- 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...
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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)