How to Build Trust in Your SAAS Sales Pipeline

Software As A Service (SAAS) allows you to deliver applications over the internet. Instead of installing complex software, you can easily access it via the internet, freeing yourself from hardware management. SAAS applications are also web-based, hosted, or on-demand software. Regardless of the name, these applications run on servers furnished by SAAS providers. The provider also manages access to the application, including performance, security, and availability. If you want to build a successful SAAS sales pipeline, you need to focus on building trust with your potential customers. In this article, we're going to share with you some tips on how to do just that.

What is SAAS Sales Pipeline

You need to have some estimates about your incoming revenue while running a business. When it comes to revenue forecasting, planning for growth, or keeping oneself prepared for anything, you need a reliable gauge for incoming revenue. One of these includes a sales pipeline.

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of your prospects in the sales process. They can estimate the amount of business your salespeople can expect to close at the end of the week, month, and year. Hence, you can easily use a sales pipeline to get an idea of the revenue coming your way.

Now when it comes to a SAAS sales pipeline, it primarily deals with the complete process of creating sales for any business. A SAAS sales pipeline incorporates everything from generating leads to the various stages of sales conversion. Before we investigate the various stages of the pipeline, it is important to keep in mind that the efforts of sales representatives to convert leads into sales through each phase are important. While there are several significant stages, let us look at a few prominent ones that can be commonly implemented across several organizations.

Prospect – At this stage, users show interest in knowing about the business services. They usually submit their information through a free email subscription for this purpose.

Worthy Or Not – The customer's profile becomes a reference to get an idea of whether the user is qualified. This helps in selecting the ideal customer profiles.  

Demonstrate – Once you have secured quality customer profiles, this stage is about understanding customers' pain points and demonstrating those business products that can solve their issues. 

Launch The Trial Period – After demonstrating, if the customer seems interested in the product, you can launch the free trial version. It can enable users to test the product for a specified period. Once this period is over, the trial period can be transformed into sales if the customer is interested.

Read Also: 19 Quick Tips to Increase Online Sales

How to Build Trust with Prospects

Recently, a recurring issue about the SAAS sales pipeline is its reliability and predictability. Leaders have a hard time trusting their own team’s forecasts. Hence, if you want to develop sales pipeline trust, here are a few ways. 

Lead Optimizations

Average leads are no longer good enough. They are harder to control and sell and create unpredictable results. Salespeople want more than that; they want qualified leads. To improve lead quality, you must define your lead better. You can use frameworks like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) or ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money) to optimize your leads.

Better Sales Meetings

Sales meetings must be made more efficient. From their structure to objectives to outcomes, any good sales meeting must comprise the following:

• There must be a pre-defined start and stop time.
• It should have a specific purpose and a clear agenda.
• There must be some ideas about the desired outcome and its future course. For example, if common ground is achieved, we can go ahead with our action plan. Otherwise, we might have to rethink our strategies.  
• In case you and your prospect do not reach a consensus, there must be a short but clear verbal agreement regarding the further course of action. 

Get Executives to Join Early

Executives whom you may have never met may join during the meeting. This can not only interrupt or slow down the pace of the meeting but also lead to the cancellation of sure-shot deals. Most people are clueless about this phenomenon until it is too late. Therefore, it would be prudent to get the executives from the prospective company and the executives from your company to join the call early. This can make the sales conversions higher, and the sales cycle shorter.

Insightful Questions

You must consider insightful questions to help your prospect buy as they navigate the sales process. Some of these may include.

• What is your budget?
• Who will be involved in the decision-making process?
• Which factors can help evaluate the solution?
• What are some other solutions that are being considered?
• What is your timeline for decision-making and implementation? 

Read Also: Why Hiring a Mentor is One of the Best Decisions for your Business

Improve Sales Responsiveness  

You are not looking to sell but to help your prospect buy, and you can achieve that by being responsive. This can include providing value earlier. Hence try to find out what kind of value buyers are expecting from you and how you can provide that better and faster.   

From optimizing your leads to making your executives join early, these steps can help you if you are wondering how to build trust with prospects and looking to develop SAAS sales pipeline trust.