Let’s face it: your prospects and current clients have choices. But by addressing their needs and showing them how you’ll make things easier for them, these people are more likely to purchase your offering – and stick around.

A B2B SaaS sales funnel can be the moment of truth. It offers profound insight into your buyer’s journey, from interacting with your brand for the first time to paying a subscription and recommending your services.

Consider it an opportunity to guide your prospects through your offering and value proposition. The more subscribers move toward your B2B SaaS sales funnel’s bottom, the faster you scale your enterprise. However, understanding your funnel workflow and optimizing it for success isn’t as cut and dried.

But don’t fret. This article offers expert insights to help you build a SaaS sales funnel that can attract more prospects, enhance customer experience, boost conversions, and increase marketing ROI. 

What Is A SaaS Sales Funnel?

A SaaS sales and marketing funnel is a perceptible representation of your customer’s purchasing journey. It illustrates how leads navigate the sales steps from when they’re first exposed to your brand to repeat subscriptions or purchases.

The process got its name from its similarity with an upturned pyramid due to the reduced number of leads between subsequent sales cycles. Its topmost section is the broadest, representing the masses exposed to your brand. The funnel narrows as the most interested prospects move down the SaaS sales funnel while their uninterested counterparts leave.

Ultimately, the marketing strategies in your funnel will enable the prospect to complete a purchase and become your customer.

What Is A Traditional SaaS Sales Funnel

Today’s SaaS sales campaigns are a step ahead of the legacy strategy. At its core, a traditional SaaS sales funnel only informs prospects of your solution and then tries to get them to buy it. SaaS technology has revolutionized the conventional SaaS sales model by framing the customer journey from the company’s perspective.

The advanced B2B SaaS funnel has this new dynamic that focuses on designing a successful sales route by encouraging qualified leads into a sale. You have all the details about the people interacting with your brand, including;

• Their current location in the funnel
• Their preferred emails
• The part of your brand message they’re interacting with
• What they’re clicking on

All this information creates a reverse funnel, and you can use it to continually optimize the funnel and your product. Every marketing and sales team must learn how to make a sales funnel for SaaS.

Why Do SaaS Conversion Funnels Matter?

You’re missing out, big time, if you still don’t have a sales funnel for SaaS in place. SaaS conversion funnels can benefit your organization in the following ways:

• Increased productivity
• Smart scaling
• Enhanced onboarding
• Predictable results
• Better opportunity use
• Enables product development

Increased Productivity

Besides measuring your strategies’ effectiveness, each SaaS sales funnel stage lets you evaluate your productivity. Knowing how many prospects have completed the customer journey will help you understand the output of your strategies.  

Smart Scaling

Exploding subscription numbers is every SaaS provider’s dream, but you wouldn’t wish to see all that vanish overnight, would you? A SaaS sales funnel prioritizes the long-term goal and concentrates your resources on the carefully designed process to drive sales.

Enhanced Onboarding

An elaborate onboarding process helps you demonstrate your value, ROI, and positive user experience to prospects. The funnel makes it as seamless and straightforward as possible. It provides user behavior analytics to determine where potential subscribers get stuck or drop off, crucial insights for personalizing and streamlining onboarding.

Predictable Results

Prospects must perform specific actions to advance in the SaaS sales funnel, and each step’s success will determine the performance of the next. Designing, implementing, and tracking your sales funnel will help you decipher the number of leads required to generate sales. You’ll easily target your marketing actions based on your goals.

Management Optimization

The sales funnel lets you standardize and segment the sales cycle, ensuring agile and objective analysis of each stage. Thus, the management team gains more assertiveness and focus, ensuring goals align with business growth.  

Better Opportunity Use

The B2B SaaS funnel enables real-time sales tracking and prospect monitoring throughout the buyer’s journey. This way, you’ll quickly identify opportunities to boost sales.

Enables Product Development

A SaaS sales funnel offers valuable insights on how to improve your company’s products or services. Understanding client demands can help you provide something extra which can surpass your customers’ expectations, boost loyalty, increase referrals, and maximize sales.

