How to Build a Sales Funnel for B2B SaaS in 2024

No one begins a business to fail. Yet, after the initial excitement fades, the harsh reality of sustaining success is like a hit of cold water. While many tips and tricks are available for the B2C and DTC sales funnel, they don’t necessarily work for B2B companies–primarily if they sell SaaS or Software as a Service. It’s critical to your company’s success to build a specific B2B SaaS sales funnel.

B2B SaaS is a shorthand way to describe businesses that sell cloud-based software to other companies, such as invoicing or payroll software, inventory platforms, or management tools that help teams work more efficiently.

The B2B marketing funnel is more insider-focused, using industry language and buzzwords to communicate a higher level of understanding. The buyer’s journey tends to be longer than that of a B2C company, which relies on finding the hot buyer and moving items out the door. By and large, B2B tends to generate more income than B2C or DTC by having higher-priced solutions that offer more features or an all-in-one solution. Key B2B trends in building SaaS sales funnels include the increased focus on personalization and automation. Companies are increasingly leveraging advanced AI and machine learning technologies to analyze customer data and predict behavior.

 

Why is a Sales Funnel Important for B2B SaaS?

In more traditional marketing setups, for B2C or DTC, the theory is that creating value in your company comes from growth and return on invested capital. While the latter may be a strong indicator of success for a more mature or conventional business, the former counts for the early stages of a company’s lifespan. This is even more true for emerging tech and SaaS providers.

According to McKinsey & Company, while most companies would love a 20% growth year over year, in the SaaS ecosystem, that growth rate would indicate a 92% chance of failure in a few years.

You want your product to sell, just like those mainstream businesses. However, the motivation for your SaaS sales funnel should continue beyond that when providing a service, especially software-based. You want the long-lasting relationship that comes with loyalty–your superfans, your ride-or-dies. Why is this? 

• SaaS companies concerned with growth need to maintain the capital to fund that growth, and having loyalty (whether it be membership renewals or upgrades, new products designed to work with existing ones, etc) ensures a constant flow of money to make the next step.
• Additionally, a robust and loyal user base can give your company the funds to hire full-time employees rather than outsource, streamlining your workflow and ensuring that people invested in the company’s success deliver excellent and thoughtful work.
• Your faithful customers feel a kinship to your business, especially if they are early adopters. This brings a shared feeling of success as the company grows, and these customers can be valuable sources of insight and innovation, along with fertile ground for testimonials.

Devoted customers can give you another ring of support as you scale, so creating a precise SaaS sales funnel to capture these folks is incredibly important. Let’s explore how to do this step by step, using a SaaS company that offers new project management software as an example.

Critical Stages for Building a B2B SaaS Sales Funnel

At first glance, the sales funnel basics are similar to those of B2C or DTC models–with the top of the funnel (TOFU) and middle of the funnel (MOFU). Since the focus for the B2B SaaS sales funnel is long-term deals, the real change comes at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), the loyalty step. 

Awareness

Simple. You get your product in front of your target audience. This could be done in several ways we are familiar with – B2B social media marketing, podcast advertising, search engines, and the like. SEO is vital at this stage, so optimizing every touchpoint should be at the top of your list. 

In our example company, this might mean spending time on curating metadata on the website, embedding information in social media posts, and creating sponsored ads for social platforms.

Interaction

Your potential customers have a problem they need to solve. If you’ve created the right marketing content for them, you show them you have the solution. When those members of your target audience are interested, they interact with you by signing up for your lead magnet (perhaps a downloadable guide or podcast episode). The bonus for you here? Valuable and specific lead generation using targeted campaigns that grab your visitor’s attention.

In our example company, this could show the variety of workflow templates they offer so that every kind of learner (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.) on their team can follow the pipeline optimally. The lead magnet could be a few customizable templates to do a trial run.

Preference

Now, the audience that sees your offer’s value is getting ready to wade deeper into the pool. In a more product-based sales funnel, this is often where the best offer is surfaced, and a B2B SaaS sales funnel is no different. Here, you give your interested audience a chance at a special price structure, extra or free months of service, or bonuses in the form of special webinars or coaching. 

For our project management software, this could be as simple as giving a more considerable discount to sizeable teams or offering a template library as a bonus sign-on gift.

Conversion

Now, the audience becomes the customer, and the funnel usually ends in most businesses. This is a crucial tipping point for a B2B SaaS sales funnel. 

Why? Since the goal is to retain rather than sell, being too impersonal or pushy can drive the buyer away. By communicating to the customer that you’re now partners in their quest to scale their business, you show your commitment to them. Conversion optimization is vital in this step.

A SaaS business like our example could offer something as simple as ‘always human assistance’ or another way to guide interested customers through their best choices using a dedicated customer service team.

Loyalty

And now, to the post-sale. After the conversion–the purchase of a subscription or a program–what happens then? Do these customers renew? Do they refer your business to others? The B2B sales funnel for SaaS needs to focus on this stage as it’s essential to keep interest and engagement in what your product can continue to do to benefit their business.

