SaaS Founders: How To Add 7 Figures in MRR in 12 Months without raising money using an automated funnel and commission-only, remote sales team
This is for you if
You are a B2B SaaS Founder or CEO selling in the United States, Canada or Europe doing a minimum of $120k who is trying to scale up to $1M per month or more and don’t want to raise money or who wants to operate with unprecedented levels of capital efficiency
If you are trying to get to 10 mil, hire a pack of sharks (SDR’s), carry on an amazing Thanksgiving Day story, and eventually sell for 5-10x revenue or 15-30x EBITDA without bringing on a load of investors, then stick around.
You want to build true, durable, generational wealth, provide for your family, maybe send your kids to private school, relieve your spouse from stress, provide more opportunities to direct kin
You want to feel proud and help people. Maybe you want to contribute more to charity and pursue social causes
You are not getting the resonance from the market that you were expecting. People are not jumping up and down when they come into contact with your solution, and you are feeling like the work, time, and energy you are expending may be wasted.
You are unable to generate demand and leads and fill the pipeline and you are feeling anxious because you committed to growth goals but it's not looking like you will hit them.
You are unable to solve the profitable unit case such that you can spend $1 and earn back at least $3 and you are worried that the business model just won't work and your goal of accumulating capital won't be realized any time soon.
Your sales cycles are too long, your pricing doesn't sustain a profitable business model and you could be burning money. You could be responsible to investors and missing these milestones. You can't build their products fast enough. You are feeling the pressure to perform and you might have trouble sleeping.
You might have diluted yourself too much and lost motivation. You have made promises to employees, investors, friends, family that you are realising worried and you are walking around like a stress ball.
You may have hired VP sales or a sales lead, but they let you down and it ended up being a waste of time. You may have hired agency or expert to help you, but the net benefit from their efforts was $ or less.
You tried doing outbound prospecting yourself to generate appointments, but you also experienced crickets. You may have tried paid advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn ads, but you ended up flushing money down the toilet.
You may have tried to raise money from investors. but they passed because they couldn't see a path to a sustainable and profitable business model.
You may have tried to read up on sales methodology, but you are still struggling to close deals.
You tried increasing your prices, but your customers didn't bite.
You read CEO books, but you are still in the same situation. You found it difficult to apply the information to your specific case.
If you hate burning money, making excuses, or wasting valuable engineering bandwidth,
And you’re feeling extremely frustrated and angry,
Then you need to pay very close attention to what I’m about to tell you
Here’s the truth:
You can build your SaaS business to $1M MRR profitably and without funding. This requires laser-focused messaging, a repeatable and predictable marketing engine that scales with cash, a repeatable and predictable sales process that scales with reps, and a pricing strategy that gives you a positive ROI within 60 days or less
However, most founders and execs are not properly equipped with the skills to pull off such profitable growth, since the technologies used are relatively new and unknown.
This training is mostly about you, but before I begin I thought it only would be polite to tell you a little bit about myself
My name is Loes Gelissen and for the last 5 years I have been obsessively entrenched in repeatable and predictable marketing and sales engine programs.
I’ve worked with dozens of offers and businesses over that time period across a multitude of industries and in doing so have generated over $150,000,000 in equity value over those years
Industries ranging from health care, education, e-commerce, marketing automation, web development, analytics, collaboration and productivity, content management, HR, and web3
I currently run the repeatable and predictable marketing and sales engine program for two bootstrapped SaaS companies in Europe in the marktech and community space
I’ve put years and tens of thousands of dollars into honing my craft and becoming very good at what I do
And for the first time ever, I’m about to share my playbook from start to finish
How Others Have Done This Before You
How Salesforce Added $100M in ARR in 4 years
How Acquia created an outbound engine to power them past $100M - source: Predictable Revenue
How Zenefits went from $1 million to $100 million in two years
Source: Medium
How EchoSign—aka Adobe Document Service, from $0 to $144 million in seven years
Source: Photutorial
It’s also how I got a friends business off the ground and cash in the door within 2 weeks of starting without spending money on ads.
However big or small, the principles are the same
Step 1: Hyper-Specify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Identify A Niche / Market And Their Threat Level One Issue
First thing you’re going to do is develop your niche and messaging using something called Foundational Copy. This copy will be used across all the other steps I’m going to describe and will be crucial for your SaaS’ success.
The reason why you want to pick a niche is that it’s extremely expensive to market to a broad group of people with a general message.
If your niche is laser-focused, the cost to generate a lead will be low, the cost to close will be low and the machine will function extremely well.
Focus on one person, one customer segment and one problem.
When you do this, you can isolate extremely compelling sales arguments. If you have multiple niches, you want do a full audit and find the most profitable segment.
Typically, the niche that’s best suited to you is the one where you have the most experience / you have ‘been there, done that’ / you have the most skills or expertise. Identifying niches and markets and their threat level one issues requires you to have a deep understanding of that particular market and if you:
You instantly have an advantage over the competition. You’ll know that niche like the back of your hand. You’ll know what triggers them, what they resonate with, what they want to see and hear and what they don’t, etc.?
