Dan Martell - December 03, 2018


How To Qualify Your B2B SaaS Leads Using These 6 Filters

Hosted by
Dan Martell
How To Overcome The Top 3 Sales Objections In Your Software Demo How To Differentiate Your SaaS Product From Your Competitors

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

194.99

Word count

1,973

Sentence count

80


Summary

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

In this episode, I teach you how to qualify your B2B SaaS leads so you don t spend time with tire kickers and people that frustrate you, and folks that were never gonna buy anyway, and instead get deals closing faster.

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, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur,
00:00:01.760 investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03.340 In this video, I'm gonna teach you how to qualify
00:00:06.480 your B2B SaaS leads so you don't spend time
00:00:09.000 with tire kickers and people that frustrate you
00:00:11.420 and folks that were never gonna buy anyways
00:00:14.180 and instead get deals closing faster.
00:00:16.180 And be sure to stay to the end where I share with you
00:00:18.120 a framework called my Rocket Demo Builder.
00:00:20.720 It's a five principles to deliver incredible sales demos
00:00:24.220 and includes the call flow that I use
00:00:26.560 to close deals twice as fast
00:00:28.060 and not give a boring product demo.
00:00:43.300 So one of the biggest challenges when you're trying
00:00:45.300 to scale your sales is making sure that you have somebody
00:00:49.020 doing an SDR role.
00:00:50.620 So I coach a ton of SaaS founders that sell SMB and mid-market
00:00:54.380 and enterprise products and they have SDRs in their companies
00:00:57.340 that are either qualifying inbound leads
00:00:59.440 or doing outbound qualifying and then kicking him up
00:01:01.680 to what's called an AE or an account executive
00:01:04.320 to do the demo.
00:01:05.680 The thing that they need to do first
00:01:07.880 is making sure that they've defined
00:01:11.080 what makes a qualified lead and walk them through a process.
00:01:14.020 I'm gonna share with you guys what I've learned,
00:01:16.400 not only doing thousands of sales calls myself,
00:01:19.320 selling millions of dollars of software
00:01:21.100 and making sure that I, even though
00:01:23.940 I was trying to close something,
00:01:24.900 I wanted to make sure that I was talking
00:01:26.440 to the right person but more importantly helping hundreds of
00:01:29.840 other software founders build this competency and strategy
00:01:33.820 into their business.
00:01:34.840 Here are the six ways to qualify a SaaS lead.
00:01:39.320 Number one, funnel filter.
00:01:41.560 So the first thing you wanna do when you're doing any kind of
00:01:44.200 lead gen is think of the, and I have a whole video on defining
00:01:48.460 your ideal customer profile so I'm not gonna get into that.
00:01:50.740 You can search it and find it on my channel.
00:01:52.760 But if you have lead generation campaigns going on,
00:01:56.540 some demand marketing stuff, what I call the attract phase
00:01:59.200 of your SaaS growth engine, then you wanna make sure that you
00:02:02.200 add those funnel filters to the submission form.
00:02:05.500 So usually it's things around role, industry size or revenue
00:02:10.280 size and number of employees because between those things,
00:02:14.720 you can kind of figure out if they're even qualified to talk
00:02:17.320 to from a pure customer profile point of view.
00:02:20.680 So make sure that if you have opt-ins for lead magnets
00:02:24.060 or webinar registrations or even maybe you want to put it on
00:02:27.280 your free trial sign up, funnel filter those people before they
00:02:31.660 get into your system so that you can easier qualify them.
00:02:35.920 Number two, behavior.
00:02:38.200 The beauty of today's world is we can literally track the
00:02:41.960 customer's interaction with our website.
00:02:44.740 I call this the click stream.
00:02:46.200 It's just a fun way for me to think about it is that if
00:02:48.940 somebody becomes an opportunity in our system,
00:02:51.440 I can actually go look at their history using,
00:02:53.880 there's so many different tools.
00:02:54.980 So I'm not gonna talk about the tools per se,
00:02:56.480 I just wanna talk about the process.
00:02:57.980 You can Google it.
00:02:58.920 But monitoring or looking at all the different pages
00:03:02.060 they visited on your website before they actually signed up
00:03:05.720 for a trial and or downloaded that lead magnet.
00:03:08.000 And so when you're talking to them,
00:03:09.400 you get so much more context.
00:03:11.520 They visited your pricing page.
00:03:12.900 They looked at your about page, that's a great one.
