How to Manage Sales Funnels for a Small Scale SaaS Startup

Sales funnel is basically the journey that a customer covers from being a lead to becoming a loyal customer. Managing the sales funnel is a taxing job for business startups. Every sales funnel starts with awareness campaigns and ends with the defined actions. However, the sales funnel is closely related to marketing. It would not be wrong to say that an effective marketing policy is the precondition to manage the sales funnel in the desired manner.

If you have a new SaaS setup, it can be a challenge to build a sales funnel but know that it is the basis of the success of your business. Being a SaaS startup, you must understand that closing more deal is the ultimate goal of the sales funnel. So, your focus should be the sales funnel rather than closing more deals. When people start their SaaS companies they sometimes go astray and shift attention towards the number of the deals. Following are the prerequisites that you need to fulfil so as to manage the sales funnel in a better way.

Make Your SaaS Company Visible

When your SaaS company is in its early phases of development, you should target to get as much visibility as you can. You can utilize different social media platforms. Always stay in touch with your marketing team and instruct them to come up with an effective yet flexible social media marketing strategy. Short videos, infographics, and updates regarding features of your SaaS products can boost the visibility of your new business on social media.

Other than marketing you should work on the user interface of your software. An attractive look & feel of your SaaS products can enhance the visibility of what you offer. Your business visibility will help in bringing more potential leads who can turn to be loyal customers.

Choose the Best Business Model

Whether you run a small SaaS startup or a large enterprise, it is mandatory to choose the business model that can help you set a smooth revenue stream. Many SaaS companies are opting for the subscription billing model. This business model is suitable for small companies as well, and to manage SaaS subscriptions you can use subscription management platforms just like SubscriptionFlow.

Subscription or recurring billing is one of the most SaaS-friendly business models. You can offer your subscribers different types of subscriptions depending on your business niche. If you use the SaaS billing engine of SubscriptionFlow, you can also integrate payment gateways to collect your subscription fees.

Offer Businesses Consultancy

Most SaaS businesses offer B2B services so, it is important to provide users with proper consultancy about the ease that your product can bring for your potential customer. It is better to give your clients appointments for consultancy. It is one of the effective ways to convert leads into customers.

Gather your experts to make a team of competent consultants. Their consultancy will not only bring more customers but will become a way of marketing your SaaS business.

Generate Buyer Personas

Experts sitting in various startup companies mull over to define their target market and target customers. Now you need to take a step forward and make buyer personas. It is the process of enlisting the qualities that you seek in your ideal customers. When you are done with enlisting these qualities, you can target customers in a better way.

There are various software that can automatically generate buyer personas for your SaaS startup. If you succeed in understanding your buyer persona well, you can orient your marketing campaigns to target the right audience and finally get more customers out of your sales funnel.

Use Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is used to attract more leads and you can place your lead magnet somewhere on the top of your sales funnel where you devise strategies to increase the interest of the audience in your SaaS product or services. For example, trial period on subscriptions and free consultancies are effective lead magnets and they always work for both small and large businesses.

Lead magnet increased the number of leads to your sales funnel and more leads mean more chances of getting potential customers out of the sales funnel.   

Now that you are aware of the importance of a sales funnel, you can come up with ideas for your own sales funnel. Nonetheless, keep in mind that there is nothing written on the stone regarding the sales funnel rather you can continue testing and modifying your strategies according to changing conditions and your business requirements. You can also get feedback from your customers and improve your strategies to get more leads and convert them into customers.