By Jeanne Hopkins

An effective B2B SaaS sales funnel is critical for your brand to drive conversions. But 68% of companies say they haven’t attempted to evaluate the impact of their sales funnel and 79% say that marketing leads are never converted.

The result is a growing need for in-depth sales funnel optimization: Companies need to consider how current funnels are performing, where they need to improve, and what steps they can take to achieve this goal.

In this piece, we’ll dig into B2B SaaS sales funnel basics and explore five ways your brand can optimize this approach.

While the stages of the SaaS sales funnel mirror those of less specialized sales approaches, the specifics of each stage differ. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Prospects

The prospects stage is the most general and involves broadly identifying potential prospects from the market at large. The goal here isn’t to make a sale on day one but rather to raise awareness of your brand to help potential customers understand that you don’t just deliver a product, you deliver a service that’s continually supported over time.

This stage of the funnel is also known as TOFU, or Top of the Funnel.

Lead Qualification

The next stage in the SaaS sales funnel is sales qualifaciton. This focuses on vetting leads obtained in the first stage: Are they interested in your SaaS solutions? Do they have the budget and decision-making authority to purchase your product? Qualified leads help sales teams boost win rates; unqualified leads can waste time for marketers, sales teams, and customers themselves.

Intent

Intent speaks to the portion of the funnel which sees leads activity looking to learn more about your SaaS solution and draft an agreement. In this stage, your sales teams are looking to connect more deeply with prospects and answer any questions they have, ASAP.

Both lead qualification and intent fall into the middle of the funnel, or MOFU.

Close (Won or Lost)

The last stage of the sales funnel is closing. Also known as BOFU or bottom of the funnel, closing isn’t always a win — your team could almost close the deal and find themselves frustrated at the last moment.

It’s also worth noting that closing in SaaS sales isn’t an end state but rather the beginning of a relationship. Ideally, your sales team wants to negotiate an agreement that sees customers purchase initial services and come back for contract extensions time and time again.

Ready to start optimizing your SaaS sales funnel? Here are eight ways to improve.

1. Boost Awareness with TOFU

TOFU content is designed to promote awareness of what your product can do and encourage prospective buyers to get in touch. Consider the example below of Adobe’s Creative Cloud on Facebook. The company offers a slick video along with a link to on-demand video content that dives into the use of 3D art tools — which Adobe just happens to sell — and how they’re impacting automotive design.

Other …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron