The sales process in B2B is not self-sufficient. In addition to the sales team’s efforts, certain tools are also required to achieve the main goal. These can be a unique selling proposition, recommendations, business launch questions, success stories, demonstrations, and presentations. In addition, you should use automated sales management tools as often as possible. We will talk about the latter in more detail below.

SaaS B2B Sales

The type of B2B business focused on SaaS (Software as a Service) is most often cloud solution providers. B2B companies sell their products or services to other companies instead of selling them to customers. Currently, the SaaS industry is growing rapidly, thereby influencing the massive growth of the B2B market.

In SaaS companies, marketers face challenges like attracting free users who can later be converted to paid. Generating publicity, earning public trust, and winning clients over is especially difficult in niche industries such as the crypto industry. This is but one example of an industry which many people are still skeptical about. In such industries, marketers need to make an extra effort to connect with the public. For example, certain companies allow their prospects to contact their sales-support team with a toll-free number calling option or instant 1:1 live chatbot. This is done to attract more inquiries from interested parties and convert them into customers. Plus, they also need to retain existing customers and expand the affiliate network. All of these should ultimately lead to increased profits. Companies also try to improve their product positioning by conducting regular perception surveys using an online survey tool or an omnichannel survey software. Conducting regular surveys allows companies to keep a track of their brand health, understand customer concerns and provide deeper insights into customer pain points.

B2B company goal options:

Organizing meetings with interested decision-makers, fitting the client profile;
Encouraging leads “stuck” in the sales funnel to make a decision;
Current customer receipt increase (e.g., selling a different product or upgrading their current product to a new version).

The sales process at these companies usually looks like this:

Inbound/outbound traffic. Marketing and sales departments generate lead flows;
Education. Company teams explain all benefits of the product to leads, generate interest and motivate them to make a purchase;
Interest and value. Customers feel the enthusiasm and are ready to move on;
Details. This is where all the details, including the decision-making process and its price, are discussed;
Proposal. Customers receive an email with an offer from the company. The latter then waits for approval;
Payment. Once the money is received by the company, the deal is closed;
Loyalty. This stage implies building customer loyalty and brand commitment by proving the value of the solution.

Tips to Use When Creating Sales Stages

The descriptions of each stage should be clear and accurate. Clearly define at what stage the deal is at.
Structured plan. Make sure your plan doesn’t resemble a Romanian arthouse film, i.e. fascinating, interesting but unclear due to many stages. Keep it simple and easy to get started. Later, you can make the structure more complicated (if you feel like it).
Once you’ve outlined the stages of your sales process, go back to stage one and make sure they match the customer company’s purchasing process.

EngageBay

EngageBay is a great platform for sales management at B2B SaaS companies. This all-in-one solution offers:

Sales lead generation with pre-validated contact data.
Engaging sales content that drives warm leads close deals faster.
Automation of account-based marketing campaigns for the most effective lead nurturing process.

EngageBay CRM has more than 30,000 businesses loving it worldwide, so it has already gone places even as a relatively new market entrant.

The EngageBay platform offers a targeting framework that is customizable in real-time!

EngageBay has been able to create a deeper level of engagement than most software in this space.

The software targets customers and helps you tailor your outreach campaigns based on their industry verticals, job function, geographic locations, as well as profile seniority.

These tags can always be customized, added, and removed, while the software itself makes automation workflows super easy to execute.

EngageBay’s omnichannel marketing makes it easy to promote your brand and connect with customers on different channels, including phone, email, SMS, web, and social media.

The Sales Bay offers deal pipelines, lead generation and management, predictive lead scoring, and appointment scheduling. You can assign reps to deals, reroute hot leads, and even get insightful reports in real-time, with your own custom metrics.

You can choose from four different plans: Free, Basic ($14.99), Growth ($49.99), and Pro ($79.99). The Prices mentioned here are per month, per user. You also get discounts for annual and biennial subscriptions.

Appointy

Appointy is multi-functional online scheduling software that helps sales & marketing teams schedule client meetings 24*7 and eliminates the back-and-forth emails to find a perfect time to meet.

Trusted by 45,000+ growing businesses and mid-large enterprises, Appointy helps you shorten your sales cycle and save time. It offers the following features to help you automate repeating admin tasks, get more qualified leads, and prepare for client meetings in advance:

Personal, round-robin, and group meetings for all types of teams
Real-time & intuitive online meeting calendar
Website booking integration
Automated email/ text reminders and notifications
Inbuilt CRM with individual client profiles
Calendar sync with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal
Intelligent resource and staff allocation
Reporting and Analytics

It also provides a mobile app for Android and iOS that enables you to manage your meetings, employee schedules, marketing and more, easily from anywhere, at any time.

