Dan Martell - How To Qualify Your B2B SaaS Leads Using These 6 Filters

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?

Dan Martell - December 03, 2018

How To Qualify Your B2B SaaS Leads Using These 6 Filters

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