Top B2B SaaS Sales Strategies to Help You Grow Today | SaaS District

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If you'd like to sponsor the SaaS District podcast or recommend any guests that you think would be valuable to be on the show, visit horizoncapital.com/saas-podcast today. Thanks again, folks. Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about the top B2B sales strategies to help you guys grow your SaaS business today. And before we get into this episode, let's just remember that like any sales, any B2B sales, the goal of sales in SaaS is to solve the problem of a customer. So I just want to make that clear that before you think about, you know, all these strategies and tips and tactics that we'll get into, just remember that it's all about the customer and solving their problem. Now, as you may know, in the SaaS industry, it's a hyper-growing industry capable of addressing, you know, you can, you can target individuals if you're B2C or businesses if you're in B2B. But there's unmatched scalability when it comes to, you know, the SaaS business model. And that's what I love about it. The model of SaaS is, you know, easy to access. You know, there's the scalability, there's the recurring subscription model, you know, the tech is super interesting. And depending on the model, you need to master different kinds of selling skills in order to be successful. And that's what I want to cover because depending on your SaaS business model, you have to have, you know, tackle it from a different way. So obviously after running, you know, recording over 100 episodes and talking with some of the top founders, the best consultants, the best coaches in the industry who talked about sales, we kind of put up some questions here and tips and tricks and strategies that comes to helping you guys with your SaaS sales strategy. All right. So let's get into it. I want to talk about probably the first mistake I see most people in sales make, or even founders, right? They're trying to help their team grow. But if there's one thing I would, I would You know, mention to you guys and look at internally is think about your qualification process, right? Your— how you qualify your leads, whether you're in marketing or you're in sales, it's probably the most important thing you can do because it's going to make you more effective with your time, make you more efficient in your closing rate, make everybody happy, and, you know, be more efficient in your ad budget, your marketing budget, and how much time you're spending on focusing on the right things. And remember, I talk about focusing on the right things when you're trying to optimize your time and be more productive. Which I talked about in a couple episodes ago, which you guys can check out. But qualification, right? So you can do this a couple of ways. Think about it on your website. Are you qualifying? Is your copy dedicated and targeting the right people you want to work with, right? Be very, very clear who you want to be working with and who you don't want to be working with. Okay, so just from the marketing side, uh, your social media, your content, who you're reaching out to— let's say you're running Facebook ads— are you targeting The exact people you want to work with, not a large pool of people, the right budget, the right industry, the right size of the team. Are they enterprise level and you're focusing on SMBs? You have to learn how to say no to these other ones, right? So that's going to make you more efficient and help you with your close. So look inside, know exactly. I've seen, I've talked to founders all the time and I asked them, who is your ideal client profile? And they tell me everybody, anybody who's willing to pay. You know, any business, well, we'll take them on. And I say, look, wrong answer. Like, who is it? They'll say agencies, they'll say e-commerce stores, they'll say, you know, healthcare professionals. But you know, you've just mentioned 3, but how about focusing on the 1 or 2 who you know are your best clients and then just create everything for them and then you can always expand later. So filtering everything in your entire kind of sales process. So like I said, on the marketing, your copy, your your demo, um, your messaging, your email copy. And then once, you know, let's say a company comes to your website and they think you're the right fit, you know, make sure you have those, uh, when you're filling out the form, whether they're filling out the form or they're starting a free trial, you want to capture as much information about the user. Okay, if they're— what are they spending right now on your solution? What industry are they in? What is the size of their company? What is their pain point and why they decided to choose you and how did they hear about you? So these are all super valuable information. So by the time it gets to the actual sales demo, let's say, or they use their product, you already have enough information to help them see if they're the right fit for you. And if not, I'll say this again, if they're not a good fit, please learn to say no to them and pass them on to the right solution. And I'll give you an example here what I mean. Let's say you're focused on enterprise-level sales, right? Or even mid-market. Let's go mid-market because we have a lot of people