Dan Martell - June 13, 2022


The Best Way to Build a SaaS Sales Pipeline


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

185.58707

Word Count

2,098

Sentence Count

108


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 There's stages in that process where the ratios are abnormal
00:00:04.480 that if they fix 3% here, 5% there, 10% there,
00:00:08.740 you can get a result where most of my clients I work with
00:00:12.120 were growing at least 100% in a 12-month period.
00:00:15.080 hey there i'm dan martell serial entrepreneur investor and creator of sas academy in this
00:00:32.780 episode i'm going to share with you what is the difference let's define these things around an sdr
00:00:38.280 a BDR, an AE, or a CSM so that you can get clear
00:00:43.280 on what the pipeline flow should look like
00:00:45.860 so you can increase what's called your sales velocity.
00:00:49.020 And be sure to stay at the end.
00:00:49.900 We're gonna tell you how to get access
00:00:50.820 to an exclusive resource called the Rocket Demo Builder
00:00:54.000 where you can close deals twice as fast, twice as big.
00:00:58.100 I know it's a big promise, but we're gonna get into it.
00:01:00.300 Let's do this.
00:01:01.080 So if you're new to my stuff,
00:01:02.220 I have been in the SaaS space for almost 25 years, okay?
00:01:06.720 building technology companies, scaling organization,
00:01:09.380 raising venture capital, exiting companies.
00:01:11.880 And one of my favorite things
00:01:13.520 is to build the revenue engine, right?
00:01:15.980 I always look at business through two different funnels,
00:01:17.700 the revenue engine and the people engine.
00:01:20.020 But the revenue engine is the funnest
00:01:21.440 because that's where a lot of the velocity
00:01:25.840 and throughput to build a really exciting company
00:01:27.940 comes from, right?
00:01:29.160 And if you've never done that,
00:01:30.660 I mean, there's challenges like comp plans
00:01:33.000 and managing sales coaching
00:01:35.480 and making sure that people are saying the right thing
00:01:37.440 to potential buyers,
00:01:38.520 and that marketing sends over leads
00:01:41.120 that the salespeople like,
00:01:43.080 and there's always a conflict between marketing and sales
00:01:45.380 and then customer success,
00:01:46.400 because sometimes you sell stuff to people
00:01:48.600 you shouldn't have sold to,
00:01:49.480 and then the onboarding team is dealing
00:01:51.920 with all the downfall of that,
00:01:53.840 and it just becomes crazy.
00:01:55.980 But here's what I've discovered.
00:01:57.120 I was recently working with one of my clients,
00:01:59.560 and part of my private coaching that I do
00:02:02.520 is we map out the whole almost buyer journey, okay?
00:02:07.160 All the way from awareness, to consideration,
00:02:10.280 to purchase, to activation, engagement, and upsell, right?
00:02:14.240 It's the whole bow tie funnel.
00:02:16.340 And what you discover when you map it all out
00:02:19.500 is there is so much waste typically amongst organization
00:02:24.300 because they don't see the opportunities just dropping, right?
00:02:28.240 They just look at their revenue numbers.
00:02:29.940 They're like, oh, well, we added an extra 15K
00:02:32.100 I have monthly reoccurring revenue this month
00:02:33.600 or a lot of my clients are in the kind of the hundreds
00:02:35.940 of thousand dollars of new revenue every month.
00:02:38.320 And they don't see that there's stages in that process
00:02:42.560 where the ratios are abnormal that if they fix 3% here,
00:02:47.080 5% there, 10% there, you know,
00:02:49.820 and 10% of the current number,
00:02:51.160 if you stack all those things together,
00:02:53.400 you can get a result where most of my clients I work with
00:02:56.780 were growing at least 100% in a 12 month period
00:03:00.340 because it's math.
00:03:01.720 We just focus on the right things, right?
00:03:03.840 To 2X your pipeline by understanding
00:03:06.280 what is the audit process,
00:03:07.720 what's mapping out what I call the flow process,
00:03:10.260 the reports that you need to be able to manage this
00:03:13.160 and then tweak the different stages of that funnel
00:03:16.080 to get your results.
00:03:16.940 But to do that, you need to understand these four roles.
00:03:19.800 I'm gonna define them because they often get mixed up.
00:03:22.100 People don't understand them.
00:03:23.500 And we're gonna make sure we get some clarity today.
00:03:26.020 First one is sales development rep, SDR, okay?
00:03:30.000 So sometimes you hear this called an MDR, a qualifier,
00:03:35.920 a setter, there's all these different terminologies, right?
00:03:38.880 But I wanna normalize it and just say,
00:03:40.860 a sales development rep is responsible
00:03:43.100 for finding opportunity, okay?
00:03:45.960 And usually it's inbound or it's in your CRM
00:03:49.220 or it's, you know, some,
00:03:50.740 you can get super nerdy on this stuff,
00:03:52.260 but it's really just qualifying the potential buyer, right?
00:03:57.000 And to me, I just think that
00:03:58.200 that's the way to think about it.
