Dan Martell - The Best Way to Build a SaaS Sales Pipeline

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. 0.67

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 0.81

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.

Dan Martell - June 13, 2022

The Best Way to Build a SaaS Sales Pipeline

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