in our market, in our audience who are founders who are working with B2B and targeting mid-market. And you get a small business who says, hey, I love your solution. I love what you're building. I see the value here. But then when you schedule a demo with them, let's say you didn't qualify them. You get them on the call, you show them your solution. You spent half an hour, an hour kind of trying to show them your product and how it can be a good fit. You know, they love it, but they're just— it's maybe overkill for them. And probably when it comes to the price, you know, your price would be a lot, you know, more expensive than what they can afford at their stage. They're probably, you know, 1 year in, 2 years in, 3 years into building their business, and maybe they're just not ready for your solution. So rather than, you know, still trying to make them fit— and I see this a lot, right? They'll still take them on because maybe they're willing to find a custom plan for them, try to get them on as a client. And what happens is a couple months in, the client will get frustrated, they'll cancel, they'll churn. They'll generally churn a lot faster because your product wasn't built for them. And what you should have done is, hey, look, this isn't the right product for you right now. However, you know, here is a competitor, or, you know, you can say your competition, but they're not really another SaaS company that I recommend. I recommend you guys check them out, start with them, and what will happen is they'll respect you. They'll appreciate you not trying to sell them and push them rather than actually care, show that you care about their business. And who knows, maybe in 3 years, 4 years, or a couple months down the line, they will be ready to use your solution. And then they'll come back and talk to you and be like, hey, you know what? I tried that other solution. I'm ready to move forward. And now I want to start working with you. So that goes a long way in terms of how you qualify and get the right person in for the right product. So, you know, I focused a lot on that one first. There's the different sales You know, stages. Obviously you have your lead generation at the top of the funnel where you kind of generate that interest for your product. Then you have, you know, the prospecting where you're reaching out to prospects, potential customers, educating them. From there, you're doing the qualification process, which I really highlighted, you know, evaluating whether that prospective target is the right fit for you and your product. Um, then from there we go into the demo, right? So the demo is about conducting those demos that could be product-led through your trials Or it could be support that helps you kind of fit and decide if it's the right fit for their solution. And then obviously the last stage is closing, right? Our favorite part of negotiating terms and making that sale. So that's number one, the first mistake, not having the right qualification process in place. The next part I want to focus on, and the mistake I see often, is not using the right marketing channel or sales kind of focus depending on your audience and your LTV. So what do I mean here specifically? Let's say you're targeting B2B SMBs, right? And your product is mainly product-led, meaning people come to your product, they want to try it out, they need to see it. And let's say your LTV is focused, let's say under $500. Okay. If it's under $500, meaning they're paying you, I don't know, like $20 a month and they stick around for a year or so. you shouldn't be doing a demo. And that's what I mean is that you have to have the right strategy for the right type of LTV and sizes of your business. If you're focusing on mid-market and you're giving them the product, showing them the product, they can use it, absolutely do the demo. But I've seen this before where a company's charging $9 a month and they're doing demos with every single person who comes to their website and asks to use their product. If you're charging $9 a month and everything is self-serve, you should be focusing on your product. You know, that's kind of what's called product-led growth and then refining your pricing model so that people can find you organically through paid advertising, through PR, through SEO, and then they can sign up for a trial, use your product as a way to sell them, and you don't need a person involved. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to scale. Like, think about it. If you're— if you need to do, let's say you got 100 people a day signing up. For your product and if it's a self-serve product, you can't do 100 demos per day by yourself, right? And for $9 a month, it's just not worth your time, right? If they're paying $400 over the year and your time is worth let's say $1,000 an hour or you're paying somebody $100 an hour to do sales, you're paying them more than you're going to get back, right? It's just hard to justify that kind of cost per acquisition by doing a demo. So the right thing to do is get them to the right channel for the right types of salesperson. If they're a mid-market, they're over, let's say $1,000 in LTV, then definitely get them on a demo, spend the time with them, show them your product, answer all their questions, and then your LTV will justifiably go up and you'll