well.
Nice. So I think what you're saying is 30%, that's kind of the goal, but I think that comes after eliminating all these non-ideal clients that you work with, right? Because, and is that typically from a lead that comes in and you have a conversation or would you say, once they say, yes, I'm interested and you get to a proposal out?
So that's a really good qualification. So early stage businesses typically don't do a great job of agreeing what are these qualifications looks like before they go to a demo, right? So, you know, when you identify that ideal customer that you want to be working with, that forms the basis for the marketing qualified lead criteria. And if you know you're not working with an ideal fit customer, then you can expect a much lower conversion rate. You've got to decide whether it's worth your while to try and push that person through the sales process.
Right.
So if we're talking about somebody who meets that criteria of being the ideal type of customer, and that they've passed a qualification, such as budget, need, timing, or authority— budget, authority, need, timing— you've got something like that to get them into your sales process, that's when the 30% begins to make sense, right?
Yeah.
They've got to qualify their way into the pipeline before you can start applying that average close rate. Now, I was just talking to a business this morning that's been in business a couple of years. They're about $1 million ARR, and they don't have that yet. And so we're just beginning to introduce that. And so you can get to decent revenue without that, but if you really wanna begin to scale and get the unit economics right, you've gotta have clear entry and exit criteria for your pipeline.
That makes sense. Yeah, and in terms of like why, so once you have these, in terms of qualifying people or disqualifying them, I've seen people who either have it on the call and their qualification, first call before getting into a demo, or they have it on the website. And I also hear of some companies who disqualify anything that's a Gmail or a Hotmail account. Do you have any other kind of rule of thumbs on how to effectively disqualify them? Like, would you put all those details on a contact form? Like, what's your budget? What's your— when are you looking to start? Or where's the best time to do that?
Yeah, so the earlier you are, the more information you need to capture by having conversations with people. The more that you've proven that your ideal customer looks like this, the more that you can begin to adjust the fields that you require for an inquiry, that sort of stuff, but all your marketers will be thinking, hang on a minute, that increases the cost per acquisition massively.
Right.
But, you know, there's a balance and you've gotta look at your data and see, you know, 'cause adding every single field that you demand in an inquiry form decreases the number of people that are actually gonna fill it out, right? So there's always gonna be that balance of, is it better to spend a little more and get a more qualified lead, or spend a little less and persuade them more. And that's got to be adjusted throughout your maturity. So there's no hard and fast rule on that, but the more you understand about your customer, the better you can do that job, and the better you can refine your messaging before they actually talk to one of your salespeople, and the better your salespeople can tell a story once they actually get onto a demo with them. And that's really what it's about. It's about tying together the story, and making it as sensible as possible for that prospect to actually make the choice to work with you.
Makes sense. So let's say we got the qualification process really refined, we have the ideal clients we're working with and we're not hitting that 30% margin, that mark for where we wanna convert those deals, maybe we're getting 15, 20, maybe less. What would you say are some of the main reasons you're not hitting that number and converting as high as you should?
Yeah, again, it might be something to do with the value proposition versus the pricing. So, you know, if people are not getting the perceived value and you're not building that story enough, maybe there's an opportunity to interview existing customers and understand the value they got more, and then feed that loop back to sales so that they can use more current stories about people like you recently invested this amount and now they're seeing this result. It's usually about fluency. How fluent is the sales team in telling stories that help people see how they're going to make their money back and more? And especially if you're hiring brand new people, something I see often is founders will bring in a new salesperson and say, go and attack new verticals.
Hmm.
But that means that person doesn't know the product, doesn't know our stories, but also is going to go and innovate in new sectors. Well, that's even harder than bringing somebody in to repeat. Let's say you focus on selling to marketers. Well, your stories need to all be about marketers in similar-sized companies that have had that benefit. So they're the sorts of things that make a big difference in conversion. It's being able to use a relevant example, being able to tell a story about the ROI, and doing it in a way that matches what they said they needed at the start of the call. Is your discovery good enough to actually tell that story for them?