Use the below diagram to ensure you provide a solution to all variables required in the equation to ensure your niche achieves their desired transformation:
If you can’t identify a particular niche and their threat level one issues based on previous transformations you’ve made / your experience or your skills and expertise, etc. the next best step is to:?
What if we have multiple niches?
If you have multiple niches, you want do an audit on the profitability of each niche, then determine the path of least resistance to the highest rate of capital accumulation. Map out the gross contribution values of each customer, then compare these values to the sales cycle length to determine the path of least resistance.
What if I don’t have a product or case studies yet?
If you don’t have a product or case studies, you will be considering the answers in this foundational copy hypotheses. You will need to validate them with customer interviews and discovery/sales calls. You don’t want to invest into building the product until you can clearly prove demand for your solution.
Who should be doing this activity?
The founders, CEOs, core team members should be filling this out. This part sets the direction of the entire funnel and if it’s off, it could mean that all cascading activities will be off as well. Charging junior folks with mapping the foundational copy and the direction could result in misalignment from the get go and founders will be forced to revisit this step a few months later. For this reason, we recommend that whoever has the most domain expertise influences the foundational copy.
Promise/Claim Message Development
By this point you should have a very clear understanding of your customers problem and how to solve it.?
Next you are going to develop your promise and claim. This claim will be used to generate attention in the market and drive leads. It needs to align to a core desire of the market.
The promise is the business.
When the promise is right, people beat down the door to work with you.
A good promise has a before state, a desired state, and a timeframe
Example of a bad promise:
Community building is key for your business’ growth
This promise doesn’t resonate with the market. You can drive traffic to this and maybe get a couple of interested prospects but it won’t beat down your door.
Example of a good promise:
We reduce the CAC & Increase their clients LTV for SaaS Companies by building a community of qualified buyers in 3 months
This promise has a before state assuming the CAC is too high and LTV is too little at the moment, an after state, reducing CAC and increasing LTV, and a timeframe, in 3 months.
If you already have case studies you can derive most or your promises and claims from there. So map out your case studies, talk to your most successful customers, ask what you did for them and collect that case study and information so you can make resonating claims to your market.
If you don’t have case studies yet, make a hypothesis based on the research you conducted and people in the market you spoke to and go test it to see what resonates.
How important is the promise or claim?
Without a strong promise or claim, you won’t be able to generate attention or leads or “at bats”. If you have “at bats” you will be able to tweak the offer and the pricing through time. Without these “at bats” you won’t have the necessary data stream to tweak any other parts of the offer. For this reason, you want to solve the promise first.
Price Validation
Next you are going to work to validate your price using a combination of a probabilistic value approach and comparison approach.
Put together an ROI justification document that you can use to validate your core value prop. Compare your absolute value to your competitor’s and determine where you can win.
What is a probabilistic Value Approach to pricing?
When you are pricing a solution, you need to account for each outcome (negative and positive) relative to the customer. Then you assign a probability of that outcome happening, then you calculate the expected value of the system. You then price our solution as a % of the expected value.?
What is the comparison approach?
The comparison approach compares expected values of competitors relative to your customer segment. This approach can be used to ensure that you are priced properly such that you are able to win business from your competitors.?
Mechanism Development and Case Study Collection
The next thing you do is audit your current mechanisms used to deliver the transformation. In some cases, you need to tweak your offer to deliver on the price.
An example of this could be including an extra training module, or service, or consulting to get that price up to a point that sustains a profitable business model.?
If you don’t already have case studies, you can create a mockup and hypothesizing the mechanism.
Do we need to have a product before we continue?
Building a product before collecting orders is the worst thing you can possibly do. You need to validate that there is clear demand to justify investing resources into product development. Just like Elon Musk pre-selling a spaceship to the Moon with renderings, you will be developing mockups and marketing material before you invest into building the mechanism.
Step 2: Build Niche-Specific Funnels and Assets
The old way involved creating general niche-agnostic websites, funnels and assets.
However, this results in websites and funnels with low resonance, low leads, hard to stand out
The New Way we want to use is Niche-specific funnels
This new way results in higher resonance, higher lead flow, easy to stand out, more profit
So, using niche-specific funnels leads to higher resonance and a decreased sales cycle length
In order to communicate your argument and test market demand by generating opportunities, you need to display your message and claim through the internet via a sales funnel.
The funnel consists of:
Before you build any sales funnels, you first craft the sales argument.
Sales Argument and Sales Letter Development
The sales argument and sales letter is a written document that is compelling enough to drive a cold prospect to action. It communicates the claim, the unique value prop, the mechanism, the price, the points of difference, etc..
Fundamentals
The sales argument is communicated in the pages, the emails, the ads, the outbound messages, etc.. If you have a strong sales argument, then generating demos will be easy.