You can choose from four different plans according to your needs and budget:

Free,
Growth ($19.99),
Professional ($49.99),
Enterprise ($79.99).

(The prices mentioned here are per annum)

You can also get completely tailor-made solutions to handle large appointment volumes, multiple employees and locations, & other complex scheduling needs specific to your business.

Close

Close is a feature-rich platform that combines CRM, email, and call automation services. It’s a versatile sales tool that can be used without any other email or call tools. It allows sales professionals to easily make calls and receive callbacks in a single click.

With Close, customers can register in the system automatically. Moreover, a visual timeline displays all the points of convergence with your brand encountered by a specialist in charge. This allows sales teams to easily personalize customer service.

Close is perfect for smaller teams and offers a number of useful features, including custom onboarding, data structuring/importing, and more.

Close prices start at $29 per month (Starter, for 1-3 person teams) and end at $149 (Business, an ultimate all-in-one CRM for sales productivity). A 14-day trial period with all additional features is also available.

Pardot

Pardot is Salesforce’s best SaaS platform for marketing automation in the cross-corporate segment, i.e., B2B marketing.

The product was created to help companies rationalize everything from lead generation to sales automation. Pardot is an impressive marketing automation tool designed to increase the interest of leads in your products/services. This is how it will push them down the sales funnel.

In addition, the platform helps you retarget your “cold” leads. You have a visual editor that allows you to build complex workflows. Pardot intensively uses AI to make its marketing automation “smarter.”

Overall, Pardot is a more professional version of Salesforce’s marketing software solution. The dev team focused heavily on increasing ROI and delivering a more positive customer experience.

Pardot has several price plans (paid annually), starting at $1,250 (the Growth plan, for smarter marketing automation) per month and can go up to $15,000 (the Premium plan includes tons of features for predictive analysis and support).

This software is best suited for:

Large businesses;
Corporations;
Salesforce;
Email marketing campaigns;
Automated workflows;
ROI-related report generation.

Outreach

Outreach is an integrated platform with an excellent reputation. With it, sales teams improve their performance, optimize inside processes, and improve customer service. You can drive efficiency and effectiveness for your Marketing, Sales Development, Closing, and Success teams.

Outreach provides useful and comprehensive information on employee activity and indicates tasks and processes worth working on. Additionally, it allows you to optimize your customer engagement throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Outreach price plans are mostly around $100/month. The final cost is custom, though. A free demo is also available.

Prospect.io

Another versatile SaaS platform for sales automation. Prospect.io helps find and structure lead information and launch campaigns for different target segments.

Prospect.io is one of the most powerful sales automation platforms suitable for modern sales teams. It can help you improve the productivity of your team, increase the number of leads, grow your email list, and much more.

Besides customer engagement analysis, Prospect.io also allows B2B SaaS companies to monitor sales team performance statistics and motivate employees through gamification.

With Prospect.io you can customize your marketing campaigns, measure results, and integrate with other services. Simply scale up your searches with Chrome extensions to effortlessly find new emails. You can also reach your target audience with built-in drip campaign tools.

The best thing is that Prospect.io also has more democratical prices when compared to Outreach.

Prospect.io prices start at $79/month and $29 for each additional user. Special kudos for the 30-day guarantee.

ZoomInfo.org

A convenient SaaS service is known for its impressive contact database and a solid set of B2B sales solutions. ZoomInfo integrates with most CRMs and related services.

Price is custom. A free demo is available.

Gong.io

Gong is an advanced cloud-based platform for analyzing sales force communication with customers. The solution allows you to record, transcribe, scrutinize sales calls, and analyze the market in real-time.

Pricing depends on several factors (e.g. number of employees and sales strategy – email, calls, etc.). A free demo is available.

Owler

Owler is a powerful tool that can help you get insights on leads and improve your customer service. The service helps salespeople gain access to information on 13+ million companies, both public and private. Thus, with Owler, you can find new leads, research the companies you’re most interested in, and get regular updates on their activity.

Price: the basic package is free, others start at $99.

Feedly

Feedly is an alternative to Owler. An AI-based solution that can help salespeople get fresh insights about their potential customers. Leo (the AI assistant) analyzes a huge number of resources and finds the required information in real-time. It can be an article on a special topic, a certain post, a Google query, etc.

Feedly also allows you to efficiently analyze collected leads with a variety of filters. You can prioritize topics, generate article summaries, and much more.

Pricing is custom.

Lemlist

Lemlist is our perennial favorite! A great tool for automating cold email series. Offers a huge range of email templates and integrates with most email providers.

