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[Music] this episode is sponsored by postalitics if you're doing any type of marketing for your startup today you're probably missing out on one of the most underrated marketing channels there is to grow your business direct mail marketing finding ways to stand out and get attention for your prospects has never been harder business people receive over 120 emails per day the average gmail account contains over 8 000 messages with postal lytics start standing out by delivering personalized messages directly into the hands of your audience to form a deeper impression than email alone the best part is you can integrate with your crm to track trace and measure the impact of every dollar you spend so whether you're an agency or startup founder and looking to build out your next direct mail marketing campaign visit postalytics.com for a free account and start sending direct mail today if you'd like to sponsor the sas district podcast or recommend any guests that you think would be valuable to be on the show visit horizoncapital.com slash sas dash podcast today thanks again [Music] folks hello hello everyone this is your host akil jabbar and welcome back to another episode of sas district in today's episode we'll be talking about the top b2b sales strategies to help you guys grow your sas business today and before we get into this episode let's just remember that like any sales any bdb sales the goal of sales and sas is to solve the problem of a customer so i just want to make that clear that before you think about you know all these strategies and tips and tactics that we'll get into just remember that it's all about the customer and solving their problem now as you may know in the sas industry it's a hyper growing industry capable of addressing you know you can you can target individuals if you're b2c or businesses if you're in b2b but there's unmatched scalability when it comes to you know the sas business model and that's what i love about it the model of sas is you know easy to access you know there's the the scalability there's the recurring subscription model you know the tech is super interesting and depending on the model you need to master different kind of selling skills in order to be successful and that's what i want to cover because depending on your sas business model uh you have to have you know tackle it from a different way so obviously after running you know recording over 100 episodes and talking with some of the top founders the best consultants the best coaches in the industry who talked about sales we kind of put up some questions here and tips and tricks and strategies that it comes to helping you guys with your sas sales strategy all right so let's get into it i want to talk about probably the first mistake i see most people in sales make or even founders right there they're trying to help their team grow but if there's one thing i would i would you know mention to you guys and look at internally is think about your qualification process right you're how you qualify your leads whether you're in marketing or you're in sales it's probably the most important thing you can do because it's going to make you more effective with your time make you more efficient in your closing rate make everybody happy and you know be more efficient in your ad budget your marketing budget and how much time you're spending on focusing on the right things and remember i talk about focusing on the right things when you're trying to optimize your time and be more productive which i talked about in a couple episodes ago which you guys can check out but qualification right so you can do this a couple of ways think about it on your website are you qualifying is your copy dedicated and targeting the right people you want to work with right be very very clear who you want to be working with and who you don't want to be working with okay so just from the marketing side your social media your content who you're reaching out to let's say you're running facebook ads are you targeting the exact people you want to work with not a you know large pool of people the right budget the right industry the right size of the team are they enterprise level and you're focusing on smbs you have to learn how to say no to those other ones right so that's going to make you more efficient and help you with your clothes so look inside know exactly i've seen i've talked to founders all the time and i asked them who is your ideal client profile and they tell me everybody anybody who's willing to pay um you know any business well we'll take them on and i say look wrong answer like who is it they'll say agencies they'll say e-commerce stores they'll see you know healthcare professionals but you know you've just mentioned three but how about focusing on the one or two who you know are your best clients and then just create everything for them and then you can always expand later so filtering everything in your entire kind of sales process so like i said on the marketing your copy your your demo um your messaging your email copy and then once you know let's say a company comes to your website and they think you're the right fit you know make sure you have those uh when you're filling out the form whether they're filling out the form or they're starting a free trial you want to capture as much information about the user okay if they're what are they spending right now on your solution what industry are they in what is the size of their company what is their pain point and why they decided to choose you and how did they hear about you so these are all you know super valuable information so by the time it gets to the actual sales demo let's say or they use their product you already have enough information to help them see if they're the right fit for you and if not i'll say this again if they're not a good fit please learn to say no to them and you know pass them on to the right solution and i'll give you an example here what i mean let's say you're focused on enterprise level sales right or even mid-market let's go mid-market because we have a lot of people in our market in our audience who are founders who are working with b2b and targeting mid-market and you get a small business who says hey i love your solution i love what you're building i see the value here but then when you schedule a demo with them let's say you didn't qualify them you get them on the call you show them your solution you spent you know half an hour an hour kind of trying to show them your product and how it can be a good fit you know they love it but they're just it's maybe overkill for them and probably when it comes to the price you know your price would be a lot you know more expensive than what they can afford at their stage they're probably you know one year in two years in three years into their building their business and maybe they're just not ready for your solution so rather than you know still trying to make them fit and i see this a lot right they'll still take them on because maybe they're they're willing to find a custom plan for them try to get them on as a client and what happens is a couple months in the client will get frustrated they'll cancel their churn uh they'll generally turn a lot faster because your product wasn't built for them and what you should have done is hey look this isn't the right product for you right now however you know here is a competitor or you know you can say a competition but they're not