Developing a holistic SaaS sales methodology is crucial to generating more revenue for your business. The typical sales process involves lead generation, inviting prospects to a demo, then sending sales follow-ups.
However, demos can only get you so far. They don’t guarantee a sale. You need a proper sales methodology to allow your representatives to build trust between your prospects and the company. In this article, we’ll be discussing:
- Why every SaaS business needs to follow a tailored sales methodology
- The three fundamental sales methodology strategies
- SaaS sales funnel optimization
- SaaS sales best practices
Why SaaS Needs a Tailored Sales Methodology
How you sell SaaS isn’t dependent on pricing alone. You must consider the market, competitors, and how your customers want to buy. Sales methodologies have to be flexible and dynamic to account for these variables.
For example, if you sell a low-ticket SaaS product for less than $10, you can’t sustainably rely on a top-down sales methodology. Sales cycles here are too long; reps must communicate with several stakeholders, and you can’t generate enough revenue to sustain this process.
So, how can you identify the proper sales methodology that fits your business? Let’s look at the three fundamental SaaS sales methodologies you can implement today.
The Three Fundamental SaaS Sales Methodologies
Understanding which SaaS sales methodology best fits your business can help it transition into the next stage of growth. Most SaaS companies use top-down, bottom-up, or hybrid strategies as their primary sales engagement process.
Top-Down Sales Methodology
Most sales outreach campaign best practices tell us to “target the decision makers” of a company. That’s the top-down sales in a nutshell.
Your SDRs start from the top, focusing on building relationships with a company's CEOs, business owners, and significant stakeholders. Then, you work your way down to the end user.
Another name for top-down is sales-led. The best SaaS products using this sales methodology are high-ticket, transformative, and core to your prospects’ business infrastructure.
Sales cycles are longer and require multiple touchpoints in your sales cadence. However, the process is worth it because the deal size is big enough to generate revenue after overhead.
If your sales size is small and you’re focusing on top-down, it might be time to re-evaluate if this is the proper sales methodology for your business and try something like a bottoms-up approach.
Bottom-up Sales Methodology
Bottom-up sales start with the end-users, not the decision-makers. Prospects often gain access to your SaaS products through freemium models or demos.
It’s essentially focused on product-led growth. Unlike product-led growth, sales are still involved. End users become champions for your products, vouching for them to their company.
That’s when your sales reps come in. They can ask if the prospect needs sitewide licenses, have it compliant with IT, or work towards integrating it into their existing tech stack.
The bottoms-up sales methodology works well for SaaS products at a lower price point. Sales cycles aren’t that long, and leads are warm. Prospects already see your product’s value.
You already have momentum within a company. All that’s left is to scale usage within that company. Or help your champions propagate your products until they reach critical mass.
Both top-down and bottom-up offer rigid solutions for your customers’ needs. The best way to sell SaaS is to consider how customers want to buy, which is where a hybrid model comes in.
Hybrid Sales Methodology
The hybrid sales methodology combines the best of both top-down and bottom-up sales strategies. It's customer-centric, allowing you to architect a dynamic and holistic sales process.
After finding qualified prospects, sales can target segmented groups within the company to sell to first. Targeting subsets within a company allows sales to tailor their approach to meet specific needs. Remember, each stakeholder can have their criteria for what makes a great product.
Create a cohesive entry and exit point to optimize your hybrid sales process. Understand how you can provide value to your initial segment targets. Then, you can strategize how to jump from one deal to another.
The best part is that you can co-create this strategy with your customers. For example, if you’re selling to end-user segments first, you can ask them more about their sales cycles and how to ease the process of further integrating your product into your prospects’ ecosystem.
This ultimately results in higher conversion rates and allows you the flexibility to adjust your sales process to fit your prospects best, which helps optimize your SaaS sales funnel.
How to Optimize SaaS Sales Funnels
Most SaaS sales funnels are similar regardless of the sales methodology used. To ensure sustainable revenue growth, sales funnels need optimization. Here’s what you can do.
Make Lead Generation Efficient and Cost-Effective
The bulk of SaaS marketing costs go toward lead generation efforts. These can be categorized as either inbound or outbound lead generation.
For inbound lead generation, ensure that the content you publish in your marketing channels aligns with your prospects. Focus on the benefits of your products, provide content that helps solve common pain points, and optimize lead capture pages.
With the proper tools, finding leads for outbound campaigns can be streamlined, drastically reducing the cost of lead generation.
When you’ve built your lead list, verify the leads using verification tools. Then, start qualifying, segmenting, and personalizing your outreach.
Qualification, Segmentation, and Personalization
There are several methods for lead qualification. The most popular include BANT, MEDICC, and CHAMP. However, the process can be time-consuming when done manually, causing bumps in your sales pipelines.
Automation tools are available to streamline the qualification process. But that just adds unnecessary costs to your overhead. And you haven’t even touched on segmentation and personalization.
The most cost-effective and streamlined method is leveraging tools like Instantly B2B Finder to help you find verified leads that you can easily qualify and segment using advanced filters.
For example, you can use the Lookalikes tools to find companies similar to one of your existing customers. But even if companies belong to similar segments, you still need to tailor your sales approach.