Loyalty is important for growing your business in other ways. Strategies such as upselling and cross-selling (offering a more expensive tier of service or selling an adjacent product you provide) can strengthen your market share. 

Another critical point: it’s four times cheaper to upsell to an existing client than to get a new one.

Our fictional project management software company can do this with a request for feedback, using an online form, and offering an incentive, such as a gift card, to show they value the time their customer is taking away from their lives to help you.

Crafting Your SaaS Sales Funnel: Step-by-Step Process

Before we begin to explore crafting your B2B SaaS sales funnel, one crucial point is that building a B2B marketing funnel should come first. To create the solid and loyal customer base you need, you must focus on customer acquisition. By building a SaaS marketing strategy that shows you to be the subject matter expert on whatever service you provide, you have already instilled the trust you need in your potential clients.

Then comes your sales funnel for SaaS. The steps are very similar to what you’ve done with the marketing funnel but with more precise goals set in place.

1. Define your audience

Using the same information from your marketing funnel, identify the customer’s behavior and the particular problem they’re trying to solve, depending on the service. For example, our project management company found that different kinds of learners were a roadblock to completing projects, so they knew that varying the templates, as mentioned above, was a product that was needed in the marketplace.

2. Decide how to attract leads.

Your goal for B2B marketing channels is marketing qualified leads (MQL), so targeting the right lead magnet for demand generation is crucial. For a product like our example, it would make sense to offer a few free templates through ads on LinkedIn. Being strategic here makes all the difference, so thorough research when building your B2B SaaS marketing funnel is a must.   

3. Nurture leads

Once you get them, you wait to go for the sale. Remember, the key here is to nurture your audience because you want to retain them, not move the product. The act of turning them into a sales qualified lead (SQL) should be taken with intention. An excellent way to do that for our example company could be a free webinar series explaining how the templates can be modified to fit different workflows. Give them quality content, and take your time.

4. Plan to convert leads.

Now that you’re at the bottom of the sales funnel and your audience is all in, it’s time to plan how to close the sale in a SaaS funnel. This can look like pricing plan tiers or customizable packages. It’s essential to give the customers the options they want instead of what you think they want. Our project management company offering customizable widgets might seem enticing, but not when the customer needs better CRM integration.

5. Have a good customer success plan.

This is where the gold is–creating a plan for post-sale nurturing. Whether that looks like a specialized email welcome sequence or a guided product tour asking for honest feedback on the tool, this removes the customer-seller wall and becomes a chance to partner with your ideal client. Getting insight from people using the tool is the most valuable R&D you could ask for.

Analyzing Funnel Efficiency

You can only manage what you can measure, so ROI tracking for your SaaS sales funnel is vital. Being able to track the sales process and get a clear view of the sales engagement can lead to revenue growth with a minimum of hiccups.

The big three are Conversion Rate, Customer Acquisition Cost, and Customer Churn Rate.

Conversion Rate

In simplest terms, Conversion Rate shows you how your customers are moving through your sales funnel, step by step. This could be how many people sign up for a free trial immediately, how many choose to sign up after seeing a demo, or how many convert to a paid plan after the free trial ends. This is a quality metric used for both the B2B SaaS marketing funnel and the sales funnel.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost is a key performance indicator in the SaaS sales funnel. It’s essential to see how much you need to spend to acquire new customers. When compared against the Lifetime Value data of your loyal base, it can give you a way to forecast future profitability, keeping your business moving forward in the right direction.

Customer Churn Rate

Contrary to what you initially thought, the Customer Churn Rate should become your favorite data metric for your sales funnel. It shows you where you’re losing customers and where you’re losing money in your sales plan. Paying attention to this is the best step when preparing to launch new products or improve existing ones.

SaaS businesses have a monthly churn rate between 3% and 7%. While that sounds low, a 5% churn rate equals losing 46% of your customers within a year.

The lower your business’s revenue per account, the higher the churn rate. Higher-priced offerings deliver more value and feel more committed to the user. Nurturing your customers plays a big part in churn reduction, which is another reason why it is vital for B2B SaaS.

Elevate Your B2B SaaS Strategy with NetShopping’s Custom Digital Marketing Funnel

You can use this framework to create your own B2B SaaS sales funnel or purchase sales funnel software.  But like any other project that relies on expertise, you always make the wiser decision by calling in the pros. 

NetShopping is a full-service digital marketing agency that has been working extensively within the B2B and SaaS markets for nearly ten years and can not only help you build a sales pipeline that will hit your goals but also give you the sales funnel support you need no matter what stage your business is in. Set up a 1:1 call with our friendly team today!

Conclusion

For B2B SaaS businesses, selling your product is not enough, and your sales funnel needs to reflect that. By focusing on customer retention, you benefit by going deeper with those dedicated users, nurturing and connecting with them. 

When your sales funnel is built to grow with you and your customers, growth and innovation come easily.