Should you work on generating more leads (or) optimizing trial to conversion? Where are you good at today? Which one should you prioritize? Do you feel you don’t have enough visibility into how your marketing & sales processes are working for your B2B SaaS? What you are missing is a good saas sales funnel which can give you quick insights to make a data-backed decision. It will help you understand where you should focus on efforts & where not to. Let’s understand more about what a saas sales funnel is & why it’s very important for you to start building one & tracking right away.
What is a saas sales funnel?
SaaS sales funnel is an infographic that represents how your customer journey with your saas product. It’s a simple funnel that looks like an inverted pyramid, where the width of the pyramid at any stage represents the total number of leads who managed to reach that particular stage.
For a B2B SaaS company, it often starts with a potential customer ( lead ) discovering your product & then interacting with your product during various stages like attending a demo, starting a trial, moving to a paid plan, engaging with the product & further expanding the plan once onboarded.
Often it involves clubbing various marketing & sales processes to build the funnel. It will help you clearly understand where your leads are slipping & where you are doing better.
Why do you need a saas sales funnel?
You can’t improve something without tracking it. As simple as that. If you want to optimize your efforts toward the right initiatives, it’s important you know what needs to be prioritized.
Once you start tracking everything you can actually understand what’s the problem with your GTM strategy overall.
Are your marketing initiatives not good enough to fill the top of the funnel with enough leads? It’s time you ventured into other acquisition channels are start filling the funnel with more leads.
Once marketing brings you leads, it’s important that you convert them into paying customers. Is your B2B SaaS a self-serve model? Then it’s important to work on the onboarding process & ensuring that you engage your lead during the trial stage. Is your SaaS a high-touch model? Then you need to figure out how to align your sales team to actually close those leads. Your closers (AEs) might have to work on better value propositions & figure out a way to illustrate value better.
Whatever it is, you can only improve something if you know how it is today. Hence building & tracking a saas sales funnel is very critical to making those data-backed decisions that will help you grow your saas business.
Understanding saas sales funnel stages
Now that it’s pretty clear why one needs to build a saas sales funnel, let’s try to understand what your funnel might look like. It’s actually going to vary from company to company depending on your GTM strategy & whether you are high touch or low touch. But broadly every saas sales funnel can actually be categorized into 3 stages from top to bottom. Let’s understand these.
Top of funnel
This is where your potential customer (lead) actually discovers your product/solution. Most of the time, your marketing initiatives ( inbound & outbound ) are responsible to introduce your product to your leads.
A user clicking on an ad, reading a cold email that your team sent, discovering your content on your blog organically, etc. all fall under this bucket.
Middle of funnel
Once a lead discovers you, they start interacting with you. Again this is a broad area & how a lead engages with you depends on your exact GTM strategy. This is where a lead clearly understands your product & starts thinking about whether it can solve their problem. They might attend demos, start trials & start using your product to figure out if it’s going to be helpful for them.
Starting a trial, attending demos, etc. fall under this bucket.
Bottom of funnel
This is where a lead gets converted to a customer. Once the lead evaluates your product during previous stages, they will have to make a decision to buy the product or not.
Negotiating a contract, closing deals, etc. fall under this bucket.
Conclusion
For every B2B SaaS company building a saas sales funnel & regularly tracking it is a must. It not only helps you give visibility into your entire GTM strategy but also helps you prioritize your efforts.
