The Saas marketing funnel: 4 steps

Developing a bulletproof SaaS marketing and sales funnel is the first step towards scaling a profitable business. Those who have this in place already are able to more effectively fill their pipeline and turn leads into customers.

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Here are four steps to building a funnel that helps close more deals.

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1. Identify your funnel stages

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This is different for every business and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. However, the stages of your funnel are absolutely critical to success. Before starting any marketing or sales activity, these stages need identifying and defining - what do they mean, who should be in them, where are they in the buyer journey. These stages can go from the initial marketing contact, all the way through to the closed sale. A brief example is below:

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• Lead - Prospect has read your blog, clicked on a case study, or opened an email.
• Marketing qualified lead - Prospect has engaged in content, such as attended a webinar or downloaded a piece of content.
• Sales qualified lead - Prospect has indicated an interest in buying the software by requesting pricing, booking a demo, or downloading a free trial.
• Meeting / demo taken place - Deal created and moves into sales funnel. First demo has taken place.
• Proposal / trial in progress - Proposal has been provided, or free trial of software in progress.
• On hold - Deal has been stalled or delayed.
• Closed won - Deal has been signed and becomes a customer.
• Closed lost - Deal has been lost.

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Whatever the stages in your funnel, identify them, and define them clearly with the criteria they need to be. CRM platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive, make this an easy process, and you can track leads as they move through the funnel.

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2. Work out which metrics you want to track

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Of course, what you really want to know is how many closed deals there are and what is the recurring revenue associated with it. However, there is a wider picture to consider.

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When it comes to revenue, you want to know how much money you need to make to become/remain profitable. You can also track things such as average deal size, the average time taken to close deals, conversion rates through the funnel, and the number of leads required if you apply the conversion rate to hit your pipeline target.

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Using these metrics, you can work out how many leads you need to get at the top of the funnel to hit your revenue target. For example, if your revenue target is € 100,000 for the year, and your average deal size is € 10,000, you could look at your conversion rates and work out that, on average, you need 10 Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) to convert 1 deal. Therefore, to reach that € 100,000 target, you’d need to close 10 deals, and you’d need to generate 100 sales qualified leads to do that.

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3. Set goals and targets for each stage of the funnel

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Now you know your metrics, you can work even further back to work out monthly or quarterly goals and targets you need to achieve in order to hit your revenue number. You should be as granular as possible here, covering how many calls your Sales team need to make, how many emails your marketing team should send, how many downloads of content you’d like to get, and so on. Well-defined targets enable everyone to come together in a common goal - growth.

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4. Ensure Sales and Marketing alignment

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Finally, given the common goal, it’s important to make sure Sales and Marketing are working together and closely aligned. Both teams should understand and appreciate the impact of the other, and the way their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are intrinsically linked. For instance, Marketing shouldn’t deliver leads and then wash their hands of them. Sales should always provide feedback on lead quality and prospect pains to help Marketing improve their conversion rates. If lead quality improves, then so will conversion rates for Sales. It’s all about building quality throughout the funnel and creating relevant content and offerings relevant to where each prospect is in the buyer journey.

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A marketing funnel is easy to overcomplicate and, of course, there are many additional pieces of the puzzle. But at the very basic level, identify and define the stage of your funnel, do some basic maths to work out your success metrics, set goals and objectives for each part of the funnel, and ensure your Marketing and Sales teams are on the same page.

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If you want to discover how you could create a SaaS funnel book a 15 minutes discovery call using this link.