SaaS Enterprise Sales Made Easy (5 SIMPLE Steps)

0:00if you're a B2B SAS founder and the thought of jumping on a sales call makes you break out into a cold sweat I get it I've been there those first sales calls are nerve-wracking and a lot of Founders dream of building SAS businesses so they don't ever have to talk to customers or learn sales uh the Allure of product-led growth but the reality is that basically never happens here's the deal learning how to navigate Enterprise sales is a GameChanger and every successful SAS founder I talk to eventually learns to love and embrace sales as an enormous growth lever in their business and unless you come from a sales background

0:35which most Founders don't you probably lack some of the Polish and efficiency of a sales framework and that means you're leaving massive Revenue opportunities on the table let's solve that in this video I'm going to break down the five simple steps you need to walk through to drive sales in your SAS business so there's no sales process without leads these are people who could be interested in buying your SAS solution and there's a bunch of ways to get leads we which is right for you depends on your Market your product your funding situation and your ICP your ideal customer Persona if you aren't sure what an ICP is I've made an entire

1:09video about it back on my channel you can check that out right here and the link for it is in the description below here are just a handful of options to gather new leads first is long form organic content this could be blogging YouTube podcasting is one of the primary lead gen sources we use to drive my SAS business castto to seven figures and Beyond and these are a mix of both self-serve customers and Enterprise sales opportunities for us organic content is nice because it continues to work long after you hit publish on that piece of content but the challenge is it can take a long time to ramp up and

1:41you're kind of unsure as to the attribution of new leads from that Medium social media marketing and I'll include both paid and organic here is a really solid option and Linkedin is definitely kind of the channel duure these days for most B2B businesses but don't discount Instagram Twitter or even Facebook as valuable channels for you and your business depending on your ICP and where they're hanging out paid search is another great one and most of us here think of Google but it also could be YouTube Reddit G2 crowd crust pilot or anywhere where people are going for information about an existing product next is cold email and following

2:18the predictable Revenue style model here is interesting instead of picking up the phone and cold calling people you're proactively reaching out via email to see if someone is interested in your product I like this as a a good way to initially test product Market fit and messaging early on in a venture cold email is getting more challenging so if you're going to do this you got to really take it seriously know your stuff especially from a technical perspective conferences are an interesting option especially if your ICP regularly attends them this typically happens more in the Enterprise space as opposed to the S&B Market maybe my favorite way to get new

2:53leads is through Integrations and integration marketing not just the integration itself and the value of combining two pieces of software but the cross promotion opportunities between you and the audience of the integration partner there's about a dozen more channels that you could try but the key here is to understand the principles of why lead gen could work and decide whether it's best to implement into your business and for your customers Rob talks about lead gen in the SAS Playbook and if you haven't picked up a copy yet I'd highly recommend it it's a great read for any founder now it's time to turn those leads into prospects by

3:27nurturing and developing them you know most Founders feel lost when they start engaging in sales activities in their SAS business but as a Founder you have a sales superpower because you're able to talk to prospects at a level that most sales reps never get to you have really deep empathy for the problem that your prospects are facing and how your solution solves that for them and depending on the channel you select the engagement St can be done via email on your website or on an opin form on a confirmation page or at the beginning of a sales call with a prospect talking about the strategy aspect of this

4:00engagement step the key here is to warm up this new lead and guide them into the sales process this is both mindset as well as like the Practical next steps they could do to become a customer uh I see this most commonly done by providing a valuable piece of content as that first Next Step this could be a pre-recorded demo a white paper a welcome message some way to encourage them to take that next step with you which is usually to book a call so this call is the first active step in the sales process and you're getting on the phone with your new Prospect here you're

4:32looking to verify the need they have their budget their willingness to buy and to make sure that your solution is a good fit to solve their problem and depending on the complexity of your sales process your sales calls can either be a single longer call or broken into two separate calls if your sales process and the product you're selling are relatively straightforward I'd opt for a single sales call these are usually between 30 and 45 minutes in length and combine both the discovery phase and the demo or pitch phase if you're selling more to the Enterprise you'll want to be prepared for a 2 three 4 or 10 step sales process and here the

