- In this video, I'm
gonna walk you through five simple steps to sell
SaaS, software as a service. And you wanna make sure
you watch this video all the way through because these strategies
are gonna be applicable if you are selling a SaaS idea
that's not quite built yet and you want to pre-sell it, and it's also gonna work even if you are working at a company selling an established SaaS product. What's going on everybody,
it's Patrick Dang here. Before we get started, make sure to give this
video a like, subscribe and turn on notifications if you wanna see more sales
training videos like this, and let's go ahead and dive right in. Now to understand from a
high level perspective, the SaaS sales funnel, essentially what we
wanna be thinking about is thinking our sales process as a funnel, almost like a triangle, right? So at the top of the
funnel is your first step where you're gonna
obviously have more people and you try to get as many people in your funnel as possible. And as you walk them
through every step, right? There's gonna be five
steps for this video, well, you know, you're gonna
filter out more and more people until you get to the end of the funnel where people are actually
qualified to buy, and they end up purchasing
your products and services. And so this video is all about how to walk your prospects,
your potential customers through every step of the funnel so that you can turn a total stranger into a paying customer. Now at the top of the funnel, right? The top of this triangle, is gonna be lead generation. So lead generation, in my opinion, is probably the most
overlooked aspect of sales, because, you know if you
think about a funnel, if you don't have the
beginning of the funnel, meaning people are not coming in as leads, you can't even walk them
through any of the steps, you actually do this on process, talk on the phone, do a presentation, close a deal and negotiate, you cannot do any of that
without lead generation. So whether you are already
a proven enterprise selling established software or if you're a startup and you just really starting out and you haven't built anything yet, you have to generate leads. Now for your industry, for
whatever you are selling, it's gonna vary a little different, right? For example, real estate in that industry it might be easier to cold call, you know, real estate brokerages
and real estate agents to try to sell them that way. For other industries, it might be better to
do a cold email, right? In other industries, like let's say if you're
selling consulting services, if you're installing any software or integrating anything, using LinkedIn and social
selling might be more effective. So whatever it is you are selling, just note that each channel is gonna vary depending on what you're selling and who you're selling it to. But what's most important is, you find at least one effective form of outreach and communication to start generating those leads. Once you get one down, you can expand. But if you don't have
one way to generate leads whether it's cold email
or LinkedIn or whatever, well, you got nothing. So definitely find one
that works for you first. And my recommendation is to look at, you know, other people in your industry, maybe your competitors or people who are much larger than you, and see how they're doing it. The chances are, if it's working
for them in their industry, it probably can work for you too if just kind of follow a similar route. Now the next step of
the SaaS selling process is you want to qualify
your prospects, right? Because not everyone is
gonna be a fit to buy. For example, if you're
sending a hundred emails, how do you know for sure that these people are
actually gonna buy from you? You don't. And that's why you have to
get on the phone, right? You basically send them an email saying, Do you wanna have a meeting? You get on the phone and you qualify them before you start selling anything, right? So qualification is extremely important because you are basically
asking a bunch of questions understanding the customer, and seeing if they are a good fit to buy. I'm not saying you have to force anything, I'm just saying, is there a fit, do they have a problem that you can solve with your SaaS product? So from a tactical level,
how it's gonna work is, you get on the phone with a prospect and you have, you know, a
little building rapport, a chat a little bit like, "Oh how's the weather over there? Oh, where are you from?" Then you say something like, "Hey, I wanna be respectful on your time, so how about we go ahead and get started. Is that okay with you?" And they're going to say, "Sure, let's go ahead
and get started," right? And that's how you start a sales meeting. You just ask permission. "Hey, do you mind if we
go ahead and get started?" Obviously they're on the phone with you, they're gonna say yes. And as you qualify the prospect, the main things you're looking
for from a high level,, is you wanna look for a couple of things. Do they have a pain, that you can solve? Is that pain bad enough that they're gonna pay
money to you to solve it? Okay, if that's true,
then you wanna talk about, okay do they even have the budget to buy whatever it is you're offering? When do they want to buy? And who is going to buy? Meaning who are the other decision makers involved in this process? And you want to get all
these questions answered during the qualification process. And some people also call
it the discovery phase. You can kind of mix the two together where you're just learning
about the prospect getting as much information as possible. And by the end of the meeting, your only goal is to understand, "Hey, is this person someone that should buy
my product and service?" You're not even quite
selling them quite yet, you're actually just gathering information to see if they are worthy, right, qualified to move to the next step. Which moves us to step number three, which is your presentations, your demonstrations
and your pitches, okay? So I'm kind of bundling this all together. Now, once you qualify the prospect, the next step is to do