00:03:59.120 You have prospects that are potential buyers.
00:04:01.340 And the job of a sales development rep
00:04:02.980 is to develop the sales opportunity.
00:04:05.760 They wake up every day and they should be chatting
00:04:08.020 with customers that come through the online forums.
00:04:10.100 They should be chatting with customers that are chatting.
00:04:12.360 They should be following up on email.
00:04:14.580 They should be, you know, somebody downloads a lead magnet.
00:04:16.920 They should reach out to them.
00:04:18.440 They should call them.
00:04:19.360 They should, you know, see if there's opportunities
00:04:21.800 to upsell within organizations.
00:04:23.460 Like there's the sales development reps job
00:04:26.320 is to execute the playbook to identify
00:04:29.520 and qualify opportunities.
00:04:31.800 And then, so once they qualify them,
00:04:34.460 then they move them up to the next stage.
00:04:36.220 But that is what a sales development rep is.
00:04:38.440 So, you know, setters and a bunch of other things,
00:04:41.020 people are like, well, we call them this.
00:04:43.240 You can call them whatever you want.
00:04:44.200 I'm just saying in the software world, in my world,
00:04:46.760 it's an SDR and that's what they do.
00:04:48.820 Number two, business development rep.
00:04:50.900 So a BDR, a business development rep,
00:04:53.520 in my language, it's outbound.
00:04:55.460 Outbound means cold, okay?
00:04:57.060 So I don't even consider if you have somebody
00:04:59.560 that's engaging in chat, that's not even outbound.
00:05:01.860 Outbound is they have ideally targeted accounts
00:05:05.960 using what we call an account-based marketing process,
00:05:09.800 and they're reaching out to the market
00:05:12.240 and they're trying to find opportunities
00:05:14.640 to create pipeline, okay?
00:05:16.340 So they're talking to the market,
00:05:18.220 they're opening up chats, they're offering assessments,
00:05:21.080 but a BDR is somebody that's dialing for dollars,
00:05:24.200 They're emailing for dollars.
00:05:25.520 They're literally sending out messages,
00:05:28.280 obviously value add, personalize,
00:05:30.480 all these things have to be true,
00:05:32.280 to get people to respond to then qualify them
00:05:35.600 and then kick them back up to your sales team,
00:05:38.400 to the next stage.
00:05:39.520 But that is when people are like, what does a BDR do?
00:05:41.960 A BDR is not an SDR.
00:05:43.180 A business development rep does outbound.
00:05:45.840 They make sure that the person has a need.
00:05:49.100 They qualify them.
00:05:50.320 They try to add value through that process.
00:05:52.360 and once they feel like there's an opportunity there,
00:05:54.520 then they move it up.
00:05:55.600 Number three is account exec.
00:05:57.640 So I call it an account exec inside my company,
00:06:01.140 but these are the salespeople.
00:06:03.100 These are people that are trained on how to,
00:06:06.200 what we call it in our company is,
00:06:08.180 we teach our customers how to buy.
00:06:10.620 These are not, some people call them closers,
00:06:12.720 and I get it because it's a cool word,
00:06:14.680 and closers get paid and all these things.
00:06:17.840 There's all these chants in the sales mantra,
00:06:19.680 but I mean, call it what you want.
00:06:21.340 I honestly don't care.
00:06:22.920 Sales rep, person who does demo, closer,
00:06:26.940 but they are an account exec.
00:06:28.560 Most of my clients that I coach,
00:06:30.080 I tell them to call them product specialists
00:06:31.800 because somebody wants to get on a call
00:06:33.200 with a product specialist,
00:06:34.040 they don't want to get on a call with a closer.
00:06:36.020 So it's funny how language you use
00:06:39.000 sometimes through the organization
00:06:41.100 gets propagated out to the customer.
00:06:43.320 So you might call them setters and closers
00:06:45.360 and then somebody in support's like,
00:06:46.920 hey, let me get you on a call with John,
00:06:48.500 he's one of our closers.
00:06:49.800 Well, the buyer does not wanna get on a call
00:06:52.760 with John who's gonna sell them.
00:06:55.180 Like nobody's ever like,
00:06:56.140 hey, get me on a call with a salesperson.
00:06:57.680 I wanna be sold.
00:06:58.900 No, they wanna be informed, right?
00:07:01.640 So you wanna give your demo process a cool name
00:07:05.260 and you want to give the title of your account executives,
00:07:10.260 which account executive is a good term, obviously.
00:07:13.480 And you wanna teach them that your job
00:07:15.040 is to teach them how to buy.
00:07:16.240 It's to help them understand how to evaluate
00:07:18.620 to opportunities in their business
00:07:20.320 and how they should evaluate other vendors and solutions
00:07:23.240 so that they can get the problem solved in a complete manner.
00:07:26.740 But that is what an account executive is.
00:07:28.760 That is a sales person that is responsible
00:07:31.940 for doing the sales call, the follow-up call
00:07:34.740 in an enterprise format, it's a complex sale.
00:07:37.820 They're usually doing solution selling.
00:07:39.700 They've gotta get all the different parties involved,