really another sas company that i recommend recommend you guys check them out start with them and what will happen is they'll they'll respect you they'll appreciate you not trying to sell them and push them rather than actually care show that you care about their business and who knows maybe in three years four years or a couple months down the line they will be ready to use your solution and then they'll come back and talk to you and be like hey you know what i tried that other solution i'm ready to move forward and now i want to start working with you so that goes a long way in terms of how you qualify and get the right person in for the right product so you know i focused a lot on that one first there's the different sales you know stages obviously you have your lead generation the top of the funnel where you kind of generate that interest for your product then you have you know the prospecting where you're reaching out to prospects potential customers educating them from there you're doing the qualification process which i really highlighted you know evaluating whether that prospected target is the right fit for you and your product then from there we go into the demo right so the demo is about conducting those demos that could be product led through your trials or it could be support that helps you kind of fit and decide if it's the right uh fit for their solution and then obviously the last stage is closing right our favorite part of negotiating terms and making that sale so that's number one the first mistake not having the right qualification process in place the next part i want to focus on and the mistake i see often is not using the right marketing channel or sales kind of focus depending on your audience and your ltv so what do i mean here specifically let's say you're targeting b2b uh smbs right and your your product is mainly product led meaning people come to your product they want to try it out they need to see it and let's say your ltv is focused let's say under 500 okay if it's under 500 meaning they're paying you i don't know like 20 a month and they stick around for for a year or so you shouldn't be doing a demo and that's what i what i mean is that you have to have the right strategy for the right type of uh you know ltv and sizes of your business if you're focusing on mid-market and you're giving them the product you know showing them the product they can use it absolutely do the demo but i've seen this before where you know companies charging nine dollars a month and they doing demos with every single person who comes to their website and ask for a you know for to use their product if you're charging nine dollars a month and everything is self-serve you should be focusing on your product you know that's kind of what's called product led growth and then refining your your pricing model so that people can find you organically through paid advertising through pr through seo and then they can sign up for a trial use your product as a way to sell them and you don't need a person involved otherwise you're not going to be able to scale like think about it if you're if you need to do let's say you got 100 people a day signing up for your product and if it's a self-serve product you can't do a hundred demos per day by yourself right and for nine dollars a month it's just not worth your time right if they're paying 400 over the year and your time is worth let's say a thousand dollars an hour or you're paying somebody a hundred dollars an hour to do sales uh you know you're you're you're you're paying them more than their work then they're you're going to get back right it's just hard to justify that kind of cost per acquisition by doing a demo so the right thing to do is get them to the right channel for the right types of sales person if they're a mid market they're over you know let's say a thousand dollars in ltv then definitely get them on a demo spend the time with them show them your product answer all their questions and then your ltv will justifiably go up and you'll be working with the right people but if they're smb focused you know focus on your your product get them into your your funnel and let the product sell itself all right so that's number two all right let's go to number three which is about pricing and how that affects your sales so that's another thing question we have here how often should i be changing my price and how does that affect my sales so a mistake i'll see often as well is people still have the same price that you know they had from three or four or five years ago when they started their business so a quick one you could do today try increasing your price okay we've done this test so many times with our own companies and our own product offerings we literally just keep just keep increasing the price until we see our conversion rates go down and we've done this before where we were selling for 75 we increased it to a hundred dollars we got no we got no push back 125 no push back 150 no pushback 200 no pushback we went up to 250 and then we started getting some pushback okay so we know we hit that inflection point where people started asking for more they were doubting it and they were pushing back and say you know what i'm not interested and until we saw that you know the the market told us right we thought it was worth 75. uh it seems like you know between 200 and 250 is the right spot for now right and now we know okay we need to go back and adjust our product improve it a little bit more and then we can try again and see maybe it's now worth 250 dollars so quick win right now like go out and increase your price and see how it affects your your sales uh you know your next demo so imagine that we left it at 75 we literally you know two over 100 you know increase in price and it didn't affect our conversions at all so quick tip do that today play with your pricing model and see if you get any pushback because i guarantee uh your revenue will go up just by making some price changes and even just even increase it by 5 10 and see what happens and if you're scared you know on how to do that like there's tools you can do you can you know kind of split test it if you're kind of uh you know smb or self-serve model focused um you know run a tool like vwo we love doing conversion rate optimization and that's actually literally like one of our our biggest kind of playbooks when we acquire a sas company is we run different conversion rate optimization tests and pricing is probably the the easiest win for us right we just take the same traffic you know they're getting 100 000 you know views a month they're converting you know a 100 or 200 new users just with that traffic or more uh and then we'll just uh you know start testing out different prices so we'll split test through two different pricing tables different pages different offerings and we'll see you know and we'll see that lift you know 30 40 50 revenue increase and mrr just by by doing those simple tests so try that out yourself guys vwos is a really good tool i love them otherwise you can do them if you're doing demos um obviously you have that presentation just you know ask your team ask your founder if you're the founder talk to your sales team and say hey look we're going to try increasing our price by 200 100 or just whatever 10 this month and let's see how that affects our quotas and our sales this month all right so that's number three the third thing you guys can do today start increasing your prices and see how that