00:03:14.800 They looked at these specific blog articles on your website.
00:03:18.000 That information is deadly to help you understand is have,
00:03:22.500 do they know enough information about the business for you to
00:03:25.000 assume that they're qualified or do you need to kind of step
00:03:28.180 back and kind of reconnect with who they are and kind of what
00:03:31.340 they know about the business and start there to build that
00:03:33.680 connection.
00:03:34.560 Number three, challenges.
00:03:36.260 How immediate is their requirements to solve their
00:03:39.520 problems today?
00:03:40.620 They have frustrations or something going on where they
00:03:42.860 don't feel like either the information's flowing properly or
00:03:46.200 it's costing them too much money to accomplish something
00:03:48.800 or somebody's not being tracked properly
00:03:51.180 and they wanna solve that problem.
00:03:53.080 What your job is to figure out is how to qualify.
00:03:56.340 How immediate is their challenge is to resolve
00:04:00.140 in the business from a timing point of view
00:04:01.880 to know that it's something that's a now thing.
00:04:03.720 If you think of a market, okay,
00:04:05.420 like this is the coolest thing ever.
00:04:07.580 Like, I'm not saying that jokingly, it's pretty neat.
00:04:09.760 You have a thousand potential customers.
00:04:12.300 most people are in market for probably two months
00:04:16.500 throughout that window.
00:04:17.600 So if you think you have a thousand potential customers,
00:04:19.740 if you start January, February, and it's kind of like
00:04:22.200 a lens that kind of goes across those thousand customers
00:04:25.320 throughout the year.
00:04:26.280 In January, February, that whatever it is,
00:04:29.420 18%, 16% of the market is gonna be in market.
00:04:33.120 And as you move across the timeline of that year,
00:04:36.900 a different, out of the same thousand,
00:04:39.620 these people are no longer in market
00:04:41.200 and these ones are ready and they're in market.
00:04:42.960 So that's just the way I think about it.
00:04:45.200 Two months window and I want to figure out is what their problem,
00:04:49.000 their challenges they're dealing with today,
00:04:50.380 is it a now thing or a later thing?
00:04:52.040 Because really I'm trying to find,
00:04:53.720 if you call it a thousand people in the market,
00:04:55.280 I'm trying to find the ones that are ready to buy today
00:04:58.180 and if not, they're not qualified.
00:04:59.820 So just think about that mental model next time about,
00:05:02.380 hey, there's a window, it's 12 months,
00:05:04.420 it's scanning, you know, two months,
00:05:06.260 it's a different group of people.
00:05:07.300 And that's why marketing works so well.
00:05:08.700 You could have stuff, you're like,
00:05:09.820 well, these people had already heard about that.
00:05:11.920 Those people aren't even paying attention
00:05:13.600 to your marketing anymore because they've either decided
00:05:16.160 it wasn't a priority or moved on to another solution
00:05:18.660 or they got fired.
00:05:19.760 So literally, you can send the same message in the market
00:05:22.260 because the group of people that are in market
00:05:24.560 ready to buy today from a timing point of view is different.
00:05:28.480 Number four, the role.
00:05:30.500 Are you talking to the decision maker?
00:05:32.780 Now, it doesn't mean that if they're not,
00:05:36.180 if they don't have the ability to buy
00:05:37.880 that you just hang up the phone
00:05:39.520 because you want to figure out they could be a champion
00:05:41.520 and that is probably the most important.
00:05:42.820 If you're doing mid-market or enterprise deals,
00:05:44.460 you want to find that champion inside
00:05:46.700 which is kind of like the driver of the deal
00:05:51.300 versus the economic buyer
00:05:53.000 because somebody might be the person
00:05:54.500 that decides what they're going to spend
00:05:56.700 but somebody else could be your inside supporter
00:06:01.340 to help give you some kind of insights
00:06:03.180 into what needs to happen to actually move a deal forward.
00:06:05.520 So to me, it's really important to figure out
00:06:07.380 what is the role that that person,
00:06:09.680 and obviously you can check on LinkedIn
00:06:11.180 and it's actually pretty much standard practice
00:06:13.180 if you ask them and it's public information
00:06:15.880 that you're kind of not doing your job.
00:06:18.320 But I think you can go deeper into kind of like,
00:06:20.660 how do decisions get made?
00:06:22.000 How have you been involved in other decisions just like this?
00:06:24.400 What software have you bought in the past six months
00:06:28.900 to solve a business challenge?
00:06:30.400 Just to kind of get an idea of how their involvement
00:06:33.440 is perceived in the organization to make a decision