Historically, the highest converting sales letter structure we’ve found is:
This type of sales letter is typically 30-45mins in length and is genuinely valuable to the audience. That’s key here.
The idea behind this content is not only to prove your point beyond reasonable doubt but also to make the viewers (your prospects) think ‘This was so useful, imagine what it’d be like to speak, and potentially work, with this person…’
That’s the point at which the prospect will book a demo.
B2B SaaS Headline Example
How long does writing a sales letter take?
It usually takes a few days to properly craft your sales argument. Some clients we’ve worked with spend a little longer and “go up to the mountains”. This is one of the highest-leverage activities you can possibly do.
Where is the sales letter used?
Sophisticated buyers love consuming content via written word. This sales argument will be published on all of your Social profiles, blogs, email signatures, etc.. It will also be transposed to video form or webinar form and page form.
Why do we write the sales letter before we build the website?
The website is just a html, css, and javascript interpretation of the core sales argument. Building the pages is not difficult, there are many landing page builders out there that will help you do this job in 30mins -1 day. The challenge is writing the words that convert and communicating a compelling argument that can be displayed on the sales pages. The sales letter is that argument. This is why you derive it first.
Video Sales Letter Creation
B2B SaaS VSL Example
After the sales letter is written, you will create the video sales letter, above is an example from Slack.
Prospects love consuming content via video since it requires less work for them. So, next you’ll translate that sales argument to a video sales letter. This VSL will be used on your marketing pages. Consider it to be your best salesperson, in their best state who can sell to 1M people simultaneously.
To do this I’d recommend you create a presentation of the Sales Letter on Google Slides and record it using Loom or another Screen and Camera recording software. Make sure you have crisp audio usually ideally any mic and edit the VSL to remove the “Um’s” and mess ups.
Will my customers actually watch a video sales letter?
A few years ago, Ray Dalio produced a video called “how the economy works”. In this 25 minute video, Ray explains the relationships between short term debt, long term debt and productivity. This video was watched 10 million times. The engagement was insane. The reason was because the content was useful.? Your video content will be optimized for utility. People will stay engaged for hours as long as the content is useful to them. So make sure this content is highly useful to the watchers. This type of content can be in video form, or just long form written style. It’s been proven that it takes approximately 7 hours of interaction for a customer to develop enough trust with you to buy. The video helps build that trust.
How long does it take to craft and record a video sales letter?
It takes approximately 1 day to write and 1 day to record. Of course, you will have to go through a few iterations to get it perfect, however, it often doesn’t take much longer than a few days. The ROI on this activity is about $40k per hour since the leverage is so high.
What’s the difference between a VSL and a webinar?
A video sales letter is very similar to a webinar, however a webinar is typically in a live environment using slightly different software that prevents people from exiting out of the window. A VSL can be hosted on a regular sales page.
Where else is this video used?
The VSL is used in all communications: You can publish on Youtube, LinkedIn, host in your email signature, host on your website, on your landing pages, your sales pages, in your follow up emails, etc..
What if I’m not comfortable on video?
If you are not comfortable on video, don’t worry. No one is when they start. You can start with audio if you are not fully comfortable on video yet. It’s perfectly normal to be a little anxious about being on video the very first time.
Who records the video?
You will be the one to record the video. All you need is a cheap mic, Google Slides, and a screenrecording software. It takes a few times to get perfect, just like anything so make a few iterations until you’re pleased with the video quality.
Can I outsource the creation of the video?
I wouldn’t recommend outsourcing the video creation since doing so will result in an unnecessary delay to getting your funnels up and running. Agencies or 3rd-party services could take weeks or months to produce a video and that video could not even work since the message could be off! You can craft videos within 1 day, publish them, test the message and engagement and then iterate. The beauty of doing this is that it’s free, it’s much more effective and you are able to get your message out the door in a matter of days instead of months. As a result, you will be able to find the market-message resonance much faster than if you were to engage someone to do this for you.
Build Niche-Specific Funnel Pages
Once you have your assets and sales argument built, you will work to develop your funnel pages. These pages include opt-in pages where you can collect leads, sales pages, where you warm up your leads, quiz pages, and demo pages, and demo-thank-you pages.
If you are selling lower ticket, you will want to develop your order pages and upsell and downsell pages.
Make sure you integrate your pages into your CRM, your autoresponder, your analytics software, your accounting software, etc..
It usually takes a few iterations before the pages will go live. So don’t rush this process and
What’s an opt-in page?
An opt-in page, also known as a lead-gen page, or lead capture page, or squeeze page, or bait page is used to capture email addresses and contact information from visitors of your site. It offers some sort of value (a model, template, training, report, data) in exchange for an email address. They are used to collect leads and they come in handy when you are driving cold traffic to the pages.
What tools do you use?
We recommend using landing page builders to start because they are easy to use and allow you to publish funnels extremely quickly. Some examples are - Clickfunnels, Hubspot pages, Instapage, Webflow, etc.. They all do the same job, but some are better than others. If you are comfortable building pages using html, css, and javascript, you can absolutely do that. If you are comfortable using Ruby on Rails, you can also use that.