Creating Tailored Presentations, Demos, and Sales Decks
All forms of business communication must be personalized for each prospect. Lead intelligence lets you enrich your lead list, allowing sales reps to create tailored presentations, demos, sales decks, and sales email outreach campaigns.
If you’re using a hybrid sales methodology, you can leverage lead intelligence tools like Instantly B2B Finder to find prospects within specific departments. These tools allow you access to a pre-segment company contact list.
B2B Lead Finder can also filter out companies using specific technologies. These could be competitors, tools that can be used as supplements to your product, or tools that you know your product is an upgrade over.
Doing so lets your sales reps find the perfect angle when crafting sales emails. Account executives can create a better demo experience that aligns with prospect needs. All that’s left is using sales closing techniques to convert prospects into a sale.
Going for the Close
Going for a close means communicating with multiple stakeholders. To prepare your sales team, reps who hop on discovery calls should always ask customers what their company's next step looks like.
They’ll tell you exactly what they need to make purchasing your products or services possible. Let’s say you’re implementing a bottom-up approach and talking to an end user. They might say they must talk to their supervisor or boss about your product.
You can ask them how long that conversation would take or make recommendations that can help streamline the process.
For example, you could ask to be included in the conversation, allowing you to see if the product is a good fit for every stakeholder. But even if a discovery call or communication with a decision maker went well, it’s always best practice to follow up.
Sales Follow-ups
Even when sending cold sales emails to unresponsive leads, you must send a sales follow-up. You could move forward if you get a positive reply after a sales follow-up. When prospects say they’re uninterested, you could remove them from your list and move on.
Follow-ups are more important after having multiple touchpoints with prospects. A lot could be going on internally, leading to them not having the time to follow through with a clear response after demos, talks with decision-makers, or initial negotiations.
According to studies, businesses that don’t follow up with prospects can lose 80% of potential sales. Email marketing tools can automate your sales follow-up process. Sales follow-ups should also be considered through different communication channels, like calls or SMS.
SaaS Sales Best Practices Every Business Should Follow
Optimizations improve the micro aspects of your sales pipeline. However, to ensure pipelines continue to be high-performing, you must also consider the macro or big-picture perspective. To do so, use these best practices.
High Touch & Low Touch Engagement
High, low, and no-touch engagement models are often found in B2B SaaS. Each engagement model helps ensure the highest possible retention rates for new customers from your sales pipelines.
Low-touch onboarding is more self-service. New customers are provided self-service content through nurturing campaigns, resources, and guides. If customers require more assistance, they contact one of your reps. This model is great for low—and medium-ticket SaaS products.
High-touch models focus on a 1-on-1, hands-on onboarding approach. Customer success reps guide prospects on the best ways to gain value from your product based on their needs during onboarding, making you a consultant.
Be a Consultant
Being a consultant means advising your customers on how to use your products best. It helps foster lasting relationships, creates many referral opportunities, and is relatively simple with the right sales enablement tools.
You can also proxy this through your online community. Encourage your customers to join. Here, they can ask questions, provide feedback, and become champions for your products.
Leverage CRM Systems
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems help you track customers and prospects. Businesses need CRMs to improve relationships, streamline sales processes, and grow revenue.
SaaS companies must have a CRM system integral to several departments, such as sales, marketing, and customer support. The more complex your product, the more complicated your CRM needs will become.
But if you’re looking for a CRM for straightforward sales lead management, Instantly has you covered. You don’t have to spend extra money on another app. All leads from outreach campaigns are seamlessly integrated into Instantly’s DealFlow CRM.
Price Has to be High Enough to Sustain Pipelines
Running a SaaS company involves a lot of overhead, such as operating expenses, cost of goods sold, and revenue. If you focus on the wrong sales methodology, you’ll likely end up stunting growth due to revenue being unable to keep up with the overhead.
Bottom-up or hybrid sales methodology is better if you sell low or mid-ticket SaaS products. Talk with your team to create a pricing strategy to scale your business growth sustainably.
Pricing strategy should consider your competitors' prices, the willingness of your buyer persona to pay for your products, how your audience perceives your brand, and the value your products provide.
Key Takeaways
If your SaaS company is seeing slow growth, the issue might be caused by using the wrong sales methodology. The most popular sales methodologies for most B2B SaaS companies include top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid.
You can improve SaaS sales significantly with the proper sales methodologies, tools, and optimizations. To recap, here are some key insights to remember:
- Optimize your SaaS sales pipelines by streamlining lead generation, qualification, and segmentation using lead finder and lead intelligence tools.
- The top-down sales methodology is sales-led. You start communications with decision-makers within a company and work your way down to the end-users.
- Bottom-up sales are the opposite. You start with the end-users, providing them access to your products through freemium models or free trials.
- Hybrid sales combine top-down and bottom-up approaches, allowing for a more flexible and dynamic approach centered around how users want to buy SaaS.
Regardless of your SaaS sales methodology, you’ll need consistent business communication with your prospects throughout the sales process. Email marketing is the most cost-effective, sustainable, and scalable vehicle to do so. That’s where Instantly comes in! Start scaling today!
