- Hey there, I'm Dan Martell, technology entrepreneur,
investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this video, I'm gonna share with you a strategy to increase
your SaaS sales velocity without adding any new reps.
Be sure to stay 'til the end when I'm gonna share with you an
exclusive resource called the Rocket Demo Builder.
It goes over my five principles to close more deals and the nine
steps that you're gonna need to follow to make that happen.
(upbeat music)
Maybe you're doing all the demos today or you've got a team
of reps that are working with your potential customers and
they're just not performing really well and you're
frustrated because it's costing you money and obviously lost
opportunity and what you want is essentially a process for
bringing on a new sales rep, to get them to close faster,
to get the deals to get bigger to essentially increase the net
new MRR, monthly reoccurring revenue,
you're adding to the bottom line.
You see when I was starting my company Flowtown we hired our
first couple reps, that was always the challenge.
As a founder I could communicate,
sell and do really well but as soon as I had to have other
people involved in that process it got really challenging.
So what I needed to figure out for myself is
how do I measure things?
How do I get clear on the specific outcomes I want from my
sales reps and my sales process and really move that forward?
And these are the five things you need to do to
increase your sales velocity.
One, measure your sales velocity
and it's a really simple formula.
Get out a pencil and a pen and I'll walk you through it.
Number one, we need to figure out what is the number of leads
that we're actually generating on a 30 day window.
Once we have that then we want to figure out what our
conversion to close rate is or
what's called the win rate of our deals.
Multiple that by the number of leads and then finally
multiply that by the average deal size.
Once you have it then divide those three numbers by the
average days to close a deal and
that will give you your sales velocity rate.
Two, increase the quality of your leads.
Now, if you've already mapped out that formula and you know
kind of where the leads are
then it's all about improving the quality.
So the first thing I'm gonna suggest is to sit down with your
marketing team and really get clear and defined on what's
considered an MQL or what's
called a marketing qualified lead.
The other thing you could do is talk to them about introducing
lead scoring so that you only get certain opportunities or
actually highly qualified in market,
eager to potentially buy your product.
Other things you can do is account based marketing lists so
essentially being very deliberate on targeting specific
companies that you want to work with.
And then for me, finally, it's installing marketing automation
'cause I believe that you should have your marketing take care of
the market 'til they're ready to buy.
Three, grow your deal size.
Now this is probably the biggest opportunity for most of you
watching this is if you're doing demos,
you're talking to customers, you want to look for opportunities
to up-sell and cross-sell.
Those are pretty traditional things
but is your pricing optimized.
Just think about the way you're doing your valuing.
Are you pricing based on a value driver and how your customers
gonna use the product?
Do you position your product appropriately for the value
proposition that you drive?
And every industry has a different kind of need that if
you can actually use that industry and vertical
information to customize the presentation,
you can drive up the deal size just by showing other customers
that have bought more and got a lot of success with your product
and finally, I would say just team training.
At the end of the day if your team doesn't know how to deal
with objections, negotiate deals,
present properly, then you're always gonna have a challenge
around growing the average deal size.
Four, decrease your sales cycle.
When it comes to looking at the speed of the sales cycle you
need to map it out.
You need to break it down step by step.
Some clients that I coach I recommend doing this in a Trello
or just on a big whiteboard.
Just walk through the whole sales process.
Who's involved?
What are the different steps,
the decision makers, et cetera?
I teach a framework in my Rocket Demo called the virtual close.
Understand who's involved in actually making decision
within an organization.
But there's a ton of different techniques
to increase the velocity.
One of my favorite that I recently learned from my friend
Michael Lit the CEO and founder of Vidyard was that they have
this motto amongst their sales reps is
essentially make more friends.
Within the organization if a deal doesn't have enough context
assigned to it the manager will just say,
"Make more friends."
And that'll help you increase the champions,
the decision makers, the influence your product has
within an organization.
It will obviously improve your velocity in the
time to close a deal.
Five, know your numbers.
As I mentioned, you need to map it out,
you need to break it down but more importantly you need to
understand the whole pipeline.
And that's everything from even measure the sales velocity.
When I sit down with clients sometimes they're struggling
just to get those numbers.
They don't know what their close rate or win rate is.
They don't understand how to measure the average deal size.
Or they're not measuring it appropriately.
Really important to map it out.
Understand your numbers and
really look at the industry best practices.
The vertical that you're in.
The kind of product that you sell and the companies you
serve, what are their numbers based on where you're at so you
can benchmark and ensure that your focusing on improving the
right part of the funnel because there is a point of diminishing
returns so the key area is know your numbers,
map it to industry best practices and then focus on your
least performing process in that pipeline to
increase the overall velocity.
So quick recap.
One, measure sales velocity.
Two, increase quality of leads.
Three, grow the deal size.
Four, decrease your sales cycle.
And five, know your numbers.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this video I want to share an
exclusive download with you.
It's called the Rocket Demo Builder.
It's linked below.
You can click the link and download your copy.
I go over the five principles that you need to understand to
really close bigger deals faster.
Specifically the 10-80-10 principle as well
as the virtual close strategy.
And I even give you the nine step workflow for you to
customize the Rocket Demo for your specific situation so you
can teach other people on your team so click the link,
download your copy today.
If you liked this video, be sure to click the like button,
subscribe to the channel and share it with a friend.
Thanks for watching.
I'll see you next week.