Lemlist is especially popular with startups and small teams today. Mostly because of its clear interface and affordable pricing policy.

Pricing starts at $29/month. The 14-day trial is available.

ProspectIn

ProspectIn is a great tool for automating outreach on LinkedIn. Allows you to create and run campaigns across thirty scenarios and different segments, send personalized messages and automate contact requests. ProspectIn also synchronizes with most CRMs.

Price: the basic package is free. Other packages start at €9.99. You can also request a demo.

LeadIQ

If you already use LinkedIn, LeadIQ is a great additional tool for finding emails. “Tastes” great with LinkedIn and LinkedIn Sales Navigator 😉

Pricing starts at $75/month.

eWay-CRM

It combines traditional and innovative approaches. eWay-CRM is operating in Outlook from Microsoft. It is a multifunctional CRM software made especially for freelancers, small and medium-sized firms. It works as a free CRM for freelancers and customized CRM for companies with an established business.

Specialists from sales, projects, customer care, marketing, and operations find it useful. External integrations with CMS, accounting, and other communication tools make it a rare thing.

CrankWheel

A great solution for people who want to combine the efficiency of telesales with the effectiveness of in-person sales meetings. CrankWheel allows your team to easily share their screen, browser window, or browser tab instantly to any device and any browser by sending a link via email or SMS. The person on the other end can enter the session within seconds since they don’t have to sign up or install anything. Screen sharing with CrankWheel gives the presenter the option to monitor engagement and grant control of the shared screen which is a great function to let them fill out forms or when onboarding customers to your SaaS solution. Another feature that’s included is called Instant Demos which enables your team to call prospects immediately when they request a demo. A nifty feature for managers is a dashboard for managers to view the number of screen-sharing sessions their teams have initiated. Most power users use the number of sessions as part of their sales KPIs once they realize that by complementing phone calls with screen sharing increases their sales.

CrankWheel is free to try and the subscription for teams starts at $89 per month.

B2B SaaS Marketing is a Real Deal

SaaS marketing is not for the faint of heart – it’s quite complicated. It’s also different from any other type of marketing for all intents and purposes.

From shorter sales cycles to loyal customers and low entry barriers, the SaaS industry boasts all the necessary features for growth. Yet most B2B SaaS businesses fail because they lack effective sales strategies. This is particularly common for early stage SaaS companies who need to acquire new users to jumpstart marketing.

Here are some proven sales strategies that will drive your B2B SaaS business in the right direction:

Identify your target audience (TA). The services provided by a SaaS company can be beneficial to any business with 5,000 employees. However, selling to smaller companies requires a completely different set of skills and marketing approaches. Consequently, before jumping into a sales pit, you want clearly identify yourTA;
Understand your growth. B2B SaaS companies will inevitably become more and more complex, as they grow from a startup to a small organization, etc. Their needs and constraints also increase relative to the employees. To attract and retain customers, a B2B company needs to understand how differences in customer size affect their day-to-day sales tactics and processes;
Mind your technical requirement specifications. Knowledge of IT and software development services is also a must for your sales team, as it needs to identify the right customer for the product. Your sales team must have a deep understanding of the product they are selling;
Inbound and outbound sales. Having an effective sales team can really accelerate a company’s growth. However, they should consider both inbound and outbound sales strategies. With the latter, you can strategically target high-value accounts and connect with the right stakeholders. You have to find the right balance between the two to improve sales efficiency;
Alignment of interests across departments. Salespeople at large B2B companies must have experience working in large organizations. They must align the interests of different departments, whether it’s your legal department or IT Security;
SMB addressing. SMBs are server message blocks, also known as Common Internet Files System (CIFS). This method is used by many SaaS B2B companies to address a large market base at the same time, instead of selling it to them one on one;
Focus on inbound marketing. For many SaaS B2B companies, inbound marketing is the cornerstone of their entire marketing efforts. Inbound marketing is a strategy that leverages many forms of marketing: B2B content marketing, blogs, events, SEO, social media, and more. This type of marketing aims to create brand awareness and attract new business;
Establish a basic sales process. You must pinpoint and select software that provides easy connectivity to data sources. Such software should be integrated with your existing outbound marketing tools.

Conclusions

Successful sales in B2B will require many challenges and adapting to an ever-changing world. Your product or service may remain the same. However, the market itself, as well as the behavior of your customers and their requirements, etc. are bound to become different.

We hope that by using the solutions and recommendations from this article, you will be able to handle everything with dignity. The main thing is to constantly evolve!

Test, automate, close more deals. Good luck!

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