Estimated read time: 3 minutes, 28 seconds

Director of Product Bill Wilson explores this topic on the SalesBabble Podcast — listen by clicking here.

Selling B2B SaaS has dramatically evolved in recent years, but the core of great SaaS sales strategies has stayed the same: find ways to build strong relationships to build lifelong customers.  

While the concept is simple, the implementation can be a struggle. Salespeople are naturally viewed as distrustful — the Simpsons display it perfectly.

There are 5 keys to nurturing relationships in SaaS that you can start using today: 

1. Offer More Choice

As salespeople, we should understand our customers inside and out — that’s how we pick packages that are best for them. But this doesn’t eliminate the role of questions and choice from your prospect. In fact. this knowledge should inform your ability to include your prospect in the process. 

Empowering prospects with choice is a fundemental piece of building strong relationships. Prospects want to choose their own destiny and feel like they are participating in the conversation surrounding the deal — especially pricing.

People want to make and commit to deals based on trust. If you can open up your sales process, and especially your pricing, prospects are going to want to commit and trust you.

2. Write Smarter, Not Longer, Proposals

Sometimes proposals are a necessary evil. But that doesn’t mean you need heavy proposal processes clogging up your sales process.

This is really important for high-velocity sales teams. You need to move and close deals quickly — you can’t do this if you’re spending hours writing proposals for each deal. To avoid this unnecessary timesuck, focus on the aspects of the proposal your prospect values the most. Learn more about succinct proposal writing for SaaS here. 

3. Say No When Necessary

Is your prospect the perfect fit, or more like a round peg in a square hole?

It’s easy to tell if a prospect is not in your ICP — but it’s hard to say no to people knocking at your door. 

The bottom line is this: if the use case isn’t right, you can’t deliver the value your prospects wants (or needs) to fully solve their problems. This wastes both your time and theirs. Plus, the renewal process is harder when your value isn’t fully utilized. 

As salespeople, our job isn’t to sell — it’s to put value in the hands of people who need it. To serve the best customers and offer the most value, learn to say no. In the long run, it will be worth it. 

4. Make Every Follow-up High Value 

Every salesperson knows that follow-ups are a necessity of the job. A good follow-up builds the foundation needed to keep top of mind with prospects, and helps nurture the relationship you need to close. 

To do this, do more than ask the prospects what they think. Messages like “Hi again, following up on my last email” are low value to the person receiving them. In contrast, sending a message that points out changes, updates, or key values mentioned in previous conversations engages the prospect’s needs and shows them you’re paying attention to what they want. 

5. Ask for the Close

This seems like an obvious solution — and yet it’s something salespeople hesitate to do. Explicitly asking for the close is the best way to build strong relationships. Why? Because every time you ask, you’ll learn something new about what’s working in your sales strategy and what needs improving for next time.

When you explicitly ask for the close, the prospect will likely say more than “yes” — they’ll tell you how they feel about moving forward in a way that informs your relationships and builds trust.

If they say “no”, this opens the door to figure out what’s holding them back. Learning objections is a great way to inform future sales strategies. 

If you’re being faced with pricing objections, your problem is likely that you’re not translating your value clearly. FastSpring Interactive Quotes was designed to eliminate this problem. Click here to learn more about how FastSpring can boost B2B SaaS opportunity to close rate by 30%.

Tagged with:
b2b sales saas