What’s a sales page?
A sales page is used to convert visitors into tripwire events (a trial, a quiz, a demo, a small purchase). It displays the sales argument in the form of either written word or video. It can be made either by hand or with a page builder like Clickfunnels or Instapage, or Webflow, or Hubspot pages. The builder doesn’t matter; the words on the page matter with respect to the conversion rate.
Do I have to be technical to build this?
You don’t have to be technical to implement this process. All pages and processes are mapped out and templates are easily found online. You will just need to use landing page builders and drag and drop elements to get this done. However, if you are technical, you can use code to create and design the pages.
Who’s writing the copy?
You, the CEO or member of the exec team, will be writing the copy. You will also be making the iterations. The copy for the sales pages and funnels is already written in the form of your sales argument. You can then simply transposing that argument to funnel form. You can then tune the sales letter and make the copy work.
Can’t an agency do this for me?
Agencies can work for the actual execution of the marketing campaigns, however, the amount of domain expertise needed to write useful insights and compelling copy specific to a particular niche is massive. An agency doesn’t have the domain expertise relative to your niche to write compelling, thought-leading sales arguments. As a result, their messages don’t resonate and the campaigns usually flop.
Also, agencies are also not incentivized in a way that is beneficial to the customer - the more clients they take on, the worse the client’s results are due to bandwidth constraints.
What if my product is not built yet?
If your product is not built yet you will need to build what are called the Minimum Viable Assets. These assets will be used to get enough attention and provide enough credibility such that you will be able to generate your first 20-100 demos so you can test your product hypothesis and pre-sell your offer. You never want to build before pre-selling to avoid costly errors.
How long does it take to build this funnel?
An experienced marketer can build a funnel in 1 day. If you are starting from scratch and it’s your first funnel, it might take you a few days to get your head around the software tools and how to use them.
What is a CRM?
A CRM is just a glorified spreadsheet that helps you keep track of your customers and prospects. It defines steps to your sales process and helps you work prospects down each step. They are pretty easy to use and not something to overthink. Don’t get caught up into the technical jargon of CRMs and gymnastics...they are pretty easy.
What CRM do you recommend using?
We recommend a CRM called Close.io for sales. We have tried all of them. Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Soho, etc.. They all pretty much do the same thing, however, the ease of use and speed at which the tool operates is what we really care about...that’s why we recommend close.io.
Craft Expert Blog Content Pieces
Create 1-2 additional content pieces/sales letters (blog articles, video/written case studies/customer interviews, training videos).?
Use the same Sales Letter framework mentioned above to create these content pieces.
Credibility and background story are strong assets that can tell your niche exactly who you are and what motivates you to solve their problems. It brings your brand to life and helps prospects put a face to the (business) name.
A content library is used to warm up prospects, get them familiar with yourself, show off your domain expertise, and get them more comfortable with trusting you with their hard earned money.
B2B SaaS Content Library example
Building organic content ranks in search engines, helps prospects view you as an authority in the space, and overall, provides thought leadership and useful insights to help you build your audience.
Step 3: Prospecting And Flooding The Calendar With Qualified Booked Calls
Before you ramp up marking and step on the gas, you want to test the assets to first make sure that the claim and messaging converts. The test is pretty clear: The assets either generate leads and opportunities or they don't.
During this phase, you will be testing your assets and determine or refine your message. If you need to change your messaging, you will be able to quickly make the iterations.
Leverage Audience + Content
In step 2 you should’ve created some content, either written or video and collected emails.?
You can now start leveraging the audience you’ve built and use it to book demos.
The reason a prospect will book in a demo call and buy from you is because they truly believe you’re the best (or only) option to get them to their desired transformation.
The goal is to get your audience to the point where they 100% believe you're the best (or only) option to get them to their desired transformation => you do this through content
2-3x/week you want to use content to drive your audience to book a call.
Those who are at the stage where they 100% believe you're the best option, will book. Those who don't believe that yet, won't.
But eventually, they will as they'll continue to get nurtured. This is key.
Content to use to book calls:
This type of content is typically made on stories after (or directly before) you've posted customer results.
For example:
Story 1: Here are some customer results we've gotten this week:
Story 2: Customer result 1
领英推荐
Story 3: Customer result 2
Story 4: Customer result 3
Story 5: DM me the word ... to {insert desired transformation/achieve the same results yourself}
When you've made a new piece of value content, always make a post on your socials such as:
"Just created a new training covering {insert desired transformation/sub-transformation}
Comment the word 'ME' below and I'll shoot it your way"
From here, in the DMs, not only can you start a conversation (by initiating with the free training) which you can eventually work into a booked call...
but if you've built your value content correctly, the value content should sell the booked call and have a CTA on the value training page itself.
