9 SaaS sales tips to close more deals in less time
3 min readNov 9, 2016
A lot of SaaS companies don’t get sales. And when you don’t get sales, you miss out on a lot of money. Money that you could otherwise put to work to build an even better product.
Fortunately, sales isn’t rocket science. Here are 9 simple tips that can help you get more paying customers fast:
Keep your trials short
- Keep your trials short: Too many startups offer free trials for way too long. That’s bad for a several reasons. If a user knows that they have a very long time to check out the product, there’s no sense of urgency and they might decide to check your software out “sometime later this week”. Then life happens, they forget about it and “sometime later this week” turns into never. But the worst thing about long trials is that they really screw up your sales process. (Click here to find out more about this.)
- Set up drip campaigns that do the selling for you: If you’re not yet sending out drip campaigns, it’s time to start doing this. (But don’t worry… even Basecamp didn’t send out drip email campaigns until very recently, and they’ve been around for a really long time. But when you do set up drip campaigns, BE INTENTIONAL AND RESULTS-ORIENTED. I see too many lame SaaS signup drip campaigns that would never convert a free trial into a paying customer. There is a right way to use drip emails to sell.
- Call your trial signups within five minutes of signing up: Now this is the part that nobody loves to do. Nobody loves calling their free trials, and oftentimes the free trials don’t like being called. But there’s tremendous value in doing it, and you absolutely can and should be doing it this way.
- Give short, value-focused demos: When it comes to giving demos, there’s three golden rules. Qualify first. Keep it short (15 minutes to demo, 15 minutes for Q&A). Focus on benefits, not features. Click here to learn more about giving great SaaS demos.
- Follow up like a pro: It’s not enough to send an email or two. You want to follow up with your trial signups until you get a response from them, a clear decision. I share a simple framework for building an effective follow up email sequence here.
- Give a lot of value and charge a lot of money: Too many founders price their product too cheap. You wanna be in a price range where most users feel like you’re a little bit on the expensive side, but still worth it. Here’s a simple framework for figuring out your SaaS pricing.
- Sell annual prepaid plans: That’s pretty obvious, right? :)
- Don’t discount: People will ask you for a discount all the time. Don’t devalue your product. Giving discounts is bad for your brand and makes creating a predictable revenue model impossible. Instead, get really good at handling discount requests.
- Never close a bad deal: Never sell your product to a customer that won’t get value out of it, even if you easily could and need the money. It’s just not worth it. It creates a lot more trouble than you anticipate at first. Here’s what you should do to get it right.