00:07:41.640 but they're responsible from, you know,
00:07:43.780 once it's qualified, they're taking the conversation
00:07:46.500 all the way to paperwork, credit card, check, right?
00:07:51.320 Like money in the bank.
00:07:52.680 And that's the responsibility of the account exec.
00:07:54.680 Number four is customer success manager.
00:07:57.020 Okay, CSM, it's a big word.
00:07:58.560 It's kind of a new industry.
00:07:59.580 Back in the day, we used to call it customer retention.
00:08:02.520 Then we call it revenue retention, then revenue expansion.
00:08:05.980 But, you know, some people call it onboarding,
00:08:08.320 but I like to call it customer success
00:08:09.980 because it just like, it's the right language, right?
00:08:12.060 Because the job of a CSM, a customer success manager,
00:08:15.180 is once the account exec has understood the pain,
00:08:19.760 talked about the solution
00:08:20.840 and showed them how the product can solve their problems,
00:08:23.560 they take that buyer and they bring them into the world
00:08:27.160 of becoming a consumer of your product or service.
00:08:30.680 And their skillset is no longer selling,
00:08:33.680 their skillset is really understanding
00:08:35.880 how to connect your product to their pain and activate them.
00:08:39.980 So a lot of companies don't think about it,
00:08:41.600 but there's different phases to this.
00:08:43.020 If you actually want a great book on this,
00:08:45.080 Joey Coleman wrote a book called Never Lose a Customer.
00:08:47.300 I think there's seven different phases of customer journey.
00:08:49.960 But the idea of mapping out the onboarding
00:08:53.620 and getting everybody from this,
00:08:55.580 what's the entry criteria,
00:08:58.260 what's the exit criteria for that stage,
00:09:00.480 and then moving them to the next stage,
00:09:02.120 which might be the first three months of engagement
00:09:04.340 and then ongoing and then renewals.
00:09:06.340 That's usually the area
00:09:07.940 the customer success manager spends time on
00:09:10.900 and it depends on the volume of your business,
00:09:13.520 but you might have like a high-touch
00:09:16.700 or a high-volume, low-touch model,
00:09:18.400 or you can have a low-volume, high-touch model,
00:09:19.980 depending on the price point.
00:09:21.240 You can have dedicated CSMs per each account,
00:09:23.700 or you might have kind of a rotating per function
00:09:26.820 where one group of customer success managers
00:09:29.440 just do activation or onboarding.
00:09:31.480 But that is what CSM stands for.
00:09:33.020 It is a relatively new skillset,
00:09:35.700 a new area for a lot of companies.
00:09:37.640 It's been around in SaaS for a while,
00:09:39.240 software as a service, but new in other industries,
00:09:42.760 but it's catching on because it just makes sense.
00:09:45.240 They are a revenue generating department.
00:09:48.060 Usually you monitor their churn
00:09:49.940 and their ability to activate
00:09:51.460 and get people retained and upsell.
00:09:53.640 That's another opportunity.
00:09:55.040 But that is what CSM stands for.
00:09:57.200 So quick recap.
00:09:58.600 Sales development rep does inbound qualifying.
00:10:01.080 Business development rep does outbound pipeline generation
00:10:05.320 or opportunity generation.
00:10:06.580 Number three, account exec.
00:10:08.540 These are the quote unquote closers.
00:10:11.300 And number four, customer success manager.
00:10:13.700 These are the people who are responsible for onboarding
00:10:15.840 and managing the customer experience.
00:10:18.020 So as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
00:10:19.480 I wanna share with you an exclusive resource.
00:10:21.460 Below, click the link.
00:10:22.600 It's called the Rocket Demo Builder.
00:10:24.300 It will help you double your win rates
00:10:26.880 or increase your win rates in half the time.
00:10:29.140 So click the link below to learn my nine box model
00:10:32.860 for following a prospect or a buyer through a sales process
00:10:37.820 that's allowed me to generate tens of millions of dollars
00:10:39.820 in revenue, personally, as a salesperson.
00:10:43.060 It's what I still use all the time.
00:10:45.260 If I'm doing any call that kind of looks like a sales call,
00:10:48.560 I pull out my Rocket Demo Builder
00:10:50.780 and I follow the exact same model
00:10:52.720 that I'm gonna give to you guys.
00:10:53.860 So click the link below to download your copy.
00:10:55.820 And if you like this video,
00:10:57.460 please click the like button, subscribe to my channel,
00:11:00.020 and please, please let me know below in the comments,
00:11:02.620 what is the number one thing you took away?
00:11:04.180 What did you like the most?
00:11:05.180 What is gonna have the biggest impact on your life?
00:11:07.380 That would be a real treat for you.
00:11:09.100 Leave that below.
00:11:10.180 And as per usual, I wanna challenge you
00:11:12.020 to live a bigger life.
00:11:13.180 Go even bigger and a bigger business.
00:11:15.800 Dream big, build an empire.
00:11:17.480 And I'll see you next Monday.