The sales funnel is the most crucial part of B2B SaaS as it ensures a higher turnover of customers and better prospects of long-term profit. Each stage of this process is curated well by the sales and marketing team, ensuring it is highly optimized! Simply, it is the best way to drive meaningful and result-oriented conversations.
What does B2B SaaS Sales Funnel Mean?
The sales funnel is a comprehensive action plan leading to a final purchase. It starts right after the initial interaction and moves ahead to turn the customer into your long-term, loyal consumer. The whole process appears like a funnel, which is wide from the top and thinner as it progresses down. It narrows down as it goes lower because it drops down every prospect that doesn’t align with the business and has a low chance of making a purchase later.
With this funnel, it gets pretty easy to track the whole process and optimize every step that is a part of it. Alongside this, it helps to analyze every step keenly, which aids in dropping down all futile actions that don’t provide any outcomes. Hence, in the long run, it ensures saving cost and time.
The following steps make a significant part of this funnel:
Prospects
This is the first part of the funnel, also known as the top of the funnel, which initiates the whole process. It is a little generic and talks about the entire market on a large scale. It is worth noting that prospects made at this stage don’t necessarily translate into sales.
This step’s primary purpose is to let prospective customers know about your business. You need to create a sense of loyalty for the customers, who should think of you as a reliable product or service provider.
Lead Qualification
This is the second stage of the SaaS funnel, which continues the prospects. Again, it is all about the leads that projections provided and further exploration of them. For instance, now the business would evaluate whether the prospects are interested in the product or service, will the leads progress into wins, and whether the sales team would actually gain something out from the process or would it just be a futile process.
This step aligns prospective customers, marketers, and the sales team and tries to bring them on one page.
Intent
The intent is the third part of the funnel, which makes things more straightforward and comprehensible. This step makes it easier for the sales teams to connect with the prospects. Alongside this, whatever confusion they have, they can have them answered and go ahead with the action plan.
Close (Won or Lost)
This is the funnel’s last part, closing the procedure and ending the process. Simply put, it is also named the bottom of the funnel. However, you must remember that closing doesn’t always mean that you have gotten the client and won in the end.
However, even if your team has achieved the required target and gotten the customer, it doesn’t end the process. Instead, this SEO Strategy leads to a new relationship, which requires the marketing team to have a long-term association with!
What are the Benefits of SaaS Sales Funnel?
The SaaS sales funnel is one of the most beneficial ways of establishing a successful B2B SaaS company. From lead generation to conversion and all the way to retention, it ensures that the consumer stays with the business for an extended period.
Some significant benefits of using the SaaS sales funnel are as follows:
Scale the Right Way
Whether you are trying to make people find your product or service or look forward to getting some results from the higher conversion rate, you can easily do so through the SaaS funnel strategy.
It will help you scale your business, considering the aims and objectives that you have with it. By creating the right kind of content strategy, you can quickly achieve your scaling goals. Doing it right might even help you scale the business without paying too much for it.
Accurately Follow the Process
You must follow this content marketing process to generate the required results. Each step ensures data provision in detail and lets you decide which step helped you the most in generating the final results.
Improve Your Onboarding Process
The onboarding process helps retain customers for an extended period. Mostly, it is this reason why business is up for SaaS. However, the marketing team must work on it extensively to make it possible. Therefore, it becomes a regular part of the activity for the marketing and sales teams; the dropout ratio gets relatively low.
Lead Nurturing on Duty
The SaaS funnel procedure helps in lead nurturing by upscaling the inbound channels. When the content managers create just the right kind of content that hits the prospective client at the right spot, it helps raise the need for your product or service. It does not only help in attracting customers but also engages them and turns them into your long-term, loyal consumers.
Higher Retention Rate
Do you want your first-time customer to return to you whenever he wants the same product or service? SaaS sales funnel helps in retaining the customers and ensuring that they choose you for a lifetime association. The retention rate with the SaaS sales funnel is unbelievably amazing!
