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in this video i'm covering the five critical components of a high performing sas sales pipeline most large sas companies are built on sales and if you don't have a high converting high performing sales team and a sales process it's unlikely that you will grow quickly 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 so first i want to break down high touch sas versus low touch or high touch sales funnels versus low touch to no touch high touch is when you have to do a lot of qualification and when you are doing demos sometimes one or more call closes you could say a one call a two call a five call close and then you go through procurement and eventually you're able to close the deals low touch or no touch sas funnels or sales pipelines is really when you're not doing much sales at all you basically have a marketing pipeline that brings people to your website oftentimes you have a lower priced product and you have a very wide funnel so you have a lot of traffic and you're just looking at converting from one step to the next you know from someone becoming a visitor to becoming a trial to converting to paid and then not churning in the long run and so today since we are diving into sales we're not going to be talking about that low touch no touch model but we're going to be looking at the five critical components of a high performing sas sales pipeline when you're doing medium and high touch sales the first component is of course leads these are businesses that are interested in your product and are folks who may want to buy it i think about leads in two buckets there are outbound leads leads that you generate by doing email outreach linkedin outreach used to be cold calling but that's not done so much with sas these days unless your businesses are brick and mortar and you know if the easiest way to reach them is via phone so those are outbound leads inbound leads are those generated by things like seo content partnerships integrations pay-per-click there's a whole list of marketing approaches many of which we cover in depth on this channel youtube.com microcom thanks for coming so without leads you have no one interested in your product and the first step is either doing that outbound outreach or building a marketing engine that allows people inbound to find you and start evaluating your software the second component of a high-performing sas sales pipeline is qualification and this is where you take a lead someone who is interested in your software and you qualify them you try to figure out are they a good fit and we'll look at a couple questions in a second about how you can go about qualifying there's a couple roles at larger companies once you get past the point where the founder is doing the qualification there's a couple roles that do this the sdr which is a sales development rep and a bdr which is a business development route so sdrs typically qualify inbound leads and bdrs typically qualify those outbounds depending on your process you may have one or both at a large organization now i'm going to be honest if you're watching this video you're probably the founder or maybe you know the first of 10 20 employees at a sas company in that case you probably won't have a lot of this differentiation because you just don't have the staff to do it oftentimes you're doing it yourself whether you know you're the founder or whether you're hired as a salesperson you're also going to be qualifying leads especially in the early stage and so questions you're asking yourself or you're asking your prospects at this time are things like do they have the budget are they a good fit for a product will they be successful in the long run using our product because if the answer to any of those is no then you're probably going to want to pass on them they're not a qualified prospect if they if they aren't going to be successful and don't have the budget to pay the third component is usually some type of sales presentation or demo you might hear this called the pitch or the demo and this is usually given by the founder in the early days and then later handed off to a salesperson now in sas sales people are usually referred to as aes or account executives and the way i like to think about sas sales is something i learned from my co-founder with tinyseed he thinks of them as a high-paid consultant who isn't getting paid basically you are an expert in this space because you know the problems you know the available solutions and you know the pros and cons of you and all of your competitors or at least you should versus the person buying your software is probably only going to buy this once or a few times in their career and so they're not all the way up to speed like you are because you live in this space day to day and so think of yourself as that consultant trying to find the optimal solution for your prospect and hopefully that optimal solution is is your product and so in terms of your demo demos should be a lot shorter than you usually think they are there should be a lot of questions coming from you to the prospect to the lead about what they need what they're looking for the problem they are trying to solve because people are going to use your product differently and finding that out from them up front and then tailoring the demo to them is usually the best way to go and if you can't demo your product in let's say 10 to 15 minutes you're probably going about it wrong you're probably getting too far into the weeds into what your product can do rather than what it can do for this prospect component number four is the close this is also usually in the early days handled by the founder and then later on a sales person is someone who is trying to drive it to close because sales people are compensated based on deals that they close they earn a commission this often requires a lot of follow-up which means you'll want a crm system to keep track of the stage that any given lead is in because once you have 10 or 20 prospects and your sales cycle is two to five months you just forget to follow up and so having a system like a trello or closed.com or salesforce this allows you to stay organized it can take many months for larger organizations to purchase and if you're selling to schools or governments you can have incredibly long sales cycles i've heard folks spend a couple years trying to get large construction firms signed and onboarded your pricing has to be high enough such that this headache is worth it and this whole process of hiring a sdrs and bdrs and aes it has to make sense you have to have enough profit in your pricing and the fifth and final component of the sales pipeline is onboarding this is where the ae the account executive hands off the customer to your customer success person and they take over because they specialize in doing this they specialize in onboarding versus an aeu who is incentivized by commission to close deals so they're not going to invest the time it takes to get someone properly onboarded if you think about churn being the death of sas this step is crucial onboarding is crucial because if the person or the business isn't successful with your product they will cancel and like i said churn which is cancellations is the death of sas so having a seamless handoff from aes to customer success managers as well as having a customer success team that is really good really good at onboarding people and getting them up to speed and getting them so that they are successful with your product in that first month or two it means they'll stick around for the long term and that's how you build an amazing sas company thanks for joining me today if you enjoyed this video i'd love it if you'd hit the like button below and subscribe to this channel we have a ton of videos like this coming out every month from the tactical videos to live streams to conference talks we have an amazing community over at microconf.com i'll see you in the next video [Music] you