5:06first call is all about Discovery and qualification of your new lead and don't feel weird about this if you're new to the Enterprise space just rest assured this is just how they buy it's how things are done and in these sales calls you ask a lot of questions and understand why they're looking for a solution like yours what their budget is what kind of timeline they're on and what requirements they have for a solution you want to ask about the buying process here as well what's the next step you can take to move this deal forward either way in the qualifying step your goal is to understand the

5:37customer as deeply as possible and the salesperson or founder in your case who best understands the needs of a prospect and can relay that back to them in the discovery phase will win a deal every time and that should be your goal in a minute I'm going to talk about closing the deal without being sleazy but first if you're looking for a solid comprehensive Playbook to go from just an initial idea to Landing your first customers you should check out the SAS Launchpad there's over 9 hours of content that go all from an idea to launch with your first SAS Rob Walling lays out his strategies and tactics for

6:13finding great business ideas creating MVPs and I teach a 35 minute section that goes deep on sales tactics and strategies for early stage SAS Founders you can see the whole curriculum and learn more at SAS launch pad. now that you're done with the discovery phase if your prospect is a good fit it's time to close that deal get some money in your bank account and if you've never done this before believe me when I say it is the absolute best feeling ever in business but here's the thing closing is not about some lazyy tactic to get someone to say yes or using persuasion to get them to sign up with you no if

6:47you've done your job well in the discovery phase then the demo or close is all about relaying that information back to your prospect of how you can solve their problem with your product I want to make sure this is really clear so I'm going to double click on this the goal of a SAS demo or a pitch is not to share every last thing your product can do in fact you'll likely lose most deals if you do that right but rather the goal is only to show the few things that your prospect just said is really important to them and a lot of times this could be just one or two screens or

7:18really key integration and that's it don't over complicate it both for you and your future customer and once that's done ask if they have any questions and get them to commit to the next step and the next step can be getting their credit card inovation and signing them up as a customer it could be booking an onboarding call with your success team it could be kicking off a pilot program whatever that natural next step in the buyer journey is offer that to your prospect as a way to help guide them through the buying journey in my opinion the biggest cheat code in SAS is expansion revenue and if you're not

7:49familiar with it here's the deal expansion revenue is growth that happens when existing customers pay you more money each month so you don't need more customers to grow you grow just by your existing customers paying you more money expansion Revenue usually is a function of your pricing model if you have built in a way for customers to naturally graduate to the next pricing tier many of them will naturally end up paying you more over time so here's just a few metrics on which you can achieve expansion revenue and the first is units right if you're a email service provider think of email subscribers if you're a

8:21CRM you might think of seats if you're a web hosting provider think about some kind of usage if you're a podcast host like castto think about maybe downloads or private subscribers or if you're someone like open AI you're thinking in terms of credits right expansion revenue is often just a natural byproduct if having a really great product that customers become more successful over time and as a result they're happy to pay you more money as their business grows and let me tell you from firsthand experience if you don't have expansion Revenue baked into the business model of your SAS product it will be quite difficult for you to grow past a certain

8:54point and that's usually a couple million dollars of ARR so we're fortunate to have a bit but almost every high growth SAS business I work with has a strong element of expansion Revenue baked in and besides expansion Revenue the next big unlock is turning your existing customers into brand ambassadors and there's no stronger lever of growth than word of mouth but it's hard to engineer really uh I think it all starts with a worldclass user experience and this is where me as a salesperson has to kind of tip my hat to our product team we've built a really incredible product and as a result we get recommended a lot in the podcasting

9:28space so you want to make sure that your product is just that good you'll get inbound leads organically naturally for free and on autopilot if you're a SAS founder who's looking for more content on sales I publish videos like this every week over on my channel you can check it out over here and subscribe today up next check out this video for six strategies for landing your first 10 customers thanks for watching