Every SaaS company pours mountains of resources into building a sales team, creating efficient sales processes, and optimizing sales emails.

That’s because the most direct way to impact your revenues is by making sure your sales processes are as tight as possible.

But, how can you be sure you use the most effective methods to follow up with leads and close more deals?

Maybe we can help.

In partnership with PersistIQ, we analyzed the complete sales cadences of 281 SaaS companies, from intro to break-up. That included signing up for a whole heap of free trials, and then collecting over 1,000 emails and voicemail transcriptions.

If you want to get proven insights from some of the world’s best SaaS sales teams, build your ideal sales sequence and learn to write emails that close deals, then check out Inside SaaS Sales.

Inside SaaS Sales is a microsite we launched that collects and organizes every single piece of sales communication we received. It’s all there for you to browse through, swipe, and analyze.

With such a lot of data, it’d be silly not to study it to find out the key trends and share that knowledge with you. So, keep reading for our full analysis of the data!

Here are our key findings:

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Ogilvy on Advertising was one of the first books I had on my reading list back when I created my system for reading more. My only regret after finally reading it is having delayed for a year and a half.

Drawing from 40 years of experience, David Ogilvy shows everything he learned from creating some of the most successful advertising campaigns to date (some of which are still running today).

From using research instead of rules to reminding yourself exactly what you’re paid to do, Ogilvy provides a blunt outlook of how to improve as a marketer and copywriter.

“When I got a margarine account, I was under the impression that margarine was made from coal. Ten days reading the literature taught me otherwise.” – David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, p.11

At times his writing is standoffish and hostile, and he never claims to be infallible, but many of the marketing tips he championed 24 years ago still hold true today. Unfortunately, finding those nine golden tips in 220+ pages of case studies and niche information on how advertising agencies work is a bit of a nightmare.

That’s why I’ve done it for you. Time is money, after all, and the quicker you learn these marketing tips, the sooner you can succeed in selling.

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At Process Street, a lot of startup blogs are required reading for our team.

It makes sense, because your startup will be informed and improved by what it reads, and every team needs to stay on top of what’s being spoken about.

In this post, I’ve compiled the 55 best blogs for startups (plus one recommended article from each) in these categories:

• Venture capitalist blogs
• Marketing blogs
• Sales blogs
• UX & design blogs
• Customer success & support blogs

… All focused specifically on advice for startups.

Here they are:

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As part of a sales team, you don’t get paid to fiddle around with the CRM. You get paid to close deals. But that can make work stressful for everyone, especially when just keeping the CRM up to date can feel like a full-time job.

It’s time to put an end to data entry, concentrate on running your sales operations more efficiently, and win bigger deals.

So, how do you start doing that?

At Process Street, we’re fanatics when it comes to automation, workflows, and systems.

That’s because we know that the foundation of an efficient business — one with lower running costs and higher output — is a solid set of processes. That’s not just for things like finance and HR. It comes down to the nuts and bolts of how you and the rest of the sales team uses your CRMs.

CRM expert David Young explains:

“Customer interactions that rely heavily on manual processes can be hit or miss. A key benefit of automation is providing a consistent customer experience. Workflow automation allows you to develop standardized response protocols and ensure that they’re followed. A good process, that is consistently followed, will almost always translate to more positive customer experiences.” — CRMSwitch

In this article, I’m going to show you how to spend less time searching, updating, and making sense of the disorganized data inside your CRM.

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The day I adopted my dog I learned a brutal and immediate lesson about myself and my daily habits.

Nothing makes you analyze your life like a 60 pound furbeast jumping on your face at 6 in the morning immediately after she decided to redecorate your living room with your most recent bulk toilet paper purchase from Costco. (The good stuff, might I add).

The first week of having this dog was hell.

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We need to find email addresses for the launch in 2 weeks – about 400 should do.

Damn…

Nobody likes to hear that the next week of their time will be spent researching, selecting, and verifying hundreds of email addresses. It’s boring enough to make you complacent, but any mistakes are costly.

In other words, it’s one of the tedious marketing processes which we all love to hate.

After all, 400 emails are no good if they’re all blocked by spam filters.

I knew there had to be a better way than Googling the target audience, so I tested 9 email lookup tools and managed to find one with 92% accuracy.

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Sales will make or break your business

Outbound sales feed your team. Your cold-callers are foragers. Your senior sales staff are hunters.

They find the new clients and bring them back to the tribe of engineers and human resources staff who depend on them.

But we live in a more complex world than the hunter-gatherers of old, and with that comes the need for more complex processes.

The key to a successful sales process is understanding the overview.

There are lots of individual processes you can employ to improve different aspects of your sales and they need to fit together into a coherent sales narrative. Some call this narrative a sales funnel, and others a sales pipeline.

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What is BANT qualification?

Let’s say you’ve got a list of leads. You don’t know which, but some will be ready to buy right now. Others, however, won’t have the slightest bit of interest…

The only way to find out is to call them. And that’s where BANT qualification comes into play.

Invented by IBM sales teams, BANT is a series of criteria, which stands for:

• Budget. What is the prospect’s budget?
• Authority. Does the contact have the right authority to buy?
• Needs. What needs does your prospect have? Do they match your product or service?
• Timeframe. How soon are they wanting to implement a solution?

Any one of these questions can be used to disqualify a prospect, or at least help you decide how to proceed with that particular contact.

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