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- If you've got initial revenues for your SaaS business if you already tapped out of your existing network of people that you can sell it to, you're likely trying to figure out how do I build a b2b sales funnel so I can generate more leads, generate more pipeline, and scale my revenues? In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through exactly what a b2b SaaS sales funnel looks like and the three key strategies that you can implement to scale your go-to-market machine and accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. Intro. (upbeat music) what's everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK, and on this channel I help SaaS farmers like you grow your SaaS businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now, if you're new to this channel, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster. So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon. That way you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TK Energy. Now, if you're already part of this community if you're part of my SaaS go-to-market coaching programs and people welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here. So across the 250 SaaS companies that I coach across the three SaaS businesses that I operate, across the SaaS companies that have started scaled and exited I've seen all the permutations of how to operate a SaaS go-to-market machine and specifically a SaaS sales funnel. In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the three strategies that have been the most effective and that are working today. And when you implement one or more of these three key strategies for your b2b SaaS sales funnel you'll be able to accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. If you're excited to dig in, gonna smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm and let's dig right into it. The first thing, let's cover the brass acks. What is a sales funnel and how should you think about it? Well, the sales funnel is a simple thing. You have your ideal customers over here, and out of your ideal customers, you're doing a series of sales and marketing motions so that they know about you, and then they trust you, and then they buy from you and at the end of that is revenue. It's as simple as that and that's what a sales funnel is really about. I'm gonna dig into the three strategies that you can do to actually attract your ideal customers into your sales funnel. Strategy number one, that has been working since the beginning of time, and I bet if you've just started out, you use this without even realizing it is, getting your ideal customers to refer you to your future customers. Maybe you were customer number one or you got your first 10 customers. Usually what ends up happening is you go into your network and you actually say, "Hey, we're building this thing. Who else is interested?" And you start to get referrals going. You tap into your existing connections, existing network and you tell them about the SaaS product that you're offering, and very quickly they get to know you because they kind of know you already and they know your existing customers. They start to trust you and then they buy from you. What happens very often is when founders get started they quickly start to get some customers and then they tap out of their existing network and referrals stop working in which case they have to start thinking about what other ways can we build a go-to-market strategy a scalable go-to-market machine and start to generate more leads and more prospects and more opportunities that drives to revenue? So the first one, if you haven't done so already you should be looking at every single one of your customers and figuring out how you can get them to introduce you to a future customer that is an ideal customer for you. Most of the time you just have to ask, as you start to get more and more customers founders and go-to-market leaders, forget to ask which is why you wanna switch to a programmatic referral program so that you're consistently asking your customers for more referrals. You might be saying, TK, I only have so many customers and I can't get more referrals. What else you got for me? Well, let's go into principle number two. Principle number two is actually doing inbound. Now, inbound is a mystifying thing to many people but I think that the guru's over complicated. All inbound means is you go to the places your ideal customers hang out. This could be LinkedIn, this could be Twitter, this could be Facebook, all the social networks. It could be places where they search like YouTube or Google and you make sure that you post content over there. So when they're searching, you show up or when you're connected to them and they're scrolling through their feeds your content shows up, and from that content you typically offer some form of a lead magnet. We call that a manifesto so that they say, "Oh my God I'm really interested in that. I wanna learn more." And they know about you. They become a lead and they go through the sales process to trust you and eventually buy from you. And that's the second way that you can actually configure your sales funnel so that you're generating leads from your ideal target customers. The beauty of inbound is you don't have to go to these people like a stranger and say, "Hey do you wanna buy my software?" Which is really hard to do. I'll talk more about how to do that effectively in the next step. But let's talk about inbound first. The beauty of inbound is customers come to you and there's something very different when they're coming to you because they're coming on their own volition. They're probably seeing some content on LinkedIn or your blog post or anywhere else on the internet and based on that, they're raising their hand and saying, "Hey, I wanna learn more about this. This is of interest to me." And that's the magic of this. And because they are coming to you, now they know about you and also they're a little bit more trusting so they can actually move through this process that much faster. Now, there's a third way you can do this, your third way of generating leads and pipelines so you can scale your revenues through your sales funnel. But before I do that, let me pause here for a second. There's an important component to this that you really want to understand. Now, there's a set of activities that you can do. You can go ask your customers for referrals. You can go and post content and generate a lead magnet and put out a manifesto and start generating leads. You can even do the third one which I'm gonna talk about in a second. But there's an invisible hand that makes or breaks whether this is going to be effective. You could do a post every day on LinkedIn you could do a thousand blog posts. You could be asking your customers every single day for referrals. Maybe you're just at two customers and you've already exhausted that there's an invisible hand that makes or breaks whether this whole thing is going to be effective and through your