Understanding The Key Stages Of A SaaS Sales Funnel 

Sales funnels vary depending on the industry you’re specializing in. The ideal funnel for a SaaS company lets you focus your resources and time on qualified prospects with a higher likelihood of subscribing. 

The primary stages of a B2B SaaS sales funnel are:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Evaluation
• Conversion and Engagement
• Referral

Awareness

The SaaS sales funnel stages begin with awareness, where the prospect first interacts with your service through advertising, learning about it on social media, or referrals. They might have also read your blog or found your site via a Google search.

With the right timing, the lead might become a customer by clicking on a link and buying. But chances are they need further convincing to gain their interest.

Interest

After they’ve learned about your brand, you’ll need your prospects to gain interest in your company and offerings. Their curiosity will grow when they interact with content on topics relevant to your industry. 

Interested leads become potential customers through steps like joining your mailing list, following your brand on social media, or making inquiries. They’ll then try finding out how your product addresses their issue. Your marketing campaign should build the trust of leads at this level.

Evaluation

Here, your prospects actively compare options as they seek a solution that aligns with their needs and budget. So your strategy should make you stand out by providing comprehensive answers.

It’s important to build rapport and trust with the prospects at this level. Most companies use different approaches to demonstrate the value of their SaaS solutions and how other clients addressed similar issues. Conversion is only possible when you build your prospect’s desire through diverse content that addresses their needs.

Conversion and Engagement

At this level, the prospect is certain of your credibility and ability to meet their needs. So they’ll make the purchase.

Considering the level of competition in the SaaS sector, you can’t relax on your laurels after turning a lead into a customer. You must continue engaging your clients throughout the relationship through a feedback poll, tagging them on social networks, or even calling them and offering to address their struggles.

Referral

Monthly recurring revenue is crucial for your subscription-based product, so only focusing on client acquisition is short-sighted. Rather, you can leverage this advocacy or loyalty stage to attract more leads. Let your clients tell others how fantastic your SaaS product is and invite them to try it out.

Leverage referral programs to grow your business. The somewhat free marketing establishes your brand presence respectably and tangibly. 

How To Build A SaaS Sales Funnel Fast

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to a SaaS sales funnel. Different sectors and companies have unique SaaS funnels and diverse building methods. Still, several best practices stand out among the most successful SaaS companies. These include:

• Understand your target audience
• Map your customer journey
• Tweak your marketing strategy
• Capture attention
• Run email campaigns
• Streamline your onboarding
• Sales process optimization
• Promote product implementation
• Optimize retention through engagement
• Create a strong support system.
• Standardize your renewal process
• Track your performance

Understand Your Target Audience

Despite this being absolutely obvious, most SaaS companies still ignore this step. No matter how remarkable you think your product is, don’t just sit there and think that everyone will like it. 

A product for everyone is a product for no one. So only focus on the prospects who actually need your product. This way, it’ll be easy to turn the select few from leads to clients, which is the essence of a sales funnel for SaaS products.

Map Your Customer Journey

An effective SaaS sales funnel must be based on a customer journey map that lays out the levels your leads go through until they become repeat customers. The map will guide you in optimizing each class to maximize lead acquisition, conversions, and retention.

The journey may vary across your target market segments, so try coming up with multiple map variations to fit varying client profiles. To make the map clear and useful, restrict the variations to your primary target markets.  

Tweak Your Marketing Strategy

Once you understand your customer’s journey, it’s time to create the appropriate SaaS marketing strategy. Typically, your method should focus on building brand awareness and drawing qualified leads, and will depend on the following:

• Market research – Understanding your target market, their needs, and the keywords they use.
• Positioning – Determining how your product meets users’ needs and what sets it apart.
• Product – Showcasing the right product to attract and convert leads.
• Pricing – Creating a pricing strategy that makes your offerings competitive.
• Promotion – Reaching out to your target audience using the most relevant promotional campaigns and media.