Tips to Optimize Your B2B SaaS Sales Funnel.
To ensure these benefits serve you well to make your business profitable, here are some ways through which you can optimize your B2B Sales funnel:
Boost Awareness with TOFU
TOFU, also known as the top of the funnel, is what needs maximum attention as it must attract potential clients. Make sure that your content for the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel are all distinct from each other. Social media platforms help make TOFU a success if the marketing team bombards them with just the right kind of content!
Be it blogs, long-form articles, or infographics, showing your company’s personality through them is indeed necessary! You need to serve the potential customer with each possible detail that you consider relevant.
Through this content, your goal is to enhance your brand’s awareness amongst the audience. Furthermore, if you have an already established business, you aim to enhance and widen the customer base.
Optimize Your Content
If you want your online presence to get you a maximum advantage, simply optimize your content according to the market you serve in! If your marketing strategy uses the right content strategy, reaching out to online customers won’t be a problem. SEO techniques can quickly bring organic traffic to your website and enhance engagement.
By optimizing your content, you would be able to enhance lead generation prospects without having to spend heavy bucks on marketing and promotional projects. In addition, if your website gets organic traffic, there are great chances of it helping you retain customers in the long run.
Most B2B brands opt for blog posts to generate an audience through content. This is because it doesn’t only build awareness regarding the brand but also works as a source of word of mouth if the content is curated intelligently.
Improve lead Nurturing
Lead generation helps develop relationships with prospective customers and ensures that they stay with your company for a long time. From the time your strategy introduces the product to the customer to when he decides to buy it, lead generation plays a crucial role in keeping him attracted!
It works extensively, which requires you to keep providing potential customers with the content and material that will attract them to your product or service. For instance, once he has opened your website and read some content on it, it’s now your turn to provide him with just the right kind of additional material to enhance his interest.
All the supplementary material that you provide your customer works towards keeping him enticed!
Make the Most of MOFU
The middle of the funnel also requires you to strategize your activities well! Here, you need to ensure the client that your product or service gives him just the right solution to the problem he is facing. This is the point where he needs to start considering your products or services, which is one step ahead of just knowing about them! Prospects in the middle of the funnel are the ones that narrowed down and got interested in your business from the top of the funnel.
The marketing team needs to strategize things logically to make this part of the funnel work for the business. It needs to interact with all the possible leads on every social media platform. Apart from this, providing relevant eBooks to the audience and creating explanatory and attractive videos regarding the products being offered also provide excellent results.
Address the problems your ideal potential customer could be facing at this point and the solution your business provides for them.
Close the Deal and Keep them Coming Back
At the bottom of the funnel, once you close the deal and sell your product or service, you need to make some extra steps that will ensure your customer keeps coming back. If this happens, you won’t have to worry about curating comprehensive strategies for the sales funnel again!
Measure Success.
Measuring the success of the B2B sales funnel is essential! You need to evaluate whether this multi-step strategy has helped in realizing your goals or not.
How to Measure Your Sales Funnel Success?
There are various ways through which you can measure the success of your sales funnel. Some of them are as follows:
Start with Business Intelligence (BI)
SaaS Business intelligence is a software solution that helps businesses evaluate the success of sales funnel strategy. It provides a proper and comprehensive data visualization, table generation, benchmarking, and trend indicators, along with several other features to the marketing team evaluating the success of the sales funnel.
Track the Key SaaS Sales Funnel Metrics
For every SaaS startup, there are specific metrics that you have in mind. You can track them to check whether your sales funnel is a success or a failure. For instance, you can measure whether the leads translated into conversions or not, what has been the rate of conversion, and how fast is the sales velocity. These data-driven metrics are indeed the right way to evaluate the success rate!
Implement A/B Testing on Different Aspects of the Sales Funnel
Split testing, also known as A/B testing, helps split the audience, which helps in testing variations of a particular campaign. This way, the marketing team can evaluate which plan works better. The version of the plan that works well can be used the next time!