You don't need to get fancy. Typically, your audience just needs a little nudge and they're over the line (booked in a call) and so, you can do simple CTAs to a booked call with evidence backing our claims.
Build Demo Setting Systems
Since you are testing a B2B offer, you want to develop your outbound and organic strategy such that you can predictably generate opportunities and test the assets to make sure you have high-resonance.
If you are selling B2B, you want to use LinkedIn and cold email to generate at least 3 opportunities per day or 20 per week.
There is are systems and automation tools that you can use to get this volume up.
If you can’t generate at least a 2% demo-booking rate, you will need to go back and test claims to make sure they generate leads. This can take a few weeks to get right, but the faster you re-work the assets, the faster you can get to resonance.
The DM System:
Initial Touchpoint => Conversation Started = 50%+
Conversation Started => Booked Demo = 20%+
Booked Call => Sales Call = 80%+
Sales Call => Customer = 30%+
Your appointment setting system should run off the above KPIs.
If you’re not meeting those KPIs you need to reoptimize your demo call system:
Outbound Prospecting
Locking in a solid outbound prospecting funnel (typically through email) is a powerful play. It becomes a predictable system to book calls as you’ll know, for every 100 messages sent, you can book ___ calls and for every ___ calls taken you sign ___ customers.
Outbound Prospecting Funnel KPIs:
Keys With Outbound Prospecting:
Who’s sending the cold messages?
You will send the cold emails and cold LinkedIn messages. There is very little margin for error when it comes to outbound prospecting. Every word matters, every sentence, every period. If the message communicates the wrong tone, it could result in a poor demo conversion rate.
What tools are used and how much do they cost?
There are many tools available to facilitate the outbound process. Some of these tools include: outbound email automation software like Reply.io, Woodpecker, Hubspot...Linkedin automation tools like Ulinc, CRMs like close.io and Hubspot, Data scrapers like Lead Leaper. We don’t like using automation until we know the message is working. For this reason we start by recommending close.io, Gmail, LinkedIn Sales Nav, Leadleaper.
Automating connection requests via LinkedIn is another great way to build your organic following.
Do I have to do cold calling?
One version of outbound prospecting includes cold calling, however, it is not required to get 2-4% contact to opportunity rate.
Can I just hire someone to do this for me?
Hiring an outbound agency to help you execute the initial tests is not likely going to work, due to the fact that the agency will have to make the iterations to your messages on the fly, however, without much knowledge of your customer, your value prop or without proven assets. For this reason, we recommend that the founders or executes or head of sales and marketing execute the initial tests.
Organic Testing
Organic testing is the process of syndicating your assets and value-content through organic channels like Youtube, Linkedin, Facebook without pushing using paid traffic. You are able to test messages and content quickly via these organic channels for free.
What type of organic content works?
The best type of organic content optimizes for utility. It news to be useful to your customers and prospects. You already created the compelling content, so all you will be doing in the phase is publishing it to organic channels.
Testing With Paid Traffic
In some cases, experienced entrepreneurs want to get straight to testing with cold social ads.
We only recommend this strategy if the entrepreneur is comfortable spending cash on the testing phase ($5k-$10k) and has intent to work with the cold channels to get them working which could take 1-3 months.
We’d recommend a minimum budget of $3k per month and patience + time to go through the iteration process. If you can’t generate appointments and leads with your messaging, then you will need to rewrite the ads.
Traffic Sources Include:
Are your customers really on social media?
It is extremely likely that your customers are using some type of social media, whether they admit it to you are not. People check in on their grandkids, kids, ex-wives/husbands, etc.. They are likely using either Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter, or all of them simultaneously. The hard part is targeting them. This takes some time and patiences and requires you to spend to learn.
Can an agency just do the ads for me?
This is a great question and the truth is that the media buying is the one of the highest leverage activities one can do. If done right, you can turn $100k in $500k in a few months. Leaving this job up to a junior person at an agency who was delivering pizzas 3 months ago is insane! For this reason, we’d recommend you or your team to become versed in media buying.
Step 4: Develop a High-Converting Sales Process That Sustains a Profitable Unit Case
So once you have opportunities flying because your assets are so strong, you need to test the offer to make sure you are actually generating revenue and customers.
Build Sales Process + Script
If you are selling over the phone, you want to develop a high-converting sales script.
Always use a script so that you can duplicate successful sales calls consistently and so you can ramp new sales reps efficiently and effortlessly.
Test on 15-30 calls
Ensure sales calls taken are qualified prospects who can actually move forward with your offer. Don’t make the mistake of testing your sales process on unqualified prospects as it’ll skew results and you’ll be making decisions based on false negatives.
Ensure conversion of 20% (give or take a few %)
Based on initial test, your conversion rate should be around 20%.
Refine and reoptimize based on data pulled from calls
Once you’ve had a few at-bats with your new sales process, refine and optimize based on the real-life data pulled from calls. Rewatch your call recordings, understand why you did and didn’t close the sale => figure out what makes people close and what turns them off, and rework your script around these findings.
