SaaS Sales Funnel Management

As a startup, one of your top priorities is driving sales and growing your business. A big part of that is creating and managing an effective sales funnel. But what does that involve? And how can you make sure your funnel is optimized for success? In this blog post, we’ll explore the basics of sales funnel management and offer tips on how to improve yours. So read on to learn more!

What is a SaaS Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a visual representation of the path consumers take from their first contact with your company to becoming a customer. 

There are many different types of funnels, and most have a number of steps that define the pathway a prospect takes towards making a purchase decision. In its simplest form, a sales funnel can be defined as:

The time it takes for a prospect to go from the first contact with your company to becoming a paying customer. The steps in this process can vary, but will often look something like this:

Lead generation > Lead nurturing > Conversion into trial user > Conversion into paying user

The important thing to remember when designing a sales funnel is that, based on how prospects interact with your website and content, the exact makeup of the pathway will most likely be different for each potential customer.

Hence, it goes without saying that a sales funnel is not a build-and-forget platform. Building a sales funnel can take time and effort but managing it is also crucial and needs your focus. Having created a funnel doesn’t mean you can let it run independently. The leaks in a sales funnel come from four things, and proper management can remedy that.

Handling Refusals

It is tempting for some SaaS sales managers to drop that lead and move on to someone more promising. Anyone who has handled sales can tell you that a refusal does not necessarily mean a “no.” It could mean “not for now” or “you need to convince me more.”

You don’t have to drop leads who say no to your initial offer with a SaaS marketing funnel. What you can do is create an email campaign for follow-ups. You can send these leads messages that seem to be tailored-made for them.

The educational emails you send your leads can help change their minds and make that purchase you want.

Look at the most common objections to your offer and figure out the best way to respond to them. Incorporate those responses in your email campaign.

Handling Churn

Every month, you’re losing some of your leads to churn. It is not just enough to count the number of users who have become inactive. You need to inspect them closely and look for what made them leave. To avoid this problem, make sure that your SaaS funnel has a mechanism for matching leads with churned customers.

You can only improve on the basis of the data you have on hand, and it is likely that you will make better decisions by looking at hard data than simply guessing.

Once you know why your customers are leaving, come up with ways to reduce churn in the future through proper product management. For example, if your customers are leaving because your product is buggy, then you can try to fix that.

The same goes if customers are leaving due to poor customer service.

Conducting Follow-ups

Another area where a SaaS sales funnel can be beneficial is when it comes to follow-ups. Sending out follow-ups is a missed opportunity, and when you learn that around 80% of sales require follow-ups. That only means if you are not doing follow-ups, you are missing out on many deals.

It’s understandable why some SaaS sales rep managers can be frustrated with doing follow-ups. Calling a sales-qualified lead for the tenth time can be frustrating. It might feel it’s better to just work on new prospects, but a sales-qualified lead can be worth more than several prospects.

You can use email marketing automations if you don’t have enough time to spare doing follow-ups. You need to use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to do proper automation.

With marketing automation, your audience will get consistent emails geared at them. Remember, your funnel will look different based on your audience’s profile. For example, a SaaS startup might have a different marketing automation set from a government agency.

Marketing automation can do follow-ups for you without any hassles. As the prospect shows more interest, they go up the funnel and get a personalized message based on their interests.

A SaaS sales funnel is customizable, and that’s also the case with your follow-up campaigns. Whatever you do, remember to come up with a proper strategy before putting together your campaign. With the right data at hand, you will be able to find and monitor each customer through your CRM software. This way, your marketing funnel becomes more effective and reliable.

Marketing automation is a digital technology tool that can help you with managing your marketing, sales, and customer success departments. It increases the productivity of all those departments by enabling them to run their tasks automatically using an integrated workflow management application.

Marketing automation software lets you create workflows for your sales and marketing tasks that include email marketing, social media marketing, lead nurturing and lead scoring.

Not Following-up Quickly

The speed of the follow-up is also very crucial in sales. With the help of a sales funnel, you can send out a follow when you have and when it’s vital. Leads are at least nine times more likely to be converted if you follow up within the first few minutes after they have expressed interest.

With your sales funnel system, you can schedule a response to be sent out when a potential customer expresses interest in your SaaS product. This will ensure that your response is immediate and gives them a good reason to remain interested in what you have to offer.

Managing Creates a Smooth Experience

As with all marketing strategies, creating a sales funnel will only work if it offers an excellent experience for the subscribers. It has to be easy-to-manage.

You can easily track a lead’s engagement with your product and see whether they need a demo or not. This will let you know if the needs of your potential customers are being satisfied. There should be an activity feed where you can get real-time updates about what all happens inside your sales funnel, thus letting you know of any successes and failures within your sales funnel.

All in all, having a SaaS sales funnel can offer you powerful insights into your customers’ behavior. You can use them for more conversions by delivering the appropriate message for the right stage. Just make sure to keep tabs on your key sales funnel metrics, so you know what areas to improve.

To learn more about getting a better SaaS sales funnel, visit our SaaS marketing blog.