some type of presentation, a pitch or a demonstration to show them how you actually solve their problem, what your product actually
is, what value you provide, and to actually show them the software if you already have it built. What does it actually do? What does it look like? What does it feel? Is it easy to use, right? And this is where you're
gonna start actually selling. Now the important part to understand is, before you even sell anything, you have to first qualify
the prospect, right? Because if you start
selling in the beginning, you're not even sure if this person even cares
about what you have to say. But if you qualify the prospect first, then suddenly everything you
say in your demonstration is going to hit a lot harder, because you're directly addressing the pains that you uncovered during the qualification step. Now in your presentation, demonstration, however you want to do it, the main thing you want to remember is that you only wanna
talk about the pain points, the prospect already told you during the qualification phase. If they didn't talk about those pains, don't talk about it in your presentation because they actually don't care, right? Don't talk about all the
different features that you have and all the things you can do because that's not what they
came for the meeting for, they came to see how you
can solve their problem. Now, from my personal experience, I find the best way to do a SaaS demonstration or presentation, is actually if you're
doing it remotely, right? Whether you're like sharing your screen and you know, talking to the person maybe with a Zoom call, I would share my screen and
I would do a presentation probably using PowerPoint or Keynote, and basically walk them through
the pains that they had, and how we solve their pains. And, you know, know why I prefer, you know, using a Keynote or PowerPoint is because you're using your
audio, using your voice, and at the same time you're using visuals so you can clearly demonstrate, you know, the problems
that you're solving. It's a very simple thing where you just a slide by slide and you don't have to
memorize too many things, you're literally just
going with the script and talking them through it. Now on top of that, what I would also recommend, and now if you have some kind of software that's very easy to use and
it's fast and it's working, I would use a combination of PowerPoint and then also go into the software after you kind of finish
your PowerPoint to show them like, hey, you know this
is how we do the thing I was talking about. This is how you, you know, add people here and delete
people here and this and that, you know, it depends on
what you're selling, right? And I would show them how
the software actually works so they can visualize, "Oh, this is how my life would look if I bought this software from Patrick." And again, when you talk
about the different features in your software, whether it's through the PowerPoint or actually going into your software and showing them live, you only gonna wanna talk about the things that they care about. Obviously don't talk about all the different features
that you have, right? Especially if you're working
at an enterprise company and they have all these different types of
features that nobody uses, don't talk about those because
they didn't ask for that, they asked for the features
that solve their problem, right? Pain, solution, match it together and that's how you do your presentations. Now, the next step of
the SaaS selling process, is you're gonna want to go for the close or go for the next steps. Now, typically when you're selling SaaS, not everyone is going to buy on the spot and buy right after the
demonstration, right? Because a lot of times if you're selling
something more complicated, especially if it's more enterprise or if it's quite expensive, you're gonna need multiple people involved in the prospect sides before
they make a decision, right? Maybe their CTO, CMO, CEO all have to get together in the meeting to decide whether or
not they should purchase a product or service from you. So that's why you can't
always expect someone to close right there unless you're selling
something that's fairly obvious very transactional and not very expensive, then yeah, maybe they will buy after you do the presentation
and do a demonstration. However, if you're doing
something very complicated, it takes many people to
integrate the software and things like that, and they have to hire a consultant and all these different things, don't expect it to close because there's a lot of steps that need to happen before
things actually do close. So what you wanna do instead, is you want to understand
what the next step is in the selling process
for the prospect, right? So instead of saying like,
"Hey, do you wanna buy now?" You could say something like, "Hey, you know, based on everything we've
talked about so far, is there anything else you need to see before moving forward?" And if they have any objections, you handle them right there. If they say nope, you know that's everything we need to see, then you're like, "Okay, so it seems like you guys are interested." Well, you know, just
curious to understand, you know what exactly
is the next step for you if you were to move forward with this. Now what's gonna happen when you ask a question like this, is the prospect is going to tell you exactly what needs to
happen on their side, if they want to buy it, right? And if they actually do want to buy it, they might want to buy right now but they cannot because maybe
there's an approval process. So they might say, "Okay, well, Patrick, thanks for doing the presentation. Well, usually our next step is I gotta talk to my boss about it, and then we're gonna go to procurement and then we got to talk to a tech guy to see if this is gonna
work with this and that." And then, you know,
they're gonna tell you, every sales will look different. So they're gonna tell you what
the next steps are, right? And then you're basically gonna ask, "Okay, interesting, well, how long is it going to take for you to have those
