Building an Effective B2B SaaS Sales Funnel in 5 Steps

Want to learn how to build a B2B SaaS sales funnel to optimize your pipeline efforts and boost your conversion rates? You’ve come to the right place.

Recent data shows that the global B2B SaaS market is projected to reach $1088.15 billion in 2030, as illustrated below.

Image via Capchase

These statistics are proof that B2B SaaS is still viable and, if anything, it’s expanding at a rapid pace. Adopting the right B2B SaaS sales funnels is crucial, considering how modern customers have become more selective, cautious, and demanding.

You have to go above and beyond to get them to buy your service. You have to carefully guide them through the sales process until they’re ready to purchase.

In this post, we’ll show you how to build an effective B2B SaaS sales funnel to guide your users seamlessly from awareness to purchase and retention.

What Is a B2B SaaS Sales Funnel?

A B2B SaaS sales funnel is a structured pathway that potential clients for your business go through before purchasing your service. This pathway guides users through various stages of engagement — from the initial phases of awareness to conversion and, eventually, retention.

A B2B SaaS sales funnel is designed to transform businesses from prospects into paying customers for your SaaS solution. It includes stages like B2B SaaS lead generation, lead qualification and nurturing, conversion, and after-sale services.

Each stage is designed to address the specific needs of your clients and move them further down the B2B SaaS sales funnel.

With competition in the B2B SaaS industry getting stiffer, building a B2B SaaS sales funnel is one of the things you can do to drive success for your business.

Below are the reasons why a sales funnel is indispensable for B2B SaaS companies:

• Streamlined processes: Without a B2B SaaS sales funnel, your sales process can become disjointed. A sales funnel brings structure to your outreach efforts and aligns them toward a common objective.

• Customer journey mapping: The stages of a B2B SaaS sales funnel correspond to specific phases in the client’s decision-making journey. This alignment enables you to create targeted messaging and offers that meet a client’s needs at a particular stage.

• Data-driven decision-making: A B2B SaaS sales funnel provides key metrics for each stage to help you enhance the process. This makes it easy to measure success and identify areas for improvement.

• Competitive edge: In a saturated market where multiple vendors offer the same product, a well-executed B2B SaaS sales funnel can help you attract high-value prospects and drive them to conversion.

• Customer retention: A B2B SaaS sales funnel doesn't end at conversion. The post-sale phase of the funnel focuses on earning the loyalty of your newfound customers.

How to Build a B2B SaaS Sales Funnel

Now that you know what a B2B SaaS sales funnel is, let’s go over the process of creating one for your business.

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Client

The first step of building a B2B SaaS sales funnel is to define your ideal client. There’s nothing more frustrating than promoting a product to the wrong audience.

For instance, if you offer advanced project management solutions, your ideal client might be mid-sized to large enterprises that handle multiple complex projects at the same time. Targeting small businesses or solo entrepreneurs who don’t require these advanced features will likely result in a low conversion rate.

To avoid such mismatches, it’s important to define and understand the ideal customer for your business. Knowing your ideal users will help you build a B2B SaaS sales funnel that caters to their unique needs.

As a result, it becomes much easier for you to convert them into paying clients.

To determine who your target users are, start by examining your existing customer base. Who are your most profitable customers to date?

Carefully study the characteristics of those companies and take note of the following:

• The company size (by revenue and number of employees)
• Their industry
• The most popular plans among your subscribers
• The most sought-after services

While your focus in creating a B2B SaaS sales funnel is other businesses that need your product, remember that the purchasing decisions are made by certain individuals in these businesses.

So, as you build a profile for your target businesses, create one for the key decision-makers in those organizations. This will help you develop strategic marketing messages to enhance your B2B SaaS lead generation efforts.

The next step in formulating a B2B SaaS sales funnel is understanding their pain points. What challenges do your target companies struggle with?

To understand their pain points clearly, you should:

• Gather customer feedback
• Run surveys
• Monitor conversations on social media about your SaaS business and the industry in general

With these insights, you'll detect the key issues your target audience needs to address, helping you build a responsive B2B SaaS sales funnel.

For example, if you’re offering a CRM tool and realize that your target clients struggle with keeping track of conversations from various channels, you can build a B2B SaaS sales funnel that emphasizes how your product solves this challenge.

Step 2: Develop a Strategy to Attract Leads

After defining your target client, it’s now time to develop a strategy to create awareness and attract leads for your business. Your B2B SaaS lead generation strategy will primarily involve creating compelling content and resources to help your audience understand how your product can solve their problem.

Today, a significant portion of the B2B SaaS customer journey is self-directed. As such, you want your ideal customers to come across your content when researching solutions for their problems.

