- Hey there, Dan Martell here.
Serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this video I'm gonna teach you how to qualify your B2B SaaS
leads so you don't spend time with tire kickers and people
that frustrate you and folks that were never gonna buy
anyways and instead get deals closing faster.
And be sure to stay until the end where I share with you a
framework called my Rocket Demo Builder.
It's a five principles to delivering incredible sales
demos and includes the call flow that I use to close deals twice
as fast and not give a boring product demo.
(upbeat music)
So one of the biggest challenges when you're trying to scale your
sales is making sure you have somebody doing an SDR role.
So I coach a ton of SaaS founders that sell SMB and
mid-market and enterprise products and they have SDRs in
their companies that are either qualifying inbound leads or
doing outbound qualifying and kicking them up to what's
called an AE or an account executive to do the demo.
The thing that they need to do first is making sure that
they've defined what makes a qualified lead and
walk them through a process.
I'm gonna share with you guys what I've learned,
not only doing thousands of sales calls myself
selling millions of dollars of software.
Making sure that I, even though I was trying to close something
I wanted to make sure I was talking to the right person but
more importantly helping hundreds of other software
founders build this competency
and strategy into their business.
Here are the six ways to qualify a SaaS lead.
Number one, funnel filter.
So the first thing you want to do when you're doing any kind of
lead gen is think of the, and I have a whole video on
defining your ideal customer profile
so I'm not gonna get into that.
You can search it and find it on my channel.
But if you have lead generation campaigns going on,
some demand marketing stuff, what I call the attract phase of
your SaaS growth engine, then you want to make sure you add
those funnel filters to the submission form.
So usually it's things around role,
industry size or revenue size, and number of employees because
between those things you can kind of figure out if they're
even qualified to talk to from
a pure customer profile point of view.
So make sure that if you have opt-ins for lead magnets or
webinar registrations or even maybe you want to put it on your
free trial sign up, funnel filter those people before they
get into your system so that you can easier qualify them.
Number two, behavior.
The beauty of today's world is we can literally track the
customer's interaction with our website.
I call this the click stream.
It's just a fun way for me to think about it is that,
you know, if somebody becomes and opportunity in our system
I can actually go look at their history using,
there's so many different tools.
So I'm not gonna talk about the tools per se
I just want to talk about the process.
You can Google it but looking at all the different pages they
visited on your website before they actually signed up for a
trial and/or downloaded that lead magnet and so when you're
talking to them you get so much more context.
They visited your pricing page.
They looked at our about page. That's a great one.
They looked at these specific blog articles on your website.
That information is deadly to help you understand do they know
enough information about the business for you to assume that
they're qualified or do you need to kind of step back and kind of
reconnect with who they are and kind of what they know about the
business and start there to build that connection.
Number three, challenges.
How immediate is their requirements to
solve their problems today? They have frustrations.
There's something going on where they don't feel like either the
information's flowing properly or it's costing them too much
money to accomplish something or somebody's not being tracked
properly and they want to solve that problem.
What your job is to figure out how to qualify,
how immediate is their challenges to resolving the
business from a timing point of view to know that it's something
that's a now thing.
If you think of a market, 'kay,
like this is the coolest thing ever.
Like, I'm not saying that jokingly, it's pretty neat.
You have a thousand potential customers.
Most people are in market for probably
two months throughout that window.
So if you think you have a thousand potential customers,
if you start January, February and it's kind of like a lens
that kind of goes across those thousand customers
throughout the year.
In January, February that whatever it is 18%,
16% of the market is gonna be in market and as you move across
the timeline of that year a different out of the same
thousand these people are no longer in market,
these ones are ready and they're in market.
So that's just the way I think about it.
Two months' window and I want to figure out is what their
problem, their challenges they're dealing with today.
Is it a now thing or is it a later thing because really I'm
trying to find if you call it a thousand people in a market,
I'm trying to find the ones that ready to buy today
and if not they're not qualified.
So just think about that mental model next time.
About, "Hey, there's a window.
"It's twelve months. It's scanning, you know,
"two months it's a different group of people."
And that's why marketing works so well.
