SaaS Sales Funnel: A Fundamental Guide to Boosting Your Conversions for 2022

All SaaS companies know that optimizing their sales process is key to success. Implementing a strong sales funnel is even more important in a SaaS business, as in this industry, the customer acquisition process requires a more tactful approach. Yet many face significant challenges that prevent them from securing a steady revenue stream. Organizations often struggle to find leads, lose customers at the top of the funnel, or have their prospects drop off after weeks of courting them with pitches and demos. While this is not uncommon, it demonstrates that the funnel may have some weaknesses that can be easily overcome. If these challenges sound familiar, our guide will give you all the information you need to build a winning sales funnel that can tremendously help in terms of customer retention.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a marketing concept used to describe a potential customer’s journey from prospect to paying customer. It’s described as a funnel because more people enter the top of the funnel as prospects than the number that exits at the bottom. Top-of-funnel actions aim to attract leads and draw potential customers. The SaaS sales funnel also helps clearly define a business strategy that moves prospects to the next stage.

Top 5 Benefits of Using a SaaS Sales Funnel

Focusing on creating an efficient and effective sales funnel can help you identify the stage at which your prospects are dropping off and not converting. When putting a smart, goal-oriented sales funnel in place, any SaaS company will then be able to:

1. Scale the Right Way

A sales funnel gives you the tools and systems that ensure constant and substantial growth. Once you have implemented a carefully-designed process, you will be efficiently using your resources rather than over-hiring unnecessarily. With a carefully executed sales funnel, your B2B sales and marketing team will continuously and skillfully drive sales.

2. Accurately the Following Progress

With a sales funnel, you can extract data from each phase and make modifications based on that information. Then you will notice the Domino effect because once one stage is altered, it affects the entire selling process. Understanding the steps potential buyers take from first exposure to your product or service to purchase can help you guide, track and convert a prospect to a marketing qualified lead and later on to a buyer.

3. Improve Your Onboarding Process

Because 58% of customers believe having a personalized experience with a SaaS product is essential, developers see the onboarding process as a very important step in showing their ROI, value, and positive user experiences. The rule of thumb is to make the onboarding of SaaS apps as simple and frictionless as possible. However, some products are too complicated to afford a three-step onboarding process so it’s a delicate balance of being succinct yet thorough in your documentation and process. While there are plenty of ways to tackle this issue ( A/B testing, feature adoption goal comparison), looking into user behavior analytics to see where people are getting stuck or dropping off is something you should properly investigate. A sales funnel adapted to your SaaS business will capture these details, providing access to critical data on why users subscribe and unsubscribe. Your team can and should use that information to streamline the onboarding process, personalize it and reduce friction even more.

4. Lead Nurturing on Duty

79% of your leads will not be converting into subscribers. Even though it is disappointing given your marketing efforts, it’s important to remember that it’s part of the process. If you are doing business intelligently, using a sales funnel to increase conversions, you must also engage heavily in lead nurturing. These users often need a bit of convincing in a personalized manner, and your SaaS sales team should customize their approach to meet these needs. Without a sales funnel to identify the leads that need nurturing, they would go unnoticed, and likely be a lost opportunity. By the time you realize that you are not gaining as many subscribers as you would have hoped to, you will be risking losing those marketing qualified leads forever.

5. Higher Retention Rate

SaaS is an industry that thrives on retention. Of course, winning new subscribers is always a goal (especially for a SaaS startup), but retention is very much the lifeblood of the model. It’s five times cheaper to retain a customer than to attract new users. A well-planned sales funnel allows you to keep existing customers engaged in the process. And for marketers and sales reps functioning on a tight budget, the lower customer acquisition cost is always a solid argument to implement the funnel.

What are the Key Stages of A SaaS Sales Funnel?

People in the marketing and sales world will be familiar with the acronym AIDA: Attention, Interest, Decision, and Action. These four concepts represent the stages most prospective customers will go through. Each step represents a customer mindset and requires careful planning to create the correct messaging and take the appropriate action.

Imagine encouraging a potential buyer to buy your product before they’ve had a chance to explore or learn about it. You’d probably lose them before you could pique their interest. Take note of these four stages, which will put you on the surest path to growth.

Read on to learn 9 easy steps to building a SaaS sales funnel and useful techniques for measuring it on PayPro Global’s Blog.