Re-test
Further refine + reoptimize
What if I don’t have sales experience?
Sales experience is not necessary to get exceptional results when you are able to follow a step-by-step process that allows you to close deals.
Who can do the sales calls for me?
As you are testing your offer and determining your pricing and features, you will be the one who is conducting the sales calls. We do not recommend anyone else doing the sales calls at this point, since they won’t have the domain expertise to exercise liberty with respect to pricing and product features on the call.
Can I hire an outsourced sales agency to do this?
In theory, an outsourced sales agency sounds useful and cost-effective, however, in practice it is not. The reason why these outsourced sales agencies don’t work is because they lack the domain expertise needed to sell the product effectively and even charge an extra 15-20% as management fees. As a result, it takes longer for you to get any real traction with this method, and you are paying large upfront fees and management fees which erode any margin and spiral you out of the black. For this reason, we don’t recommend using outsourced sales agencies.
How long does this process take?
The validation process takes approximately 1-6 months. The key metric here is the number of sales calls that you do. Ideally, you want to do at least 200-500 sales calls yourself to really validate your market, your price, and your offer. Yes, this could seem a little intimidating, however, this is necessary if you want to scale to millions extremely quickly.?
Can I do this without a product?
This is a great question and most of our customers asked the same thing. The key is that you want to sell without a product if you haven’t already developed it yet. The reason is that selling before building will help you build only features and products that have demand and save you years and millions in development costs. You will be using mockups and renderings to sell the product/solution before it exists. Elon Musk sold a spaceship to the moon for hundreds of millions with just renderings...you can sell a b2b or b2c simple offer :)
Create an Automated Sequence That Can Drive Conversions
If you are selling using an automated funnel, you want to develop the automated sequence such that you can drive conversions.
What if my product is low-ticket and I want to use an automated funnel?
If your product is low-ticket, you still need to test the resonance with methods that don’t scale like inside sales and one-on-one webinars. This allows you to get the feedback necessary quickly. Automated funnels are great, but there is a time and a place for them. In the beginning, you don’t want to introduce any unnecessary feedback delays.
Tweak Offer and Features
In this step, it’s common that the pricing and features are tweaked to align better to the market’s desires. This is par for the course.
You can iterate your offer and your price such that you will be able to close at least 20% of demos at a price that sustains the profitable business model.
Iterate Message, Price, Or Product
If you are unable to get sales at a price that sustains a profitable business, you will need to go back and iterate either the message, the price, or the product/service.
This can take a few months, but this is the quickest way to validate the profitable business model.
Step 5: Automate The Funnel and Introduce Paid Traffic
The next step is to scale paid traffic. This is the biggest lever in the whole business since these paid channels allow you to reach millions of people instantaneously simply by spending money.
Metrics To Look At When Using These Methods
You are going to be seeking a cash on cash return of at least 20%, which means that for every $1 you spend, you want at least $1.20 back within 30-60 days.
You want a cash on cash return of at least 400% over a 12 month period.?
Scale Paid Traffic
How much money does it take to start with paid traffic?
We recommend starting with $3k per month during the testing phase and waiting to determine your cash on cash ROI. Then you scale up to $10,$50, $100k, $300k per month. If you can maintain a healthy ROI, then you can scale to the moon and collect insane profits.
How long does it take to get set up?
It takes a few days to set up your ads, however, it takes a few months to validate your cash-on-cash ROI. This is why patience is needed and a stable lead source and conversion mechanism is already validated so you are not forced to make paid advertising work. Working with us in our mastermind is the key to unlocking insane results.
Can I hire an agency to do the paid advertising?
You can hire an agency to do the paid ads, however, if they are not compensated on profit, then the incentives are mis-aligned. If the agency is unwilling to work on profit, and is charging you a steep retainer, then you know that they are optimizing for retainers and not for performance. It’s much better to learn these skills in house, then comp your media buyer on profit of the whole machine.
Media buying is one of the highest-leverage things you can do. You can turn $100k into $500k in a few months. Trusting someone junior at an agency to do this for you is irresponsible and often results in waste, failure and frustration.
Scale Using Outbound Teams
Scaling outbound is a fantastic way to ramp up lead generation. This requires that you hire and bring on BDRs or SDRs to hit 100-150 cold prospects every day and book demos.
Scaling outbound works well for offers with at least $6k in annual gross profit contribution.
Each SDR should be booking at least 10-20 appointments per week.
Can I outsource the SDR role?
You can outsource in some cases, however, it is in our experience that this method doesn’t work as well as bringing someone in-house. The reason is because sometimes the SDR will need to tweak the messaging and the assets to improve market-message resonance. If a firm is managing this process, there is often a delay - it could take 3-7 days for the firm to change assets, which is extremely inefficient. Also, some firms who outsource the SDR role bring on multiple clients per employee which allows them to make profit. This is great for them, but not for you since your outbound prospector will be working multiple accounts simultaneously and bandwidth will be spread which will decrease yield for you. The outsourced agency will often do the bare minimum of work and drive the bare minimum of appointments necessary to keep the retainer. If you hire in-house, you can drive up the efficiency and capture surplus. Another point is that if the outsourced agency is successful, you will opt to bring the outbound efforts in house to increase efficiency. It makes sense to start from this point to avoid any unnecessary transfer costs and load.