You can increase sales conversions and attract more qualified prospects to your SaaS B2B sales funnel by fine-tuning these elements.

Capture Attention

Building brand awareness is an indispensable component of business growth, but it’s challenging. Whether you use paid ads or grow your leads organically, the goal is to boost exposure.

Therefore, draw in your audience by producing interesting and useful content that is SEO-optimized and distributing it across your platforms.

Run Email Campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most crucial tools for a competitive SaaS sales funnel. The approach is cost-effective, flexible, scalable, and permission-based. That’s why 37% of brands intend to expand their email campaign budget. 

Often, but not too repeatedly, nurture your prospects with high-quality email content. One or two emails weekly are just fine, but make them engaging and informative.

Streamline Your Onboarding

A successful purchase is just the beginning of your partnership with your client. Your SaaS sales and marketing funnel must also provide a smooth post-purchase experience, starting with onboarding. Aim to encourage prospects to start using your product and make the process as simple as possible.

• It’s crucial to have pre-established onboarding procedures to ensure a streamlined experience, such as:
• A welcome message for new clients
• A client manager as the primary point of contact
• Detailed guidelines on how to use the product

A smooth onboarding experience gives your clients value and boosts their satisfaction with your product.

Sales Process Optimization

After the marketing team has attracted leads into the funnel, the sales department will be tasked with conversion. Here’s how to optimize your SaaS sales process:

• Rank your qualified prospects based on their readiness to pay to allow sales to focus on red-hot leads while cultivating those that need more time to be ready.
• Monitor interactions with individual prospects via CRM (customer relationship management) software
• Implement standard operating procedures for the different stages of the sales process
• Design a compelling closing offer highlighting your SaaS product’s value
• Train your sales reps to leverage effective objection handling and closing scripts
• Use ongoing marketing efforts to follow up on prospects who take time to convert

These best practices will boost your sales and maximize your closing rate.

Promote Product Implementation

After convincing your client to begin using your SaaS product, how often they continue interacting with your product can define whether they become frequent buyers. Thus, it’s essential to promote higher engagement using the following steps:

1. Sending timely notifications reminding clients of advanced features that they may be missing out on
2. Providing tutorials guiding them on how to leverage advanced features
3. Training them to integrate your SaaS product with other tools that run their operations

Clients will see how much value they will receive from your solution by participating in the integration of your product into their workflow. In turn, this encourages repeat subscriptions.

Optimize Retention Through Engagement

Retention fuels SaaS business success. So don’t abandon your subscriber after their first payment – you’ve just started your partnership with them.

Because of its dynamic nature, you must constantly monitor and evaluate your SaaS sales funnel. This way, you can identify the weakest points where prospects drop out, never to return.

Create a Strong Support System.

Bumps are commonplace in the customer journey. But you can ensure their satisfaction by quickly helping them resolve their hurdles. A robust customer support system mainly entails the following:

• Standard response procedure for common issues
• Self-service tools like knowledge bases and tutorials
• Chatbots and other automated service tools
• Opportunities to bypass automated tools to interact with live agents

A robust client support system will boost client satisfaction and retention rates. 

Standardize Your Renewal Process

The above processes aim at drawing clients to renew their subscriptions at the appropriate time. However, they also need guidance through the actual renewal process.

• Standardized renewal procedures can help prevent snags, including:
• Sending automatic renewal notifications before the current subscription expiration date
• Implementing an automated renewal billing procedure
• Recommending cross-sell, upsell, and upgrade prospects before or during renewal

A seamless renewal process will cut churn rates and boost subscriber retention.  

Track Your Performance

Once your SaaS sales funnel is up and running, you should monitor your performance and boost its effectiveness. Identify key performance indicators for the respective stages of the buyer’s journey. You may keep track of:

• Marketing and sales metrics
• Onboarding metrics
• Product implementation metrics
• Renewal metrics
• Customer service metrics

Prioritize the KPIs that align with your current sales objectives. A tracking app can make it easy to view crucial metrics at a glance.