conversations, right? When will you have those conversations?" And then they're going to say, "Oh, probably sometime next week." And then you're gonna say, "Okay, do you need me to
be on that conversation to make sure that everything goes smoothly and I can answer any of those questions? And they might say, "Okay, yeah, that sounds
pretty good, Patrick and it'd be easier for you
to do it than me to do it." So then what I would do
as a sales person is, I would make a recommendation and I'll say, "Hey, do you mind
if I make a recommendation?" They'll say, "Sure." "Well, it seems like if you
need to talk to this person, and talk to the IT guy
and talk to this person, how about we go ahead and do this. We schedule a meeting with everybody, me, you and everyone included, and we have a conversation to see whether or not this is really
a good fit for everyone. And that way, you know, you
don't have to do it by yourself, and I can help answer
some of the questions that maybe your boss might
have, the IT guy might have, and it will be a lot smoother, quicker, and it will save a lot
of time for both of us. How does that sound?" And the other person who might say, "Okay, that sounds pretty good, Patrick. Well, let me go ahead and
work on getting everyone on you know, on the same page
and we'll schedule a meeting." And then from there you say, "Okay, how about I go ahead and put a tentative date for now and then you try to get everyone on. How about next week,
Wednesday at 10:00 AM. Does that sound good with you?" And they're going to say yes. And then that basically
closes out the presentation and moves them to the next step, right? And so usually for like
longer deals where, you know, it takes multiple steps before someone closes a deal, you basically have to keep doing
this over and over and over until you go through every step that a company needs go
through before buying, right? So after all that, maybe they get on the call,
everything sounds good and then you ask them the same thing, you know, to everyone and say, "Hey, is there anything
else you need to see before moving forward?" And they're going to say, "Okay, well we need to do this." And then you basically drop a timeline, make sure both sides know, and then do the thing
and have another meeting and then you keep doing that until you get to a point
where they're ready to close, you send them the contract
and that's when they sign. But it isn't always that easy which leads us to the final
step, which is following up. So any type of sales deals, you know, whether you're selling SaaS and enterprise startup whatever it is, you know, not everything
goes according to plan, sometimes things get delayed, sometimes people it's just not
the right time in the moment, or maybe they had the budget, then they lost the budget and they had need to wait
for the budget, right? There's so many different
things that can happen. And sometimes it's just
totally out of the blue and you don't expect it. So what you wanna do, is you want to always be following up if those things don't go the way you want and things get off track, right? And as you can see,
the way I'm selling is, I'm always creating a timeline that I understand and they understand, we're on the same page, we're working together to close the deal. But when things don't
go according to plan, well, you wanna make sure
that you follow up, right? So if someone says, "Okay, you know, everything
sounds good, Patrick, but you know, our company
just pulled the budget, we don't have any money
to buy this IT anymore." Then I would say, "Okay,
I totally understand, that happens all the time, right, nothing we can really do about that. And I'm just curious,
you know in the future is this something that
your company wants to do in the future and create a budget for it or is this something that they just don't care about at all?" And the person might say, "Yeah, we want to do this but it's just that they need
money for this other project. And maybe six months from now we're going to get the budget again." So then you basically
schedule another meeting or basically you can say something like, "Okay, well that totally fine. How about this? Six months from now I'll go
ahead and follow up with you, maybe I'll send you an
email, give you a call, whatever works best for you and you know, we can talk about whether if you got the budget or not, if you did get the budget, we can kinda start things over
and resume the conversation. But if not totally fine, because I understand if you
don't have money, you can't buy, is that right? And they're gonna say, "Okay,
it sounds totally fine." So you create an opportunity for you to follow up six
months from now, right? And that's very different from, let's say, you say, "Okay, thanks, bye." And then six months from now, you give them a call out of the blue. Because when you tell them ahead of time that you're going to follow up, following up is a lot easier because they already
expect you to call them or expect your email, you're almost like friends, but if you're just like not
setting those expectations in the beginning and you
try to follow up later, they're not gonna pick up your calls, they're not gonna respond to your email because they don't feel like they need to. They never agree to it, right? So that's why when you follow up, make sure you, you know, set the expectations in the beginning for your follow-up, if you can, and then just keep following up until something changes on their side. And then when they're ready to buy again, they have the budget they're ready to go, you're the first person they're gonna think of to move forward. And so with that said, that's
gonna be the five steps to selling SaaS, whether you're working at a
startup or a large company. If you enjoy this video, make sure to give it a like, subscribe and turn on notifications. And if you want a free training on how to start accelerate
your sales career and sell anything to anyone, I got a free training,
link is in the description. So that said, my name is Patrick Dang, and I'll see you guys in the next one.