How much do I pay an SDR?
The typical compensation for an SDR is $40-$50k per year + 2-5% of commission. This incentivizes them properly.?
How long does it take to ramp an SDR?
With our training and help, it will take you no less than 1 week to get an SDR ramped to full production. The key is mapping out a bullet-proof process that anyone can use and get results.
Scale Using Channel Partners
Channel partners are a great way to scale marketing.
However, starting with a channel is a dangerous strategy since the success of the campaign depends on one single event (the launch). We recommend that you test your offer, message, price, etc.. with organic methods before scaling with channels.
When you are ready for channels, you will initiate a relationship and an agreement with them. This agreement can be an affiliate agreement or an up front fee to launch. Both methods work.
Line up channel partners and make sure to prep your webinar or presentation.
Can I engage channels before selling direct?
You can engage channels, however, if you push or launch with a channel before your sales process and funnel are dialed in, you can end up making mistakes, confusing the prospects, and bruising the relationship with the channel partner. For example: if a payment link is broken, or a url is broken, or your funnel doesn’t work on mobile the way you need it to, you can end up wasting a ton of time and money. Also, channel partners are smart and want to protect their reputation with their customers. They will not push an unproven offer. They will want to wait and see if you are able to sell the offer yourself before they take on risk and push to their audience.
Step 6: Scale Sales Systems With a Commission-Only, Remote Inside Sales Team
Scaling With An Inside Sales Team
Once marketing is solved, you need to scale up conversion. You do this with a sales team.
The goal is to ramp your reps to at least $1M per year per rep in 2 months or less.
How do you compensate sales reps?
We like to compensate sales reps on strictly commission. This attracts the superstars and allows them to make an extremely high incomes. We also have experience compensating reps with a base salary $50k-$80k + ? of their compensation being commission. This structure works for when you are selling more complex deals to sophisticated buyers and you are unfamiliar with building a commission-based sales team.
When do you hire the sales team?
You want to hire the sales team when you are able to overwhelm your calendar with qualified appointments. The reason why we don’t hire a sales team before this point, is because if the sales team doesn’t have leads or appointments, they will be burning time and money. Commission-based sales people will want to know that you have your marketing solved or they won’t be attracted to your business.
Can you outsource the sales team?
We have had clients who have tried to outsource their sales team, however, this is not a long-term solution and it often leads to extraordinary waste. Outsourcing sales is dangerous since you will be dependent on someone else for survival. A better strategy is to learn how to build a sales team in-house. Once you have this skill, you will be able to push any offer, any product, anything into the market and capture fabulous surplus.
Sales Team Recruitment
Your need to be a recruiting machine, and the best way to do this is by automating the process using a hiring VSL and group webinars.?
The new recruits are the oxygen to the sales organization, and without them, the machine will die.?
The use of a hiring VSL shaves down the time needed to explain the opportunity to reps to nothing, providing a massive advantage over traditional methods.?
Group webinars are faster and easier than one-on-one interviews and also provide social proof. The best screening method is having reps pay you to work.?
This is pretty unorthodox, but it works. Looking at the net equation: the rep pays $2500 to make $20k per month in 30 days or less. This is a good trade for the rep. If the rep is unable to see this value exchange, then they likely will not put in the effort to become valuable to you.?
Sometimes the reps are unable to pay $2,500, however they can scrape together $1k and pay off the difference using their commissions.?
Sometimes reps are unable to pay the full amount but can scrape together some money and pay off the difference using their commissions.?
This is a commitment payment and pay to play.
Sales Team Training
Onboarding new reps quickly is crucial to the success of a sales organization.?
The goal is to get them into the training program as soon as possible, with the aim of reaching the first end-to-end deals in 1-3 weeks.?
A comprehensive Sales Rep Training and Ramping Bible should be created, outlining everything about the business, from the software used to the product itself.?
This will help new reps understand the process and be effective faster.?
The systems must be straightforward, and reps should not have to think about how to complete tasks.?
If reps are asking questions, it means the system or training needs improvement.?
If frustration arises, it's an opportunity to identify and fix errors in the system. When an error is spotted, fix it immediately, rather than scheduling a task or delegating it to someone else.?
Moving quickly by spending a few minutes creating a new video or updating text can lead to more efficient onboarding and training.
Sales Team Management
Morning Meetings are a crucial aspect of sales organization success. Team leads should conduct the morning meetings every day at 8:30 am to start the engines and get reps going for 9am.?
It's important not to be late and to post stats as regularly as possible in the general channel, even late at night.?
