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- If you don't have a process for selling your software then your customers gonna introduce you to their process for not buying. (upbeat music) Hey there, Dan Martell here. Serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SAAS Academy. In this episode, I'm gonna share with you how to think through the sales SAAS pipeline. I'm gonna break it down for you. But be sure to stay to the end where I'm gonna tell you how to get access to my Rocket Demo Builder framework. That's exactly the nine boxes that you need to follow, the talk tracks and script to be able to reduce your sales cycles by half and increase your win rates by double. So be sure to check that out, but let's get into it. One of the privilege that I have is working with coaching clients to help them go from a founder led sales, where they're doing all the sales demos, they're onboarding customers, there's qualifying people, they're managing the pipeline to one which is, honestly, where everybody wants to end up, to this place where a team is leading the sales process, where somebody else is doing the qualifying, the demos and onboarding clients 'cause if you don't figure out how to do this you will always be bottleneck. 'Cause no entrepreneur will grow into pain. If this is pain and you're growing, you will do things like sabotage your success, be slow to respond to emails, et cetera, because anything you do to grow means more pain for you. Meaning you that if you figure out a marketing hack, then all of a sudden your calendar gets just full of sales demos. And you're doing a bunch of sales demos and then people don't show up and you get frustrated. And then you open up your calendar for Saturdays 'cause maybe that's the problem and you start taking calls on Saturdays, and guess what happens? Half the people don't show up and you just start getting frustrated. If you don't learn the process I share with you today as an entrepreneur, you're gonna feel frustrated and not be able to move things forward. So, the ability to design this and understand what's broken. Maybe you have a sales team right now and you just don't know how to diagnose the steps that are broken or where to take things off of other people and give it to a different department, to really increase what's called your sales velocity. So, let's get into it. Number one, the sales development rep or what I call the SDR. The SDR is somebody that typically deals with inbound. Meaning that if you have content marketing going on, you have social media marketing going on, you have, you know, anybody sending traffic to your website and that might initiate a chat or an email, somebody needs to qualify those inbound requests to make sure that you don't overwhelm your sales team with people that are not ready. So, typically, I like to do this thing called speed to lead. So as soon as a lead comes in through a contact form or somebody emails, you know, the general inbox, somebody's on the phone with them right away. Boom, form comes in, get on a call. Doesn't answer, totally fine. Leave them a voicemail, follow up with an email. But having somebody take that over, if you're doing it today as a founder, and have that SDR process defined so that you're qualifying those people to even get on a call. They're confirming... Hey, even if you let them book into a call. Hey, I noticed you just booked a call with one of our scale specialists, Rob. Just wanted to make sure that it was in your calendar, if you had any questions, also qualify them. I noticed that, you know, you have this role in your company, is that something you're about to make a decision? So the SDRs job is not to sell. It's really to make sure that the opportunity is qualified for a sales rep to engage. Number two is BDR or business development rep. Now I call it a BDR and trust me there's just even in the three level acronym aspect of you know, naming stuff. Some people call MDR. Some people call SDRs, but market development rep, sales development rep, I call it BDR, business development rep that's somebody that's do an outbound. They're creating demand. They're doing LinkedIn. They're emailing prospects. They're using what's called account-based marketing. They're prospecting. They're out there trying to drum up opportunities. And what's interesting is they're typically doing the exact same roles in SDR but from an outbound point of view. So it's not just qualifying inbound. They literally gotta go find people that are in market that have the problem that are qualified, that are the decision makers. And from there, they pull them forward to see if there's an opportunity before they send it over to sales reps. So in this bucket, if we think of like three phases from qualifying, closing and farming we wanna make sure that we have somebody doing outbound. That's qualifying, finding the need and then queuing up the conversation to be heard with your sales rep. Number three, the account exec, the AE that's the general term that a lot of people use in the sales space. You can call them a product specialist. You can call them an account exec. You can call them a sales rep. You can call them whatever. Literally, as long as the person typically is a quota carrying member of your sales team, they're a sales person. They have to close deals, get the customer's payment, move them forward. So typically this person is using some kind of sales process 'cause my rule is if you don't have a process for selling your software, then your customer's gonna introduce you to their process for not buying, okay. And I got that from one of the literally 300 sales books I've read. Maybe it was a Zig Ziglar quote or Tom Hawkins. I don't really remember, but that's the idea. If you don't have a systematic process for selling then your prospect will systematically tell you why your product isn't a good fit for them. Not that they won't buy, maybe they will. But I mean, I just wanna increase what's called the win rate. So if you don't use a process be sure to check out the Rocket Demo Builder which I'll share with you in a second. But one of my favourite overall sales process if you're trying to buy one or model one is meddic, okay? M-E-D-D-I-C you can Google it, check it out for yourself. But the meddic sales process is more of an appropriate one for software than using what's called bant, budget authority needs and timing which is an old school sales process. Software sells completely different. Follow the meddic process and teach your account execs to do that but they should be responsible for closing the deals that the SDRs and the BDRs bring into the opportunity pipeline. And number four is your customer success team. This is a CSM. This is a manager. They're usually accountable for certain amount of volume sometimes one to 2 million in error depending on the kind of the go-to market that you employ. But the CSM is the person that wants the account exec gets the deal. They hand it over in a beautiful CS processes where there's, you know kind of a soft handoff with the client's like, hey now I'm gonna hand you over to Mark he's on our CS team. He's gonna get your account activated. He's gonna figure out, you know I've shared all my notes with him. And typically that person is really responsible for activating, onboarding and then overall success with the product depending on if you sell SMB mid-market or enterprise you may have a CS component, regardless if you're SMB it just might be done through automation a little bit more. And an account person might have, you know, thousands of accounts that they manage as a block of accounts to make sure that they're being successful and they monitor et cetera for churn and for opportunities to upgrade. So I always look at them as the farmer. So you have the qualifiers, you have the closers and then you have the farmers. The customer success person is the person that's going to find opportunities a bunch of customer base to upsell, cross sell, support make sure the use cases from your products are being deployed amongst your customer base. And when, if you're the founder and you're trying to figure out, well, what do I do first? Do I hire somebody to sell? Do I hire somebody to do this? I typically always go handoff first. So get somebody to take over the activation onboarding and success part 'cause that's a little bit more kind of usually systematised or well thought out, then I'll go qualifying. And really the goal is to leave yourself as only getting on calls as a founder with qualified confirmed sales appointments in your calendar and then you manage those plus followup. And then over time you'll hire, you'll take somebody to an SDR sales development rep or BDR and then train them up to be an account exec, replace them with ideally two maybe you'll hire two salespeople but that's usually the path that seems to work best for myself and for my coaching clients that you can now, now that you understand those three different stages of the kind of the sales pipeline overall that's how you generate revenue. That's the revenue engine that you need to develop for your SAAS company. So quick recap. Number one is the sales development rep and number two is the business development rep. Number three is the account exec and number four is a customer success person. As I mentioned the beginning of this episode I wanna share with you one of the most powerful frameworks that I give away to my community which is the Rocket Demo Builder. It will literally help you double your win rates and reduce the time to close or get a deal by half. Just follow the nine specific sequences. The talk tracks that give you the questions I tell you how to go for the close, how to deal with objections. Just click the link below to download your copy of my Rocket Demo Builder to help improve your software demos today and be sure to... If you like this video, share it with somebody that you think it could serve somebody you care about, smash that subscribe button and leave a comment with your biggest takeaway. And as per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday. (upbeat music)