entire sales funnel. That is your message. The way you message what you do, what the transformation is you're bringing to this world, what problem you are solving, what your value proposition is, why they should trust you, what your software actually does. All of those things is part of the message. Put simply. If you were to ask an existing customer, "Hey can you refer us? Here's how you can refer us. Here's how you can describe what we do to another person that would get value from our platform." That's a message. If you were to post content and then say, "Hey, download our manifesto, it's titled this." Or they go to your website and they see in the website exactly what that hero headline is, all of those little things make or break whether people once they know about you start to trust you and engage in your sales funnel. And I meet founders all the time. They're like, look, we're doing all the activities we're sending the emails, or we're writing the content or we're doing the blog posts, we're running the ads, but nothing's working. People are looking but they're not engaging and it's not turning into real trials, it's not turning into real opportunities, it's not turning into real revenue. And almost always it's because the message is wrong. Whatever you're saying is not quite resonating and that's the invisible hand. So with these two strategies, no matter which one you pick or you do both of these and even the third one I'm gonna talk about next, what makes or breaks your likelihood of success is how effective your message is. If you're starting to see the power in this, you start to see where the sales funnel is important. And look, people overcomplicated, all it is is they need to know about you and they don't know about you nothing's gonna happen. Then they need to trust you and then they'll buy from you. If you are not being effective in the message then none of it will matter. But if you get the message right then all these pieces can start to click. If you're starting to see the power in this, can I just get a yes in the comments below and also smash on like button for the YouTube algorithm? It loves it when you do that, and so do we. We put a lot of love into these videos. Also, if you're in that stage where you're looking to figure out, okay how do I build out this sales funnel? And we did a little bit of referrals, we did a little bit of inbound we did the third one I'm gonna talk about which I think you can guess but I'm gonna talk about how to really make it work. But maybe your messaging isn't right or maybe your ideal customer is unclear. This is why I run my SaaS go go-to-market coaching program. Inside of this program I work with you to develop this sales funnel, develop the messaging, develop the ideal customer profile. So you can actually put all this into motion. You don't have to go anywhere right now. I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode. I'll link to it below. Right now, let's go to the third one because this one's one of my favorites. One of my favorites, but also my least favorites because it's one of the hardest to do is outbound. This is, and you probably guessed it as you were watching this video but I'm gonna add some nuances here to reward you for watching them for this long because I don't like stating the obvious. There's always nuances to this stuff. So outbound is where you go to the ideal customers. This is the classic way, and in fact, my last company ToutApp pioneered the sales engagement space. And what we did was make it programmatic so that you can actually go out there and email a thousand people and generate pipeline and make them know you build that trust and get them to show up in meetings or start trials so they buy from you. And outbound is still incredibly effective today, sending cold emails, cold calling all of these things are incredibly effective to get people to know about you, get them to trust you, and then eventually buy from you. And that's the third way you can do this. But there's a caveat here, today, inboxes are noisier than ever, and there's entire AI algorithms that monitor for inboxes and rule out spam. And even on top of that, people have so many emails coming in they're getting so many outbound emails they kind of know that it's an automated message. Now, here's where it gets super interesting. If you really wanna make outbound work for you in terms of your sales funnel, here's one little trick that has always worked really well and we use this in our companies and it's been showing really great rewards. What you do is you start an outbound campaign. You start to target your ideal customers. That's see of a thousand people you want to go after and you do a eight touch or nine touch sequence to start to email them. Well, as you email them, instead of just saying, "Hey we do this, do you wanna book a call? Hey, we do this, is now a good time? Hey, I haven't heard from you. Is a bear hunting you down should I save you?" Clearly that's a template that exists out there. It bogs my mind. Instead of just doing that, one of the things you can do is you can actually direct them to quality content on your website or quality content on your LinkedIn profile. Just get them to a piece of property that you own. And what you can do from there is as they look at your website and look at your content or they get into a guide that you created that's hosted on your website, you can actually retarget them in a way through ads so that they are actually starting to see your ads. And as they start to see your ads you offer them your lead magnet, your manifesto, and they actually start to come inbound as well. This is one of the little tricks we've started to test out there where you turn an outbound prospect into an inbound, meaning you give them so much value and drive them to your website and then you retarget them with valuable content. They essentially come right back around as an inbound lead even if they don't trust you right away to become a prospect through your outbound sequence. Remember what I was telling you with inbound where they just trust you more because they're coming on their own volition. This is one of the interesting strategies with outbound where if you do it right not only are you serving them not only are you fast tracking your progress to getting to them and getting them to know about you you're also retargeting them with valuable content with your lead magnet manifesto and getting them into your sales process on their own volition, which is incredibly powerful. These are the three strategies that you have for operating your b2b SaaS sales funnels. If you've got some revenues and now you're looking to scale the number of leads you're generating, the amount of prospects you're generating, the number of trials or sales opportunities they're generating, these are essentially the tried and true methods that you can use to actually generate more pipeline and generate more revenues. The first one is referrals. Referrals are an incredible, even if you have five customers or 10 customers