If you’re building a SaaS startup then you know how important increasing your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is to covering your costs and becoming profitable.
MRR will be one of your key SaaS metrics you’ll need to track and is essentially predictable income you can expect each month from paying users. Since you’ll most likely be operating under a subscription model you’ll want to know how much revenue you’re generating each month to get a clear picture of your performance.
Which means you’ll need to step up your SaaS sales and marketing activities to see your MRR grow. However with resources most likely tight in the early stages, everyone from the founders to early employees will need to pull together to drum up sales. And what if you’re new to sales – and haven’t hired a sales person yet?
While it may seem like a daunting task at first, there’s no need to be put off by it. The first step is identifying the different stages of your sales cycle to see how a successful deal would look like. By mapping out your sales cycle, you can also see where your strengths and weaknesses lie to help increase your chances of closing more deals.
For an illustrative example, the good folks at Marketo created this infographic with which you can model your own SaaS sales cycle on. In this example they break it down into the following steps:
- Discovery call
- Demo
- 2nd demo or trial
- Enablement and support
- Pricing and packaging
- Buying and negotiation
- You’ve won the deal!
For all the details, simply scroll down to discover what’s behind each step in this sales cycle.
Getting Started With SaaS Sales
Brought to you by Marketing Automation Software by Marketo
While there’s no one-size fits all, this infographic is a good starting point for anyone just beginning to ramp up their sales efforts. Another useful resource you might want to check out is the blog over at Groove. Maintained by their CEO and founder Alex Turnbull, he documents every detail of their journey to achieving $500K in MRR on the blog.
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