Dan Martell - July 30, 2018


How To Measure And Increase Your B2B SaaS Sales Velocity

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Michael Litt
3 Great Business Questions To Cut To The Core Of Your Issues How To Setup Your Free Trial Email Sequence To Activate Customers

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

170.19

Word count

1,237

Sentence count

50


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dan Martell talks about how you can increase your SaaS sales velocity without adding any new reps. He talks about the process of measuring your sales velocity, how to improve the quality of your leads, and how to increase the number of deals you close.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey there, I'm Dan Martell, technology entrepreneur,
00:00:02.100 investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:04.080 In this video, I'm gonna share with you a strategy
00:00:06.440 to increase your SaaS sales velocity
00:00:09.880 without adding any new reps,
00:00:11.580 and be sure to stay at the end where I'm gonna share with you
00:00:13.180 an exclusive resource called the Rocket Demo Builder.
00:00:16.880 It goes over my five principles to close more deals
00:00:20.520 and the nine steps that you're gonna need to follow
00:00:22.720 to make that happen.
00:00:30.000 Maybe you're doing all the demos today
00:00:37.920 or you've got a team of reps
00:00:40.160 that are working with your potential customers
00:00:42.180 and they're just not performing really well
00:00:44.040 and you're frustrated because it's costing you money
00:00:45.960 and obviously lost opportunity.
00:00:48.220 And what you want is essentially a process
00:00:51.320 for bringing on a new sales rep
00:00:52.900 to get them to close faster,
00:00:54.380 to get the deals to get bigger,
00:00:55.700 to essentially increase the total net new MRR,
00:00:58.860 or monthly reoccurring revenue,
00:01:00.260 you're adding to the bottom line.
00:01:01.800 You see, when I was starting my company, Flowtown,
00:01:04.000 we hired our first couple reps.
00:01:05.800 That was always the challenge.
00:01:07.460 As a founder, I could communicate, sell, and do really well,
00:01:11.080 but as soon as I had to have other people involved
00:01:13.480 in that process, it got really challenging.
00:01:15.680 So what I needed to figure out for myself is,
00:01:17.620 how do I measure things?
00:01:19.120 How do I get clear on the specific outcomes I want
00:01:21.980 for my sales reps and my sales process,
00:01:24.420 and really move that forward?
00:01:25.660 And these are the five things you need to do
00:01:27.560 to increase your sales velocity.
00:01:29.760 One, measure your sales velocity.
00:01:32.300 It's a really simple formula.
00:01:33.660 Get out a pencil and a pen and I'll walk you through it.
00:01:36.740 Number one, we need to figure out what is the number of leads
00:01:40.040 that we're actually generating on a 30-day window.
00:01:43.000 Once we have that, then we wanna figure out
00:01:44.520 what our conversion to close rate is
00:01:46.240 or what's called the win rate of our deals.
00:01:48.840 So multiply that by the number of leads
00:01:50.880 and then finally multiply that by the average deal size.
00:01:55.860 Once you have it, then divide those three numbers
00:01:58.860 by the average days to close a deal
00:02:03.040 and that will give you your sales velocity rate.
00:02:06.600 Two, increase the quality of your leads.
00:02:09.600 Now, if you've already mapped out that formula
00:02:12.040 and you know kind of where the leads are,
00:02:13.540 then it's all about improving the quality.
00:02:15.420 So the first thing I'm gonna suggest
00:02:16.720 is sit down with your marketing team
00:02:18.620 and really get clear and define on what's considered an MQL
00:02:22.120 or what's called a marketing qualified lead.
00:02:24.980 The other things you can do is talk to them about introducing
00:02:27.540 lead scoring so that you only get certain opportunities
00:02:31.580 that are actually highly qualified in market,
00:02:34.480 eager to potentially buy your product.
00:02:36.460 Other things you can do is account based marketing list,
00:02:39.100 so essentially being very deliberate on targeting specific
00:02:42.740 companies that you wanna work with.
00:02:44.400 And then for me, finally, it's installing marketing automation
00:02:47.000 because I believe that you should have your marketing take
00:02:49.680 care of the market till they're ready to buy.
00:02:52.240 Three, grow your deal size.
00:02:54.840 Now, this is probably the biggest opportunity
00:02:57.240 for most of you watching this,
00:02:58.840 is if you're doing demos, you're talking to customers,
00:03:00.840 you wanna look for opportunities to upsell and cross sell.
00:03:03.780 Those are pretty traditional things,