Create captivating content that captures the attention of your prospects and adds value to them. At this stage of the B2B SaaS sales funnel, you should prioritize low-commitment content, such as:

• Case studies
• Free templates
• Free webinars
• Ebooks
• Authoritative blog posts

Use these resources to showcase your authority and offer solutions to the common problems of your target customer. However, try not to offer this material for free.

The prospect should at least provide you with their contact details in exchange for the valuable information you provide. For instance, to access or download your free template, the prospect should fill out a lead capture form and share their details, such as email address, company name, and industry.

With this information, you can reach out to the prospect at a later time with more offers and educational material to nurture them down the SaaS marketing funnel.

HubSpot uses this strategy effectively for its B2B SaaS lead generation strategy. The brand offers numerous free templates that the prospects can access after filling out a lead capture form.

Image via HubSpot

Step 3: Nurture Your Leads

The next step of the B2B SaaS marketing funnel is to nurture your leads. When prospects show interest in your SaaS business by downloading an ebook, registering for a webinar, or downloading a free template, you can proceed to nurture that interest further.

Lead nurturing campaigns are a necessary aspect of a B2B SaaS sales funnel because they allow you to:

• Educate prospects about your product
• Increase brand awareness
• Build trust with prospective customers
• Convince prospects to choose you over the competition

However, keep in mind that your lead nurturing campaigns can only be successful when they are personalized to individual users. As such, study a prospect’s level of interest to determine the best way to nurture them.

Case in point, a prospect who registers for a demo exhibits a different level of interest to one who registers for your newsletter. The former is further down the B2B SaaS sales funnel than the latter, therefore requiring a different kind of nurturing to convert.

Furthermore, it’s important to classify your leads according to their level of intent. The best B2B lead generation tools can help you identify marketing-qualified leads based on their interaction with your product, website, and other marketing assets.

Following this classification, you can add high-intent leads to a specific pipeline and nurture them to conversion using custom offers and content. Alternatively, the low-intent leads can be added to an automated email sequence to develop their interest further.

Some of the effective strategies for nurturing leads include:

High-Quality Content

B2B SaaS clients want to know that you can solve their problems before they make a purchase. You can demonstrate your expertise by creating high-quality content that appeals to your target users.

This could be videos, blog posts, webinars, comprehensive guides, and white papers about industry-specific challenges and how your services can address them. You can also conduct a survey and publish your findings in the form of a report.

By sharing such valuable content, you establish yourself as an industry authority and earn the trust of potential clients.

Automate Email Sequences

One of the most effective ways to nurture B2B sales leads is through strategic email campaigns. Create an email series to deliver helpful content to your leads, such as:

• Detailed product features
• Recordings for past webinars
• Latest blog posts
• Case studies
• White papers

Ensure the content is relevant to the individual recipient and demonstrates how your SaaS business can solve their problems.

Personalized Demos

Providing a demo at this stage of the B2B SaaS sales funnel can greatly enhance your efforts. Your marketing team has done a great job of getting potential customers interested in your product. You now have the chance to prove your product’s value through a personalized demo.

By leveraging the information a prospect has provided up to this point, create an interactive demo to show them how your SaaS product can solve their problems.

Step 4: Convert Leads Into Paying Customers

After you’ve implemented the lead nurturing strategies discussed earlier, your prospective customer should be familiar with your B2B SaaS business. The next step in the B2B SaaS sales funnel is to convert them into a paying customer.

Below are the best strategies for this stage of the SaaS marketing funnel:

Offer a Free Trial

Providing a free trial is an effective way to allow your prospective clients to test your service and find out if it’s a perfect fit. By showcasing the usefulness of your service, it becomes easier to convince prospects to become paying members.

Salesforce uses this strategy to turn leads into sales. Its 30-day free trial gives prospects the chance to see if Salesforce’s CRM tool is ideal for their customer management needs.

Image via Salesforce

When designing your free trial, pay attention to the following steps:

• Make it easy for prospects to sign up for the free trial.
• Provide users access to all features to help them determine the value of your product.
• Track the conversion rate of your free trial to determine its effectiveness in driving sales.

Use Testimonials to Build Trust

Sharing testimonials at this stage of the B2B SaaS sales funnel is another effective strategy for turning leads into customers. When prospects see that other customers have had a great experience with your product, they're more likely to trust your company.

Make sure to add a few testimonials and reviews on your website and social media pages. You can also add them to your email newsletters to convince suspecting prospects about the value of your product.

The example below is a classic example of how to leverage client testimonials effectively. Omnisend has published client testimonials on its landing page to showcase the quality of its email marketing platform.

Image via Omnisend

Offer Several Pricing Plans

Your customers have different needs and budgets. Therefore, to finally turn them into paying members, provide several packages that cater to their varying needs.

This allows you to appeal to a wider group of audience and grow your customer base. You can have a plan for beginners, intermediate users, and advanced users like Monday.com does.

