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in this video i'm going to talk through the best customer acquisition funnels for sas startup stick around until the end to hear which funnel i would seek every single time i'm rob walling i'm a startup founder with multiple exits author of three books about building startups and an investor in more than 100 companies i'm going to cover two funnels today i'm going to simplify it obviously there's a lot of different ways to get folks to your sas app to get them to sign up and become customers i'm going to simplify it and go with the two main funnels that i refer to the most low touch and high touch first i want to talk about low touch and really define it for you talk about the implications of it and give you the three basic steps of what a low touch funnel looks like so a low touch funnel is one where you probably guessed it you drive traffic to a website and you try to get people to convert you don't have a lot of customer interaction and in fact low touch and no touch are often used interchangeably low touch funnels usually imply a lower price point it's hard to have a really expensive product and not speak to your prospects or customers in advance and the first step in a low touch funnel is to drive traffic and since your price point is low oftentimes that means you have higher churn and that tends to mean your annual contract value or your lifetime value is lower than if you had a more expensive product so that implies as you drive traffic you can't afford to pay a lot for that traffic and so some of the common lower cost traffic channels are things like seo content marketing social media even like partnerships and integrations if you can get enough scale there and get someone to promote it sometimes you can get pay-per-click to work but pay-per-click ads like adwords and facebook ads are getting more expensive over time and so if you truly have a lower no touch funnel it's harder i'll say in b2b sas specifically it's pretty hard to get pay-per-click to work just keep in mind that if you do seek a low touch funnel which is what a lot of bootstrappers want they kind of want that lifestyle business where they don't have to talk to someone before they become a customer and the dream is that a bunch of traffic comes to your website and converts without you having to do a lot of work and you're right you don't have to do a big sales job but the work is in driving out traffic and converting folks to becoming paid customers so that was step one of a low touch funnel which is to drive traffic and sometimes those people convert on their first or second visit just with the copy you have on the website but more often than not step two of a low touch funnel is to nurture those leads and there are many ways to do this you can use retargeting which is where you cookie that individual and then you can advertise to them on facebook or google or other networks an email list is another way to nurture and that's where you offer a lead magnet like an ebook or a free course so folks can learn how to solve problems relevant to your application or even a free trial and a free plan these are ways to nurture leads so folks can try out your product they can start thinking you know is this valuable to me and a free trial of course usually expires after a certain amount of usage or a certain amount of time versus a free plan which usually has a low usage limit and eventually maybe hopefully crossing your fingers if you really know how to do freemium someone might convert to paid and that's step three when someone converts to paid when someone starts paying you money they enter their credit card they've gotten enough value from what you've been offering them that they are to the point where they want to pay for your product and of course there are steps beyond this right there's retention can we keep people from churning and as i said earlier in a low touch funnel churn tends to be higher than if people are paying you more money so there are more things to worry about but for the purpose of this video that's where we'll stop with the low touch funnel and we'll dive into the high touch funnel now i already covered high touch sales funnels in a video on this channel called five critical components of a high performing sas sales pipeline so i won't go so deep into them here because you can go watch that video for a deep dive but in essence there are five steps to a high touch sales funnel the first is getting leads there's outbound outreach and there's inbound traffic much like you would use in a low touch funnel although you will have more budget if you're doing high touch you're charging more and so you should have more budget to do things like pay-per-click ads to do cold outbound outreach and to really double down on these marketing approaches so after you drive the leads step two is usually to qualify those leads and as a founder early on you'll be doing that yourself later you will assign it to members of your team sdrs and bdrs and the questions you're asking in this phase are does this prospect have the budget to afford our product are they a great fit for our product will they be successful with it in the long term you're qualifying them to find out if they are a good customer for you and your product is a good fit for them step three is usually a demo and in the early days this is given by a founder and as you move on you hire sales people or as they're more commonly known account executives or aes this is where you're able to find out from that qualified prospect what they're actually looking to accomplish with your software and then you're trying to show them just enough that they know that they can solve that problem you're not giving them a full demo of every settings page your demo should be shorter than you think and it should involve you asking a lot of questions of that prospect to find out what are they trying to do with your product step four is to close the deal this often requires multiple follow-ups might even require multiple demos multiple conversations if there are many people making the decision and obviously the more complicated the sales process is the longer it takes to get to close the more you need to be able to charge for your product to make it worth not only your while but as you expand your sales team you're gonna bring more people into it and the more time they have to spend the more money the deal needs to be worth in order to justify it the process from demo to close can be amazingly fast it can be a few weeks or it can take many months depending on your sales cycles and the last step in a high touch funnel is to onboard that customer usually there's a customer success person involved and they take over they get the person onboarded and now it's time for customer success to be able to show that person all the value that they've paid for and to follow up and touch base with them on enough of a cadence that you keep them around as a customer and they don't churn because all of the effort you put in to driving those prospects to your website to qualifying them to demoing to closing the sale you don't want that to get wasted i keep saying that churn is the death of sas and it's something you need to focus on in any of your funnels in a second i will tell you the funnel i would choose every single time but before that if you've enjoyed this video i'd love it if you would hit the like button and subscribe to the channel we have content like this coming out every week on this channel so if i were to decide between a low touch and a high touch funnel i would pick neither i would pick a dual funnel where you have both there's incredible power in having a low touch high traffic funnel with a lot of people coming to your website and a lot of folks talking about your brand and if you can have that lower end funnel with lower price points but also support enterprise customers it's an amazing combination and we see that in startups like signwell which is electronic signatures they have folks coming in paying them 12 15 a month and then they have folks coming in wanting enterprise deals squadcast.fm which is studio quality podcast recording in a web browser has a similar dual funnel you can imagine there are folks coming in to do their dungeons and dragons podcast and then on the high end you get a huge podcasting network or even a radio station that is trying to record remotely and they can and should pay thousands of dollars a month there's such strength in this dual funnel because you get these big low churn customers who pay you in advance but you also get hundreds if not thousands of customers who are paying you less and may have a little bit higher churn but it builds the brand and it builds your reputation across the internet across the facebook groups and the slack groups and that mix of low and high touch customers actually makes your revenue into a much smoother graph as it grows instead of having either these big spikes as you normally do when you have these big high-touch enterprise sales processes and it also keeps you from having the high churn that a low touch funnel normally gives you so hope you enjoyed my walkthrough of the best customer acquisition funnels for assass startup and i'll see in the next video [Music] you