How to acquire customers for your SaaS with an efficient outbound sales process

 
 

If you are like most technical SaaS founders, the idea of picking up the phone and making cold calls is terrifying and enough to give you second thoughts about this whole “starting your own company” thing.

However, when done well, outbound sales strategies like cold calls and cold emails can be a cost-efficient way to reach your potential customers and kickstart your business. 

In this post, we’re going to share an efficient way to reach potential buyers and scale your SaaS startup with outbound sales.  

Let’s dive in. 

What’s the difference between inbound and outbound sales? 

The biggest difference between inbound and outbound is with outbound, your company (typically either the founder or someone in sales) identifies and reaches out to the lead, whereas with inbound sales, the lead initiates and expresses some level of buying intent first.  

Because of this, outbound sales tends to have a longer sales cycle because you may need to spend more time educating and building trust with each prospect. 

There isn’t a right or wrong way to do sales in a SaaS startup. In fact, some of the strongest and most profitable companies incorporate both approaches. 

Top benefits of outbound sales 

Outbound sales have some immediate advantages, especially for brand new SaaS companies, including: 

  • Jumpstart sales: It is the fastest way to start bringing money into the business. You don’t need to wait for paid ads, SEO, content marketing, or word of mouth to kick in. 

  • Take away excuses: There is nowhere to hide with outbound sales. You can’t hide behind `we just need one more feature, and we’ll be ready,” or “we need to wait 3-6 months for SEO traffic to start kicking in.” 

  • Get feedback from real customers: It is all BS feedback until you ask a stranger for money. You won’t know if you have a viable product that solves a specific pain point until you can get real people to open up their wallets. 

  • Gain valuable material and context: A lot of stuff happens when you are emailing and/or talking to a couple dozen or more potential prospects each week. This information, along with intel, can be turned into sales enablement assets. For example, when you reach someone who likes the product but isn’t the decision-maker, you can build out a playbook to help them sell it to their team. This is something you can recycle and use over and over again. 

Building your outbound sales funnel

An inbound sales process is fairly simple. It typically looks like this: 

A lead reaches out --> Qualify the lead → Do a demo or get them to initiate a free trial → Close the sale

Outbound sales takes a little longer and has a few more steps. 

Identify your best-fit prospects → Research --> Get their contact details --> Prospecting → Demo → Actual free trial → Close the sale 

While there are more steps with outbound sales, there are strategies you can use to make the process more efficient. 

Identify and research

The first thing you need to do is identify and qualify who your ideal-fit prospect is and create your ideal customer profile (ICP). Then, you need to build, organize, and enrich your prospect list. This is something that you should hire and delegate to a $5-$10 per hour sales assistant on marketplace sites like Upwork or Fiverr. 

At the minimum, your prospect list should include the following:

  • Primary contact (i.e. the decision-maker)

  • Company Name

  • Company Website

  • Primary contact's email address

  • Primary contact's Linkedin profile

  • Job Title 

Some freemium and paid B2B prospecting tools that might be helpful at this stage:

  • BuiltWith: Find the tech stack and key company profile info for specific companies. 

  • Crunchbase: Discover additional information about companies, senior executives, and funding / investing insights, among other things. 

  • Linkedin Sales Navigator: Find who the key decision-maker(s) are at the company and connect with them on Linkedin 

  • Hunter.io: Find email addresses for your key decision-makers 

  • RocketReach: Find email, phone, and social media details for key decision-makers.

Prospecting

Once you have your initial prospect list, it is time to start your outbound sales campaign via cold calls, cold email, or social selling (think Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc). 

One of the biggest mistakes that salespeople and founders make at this stage is they try to close the sale too early. Remember: Your prospect probably hasn’t heard about your product before. So, you need to educate and start to build trust. That’s why your only goal at this stage should be to get your prospects on a demo call. 

The prospecting tools you use to do this (For example, outbound sales software like Lemlist, Salesloft, Mailshake, etc), methods you use at this stage (cold email, cold call, Linkedin cold outreach, etc), and how often you contact each prospect will vary depending on your industry and business. It is important to experiment early on until you find a prospecting cadence that works for you.

From Jordan Gal’s talk at MicroConf in 2015, he used Salesloft and landed on a cadence of 6-7 emails and calls over a lengthy period of time. 

Note: When you are just starting to prospect, you should send the first messages yourself as the founder. This will help you understand what messaging resonates with your target audience. You can use this to build a sales library of call, email, and/or Linkedin messaging scripts. Once you have something that is starting to resonate, hire and delegate this process to a sales development representative (a.k.a. SDR).  

3. Demo

At the demo stage, it is all about providing enough value on your call to convince them to sign up for a free trial or, in some cases, close the deal on the spot. 

So, you want to use language like, “Let me show you how XX similar customer / example used our product” instead of "Let me show you a demo."

If you’re like most technical founders, your natural tendency is to avoid doing live demo calls. Resist the urge and do at least the first 25 successful demos yourself.  You will learn a ton about what your customers actually care about. At that point, you can start to think about hiring and bringing on a salesperson (sometimes called an account executive or closer) to handle demos. 

4. The actual trial

If you have a free trial, your goal at this stage is to convert trials to customers. Simply put, your main KPI to focus on is trial to paid conversions. 

Two ways to supercharge your outbound sales efforts 

Now that you know the general process, here are two things you can do to maximize your efforts. 

Integrate your outbound sales efforts with marketing 

Between your prospecting replies and demo calls, you are going to get a treasure trove of insights into what your prospects’ key goals and pain points are. You can use this information in your marketing, including:

  • Add the language that your leads use directly on your website

  • Create sales enablement content to help sales close more deals (Ex: webinars, product use case landing pages, blog posts, case studies, etc) 

Set up annual billing from the get-go 

If you have a solid product that customers find valuable and execute annual billing correctly, this will give you a near-infinite marketing budget.

For example, if you convert 20% of your customers into prepaid annual billing in the first 60 days, you are adding money upfront.  This means you are recovering your customer acquisition costs faster, and your marketing efforts are essentially funding themselves (as long as they keep working). 

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In sum, the key to an efficient and aggressive outbound sales process is to orient the entire company around sales from the get-go. This means everything from product to marketing and customer success is oriented around what sales are learning talking to customers.

Want to get more insights into how an efficient outbound sales process can work? Listen to Jordan’s full MicroConf talk here.