affects your overall revenue all right fourth question here is about demos how to improve your conversion rate on demo so you're probably asking what's the right number if you're getting you know qualifying your leads you're getting high quality leads coming in you know good prospecting good kind of lead generation talking to the right people at the right stage you know at this point it's a couple of things you're going to push back on right not the right timing not the right budget you know it's not the right solution or they need to talk it's not the right decision maker right so you got to overcome all those objections but before that people think it's all that which is good that's going to be your sales process uh part of your demo before that is make sure you prepare and have the right research before you even talk to them right don't show up to your calendar and say you know hey i'm five minutes out from talking to this person if you have captured all that information from the prospect before in your qualification stage do your research okay go to hunter.io go to you know linkedin check out their all their social media pages check out their website what are they doing um is there anything on techcrunch about their business is there any new press releases have they raised a recent round try to get as much information about the person you're about to talk to um you know a to build rapport when you get on that call you can talk see something on their linkedin profile maybe they have uh you know similar you know in the same city that you live in and you can talk about similar sports that you guys enjoy um but also you know you know how far they are in their career and how long have they been working that position did they get promoted who are they you know who are they working with understand the size of their team who's the founder so have a proper roadmap and do really really good research beforehand so you beco you come prepared and i guarantee your your closing rate will go up if you have that information before i've done this many times where i've just come in and just try to listen but if i do that extra step of doing the research beforehand uh people really appreciate that and i feel i think i think it just comes off naturally right right like your confidence level goes up just because you feel comfortable that you actually know the person versus coming in uh who is this unknown person how are they going to react and you have no idea what to expect so just take that extra step uh and i guarantee it'll help a lot on your demos all right a couple more more points about the demo side i think it's super super important and then we'll wrap up this uh episode here um okay so when you get on the actual demo make it a conversation i was literally on a demo the the other day and it drove me crazy the guy was like literally reading a script like he was just reading everything asking me these questions and i'm like okay i i don't really care like why are you telling me this it's not relevant for me i you just like get to the point and he didn't ask me questions like get me involved like okay say what you have to say show me you have to but keep me engaged be like alright so like i showed this product you know we can do this this and this what do you think about you know do you see yourself using this or have you done this before or you know just just simple questions and and get that yes from me right get them to say yes because those are micro commitments right ask them questions where they say yes repeatedly i think you've probably heard that before and that actually helps improve your chances of of getting the the closing the sale right so don't read scripts don't follow you know the same pattern have a baseline yes you know some questions that you have to work off to qualify them to show them and have a good process of how you demonstrate it but also be able to read the flow and read the conversation and understand the other person right people want to feel heard so you know just just don't read it off the script that's all that's all i'm going to say on the actual doing the demo if afterwards you're doing a proposal make sure you customize it okay so that's another quick tip um i get demos you know demos and proposals all the time from different you know sas companies that i look to work with or you know use myself and i can see that this is just like a copy and paste there's no effort put behind this and if i see there's no effort then i say okay this guy wasted my time i just gave you you asked me a hundred different questions and you showed me a demo you spent a lot of my time and then you give me a generic demo um you know presentation expect that to sell me like why didn't you just give me that from the beginning if that was the case right why you know we just why why even waste my time with all that if i'm gonna get something that was there's no effort put behind it so if you're gonna put together a presentation a demo uh proposal take that extra same thing just like you did the research of the demo take that extra time and put a thorough uh proposal put together specifically for them right so simple things right like even just putting their logo on the first page and your logo um you know mentioned their name throughout different pages their industry how you know throw in words that you picked up during the conversations based on their time of um sorry the size of their business or maybe the size of their team or write down the actual problem that they told you that their problem is and then write down the solution of how they present it to you and you'll say hey this is the problem you're having this is the solution i have you're like no this isn't the problem i just told you you know two days ago and this isn't the solution that we talked about so why are you giving me this different uh mismatch of information so make it clear that you really really understand them that they want to be heard and you know make the pricing based on them they have 10 users um show them only the price for 10 users you know and then you can show them a little bit more hey as you grow we're going to give you a discount if you get to 20 users right don't show them uh okay so zero to five five to ten uh you know five to thirty whatever like just just make the price for them they ask for ten users today and you know they're going to be growing give them the price for them and they'll appreciate that a lot more all right guys so that's it i think that's enough tips for today i hope that helps i mean try to try to implement these today and let me know if that helps like improve your closing rates get more revenue that's all this is this is all this is about right increase your pricing and i hope you guys success in your sas journey all right guys see you guys on the next episode where we'll have you know more interviews next week thank you all for listening in to this episode and joining sas district today don't forget to leave a review and subscribe for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the sas industry if you're a sas company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business get in touch with us at horizoncapital.com and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals if you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast please dm us on instagram or linkedin at horizon capital and help us improve our content for you all thanks again and hope to see you on the next one [Music] you