I’ve founded a B2B SaaS. How to start sales?

This guide is a short step by step plan how you can reach your first KPIs. At the end I’ve provided a flow budget and results checker.

After you’ve tried and hopefully have made a couple of deals with your friends/mates you probably think how to manage sales with people you never met or talked with. Meanwhile your content marketing is trying to start and there is not much meetings or conferences in place you need to start your cold outbound sales.

1 step

Define who would be the person or persons in your company that you will put face on your outbound sales campaigns. Make sure they have a likable LinkedIn profile and photo.

2 step

Create a couple of email accounts per each team member you have chosen. For example julia@mycompany.com; julia.jensen@mycompany.com.
Keep them separate from the subscriptions and internal communication; keep it clean and use only for outbound sales.

And yes, you need to warm-up your emails at least for two weeks(here is a great tool for that) before using them; and don’t send more than 100 email/a day from each account.
Remember not to stop warm-up when you will start campaigns or you can find your emails in spam or promotion tab.

3 step

Get 1 Sales Navigator License for your team. It would save you a lot of time, believe me.

4 Step

Go to Sales Navigator and create a list of your ICP (if you don’t know what is that then Google and work on this and then get back to this guide) with no more than 1000 leads in it.

Tip! If you have enough of connections choose only 2nd degree connections

5 step

Extract this search with Evaboot. There is a lot of tools to manage that, but I know that you will save a lot because the Sales Navigator lists will have a lot of unrelevant leads and you will spend hours to clean them. Evaboot makes in for you in minutes.

Check your file and choose only good leads.

6 step

Go and start using my favorite tool for Linkedin outreach. If you will use more than one LinkedIn account, create a team as it will help you not to work on the same leads with your team mates simultaneously.
After setting up create your first list and upload your list from step 5.

7 step

Go and create your campaign. That’s the important part as you campaigns will need content: messages and emails (finding and sending emails are available only on Business Plan).
Work on your messages a lot. Make some researched, try to be educational, valuable, show your expertise. There is a lot of how-tos online, read as much as you can and make this job done.

8 step

Start the campaign! As soon as you will start to receive your first replies PLEASE don’t start to sell your product immediately, take the right pace.

9 step

In two weeks go to step 4 → Create a list of leads → export → Import → start a new campaign. Feel free to update the the content and the sequence and then start the campaign#2.

10 step

After your campaign ends go and export the leads without any results as shown.

11 step

Upload the list from step 10 to your second account (if you have more than 1 Linkedin account for outbound) and start the campaign. My stats says that outreaching people at least from three accounts increase conversion by 34%!

Don’t forget to use another content and messaging approach here. People don’t want to see the same messages from your side. Work on the content and strategy once again and try to show other features, materials, how-tos.

12 step

Keep going with the campaigns:
Find and export leads lists → Create and start campaigns → Export and give a try to each lead with another two accounts.

Tips

Tag who is interested/not interested/not SQL/customer in Waalaxy easily to see the stats.

Don’t be boring, chat with people, use GIFs

Don’t forget to move toggle on Step 10

Budget

For one account:

• Sales Navigator → $99.99/month
• 2 business gmail accounts → $12/month
• Evaboot → $29/month
• Mailwarm → $79/month
• Waalaxy → $89/month

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Total is → $309/month

For three accounts:

• Sales Navigator → $99.99/month
• 6 business gmail accounts → $36/month
• Evaboot → $49/month
• Mailwarm → $179/month
• Waalaxy → $267/month

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Total is → $631/month

Results

What to expect? Work on your flows until you will have at least 35% acceptance rate and 5% positive reply rate. That would be great if you will lead to Demo/meeting at least 30% of those who reply you with the positive messaging (don’t take into account replies like Not interested; We don’t need that kind of product; etc.). The rest of the result depends on your demo to deal conversion rate.

So if you will have 1000 qualified leads, you should be able to get connected with 350 of them and get a positive reply from 17–18 leads that will become prospects. At least you should able to lead 6 of them to the demo. If your close rate will be 30% you will close at least two deals.

With the LinkedIn restrictions you can connect with around 2000 leads per month per account. So depending on your sales cycle you should be able to close at least 4 deals/per account or 12 deals/per 3 accounts.

If you will have higher acceptance rate/positive reply rate/demo conversion rate or demo to sale conversion rate you can close twice more deals a month. If the results are lower, go back, check and improve:

• ICP segmentation
• content
• messaging

Good luck!

Disclaimer: Yes, there are some affiliate link in my text. I love this tools, I use them and I’m happy to be the one who help them acquire new customers 😎
You can google those apps and not use the link.