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in this video i'm talking about 10 strategies for selling software as a service these are strategies that can apply to any sas sales funnel where you're actually doing sales calls demos one two five call closes as long as you're not doing super low touch where it's just someone coming to your website and converting these strategies should be able to help you optimize and improve your close rates i'm rob walling i'm a startup founder with multiple exits the author of three books about building startups an investor and more than 100 companies strategy number one is to generate inbound leads and not just focus on outbound so many sales orgs focus on cold outreach only cold and warm outreach really but why not invest in generating warm leads who come inbound and have that interest whether you generate it through seo or content partnerships or integrations pay-per-click ads there are a myriad of sas marketing approaches most of which we explore in depth on this channel if you're not already subscribed i'd encourage you to go do so but the benefit of inbound leads is incredible because if someone comes to your site and they are interested they're already kind of warmed up there's so much less effort to get them to convert to a paying customer strategy two is to qualify your leads early when i see broken sales processes oftentimes there's no qualification up front or very little and as the founder well you have to have a process in place to be able to figure out who is a decent fit for your product otherwise you're wasting so much of your and your team's time talking to unqualified prospects so you want to answer questions like does this person or their company have the budget for our product are they a good fit for our product will they be successful using our product because if the answer to any of those questions is no they're an unqualified lead and they're not going to be a fit for you to invest your time into strategy three is to track your sales metrics i have seen companies sas companies doing low seven figures without tracking the basic metrics of how many leads do we get in a month how many then become qualified then how many demos do people show up for how many of those do we close and then past that how do we retain them you know do they stick around based on their source to track these sales metrics which are absolutely crucial because what gets measured gets managed you'll want a crm system a crm is a sales enablement system and this is what it's designed for is to track your metrics through your sales process strategy four is to ask for the close i have shadowed salespeople where they do the demo and at the end they say well i guess we'll have another chat at some point they just leave it wide open and that's not what you want to do you want to ask for the clothes you want to ask questions like does this seem like a fit are there any reasons why you wouldn't want want to move forward here are the next steps to move forward with a purchase shall we start those you're just asking for the close and if the person or the business is unable to move forward or unwilling to move forward at this point that's okay but then they should have a reason for that right well i need to go back and convince my boss or we're really not sure yet or we're still evaluating other products and then the the next piece which is strategy five is to follow up it's to have some type of system usually it's your crm system that reminds you that when that person says you know we we aren't going to close right now but get back to me in a week because we're still evaluating other products then you follow up in a week and you say things like hey sarah we had a great call uh last week you know how's your evaluation process going just checking in and following up the death of your sales process is not having follow-ups and you should follow up and follow up until someone gets back to you and they give you a hard yes or a hard no strategy number six is to keep a list of objections and responses much like support teams have their internal and external knowledge bases that help their customers learn more about their product and help them serve their customers better as a sales team you should have essentially a knowledge base whether this is in notion or google docs or dropbox it really doesn't matter but it's a list of objections and then the the possible responses right the responses that have worked in the past when someone complains about price or they're not sure it's a fit or you know do they trust your company with their data and and you know do you have a security compliance and how big is your team there's all these questions that are going to come up or objections that someone may come up with to not buy your software and so keep a running list of those and much like an internal faq distribute that to your sales people strategy number seven is to create content for every step of the funnel i think a lot of marketers focus on the top of the funnel getting folks interested into your space are interested in your product but if you think about someone's sales journey as they become problem aware and then they realize there are solutions out there and then they come to your website and then they are a lead and then they become qualified and then they demo and then you know they eventually close there are a lot of steps there where a lot of education can be helpful and so creating content not just for the top of the funnel but for someone in the middle of evaluating your product versus others or someone in the final steps of signing up for a paid account it can be super helpful to have content for all of those steps strategy eight is to offer paid trials or paid pilots now this one might be controversial oftentimes trials are free and if someone needs a 7 14 21 day trial usually if they're a decent account that you think could close you're probably just gonna give them a free trial but oftentimes larger companies will want three month six month trials and that's where you start thinking of it as a paid pilot because you and your team your whether it's customer success or your sales folks are going to be going through a lot of pain and and spending a lot of time to get someone into that pilot and they're going to be using your software and getting value out of it and so that's where you consider having this paid trial or paid pilot especially for those larger customers who need a longer duration to evaluate your product strategy number nine something you may already be doing it's sell annual plans if you're gonna go through the effort of a sales process even if it's a one call a five claw a six month close you want to get as much of that money up front as possible sas is amazing because it's recurring but sas has the achilles heel of you only get paid monthly and instead of getting all of that value up front you get the value stretched out over time so you can help pay for the sales commissions and just the cost of sales as well as the cost of marketing if you sell annual plans you can get more of that cash up front it'll help you grow faster and the tenth and final strategy is to raise your prices similar to selling annual plans raising your prices allows you to get more value from the customer and it can send a signal to the space that you are a premium product it's tough when you're early if you're not a brand raising your prices can be challenging especially if there is an entrenched incumbent and there are certain cases where you should keep your price lower than them as you're trying to capture more of the market but i say this all the time pricing is the biggest lever in sas and most early stage sas companies are underpriced so raising your prices not only allows you to get more money but it allows you to explore more marketing approaches because a lot of marketing approaches like let's say pay-per-click ads and cold outreach these are things that are quite expensive and if your prices are too low you can't afford to generate enough inbound leads see strategy one earlier to you know to keep your sales pipeline filled and so while raising your prices is not the correct answer in every single case for most sas companies who haven't raised your prices in the past six to 12 months it's something you should think about not only will it help your entire sales effort but it helps you build a healthier sas company and it will help you grow faster so i hope you enjoyed this video you should check out the other videos on our channel youtube.com microconf we are covering all manner of sas topics from sales to marketing to growth everything you need to grow your sas company faster [Music] [Music] [Music] you