00:06:36.740 to buy a solution like yours.
00:06:38.440 Number five, authority, very similar to the role
00:06:41.640 but it's really just trying to qualify the economic buyer.
00:06:44.420 Do they have authority to make that purchase
00:06:47.180 or maybe they have authority to spend up to maybe $5,000
00:06:51.180 without having to get budget approval
00:06:52.620 or trying to go through the whole process of,
00:06:55.600 you know, getting a PO or whatever.
00:06:57.420 You might want to just figure out how to change
00:07:00.240 what you're selling to address their challenges
00:07:02.440 and bring the price down to still get the buyer.
00:07:04.140 So at the end of the day, you want to figure out
00:07:06.040 what their level of authority is.
00:07:07.300 Because maybe it's not to do the bigger deal where it's more
00:07:09.880 of an enterprise rollout but they might be able to buy a POC,
00:07:13.980 a proof of concept.
00:07:15.020 And this is where I see a huge opportunity for a lot of my
00:07:17.880 clients in the mid-market or enterprise space to figure out
00:07:21.660 what would a lower cost POC, proof of concept,
00:07:24.220 to deploy within that organization you're already
00:07:26.560 talking to that the person can actually make a decision
00:07:29.060 around what would it look like so that you can move the sale
00:07:32.360 forward even if the person doesn't have the authority.
00:07:35.400 So that is number five, how to qualify.
00:07:38.500 Number six, product fit.
00:07:40.740 At the end of the day, they have problems they need to solve
00:07:44.100 and you're asking yourself,
00:07:45.440 does my solution solve those problems?
00:07:48.080 And more importantly, how well does it align
00:07:50.980 with their challenges?
00:07:52.420 Because the way I think about selling any product,
00:07:54.820 think about this, the customer's standing
00:07:56.480 at the bottom of a mountain.
00:07:57.760 At the top of the mountain is the results or outcomes
00:08:00.920 or success they want to achieve.
00:08:03.260 And at the bottom of this mountain,
00:08:04.600 there's a row of vehicles of essentially change.
00:08:08.340 There's different types of vehicles.
00:08:09.900 There's, you know, mortar bikes and four-wheelers and Jeeps
00:08:13.500 and dune buggies and all these different,
00:08:16.120 there's rock climbing gear and there's all these different
00:08:18.440 vehicles of change that can help them get to the top of
00:08:21.980 that mountain and your job is to sell your specific vehicle.
00:08:26.960 So, because at the end of the day they could buy your solution
00:08:30.000 or somebody else's so what you're trying to do is make sure,
00:08:33.720 and this is upfront qualifying,
00:08:35.420 is that what they're trying to achieve,
00:08:37.320 that that mountain is best suited for your vehicle
00:08:40.600 because at the end of the day,
00:08:41.560 you don't wanna spend two months, three months, six months.
00:08:44.200 I've seen some of my clients spend up to a year and a half
00:08:47.840 thinking they're gonna get a deal,
00:08:49.400 planning their business around this big enterprise deal
00:08:52.580 only to find out that at the beginning,
00:08:55.000 the solution they were building
00:08:56.240 and the customer's challenge were not aligned
00:08:58.480 and somehow that was missed
00:09:00.080 and they only figured it out at the end.
00:09:01.740 It is heart-wrenching to see and it happens all too often
00:09:05.940 because they didn't qualify that specific alignment
00:09:09.520 at the beginning.
00:09:10.580 So real quick, six steps to qualify your B2B SaaS leads.
00:09:14.420 Number one, funnel filter.
00:09:16.520 Number two, the behavior on your website.
00:09:19.020 Number three, challenges.
00:09:21.160 Four, the role.
00:09:23.060 Five, authority.
00:09:24.960 And number six, product fit.
00:09:27.600 As I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
00:09:28.740 I wanna share with you the Rocket Demo Builder.
00:09:30.900 Essentially, it's a nine box model, a conversation flow you
00:09:34.100 can use to double your sales conversions.
00:09:36.740 I also cover the five key principles of having a Rocket
00:09:40.380 demo, number two is amazing, the virtual close.
00:09:43.420 I think it'll really serve you and more importantly, you want
00:09:46.680 to not have boring demos so click the link below.
00:09:49.780 You can download your copy of that today and if you like this
00:09:52.480 video, be sure to click the like button.
00:09:54.500 Subscribe to my channel if there's anybody you think it
00:09:56.600 can serve, feel free to share it with them directly as per
00:09:59.700 usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business and I'll see you
00:10:03.100 next Monday.
00:10:04.100 Am I wearing the same shirt?