Crucial SaaS Sales Funnel Metrics To Consider

A greater part of tracking your SaaS sales funnel performance involves staying ahead of the key metrics. Generally, marketing sales funnel metrics for SaaS are classified into:

• TOFU or Top of Funnel metrics – Focused on the awareness and interest levels of the SaaS sales funnel where you’re trying to familiarize your prospects with your brand or product.
• MOFU or Middle of Funnel metrics – Applicable to the consideration and intent stages where prospects have checked the available options and have expressed their intention to buy.
• BOFU or Bottom of Funnel metrics – Relevant to the evaluation, purchase, conversion, engagement, and referral stages.

That said, here are the main metrics to prioritize in your SaaS sales funnel:

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Customer churn
• Conversion rate
• Lifetime value
• Revenue churn
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) - BOFU Metric

This refers to the amount you spend to acquire each new customer. You’ll divide your total campaign costs by the number of new clients you’ve gained within a given duration. This metric helps you determine how efficient your sales and marketing efforts are. A lower CAC means more efficiency. 

Customer Churn – Retention Stage Metric

This is the percentage of clients who discontinue their subscription over a given duration. It’s computed by dividing the number of canceled subscriptions by your total customers. This metric sheds light on your customer base’s health, and a higher value means you’re losing more than you’re converting.

Conversion Rate – BOFU Metric

This is the percentage of prospects that end up as paying customers. You can use it to determine your sales process’ effectiveness. With different levels in the SaaS sales funnel, you must break down the rate by stage to determine the areas that need work. For instance, a higher conversion rate at the Evaluation stage than the Purchase stage means your product is a good fit for your prospects, but you must do more to convince potential customers to buy. 

Lifetime Value – Retention Stage Metric

This refers to how much you expect users to spend with your brand throughout their relationship with your company. You’ll compute it by multiplying your average customer lifetime by the average revenue per account (ARPA). You can use this metric to determine your company’s long-term profitability. A higher value means a more profitable business.  

Revenue Churn

This is a measure of revenue lost throughout the funnel. It’s mostly expressed as a whole number, but you can also present it as the actual lost revenue or a normalized value like monthly recurring revenue.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) – BOFU Metric

These are the monthly earnings you can anticipate from your customers. It’s computed by multiplying the number of customers by their average monthly subscription price. You may also determine its growth rate by determining the percentage decrease or increase from last month. This metric is crucial in predicting your company’s future growth.

How to Optimize a SaaS Funnel

Your work continues beyond creating a sales funnel. You must constantly look for ways to optimize and improve it and determine the levels that are losing prospects. Pay attention to the transition points between two subsequent funnel levels.

Start at the top. Check your content. Does your initial content capture enough prospects? Typically, your content should follow the call to action. If so, it could be time to tweak the element or try something new.

Next, you’ll check your landing page to ensure your offer and CTA mirror the content that attracted your prospect to the page. Do they trust you with their contact details? Test all landing page elements to determine what’s working and what’s not.

You’ll also test all offers in your funnel’s Conversion and Engagement stages. Compare how your different offers are performing. If an offer delivers much better outcomes than the other, focus more on it and find out how to improve it. 

Finally, be sure to track your retention rates. How often do clients return to buy your SaaS product or service? Also, monitor how often they refer others to your brand.  

Build a SaaS Sales Funnel That Converts

Today’s competitive SaaS landscape demands a delicate and thoughtful approach to customer acquisition. You must build your communication with leads to raise their trust through expertise demonstration, engagement, and communicating values.

Your leads must go through all the stages of the SaaS sales funnel to become customers. You must monitor the funnel’s effectiveness, point out its weaknesses, and optimize your sales pipeline. While the above guidelines can help you reach your goals, implementation can take time as you’ll have core business to focus on.

Fortunately, Seattle PPC is here to assist you. We can polish your SaaS sales funnel, boost lead generation, and maximize conversions by improving content quality and articulating your product values. Reach out for our apt guidance today. 

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