ask them manually. As you start to get 50 customers, a hundred customers go programmatic. If you need a tool that sets up a referral program for you, I recommend megaphone. I'll link to it below. The second one is to do inbound. This is where it's super powerful to create a lead magnet and a manifesto and share content out there that drives to that manifesto and actually generate leads for you. If you wanna launch a lead magnet really quickly I recommend a tool called Instant. I'll also link to it below. And the third one is outbound. This is tried and true. If you want to do outbound you want to email a thousand people in your ideal customer profile then I recommend a tool called Apollo. They're incredible. And you can just sign up for that tool and start doing outbound really effectively for that as well. And these are three key strategies that you can use so that your ideal customers can know you, and then trust you, and then eventually buy from you as they operate through your sales funnel. Now, here's the catch. There's one catch to all of this. You can have the tools, you can do the activities but remember that one thing I said,. The key, the invisible hand that makes or breaks your referral requests, your inbound content, your lead magnet, your manifesto, your outbound messaging, your website is the message. If your message is effective, then all of this will work. If your message is not effective, then people will look at it. You'll do all those activities but you won't get their email response and you won't get the clicks, you won't get the engagement and you won't generate the leads and you won't get the referrals. And you'll know very quickly if you're doing all the activities, inbound, outbound, referrals, running ads, all of these things. If you're doing all of them but they're not yielding the results chances are your message is just not resonating. There's also a second thing that I see go wrong as well and may also be that you're targeting the wrong people. What you think is your ideal customer profile may not actually be your ideal customer profile. You may be targeting the wrong people. This is the difference between just operating a sales funnel versus actually creating a proper go-to-market strategy. Now, what is a go-to-market strategy? Well, a go-to-market strategy actually tells you how you're going to execute on your sales and marketing. The first thing it does is it builds out your ideal customer profile. What exactly is your ideal customer profile? What do they do? Where do they live? What type of companies are they in? Everyone thinks they have an ideal customer profile but when I work with them we do a 29 point ideal customer profile exercise. This allows you to really hone in on exactly who you're going to be serving. The second part of a go-to-market strategy is your manifesto. A manifesto essentially is your value prop. It's your strategic narrative. It's how you build trust as people know about you. When we create a manifesto, it turns into a lead magnet but it also enables you to craft your content. It enables you to figure out how you can actually ask for referrals, enables you to figure out how you can send outbound emails and structure the message properly. Heck, it even clarifies what you put in your homepage that big hero headline which I know you're changing every day 'cause you're not sure what it is. So it helps you craft that as well. And then the last piece of a go to market strategy is I gave you three of the best strategies for running your sales funnel. But there are other ones, but there are also ways to do it effectively. And the key to doing this is running a Broadway show. This is a consistent set of sales and marketing activities that you can do to bring your message to your ideal customers. When you clarify your ideal customer profile, when you clarify your message, it allows you to run your Broadway show much more effectively. And then you won't send a thousand emails and then wait for crickets when no one responds and you're like, let's send 10,000 more. And then say, you know what? We just need to add this feature and then everyone's gonna buy. That's where you fall apart and you waste months building the wrong product and never quite figure out how to scale. But if you figure out your go to market strategy and then you execute on your sales funnel with these three proven methods then you can generate leads, generate pipeline, get people to know you, trust you, accelerate that trust and they will buy from you. So now you know exactly what a b2b SaaS sales funnel is. The three best strategies that I'm seeing right now that works really well, and also the biggest place where founders go wrong and that's the lack of a go-to-market strategy. Now, if you wanna build out a proper go-to-market strategy this is exactly how I help inside my SaaS go-to-market coaching program. It's an incredible program. I've worked with over 250 founders across my go-to-market programs across different stages. We've had so many success stories that we've shared on this channel. Specifically inside of this program I help you flash out your ideal customer profile. Once you have your ideal customer profile then I help you flesh out your manifesto. This manifesto really clarifies your message. That's the most important piece for this. And then I teach you how to run a Broadway show. It's a consistent set of sales and marketing activities that you can run to bring your manifesto to your ICP on a consistent basis and run them through your sales funnel so they can know you, they can trust you, and then they'll buy from you. It's an incredible program. If you'd like to work together one-on-one inside of my SaaS go-to market coaching program just go to tkkader.com/gtm, tkkader.com/gtm. Inside of that page, you'll get all the details you need about the program and how it works. Now, the better the fit, the better the results. So what we do is we get on a small zoom call to really understand where you are in the business, what your challenges are, and if the go-to-market program that I run can be helpful to you. So if you're interested, just fill out that little form book a time, and we'll get on a Zoom call and we'll review exactly where you are in your business. And if it sounds like it's a fit, we're off to the races right away. So just go to tkkader.com/gtm or follow the link below. If you got value from this video please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm and just loves it when you do that. If you have a fellow founder, a team member, if you're part of of a Slack group or WhatsApp group where there are other SaaS founders please share this video with them. You wanna help as many SaaS founders as possible. I also drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches. So be sure to hit that subscribe button on that bell icon if you haven't it already. And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK and I'll see you in the next episode or inside the SaaS go-to-market coaching program. Take care everybody. (upbeat music)