How is B2B SaaS funnels different from traditional marketing funnels?

When you think of a traditional marketing funnel, you probably think of awareness, consideration, and decision. A funnel that’s much wider at the top and much narrower at the bottom with the final step being your customers. In a B2B SaaS business, you must think of your funnel differently.

In this article, I talk about how you take your traditional marketing funnel and transition it into a machine that allows you to gather insights and better understand your buyer journey.

Traditional funnels vs. B2B SaaS funnels

In a traditional funnel, you’re trying to get people to be aware of your solution and consider buying it and then do so. It’s a funnel that gets narrower the further you go.

 

In a B2B SaaS funnel, you have this new dynamic. You have all this data you can get from people using the product, where they are in the funnel, what they are clicking on, and what emails they are opening? What parts of the product are they interacting with, getting feedback through the product interface? All this data is sort of your reverse funnel that flows back.

With a lot of modern SaaS businesses, there’s a huge opportunity to use this data to constantly optimise not just the funnel itself, but the product and what you’re doing for these customers, and how they’re recruiting value from what you’re doing. You can then use that data to constantly improve your revenue department and product.

SaaS Funnel Stages

Now just like a traditional marketing funnel, a SaaS funnel consists of awareness, consideration, and decision. However, one more stage of the funnel you need to focus on for SaaS is adoption. That post-sales stage allows you to track your onboarding process and how they use your product and make the most out of it. You can also break down your funnel into the following categories:

    Attract

The first section is about attracting a prospect or driving traffic. This is mainly through your demand capture channels. This, of course, doesn’t consider pre-funnel or demand generation efforts.

Impress

The second step is to wow. When someone lands on your site, it must resonate with their pain points. This tests how well you understand your ICP, personas, positioning, and how it resonates with your audience.

Educate

The next step is to educate and nurture your prospects. Make sure to have the appropriate marketing automation and workflows in place that trigger based on the data you’ve collected about your prospects to ensure they get the most personalised experiences. This is also the time for you to educate your prospects about your solution and your unique value propositions. 

Engage

This step is typically when you’d do personalised demos of your solutions and prepare to convert your prospects.

Convert

This one is self-explanatory. You are converting your prospect into a customer. Typically, a signed contract or an LOI.

Onboard

Once they’ve signed the contract, now the onboarding process begins. This includes your implementation processes and any necessary training. This step is an excellent test of your demos and how much you were able to educate your client before they signed the contract.

Turn Into Evangelist

This is after your client has been onboarded and using your solutions for a while. You now need to continue supporting them so they make the most out of the product, rave about it to others, and turn into evangelists that love your product and refer others to it.

Upsell

And finally, once they’ve used the product enough, you start to find the best add-ons that would help them achieve the highest ROI using your platform, which opens many upsell opportunities for you.

Always Improving

The notion of constantly improving based on your insights gets an entirely different dynamic in a SaaS business, where you have all this data flowing back to you if you’re willing to listen. And then, of course, you also need to make sure that in everything you do, you monitor and experiment based on the data you’re getting back from the funnel.

Now, with every email you send out, every feature you enable in your product, or a piece of content that you publish, you need to make sure that you always have a varying test behind them, so you’re constantly learning and getting as much information from that funnel as possible.