be working with the right people. But if they're SMB-focused, focus on your product, get them into your funnel, and let the product sell itself. All right. So that's number 2. All right. Let's go to number 3, which is about pricing and how that affects your sales. So that's another thing, question we have here. How often should I be changing my price and how does that affect my sales? So a mistake I'll see often as well is people still have the same price that, you know, they had from 3 or 4 or 5 years ago when they started their business. So a quick win you can do today, try increasing your price. Okay. We've done this test so many times with our own companies and our own product offerings. We literally just keep increasing the price until we see our conversion rates go down. And we've done this before where we were selling for $75. We increased it to $100. We got no pushback. $125, no pushback. $150, no pushback. $200, no pushback. We went up to $250 and then we started getting some pushback. Okay. So we know we hit that inflection point where people started asking for more. They were doubting it and they were pushing back and saying, you know what? I'm not interested. And until we saw that, the market told us, right? We thought it was worth $75. It seems like between $200 and $250 is the right spot for now. Right. And now we know, okay, we need to go back and adjust our product, improve it a little bit more, and then we can try again and see maybe it's now worth $250. So quick win right now, like go out and increase your price and see how it affects your, your sales, you know, your next demo. So imagine that we left it at $75. We literally, you know, over 100%, you know, increase in price and it didn't affect our conversions at all. So quick tip, do that today. Play with your pricing model and see if you get any pushback because I guarantee your revenue will go up just by making some price changes and even just even increase it by 5, 10% and see what happens. And if you're scared, you know, on how to do that, like there's tools you can do, you can, you know, kind of split test it if you're kind of a, you know, SMB or self-serve model focused. You know, run a tool like VWO. We love doing conversion rate optimization. And that's actually literally like one of our biggest kind of playbooks when we acquire a SaaS company is we run different conversion rate optimization tests and pricing It's probably the easiest win for us, right? We just take the same traffic, they're getting 100,000 views a month, they're converting 100 or 200 new users just with that traffic or more. And then we'll just start testing out different prices. So we'll split test 2 different pricing tables, different pages, different offerings, and we'll see. And we'll see that lift, 30%, 40%, 50% revenue increase in MRR. just by, by doing those simple tests. So try that out yourself, guys. VWO is a really good tool. I love them. Otherwise, you can do them if you're doing demos. Obviously, you have that presentation. Just, you know, ask your team, ask your founder if you're the founder, talk to your sales team and say, hey, look, we're going to try increasing our price by $200, $100, or just whatever, 10% this month. And let's see how that affects our quotas and our sales this month. All right. So that's number 3. The 3rd thing you guys can do today Start increasing your prices and see how that affects your overall revenue. All right. 4th question here is about demos, how to improve your conversion rate on demos. So you're probably asking what's the right number if you're getting, you know, qualifying your leads, you're getting high quality leads coming in, you know, good prospecting, good kind of lead generation, talking to the right people at the right stage. You know, at this point it's a couple of things they're going to push back on, right? Not the right timing. Not the right budget. You know, it's not the right solution or they need to talk to— it's not the right decision maker, right? So you got to overcome all those objections. But before that, people think it's all that, which is good. That's going to be your sales process. Part of your demo before that is make sure you prepare and have the right research before you even talk to them, right? Don't show up to your calendar and say, you know, hey, I'm 5 minutes out from talking to this person. If you have captured all that information from the prospect before in your qualification stage, Do your research. Okay, go to hunter.io, go to LinkedIn, check out all their social media pages, check out their website. What are they doing? Is there anything on TechCrunch about their business? Is there any new press releases? Have they raised a recent round? Try to get as much information about the person you're about to talk to. You know, A, to build rapport when you get on that call, you can talk, see something on their LinkedIn profile. Maybe they have similar You know, in the same city that you live in and you can talk about similar sports that you guys enjoy. But also, you know, you know how far they are in their career and how long have they been working that position. Did they get promoted? Who are they, you know, who are they working with? Understand the size of their team. Who is the founder? So have a proper roadmap and do really, really good