You could have stuff, you're like,
"Well, these people had already heard about that."
Those people aren't even paying attention to your marketing
anymore because they've either decided it wasn't a priority or
moved on to another solution or they got fired so literally you
can send the same message in the market because the group of
people that are in market, ready to buy today from a
timing point of view is different.
Number four, the role.
Are you talking to the decision maker?
Now, it doesn't mean that if they don't have the ability to
buy that you just hang up the phone.
'Cause you want to figure out, they could be a champion and
that is probably the most important.
If you're doing mid-market or enterprise deals,
you want to find that champion inside which is kind of like the
driver of the deal versus the economic buyer.
'Cause somebody might be the person that decides what they're
gonna spend but somebody else could be your inside supporter
to help give you some kind of insights into what needs to
happen to actually move a deal forward so to me it's really
important to figure out what is the role that that person and
obviously you can check on LinkedIn,
and it's actually pretty much standard practice if you ask
them and it's public information that you're kind of not doing
your job but I think you can go deeper into kind of like
how do decisions get made?
How have you been involved in other decisions just like this?
What software have you bought in the past six months
to solve a business challenge?
Just to kind of get an idea of how they're involvement is
perceived in the organization to make a decision to buy a
solution like yours.
Number five, authority.
Very similar to the role but it's really just trying to
qualify the economic buyer.
Do they have authority to make that purchase?
Or maybe they have authority to spend up to maybe $5,000 without
having to get budget approval or trying to go through the whole
process of getting a PO or whatever.
You might want to just figure out how to change what you're
selling to address their challenges,
bring the price down to still get the buyer.
So at the end of the day you want to figure out what their
level of authority is 'cause maybe it's not to do the bigger
deal or it's more of an enterprise rollout but they
might be able to buy a POC, a proof of concept,
and this is where I see a huge opportunity for a lot of my
clients in the mid-market or enterprise space to figure out
what would a lower cost POC, proof of concept,
to deploy within that organization you're already
talking to that the person can actually make a decision around,
what would it look like so that you can move the sale forward
even if the person doesn't have the authority?
So that is number five, how to qualify.
Number six, product fit.
At the end of the day, they have problems they need to solve and
you're asking yourself, "Does my solution solve those problems?"
And more importantly,
how well does it align with their challenges?
'Cause the way I think about selling any product,
think about this, the customer's standing
at the bottom of a mountain.
At the top of the mountain is the results or outcomes or
success they want to achieve.
And at the bottom of this mountain there's a row of
vehicles of essentially change.
There's different types of vehicles.
There's motorbikes and four wheelers and jeeps and
dune buggies and all these different,
there's rock climbing gear and
all these different vehicles of change that can help them
get to the top of that mountain and your job is
to sell your specific vehicle.
'Cause at the end of the day they could buy your solution or
somebody else's so what you're trying to do is make sure,
and this is up-front qualifying, is that what they're trying to
achieve that that mountain is best suited of your vehicle.
Because at the end of the day you don't want to spend
two months, three months, six months.
I've seen some of my clients spend up to a year and a half
thinking they're gonna get a deal,
planning their business around this big enterprise deal only to
find out that at the beginning the solution they were building
and the customer's challenge were not aligned and somehow
that was missed and they only figured it out at the end.
It is heart-wrenching to see and it happens all too often because
they didn't qualify that specific alignment
at the beginning.
So real quick, six steps to qualify your B2B SaaS leads.
Number one, funnel filter.
Number two, the behavior on your website.
Number three, challenges.
Four, the role.
Five, authority.
And number six, product fit.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
I want to share with you the Rocket Demo Builder.
Essentially it's a nine box model,
a conversation flow you can use to
double your sales conversions.
I also cover the five key principles
of having a rocket demo.
Number two is amazing, the virtual close.
I think it will really serve you and more importantly you want to
not have boring demos.
So click the link below.
You can download your copy of that today and if you liked this
video, be sure to click the like button.
Subscribe to my channel.
If there's anybody you think it can serve,
feel free to share it with them directly.
As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger
life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
(mouth noises)
Am I wearing the same shirt?