SaaS Sales Process (How To Nail Your Strategy)
Does your SaaS sales process enable you to convert recurring users? To see success as a SaaS founder, you must match how you sell to the way prospective SaaS product users make purchasing decisions. In this guide, we will break down the SaaS sales cycle and present some useful tips for enhancing your SaaS sales process.
SaaS Sales Stages (What Does This Include?)
The SaaS sales process is defined as a prospective user’s journey from consideration to making a buying decision. You can think of this as a set of actions you initiate to transform a prospect into a paying user on a recurring plan. If you’re struggling to convert prospects into paying users, the SaaS sales process may feel like jumping through a series of hoops.
Taking some time to carefully consider and define your SaaS sales stages will help bring clarity to your sales strategy. When you have a solid understanding of the user’s journey to becoming a paying customer, it enables you to think objectively about how to refine the sales process. You can begin to break down the sales stages and identify various areas for improvement.
From how you position trial periods to how you educate prospective users on unlocking the SaaS product’s value proposition, there are many elements to consider. Major milestones in the SaaS sales process include getting a prospective user to commit to a trial period with your product and onboarding them as a paying user on a recurring plan further down the line.
SaaS Sales Process Steps (Why Do They Matter?)
With the right steps in your SaaS sales process, you can increase user trial sign-ups along with the percentage of those prospective customers who end up making a buying decision. While it’s easy to let the SaaS product speak for itself during the trial period, it’s better to strategically offer a range of resources designed to help prospective users explore the product’s potential.
This is just one of the reasons why it’s important to carefully consider the steps in your SaaS sales process. Ensuring prospective users have everything they need at the right time is essential to getting more people over the finish line. As you collect data on prospects moving through your sales process, you can use this to refine elements of your SaaS sales strategy.
Selling a SaaS product is very different from selling other products because the sales cycle is often longer. While some may see this as a hurdle, you can choose to embrace the length of the SaaS sales cycle and use it to educate prospective users on your SaaS product’s unique value proposition. Those who do this effectively build user bases with high retention rates.
SaaS Sales Cycle (How Long Do They Last?)
The length of the SaaS sales cycle can depend on a number of factors. From the product’s price to the complexity of the solution, there are different variables to consider. Generally, a product that is available for £100/month will have a quicker sales cycle than a product costing several thousand pounds a year. With this in mind, patience is needed to sell SaaS to enterprise users.
The more expensive the SaaS solution is, the more time it will take for the prospect to reach a buying decision. After all, nobody wants to make an expensive mistake, particularly if you are an employee purchasing a software solution on behalf of an organization. When you know who you are selling to, you can build a sales process that accounts for how they make decisions.
SaaS Sales Process (5 Tips To Consider)
Develop strategic trial incentives
A free trial offer is an easy way to get new users through the door. However, the overall strategy behind your free trial offer can make or break its conversion power. You need to consider how long it will take for the prospective user to unlock your SaaS product’s value proposition and structure the trial accordingly. In some cases, a 14-day trial is necessary to see the value.
Connect with users during the trial period
Checking in with prospective users during trial periods creates an opportunity for you to address any questions or concerns they may have about the product. You should always position your team as being on-hand and ready to support the trial users. This can give the SaaS trial users confidence in your ability to provide tailored support and help them overcome learning curves.
Offer insightful demos and tutorial content
You should encourage trial users to book demos with your team. To conduct an effective demo, focus on demonstrating the value of the product. Ideally, you need to make these demos short and concise while still offering plenty of useful insights. You can leverage pre-recorded tutorial content during the trial period to educate prospective users on how to use the product.
Use annual plans to your advantage
At the end of the trial period, you can position both monthly and annual plans to the prospects. When you encourage SaaS buyers to pre-pay for the year, this enables you to pull in more revenue upfront and increase user retention. For SaaS buyers to make an upfront commitment, nailing the concepts we have covered in this guide is critical to inspiring this type of confidence.
Collect user feedback
You should create systems that enable you to collect feedback from paid and trial users. From a simple pop-up form to a survey sent via email, there is no shortage of ways to collect qualitative and quantitative user feedback. Both are essential to understanding how users are responding to your value proposition and what you can do to elevate your product’s value proposition.
Leveraging Email Marketing In Your SaaS Sales Process
Email marketing can play an important role in educating prospective users on the product’s value proposition. You can also launch email campaigns to touch base with trial users to see whether they have any questions about the product offering. At Unstuck Agency, we have a proven track record of supporting SaaS businesses in their efforts to drive conversions.
If you would like to book a demo or arrange a call to discuss our B2B email marketing services, you can do this below.
Leo Kesner is the founder of Unstuck Agency. Based in Bristol, England. Since launching Unstuck Agency in April 2020, Leo has managed over 3,000 B2B lead generation campaigns globally. You can follow Leo on LinkedIn.