B2B SaaS Best Practices

Generating leads could be a whole training in and of itself but this section will introduce you lead generation for SaaS sales and how to think about building a pipeline from a macro level. 

It's really important in sales to know who your buyer is - specifically, what do they care about and what is the best way to get in touch with them and to sell to them.  This section will talk about how to use Buyer Persona information and how to build your profiles if your company has not built them already.

LinkedIn is a treasure trove of opportunity for lead generation and for engaging with your prospects about what they care about.  The secret is that most people are using LinkedIn incorrectly.  For example, if you're sending DMs saying that "you'd love to set a meeting and tell them about your software" - stop.  Watch this section instead and learn how to engage with your prospects content, and respond to what they care about.  You'll also learn how to engage with prospects in a way that pattern-disrupts the typical "I'd love to meet" message.

In this section we'll talk about the best way to engage with your prospects once we have defined the buyer persona.  We'll talk through different options and how to build out the strategies.

In this section we're going to talk about the kinds of content you can be sending to your prospects and to your contacts active in your sales funnel.  There are some strategies that almost everyone does that are not good (hint, no one cares that you'd love to set a meeting); so we'll talk about what not to do and some of the things that get people to respond. 

Cold calling is a critical part of generating pipeline.  This is just a brief overview of some cold calling best practices - not a comprehensive deep dive but just basic cold calling principles.

Let's book the meeting and talk about how to prepare for it!

The biggest mistake I see sales people make is showing up to meetings unprepared.  If you are starting your calls asking your prospects "where are you located?" this section is for you - you're creating a massive disadvantage for yourself.  Learn how to prepare and make your buyers feel like they're the only thing that matters to you and your company in a time efficient and strategic way.

So much of being a sales person is owning the process and to get really good at that, we want to make sure we are constantly setting the agendas for our meetings and owning the tone of what's happening on calls and in meetings.  This section will provide some templates for how to set agendas in advance of a meeting and how to make sure you're staying in control of the tone.

Everyone knows that you have to do discovery to close a deal.  That's not new information.  What most people do, however, is ask a bunch of questions, popcorn style, and then they shift into a demo or a platform overview without using the information that they gathered at all.  In this section we'll talk about how to do better discovery and use what you learned to make the demo matter to your prospect.

Sales is project management.  Deals are often lost because control is lost.  If you are asking your prospects "What are the next steps?" and they're saying that they want to regroup with their team and get back to you - this section is for you.  Learn how to stay in control and drive your deals to close.  Think chess, not checkers.

There is an art to getting to decision makers in sales.  If you're asking "can I talk to Jane" and you're being met with:  "Let me connect with her and I'll let you know"- you'll benefit from this section.  Learn how to stay in control of the conversation and insert yourself where you belong in the process so you can do the selling and you're not stuck with waiting to hear back from a junior team member who will simply not be able to sell your solution in to her boss. 

As a sales person, you are a project manager-- you're managing a process to get your buyers to buy.  The reason this matters is that they often know what they know, but do not have any idea how to buy within their organization.  There are some key processes that we want to make sure we're using to shepherd your buyers through the buying process - operating the entire time on telling them what the next steps are.

Showing a demo of your product should not be a training of the product. The demo should also categorically not be a description of what buttons do or of what features you have.  No one is going to buy your product because of a features.  The art and science of the demo is to make sure you incorporate into your talk track what you learned in discovery about their pain and how the product represents an alternative, future state without that pain.  You should be incorporating "This is why this matters" into your talk track about the future state- NOT providing details about what buttons do or about what features you have.  In fact a good demo goes deep on what the future state without the pain looks like and does not necessarily even show all of the features.  This section will help to explain how to do that and importantly, what not to do. 

There is so much that people do wrong with proposals:  starting typically by sending it over without checking for understanding on the scope, the timeline, or the pricing.  In this section, we'll talk about how to turn the proposal review into a call that will yield a higher conversion rate.

In this section we will cover more best practices - including lots of things to avoid and how to stay in control of the sale. 

Consultative sellers help their buyers to contrast their current state or current work flow from the future work flow that has your technology stood up and support their processes.  Depending on what you're selling, there are varying degrees of how you can measure why your solution matters to your buyer. I like to present this as metrics that matter versus ROI (return on investment) because ROI selling is complicated.  People will often not want to spend money, even if you tell them how much money your solution is going to save them.  So discussing a quantitative reality can be more like data sharing and lead the buyer to see why a partnership makes sense to open the door for other stakeholders to join the high level conversation.

Pricing is a dark art.  In this section we talk about how to talk about pricing (and how not to talk about it) to make sure that you're focused on solving a problem that matters to your buyer and  not coming across as a budget line item that will be rejected.

Most people do trials and proofs of concept wrong.  If someone wants to "Log in and Play around" with your tool, and it's not designed to be a PLG experience, you're extending your sales cycle and possibly getting false negatives from your buyers.  This section will teach you how to say yes to trials but stay in control of the sale. 

When a prospect asks for a reference, that can be a great buying signal, but it can also be a sign that they're afraid to make a wrong decision and they want to punt out the final decision until "later."  In this section, we'll talk about how to handle references and use them to actually close deals and not just delay decision making.

The finish line- hooray!  In this section we'll talk about some of the best practices for bringing the deal past the finish line so you can forecast accurately when your deals will come in and avoid the dreaded "Just checking in on the contract!" which everyone hates...

I want to hear from you!  Much of the content in this course is taken from trainings I have created for sales teams.  How it applies to your unique role in your company may require tweaking.  Connect with me on LinkedIn or send me a note to talk!

deb@dbsalescoaching.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/deb-berman/

The best sales people I know are ninjas with their calendars - they plan and they set aside time to get the hardest tasks done.  They calendar block work that they need to get done early and often and don't let it pile up and don't let it slip away.  This section will share some of what I've seen work the best for sales people.  In addition, in this section, I am sharing some of the books that have made a material difference in how I manage my time and think about work that I have to get done.  I hope you find them helpful too!