Image via Monday.com

Step 5: Create a Customer Success Plan

The last phase of building a B2B SaaS sales funnel is creating a customer success plan. Your work is not done after landing a customer. You still have to earn the customer’s loyalty and establish a long-term business relationship.

Here are the steps you can take to develop a customer success plan:

• Provide new customers with essential product information to help them gain maximum value from your product.
• Offer personalized onboarding to new clients.
• Avail adequate customer support options to help solve your clients’ problems.
• Actively seek feedback from customers to identify areas of improvement.

The Stages of a B2B SaaS Sales Funnel

Now that you know how to build a B2B SaaS sales funnel, structuring it into appropriate stages will help you come up with the best strategies to drive conversions. Ideally, a SaaS marketing funnel has four stages, which we’ll discuss below.

Top of the Funnel – Awareness

At this stage of the B2B SaaS sales funnel, potential customers have become aware of their problems. Their main focus at this moment is to understand their problems in greater detail so they can find the best solution.

At this point, they’re not yet aware your service exists. As such, your sales strategy should focus on creating awareness for your SaaS business. By developing a robust SEO strategy, your SaaS business will appear as an option when customers make online searches.

You should also consider investing in social media marketing and paid ads to make prospects aware of your SaaS business.

Key metrics to track:

• SERP position: Your position on search results for important and relevant keywords
• Website visits: The number of people who land on your site from different sources
• Social media engagement: The likes, comments, views, and shares your social media content receives
• Bounce rate: The percentage of users who leave your site without taking any action

Middle of the Funnel – Consideration

At this stage of the B2B SaaS sales funnel, the prospect understands their problems clearly and is already looking at providers. They’re aware of your business and are beginning to ask specific questions to determine the suitability of your service.

In this part of the B2B SaaS sales funnel, your best bet is to allow your potential clients to test your product to see if it solves their problems. A free trial would be ideal at this stage. However, you can also offer a personalized demo or custom presentation if you don’t want to offer a free trial.

Key metrics to track:

• Free trial applications: The number of users signing up for the free trial
• Free trial activation rate: How users interact with your free trial
• Demo requests: The number of users who request a custom demonstration of your service

Bottom of the Funnel – Action

After completing a demo or free trial, the prospect is now ready to be a paying customer. Chances are high that they’ve already made their decision at this point, but you can reinforce it by sharing testimonials from previous customers and providing comprehensive information on pricing and features.

The customer may try negotiating the price at this stage of the B2B SaaS sales funnel. Try to be flexible and willing to accommodate reasonable client requests to get them to complete the purchase.

Key metrics to track:

• Number of subscribers: The number of people who pay to use your service
• Customer acquisition cost: The cost of converting a single user
• Conversion rate: The percentage of users who have completed a purchase

Post Sales

A successful B2B SaaS sales funnel doesn't end with conversion. It extends to the post-sales phase to help brands convince existing customers to continue their subscriptions. B2B SaaS depends on recurring revenue; this stage is all about customer retention.

It’s also at this stage that SaaS companies focus on upselling and cross-selling other products to get clients to spend more.

Key metrics to track:

• Customer churn: The number of customers who stop using the product after signing up

• Customer lifetime value: The average revenue a customer will generate for your business before cancelling

• Net Promoter Score: How likely customers are to recommend your product to other people

FAQ

Q1. What is a B2B SaaS sales funnel?

A. A B2B SaaS sales funnel is a structured pathway that potential clients go through before purchasing your product or service.

Q2. Do sales funnels work for B2B SaaS businesses?

A. Yes, they do. A B2B SaaS sales funnel guides users through various stages of engagement, starting from the initial phases of awareness to conversion and customer retention.

Q3. What are the stages of the B2B SaaS sales funnel?

A. The stages of the B2B SaaS sales funnel are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Action
• Post-sales

Q4. What is at the top of the funnel in B2B SaaS?

A. The focus of the top-of-the-funnel stage in B2B SaaS is to create awareness around your service among potential clients. Through strategies like SEO, social media marketing, and paid ads, you can increase your brand’s visibility, thereby increasing awareness. It’s at this stage of the B2B SaaS sales funnel that prospects can discover how your service can address their problems.

Q5. What strategies can I use to convert leads to sales?

A. Appropriate strategies for converting B2B SaaS leads include:

• Offering a free trial
• Using testimonials to build trust
• Offering several pricing plans to cater to diverse client needs

Ready to Build an Effective B2B SaaS Sales Funnel?

Building a B2B SaaS sales funnel is crucial to the success of your business. With the B2B SaaS industry getting very competitive, you need a streamlined system of generating and nurturing leads for your businesses.

By following the steps highlighted above, you’ll create an efficient sales and marketing funnel that converts many of the leads that enter your sales pipeline.

Lastly, remember to track the relevant B2B SaaS sales funnel metrics. Make adjustments as necessary to improve the efficiency of your sales and marketing efforts.