Sales models
For many of us, you’ve probably worked in a few sales roles that all claim to have the perfect sales model. Whether you’re in conversational intelligence software, booking software, or really any SaaS market they all cover the same key points.
Then the question becomes, how come some SaaS companies thrive and others barely survive? If ultimately the sales framework has the same principles, shouldn’t they all thrive in some aspect? Unfortunately, we all know that the answer is “no”. While the concept does matter, when it comes to your sales framework, using the right model for your service is even more important.
Here are some typical examples of a sales model:
- Traditional Sales
Marketing and sales work closely together with traditional SaaS sales to build a strong brand and generate prospects based on marketing. This includes ABM and knowing your audience to build your sales pipeline. - Enterprise Sales
Most higher-priced SaaS companies follow this model as you need companies on board, not individual teams. If you are charging $30,000 per year for your service – larger companies that have the bandwidth and budget will be your main targets. Vastly different from smaller SaaS companies services start at $12.99 per user. - Customer Self Serve
This is more for services that offer free trials and have users sign up on their own because of marketing and word of mouth on your service. Sales reps can be there to answer questions, but most of the time users sign up themselves as it’s a low enough cost to provide the right solution for the customer.
Executing your Sales Model
Now let’s take a step back. If you set up your sales framework but don’t know who your target persona is… do we think that’s a good thing? Of course not!
Go back to the beginning and create your buyer persona to understand how you can best sell to them and actually grow your SaaS business.
What type of SaaS do you offer? We’ll stick with ours for this example – next gen conversational intelligence software. Our decision makers are sales leaders and C-suite level executives. However, we need the buy-in from SDRs and those using our platform every day to advocate for needing us.
The buyer’s journey
As mentioned above, defining the buyer’s journey will always be at the top of the list when it comes to executing on your chosen model. There are quite a few different ways this can be setup, but important questions you need to ask about they buyer’s journey include:
- Who are your target personas?
- Is sales and marketing operating in parallel?
- How are you building awareness
- What are you providing to the prospects in the decision stage?
There are probably dozens of more questions you can list, but we hope you get the point!
How to Convert
The next step is to come up with the highest propensity to convert prospects. You don’t always need to compete with the shiny big competitors on the biggest platforms. Evaluate the lifecycle of prospects you develop on different platforms.
Understanding the buyer’s journey and mapping that out will improve your conversion rates.
Again, each step is vitally important!
Least Sales Complexity
While big customers and enterprise sales are great and allow us to quickly scale the business, they may not always be the right fit. The sales cycle can be complex and lead time to close even longer. Figure out what industries you have the most success in already and start with referrals along with advertising to other similar type companies.
This also comes with experience, as do a lot of things when starting a SaaS business. Learn from each lead, prospect, and customer to enhance your lead generation from your marketing and sales team. If you are planning to have an enterprise sales model, but realize that’s not where your current customers are coming from then it may be time to re-evaluate.
The Right Strategy Matters
SaaS companies have become extremely popular due to the ability to scale and pivot quickly to meet any needs. However, if you have the wrong strategy, you could have to pivot more often. Even the slightest mismatch between what the target market expects and the process you require it to go through might result in sales struggles.
In the conversational intelligence field, there are competitors popping up every day. Our traditional sales model allows us to scale and reach our ARR goals as a SaaS business. However, we know this model isn’t for everyone. We hope this helps you build yours or re-evaluate if something is missing so you can go out there and crush your 2022 goals.