Reps need to look at the numbers every morning for continual repetition. S
etting short term goals and reviewing calls during the evenings, commenting on their recordings and providing clear feedback is also important.?
To encourage reps, short term incentives with daily and weekly time frames are better than monthly and yearly.?
Analytics are key to track progress, with the close/quiz rate being the most important metric. Additionally, tracking Cash Against Ad Spend and Rep, as well as Rep Ramp Times, provides valuable insights into the performance of the sales organization.
Additionally, it's crucial to continuously improve your materials. Listen for objections and questions from your sales team on Slack and on their calls, and update your training and script/questions each day to ensure maximum effectiveness.
Scaling With An Automated Funnel
If your offer is lower-ticket or you are leading with a free-trial, you will dial in your funnel, your video sales letters, and your follow up sequence to help you achieve high returns on your marketing.
Automated funnels are tricky to get profitable since they significantly depend on the cost of traffic and the amount of competitors in the market. There is less margin or error with them than inside sales funnels, however, they can scale quickly if you keep them profitable.
Don’t use it unless you are youtube famous and you have a backend high-ticket funnel.
When should I install an automated funnel?
You want to install an automated funnel before you are certain that your trial or tripwire converts with the messaging you used during the inside sales process. If this is not done before you lean on the automated funnel, the automated funnel will likely yield negative returns.
Step 7: Keep The Machine Profitable and Scale To $12M/ARR
Setup Tracking and Reporting
Once the sales team is built and marketing is flooding the funnel, you will need to watch metrics like a hawk to make sure the machine remains profitable at scale. With more moving parts and more volume, efficiency will drop. Without proper tracking and tweaking, the machine can spin out of control.
During this phase you really square on your economics, tweak features or even rebuild features to handle the increase in volume, dial in the customer success process so that you can manage volume, install managers, and craft renewal offers.
Also, install metric dashboards like Chartmogul or Baremetrics so you can track cash and revenue against lead source, rep, and campaign content. This will allow you to effectively allocate resources.
What tools do you use for tracking and reporting?
We recommend chartmogul for revenue and cash tracking. This allows you tag cash with lead source and rep so you can accurately determine your cost of acquisition.
Customer Success
As you are overwhelming your business with customers, you will run into customer success and product bottlenecks/operations bottlenecks.
For example: Server speed, slow onboarding times due to lack of standardized process, false starts due to new customers being confused on how to get started. This is a good problem to have, but still an important problem to solve.?
What tools do you use to help with customer success?
We have experience using Helpscout and other service backend tools, however, we prefer to use our CRM for this type of activity so everything stays organized.
Rebuilding Products (Optional)
When you are driving loads of customers into your business, your product and system will be put under significant stress.
In some cases, technical limits are reached and product development teams are forced to rebuild. When this happens, you don’t want to slow down sales, you simply bust your bum and work overtime to make sure the product can meet the demands of your market.
Manager Installation
Once you have your marketing, sales, and product solved, you will be installing mission-oriented managers to manage the jobs. You usually start with the customer success manager, then the sales manager, then the marketing manager, then a product manager.
Renewal Offers
As you are scaling up and building your fantastic business, you will need to start thinking about renewal offers for the future. You don’t want to get caught with your pants down once your offer runs its course and yield starts to drop. You will need to focus on innovating to stay in the lead.
Summary
So you all you need to do is:
And you can add 7 figures in MRR in 12 months or less without raising a dime in funding.
You can,
Try doing this yourself
Or you can,
Hire Someone In-House
But if you want it done right, and you want it done right now,
Work With Saasleaders.io
Again, this is for B2B SaaS Founder or CEO’s doing a minimum of $120k who are trying to scale up to $500k per month or more and don’t want to raise money or who want to operate with unprecedented levels of capital efficiency
I have over half a decade of experience and a proven playbook that has driven over $150,000,000 in equity value across a multitude of industries over that time period.
Industries ranging from health care, education, e-commerce, marketing automation, web development, analytics, collaboration and productivity, content management, HR, and web3
When you work with me, you’re not getting some cheap, quick put together program filled with fluff, and one group support all a week.
Instead,
Our program comes with an entire manual on all the processes, systems and phases described in this video.
It also includes all the asset templates, blueprints, code, scripts, examples, process flows
Dedicated 1on1 support from myself and my entire team through a private Slack channel and 1on1 support calls to tailor the entire process to your business and situation and review all your assets
Doing this for our clients is tough work, even for myself, and I can only work with 4-5 businesses per month depending on the complexity of their business. So if you’re serious about growth and you’re sick of spinning your wheels in the mud and you want to see growth as soon as possible I’d encourage you to book a meeting with me below this video
All of this is of course backed up with a guarantee. Meaning if we don’t succeed in creating a machine that repeatably and predictably generates new MRR MoM I will of course work with you to do so because I think that’s the desired result for most SaaS Founders. Or desired, I will provide you with a refund.
I look forward to meeting you and growing your business
-Loes
CCO
1 年Bedankt, zeer waardevol!