A SaaS company’s success depends on acquiring, qualifying, and converting leads, whether it’s a startup or an established enterprise. However, trying to balance multiple marketing, sales, and retention efforts can be difficult.
Hence, it is best for B2B SaaS companies to organize their efforts using a well-crafted SaaS sales conversion funnel. You must balance retention and acquisition efforts, identify new features customers want, and work to maximize customer lifetime value, among other things.
But how can all of this happen?
You can organize reporting from the beginning by working with your marketing team and optimizing the sales process. It is critical to ensure you’re communicating the right message to the right leads at the right moment.
Optimizing Your B2B SaaS Sales Funnel
The following are the proven techniques to optimize B2B SaaS startup strategy:
1. Bring In Automation
Maintaining records in a Rolodex is a thing of the past; however, using an Excel spreadsheet is not as far behind.
Human error is likely to occur and result in poor data quality when records are manually entered and sorted; as your business expands, this gets more difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the records.
Having the proper data infrastructure in place and automated processes is crucial for any good sales squad. However, setting up these systems is not always straightforward, and the learning curve may be steep, but once they’re up and running, you’ll save time and access reliable information.
Once you have that information, utilize it! The best method to continuously enhance your sales approach is to recognize patterns in your customers and optimize to address them.
And this brings us to the next phase in optimizing the sales funnel.
2. Analyze Your Current Sales Pipeline
The first step in developing a solid analysis foundation is choosing the right type of CRM software. Salesforce and Zoho CRM are all good choices, especially when used in conjunction with the rest of your technology stack, but in situations where CRM is integrated with your CMS and other reporting tools, using a tool like HubSpot should be preferable.
Once you’ve found the right CRM for your B2B SaaS business, integrate it into your marketing and sales operations as soon as possible. It’s obvious that the more historical data you have to look back on, the stronger your conclusions will be.
You can look for the following info in your existing sales funnel:
- Time leads spend on each funnel stage
- Stage-to-stage lead conversion rates
- Why are leads dropping out of a stage?
- Percentage of leads that fall in your ideal customer profile
Based on the answers try to identify how you can improve such situations. You can pick among the strategies I’ll discuss next to create the best B2B SaaS funnel.
3. Start with Top of the Funnel
When using top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content, companies highlight the advantages of their products and encourage prospects to get in touch.
Adobe Creative Cloud, for example, uses Facebook to present a slick video and an on-demand video library that educates about 3D art tools and how they are used in automotive design. TOFU also includes tutorials, how-to guides, and multichannel social media campaigns.
During this phase of the funnel, you should use content marketing, paid advertisements, live stream video shopping events, and social media marketing to generate awareness about your product.
Following are the most important TOFU metrics you’ll have to measure to see the effectiveness of your strategies:
- Website visits
- Ads impression and reach
- Social media engagement
4. Focus on the Middle of the Funnel
Your customers go through two more stages after visiting your website: consideration and intention. In the consideration stage, the customers are seeking solutions, and you’re one of the choices.
In the intention stage, they express a specific desire to purchase your SaaS product. In these phases, your potential customers turn into leads. Therefore, the first thing you should do to nurture these leads is to send them emails.
The metrics you’d look at during this stage are:
- Open rate
- Bounce rate
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Lead velocity
5. Don’t Miss Out Bottom of the Funnel
The bottom of the funnel involves the evaluation and purchase phases. During the evaluation phase, your SaaS product is evaluated to determine if it best fits the client’s needs.
Every salesperson wants to be in the Purchase phase, which is where the customer buys the product. It is named as such because the client turns into a customer after purchasing the product.
This phase of the funnel also includes upselling and retaining customers. Most B2B SaaS businesses use subscription management solutions such as Younium for this purpose.
Concluding Note
Although funneling can be time and resource-intensive for B2B SaaS connections, it is a common tactic. You can increase funnel efficacy and win more long-term agreements by emphasizing your ongoing value proposition, highlighting valuable leads, and quantifying success over time.
Author Bio – Reena Aggarwal
Reena is Director of Operations and Sales at Attrock, a result-driven digital marketing company. With 10+ years of sales and operations experience in the field of e-commerce and digital marketing, she is quite an industry expert. She is a people person and considers the human resources as the most valuable asset of a company. In her free time, you would find her spending quality time with her brilliant, almost teenage daughter and watching her grow in this digital, fast-paced era.