research beforehand so you become— you come prepared. And I guarantee your closing rate will go up if you have that information before. I've done this many times where I've just come in and just try to listen, but If I do that extra step of doing the research beforehand, people really appreciate that. And I feel, I think it just comes off naturally, right? Like your confidence level goes up just because you feel comfortable that you actually know the person versus coming in, who is this unknown person? How are they going to react? And you have no idea what to expect. So just take that extra step and I guarantee it'll help a lot on your demos. All right. A couple more points about the demo side. I think it's super, super important. And then we'll wrap up this episode here. Okay, so when you get on the actual demo, make it a conversation. I was literally on a demo the other day and it drove me crazy. The guy was like literally reading a script. Like he was just reading everything, asking me these questions, and I'm like, okay, I don't really care. Like, why are you telling me this? It's not relevant for me. I— can you just like get to the point? And he didn't ask me questions. Like, get me involved. Like, okay, say what you have to say, show what you have to. But keep me engaged. Be like, all right, so like I showed this product, we can do this, this, and this. What do you think about— do you see yourself using this or have you done this before? Or just simple questions and get that yes from me, right? Get them to say yes because those are micro-commitments, right? Ask them questions where they say yes repeatedly. I think you've probably heard that before and that actually helps improve your chances of closing the sale, right? Don't read scripts. Don't follow the same pattern. Have a baseline. Yes. Some questions that you have to work off to qualify them, to show them and have a good process of how you demonstrate it, but also be able to read the flow and read the conversation and understand the other person, right? People want to feel heard. So just don't read it off the script. That's all I'm going to say on the actual doing the demo. If afterwards you're doing a proposal, Make sure you customize it. Okay. So that's another quick tip. I get demos, demos and proposals all the time from different SaaS companies that I look to work with or use myself. And I can see that this is just like a copy and paste. There's no effort put behind this. And if I see there's no effort, then I say, okay, this guy wasted my time. I just gave you, you asked me 100 different questions. And you showed me a demo, you spent a lot of my time, and then you give me a generic demo, um, you know, presentation, expect that to sell me. Like, why didn't you just give me that from the beginning if that was the case, right? Why, you know, we just— why, why even waste my time with all that if I'm going to get something that I was— there was no effort put behind it? So if you're going to put together a presentation, a demo, a proposal, take that extra— same thing, Just like you did the research of the demo, take that extra time and put a thorough proposal put together specifically for them. Right. So simple things, right? Like even just putting their logo on the first page and your logo, you know, mention their name throughout different pages, their industry, how, you know, throw in words that you picked up during the conversations based on their time of, sorry, the size of their business, or maybe the size of their team, or write down the actual problem that they told you that their problem is. And then write down the solution of how they present it to you. And they'll say, hey, this is the problem you're having, this is the solution I have. You're like, no, this isn't the problem I just told you 2 days ago and this isn't the solution that we talked about. So why are you giving me this different mismatch of information? So make it clear that you really, really understand them, that they want to be heard and make the pricing based on them. If they have 10 users, show them only the price for 10 users and then you can show them a little bit more. Hey, as you grow, We're going to give you a discount if you get to 20 users, right? Don't show them, okay, so 0 to 5, 5 to 10, you know, 5 to 30, whatever. Like just make the price for them. They asked for 10 users today and you know, they're going to be growing. Give them the price for them and they'll appreciate that a lot more. All right guys. So that's it. I think that's enough tips for today. I hope that helps. I mean, try to implement these today and let me know if that helps, like improve your closing rates, get more revenue. That's all this is. This is all this is about, right? Increase your pricing. And I hope you guys success in your SaaS journey. Alright guys, see you guys in the next episode where we'll have, you know, more interviews next week. Thank you all for listening in to this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to leave a review and subscribe for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at horizoncapital.com. And myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please DM us on Instagram or LinkedIn @HorizonCapital and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and hope to see you on the next one.