00:03:05.240 but is your pricing optimized?
00:03:07.580 Just think about the way you're doing your valuing.
00:03:09.380 Are you pricing based on a value driver
00:03:12.200 and how your customer's gonna use the product?
00:03:14.600 Do you position your product appropriately
00:03:17.500 for the value proposition that you drive?
00:03:19.740 And every industry has a different kind of need
00:03:23.140 that if you can actually use that industry
00:03:25.100 and vertical information to customize the presentation,
00:03:29.020 you can drive up the deal size just by showing other customers
00:03:32.920 that have bought more and got a lot of success
00:03:35.020 with your product and finally,
00:03:36.660 I would say just team training.
00:03:38.060 At the end of the day, if your team doesn't know
00:03:40.320 how to deal with objections, negotiate deals,
00:03:43.160 present properly, then you're always gonna have a challenge
00:03:46.520 around growing the average deal size.
00:03:48.700 Four, decrease your sales cycle.
00:03:51.800 When it comes to looking at the speed of the sales cycle,
00:03:56.100 you need to map it out.
00:03:57.700 You need to break it down step by step.
00:04:00.300 Some clients that I coach, I recommend doing this in a Trello
00:04:03.100 or just on a big whiteboard and just walk through
00:04:05.600 the whole sales process.
00:04:07.200 Who's involved, what are the different steps,
00:04:09.400 the decision makers, et cetera.
00:04:11.100 I teach a framework in my Rocket demo called
00:04:14.500 The Virtual Close to understand who's involved
00:04:16.900 in actually making a decision within an organization.
00:04:19.600 But there's a ton of different techniques
00:04:21.900 to increase the velocity.
00:04:23.480 One of my favorite that I recently learned
00:04:25.240 from my friend Michael Litt, the CEO and founder of Vidyard,
00:04:27.980 was that they have this motto amongst their sales reps
00:04:31.040 is essentially make more friends.
00:04:32.720 Within the organization, if a deal doesn't have enough
00:04:35.480 context assigned to it, the manager will just say,
00:04:38.620 make more friends.
00:04:40.380 And that'll help you increase the champions,
00:04:43.600 the decision makers, the influence your product has
00:04:46.160 within an organization, and will obviously improve
00:04:49.260 your velocity and the time to close a deal.
00:04:52.340 Five, know your numbers.
00:04:55.100 As I mentioned, you need to map it out,
00:04:57.100 you need to break it down, but more importantly,
00:04:59.940 you need to understand the whole pipeline,
00:05:02.880 and that's everything from even measuring
00:05:05.200 the sales velocity, when I sit down with clients,
00:05:06.820 like sometimes they're struggling just to get those numbers,
00:05:09.200 they don't know what their close rate or their win rate is,
00:05:11.020 they don't understand how to measure the average deal size,
00:05:14.400 or they're not measuring it appropriately,
00:05:16.140 so really important to map it out,
00:05:18.840 understand your numbers and really look at
00:05:21.240 the industry best practices, the vertical that you're in,
00:05:24.080 the kind of product that you sell and the companies you serve,
00:05:27.020 what are their numbers based on where you're at
00:05:29.520 so you can benchmark and ensure that you're focusing
00:05:31.920 on improving the right part of the funnel
00:05:33.960 because there is a point of diminishing returns.
00:05:36.260 So the key area is know your numbers,
00:05:38.660 map it to industry best practices
00:05:40.620 and then focus on your least performing process
00:05:43.960 in that pipeline to increase the overall velocity.
00:05:46.860 So quick recaps, one, measure sales velocity,
00:05:50.100 two, increase quality of leads,
00:05:52.440 three, grow the deal size,
00:05:54.740 four, decrease your sales cycle,
00:05:57.240 and five, know your numbers.
00:06:00.580 As I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
00:06:01.840 I wanna share an exclusive download with you.
00:06:03.880 It's called the Rocket Demo Builder.
00:06:05.840 It's linked below, you can click the link
00:06:07.440 and download your copy.
00:06:08.780 I go over the five principles that you need to understand
00:06:11.520 to really close bigger deals faster,
00:06:13.980 specifically the 1080-10 principle,
00:06:16.120 as well as the virtual close strategy.
00:06:18.420 And I even give you the nine step workflow
00:06:20.860 for you to customize the Rocket Demo
00:06:22.520 for your specific situation
00:06:24.320 so you can teach other people on your team.
00:06:26.480 So click the link, download your copy today.
00:06:28.820 If you like this video, be sure to click the like button,
00:06:31.220 subscribe to the channel and share it with a friend.
00:06:34.220 Thanks for watchin', I'll see you next week.
00:06:46.120 Thank you.