#93: SaaS Sales Coach Shares How to Improve Your Demo Close Rate – Matt Wolach
May 17, 2024
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In this discussion, Matt Wolach, a seasoned SaaS sales coach with a rich background in sales leadership, reveals game-changing insights for B2B SaaS founders. He emphasizes the importance of understanding one's sales process before hiring. Matt also highlights the need for emotional engagement with buyers, illustrating how effective demos focus less on the product and more on addressing customer problems. Learn about the significance of follow-up communication and the structured Three C's Model to boost demo success rates while navigating the unique challenges in startup sales.
Founders must understand their sales processes and engage directly with customers to effectively convey solutions to their pain points.
The DEAL approach emphasizes emotional engagement by addressing buyer problems rather than just showcasing products, leading to increased close rates.
Consistent follow-up is crucial for success in sales, as persistence significantly enhances conversion rates and builds stronger customer relationships.
Deep dives
The Importance of Close Rates
Closing deals is a crucial element for B2B SaaS founders, especially in the early stages of their companies. Founders often face challenges in converting leads despite having a working product and potential customers. A low close rate can hinder growth and profitability, making it essential to improve this metric. Matt Wallach emphasizes that a close rate below 20% is concerning, and improvement in this area can lead to significant business growth.
Sales Process Framework
Matt Wallach has developed a sales process framework called the DEAL approach, which stands for Discovery, Educate, Associate, and Lead. This framework is designed to resonate emotionally with buyers, enhancing their understanding of their issues and the solutions offered. By implementing this structured approach, many founders reported dramatic increases in their close rates, demonstrating its effectiveness across different companies and markets. The approach aims to shift the focus from merely presenting a product to creating an emotional connection with the potential buyer.
The Role of Follow-Up
Effective follow-up is a game-changer in the sales process, often leading to higher conversion rates. Wallach's experience shows that a successful salesperson consistently follows up, noting that one salesperson who averaged 14 follow-ups significantly outperformed those who followed up only a few times. This emphasizes the need for persistence in sales, where timely and consistent communication can make all the difference. Founders are encouraged to adopt a mindset focused on helping prospects, understanding that consistent follow-up is not pestering but a vital part of the sales journey.
The Emotional Engagement of Buyers
Creating an emotional engagement is essential for successful sales interactions, as it helps prospects recognize the gravity of their problems. Wallach illustrates this with the analogy of a buyer in a desert who, when offered water, prioritizes immediate relief over product specifications. This analogy underlines the importance of adequately addressing the buyer's pain points before emphasizing the product itself. Techniques like 'twisting the knife' can help sellers highlight the urgency of the issues faced by the buyer, making them more receptive to proposed solutions.
Founder-Led Sales and Its Benefits
Matt Wallach underscores the critical role of founder-led sales in the initial phases of a B2B SaaS business. Founders possess intimate knowledge of their products and markets, which equips them to engage with customers more effectively than new sales hires. Selling as a founder not only helps align the solutions offered with customer needs but also aids in refining the overall sales process. This hands-on experience fosters a deeper understanding of customer issues, ultimately benefiting the product development and marketing strategies.
Matt Wolach spent 15 years as a successful SaaS account rep, sales leader, and software founder before becoming a SaaS sales coach for early-stage B2B SaaS companies. He has worked with over 250 SaaS founders and sales leaders worldwide to improve their close rates and create repeatable sales systems quickly.
In this episode, Matt shares:
How B2B SaaS founders need to learn to sell and understand their own sales processes before hiring salespeople
Why technical founders can their sales using a helpful mindset of customer problem-solving
Why he starts by analyzing the sales demo to understand what’s working and what needs to be improved in the sales process
How successful founders and salespeople show their product less and follow up more than their peers
Why software buyers are tired of buying software and don’t want to engage with commission-focused salespeople
Quote from Matt Wolach, B2B SaaS Sales Coach
“The only way a buyer can be excited about your solution is if they are really emotional about their own problem. How can we get them to realize their problem is important and worse than they thought?
“If they’re gonna take action, they’ve gotta be emotional about their problems. They come in thinking, I just got this thing I want to take care of. And they leave saying, Whoa, I had no idea we were in so much trouble. We have to move now.
“We have to make sure that they prioritize the problem we solve instead of not doing anything and moving on to a different problem. When they realize how bad their problem is and feel the emotion, it helps them see they need to prioritize it and take action instead of putting it on the back burner and waiting till later.”
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