EPISODE SUMMARY
In this episode, SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein offers his best advice on how businesses can win more clients by developing a service or product they can’t refuse. He shares his CRM secrets with SaaS Story In The Making host Matt Wolach and expounds on funnel building for effective lead generation and conversion. SalesNexus is an all-in-one platform for digital marketing services to help you automate the unique processes that drive your business growth.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: SaaS-Story in the Making
Episode: How to Win More Business by Knowing Your Customers
Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS sales coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor.
Guest: Craig Klein, CEO of SalesNexus
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
Know Your Customers To Develop a Killer Product
Knowing the target audience of your business is probably one of the most important milestones to success. By being customer-focused and connecting with them on a deeper level, you’ll be able to understand what customers are trying to get done for themselves. This method will then help you create an offer that customers couldn’t refuse. Take it from Klein, who would instead do the legwork to get to know their clients more than farming out the work to consultants.
Here’s what Klein has to say about that: “We build relationships with our customers that are much more intimate than most SaaS companies, frankly. So, we’re getting a lot of feedback, a lot of learning about what to make it work for their business process – what tools they need in the platform. That’s what I love about what we do. We get to meet all these business owners and salespeople and help them solve that problem.”
Get Your Funnel Figured Out
If you want your business’ sales process to run as efficiently as possible, you need to figure out your funnel. Most software startups are hyper-focused on one part of the funnel, but the best way to get your marketing and sales figured out is to take a step back and envision your ideal funnel as a whole.
Having a clear picture of your customer’s entire journey through their relationship with your company and ensuring that you are supported with the right tools to manage customer lifecycle is crucial to retention. It’s all about the funnel.
Klein added that “With today’s tools, you cannot automate that entire thing, but I think most founders don’t realize the importance of that until way too much water has gone under the bridge. It’s easier to build it when you don’t have any customers and the days when you have a hundred customers.”
Convert Leads Efficiently
The most efficient way to convert leads is by measuring historical data and optimizing each step in the funnel. Churn is inevitable, but we can reduce this with better strategies for retention. When you start losing people, you have to figure out what to do and be open to tweaking your funnel to get that extra 10% to come down to the next level. Conversion lies in how the customer journey is executed, so everything must be planned out accordingly from the start, with some flexibility for contingency.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Engaging with Customers Reduces Churn
The path to a profitable business is high customer retention. Klein reiterates in this episode that the secret to keeping customers is getting them engaged and connecting with them on a deeper level. As a CEO, he makes it a point to get involved as often as he can. When you solve people’s problems with them, they stick around longer.
As Klein said, “We keep our customers. It keeps getting longer as we get older but, we keep our customers. The last time we measured it, about six months ago, our churn rate was four times less than the industry average.”
Email Marketing Is a Saving Grace
While CRM has been proven a challenge to most businesses, Klein’s platform has been a game-changer to many new companies in the industry. Email marketing has been a saving grace for many sales teams, and the SalesNexus tool has been proven impactful for most of them. When mobile and chatbot marketing fails us, email content stays, and here’s how SalesNexus do it:
“We have a team that can help, not only just design email templates but work with the customers on strategy too. That’s been tremendous here in the last few years because so many people lost contact with their customers. Not only do they get sent home to work, but they can’t call their customers at work, right?”
A Well-Oiled Funnel Maximizes the ROI
Advertising investments are inevitable to boost marketing campaigns. But one of the best lessons Klein imparted was how a lead funnel could maximize the ROI on ad spend. Klein has been around in the industry for 19 years, and he has proven that a well-managed lead funnel can work wonders in the business. Not only does it automate the process for your sales teams, but it also makes capturing leads more accessible from the get-go. Thanks to CRM platforms and digital marketing, it is now easier to win more business than ever before.
TOP QUOTES
Craig Klein
[13:09] “Email marketing has been a real saving grace for a lot of sales teams.”
[16:52] “We released the ability to add to that text message. That’s a game-changer. It’s mind-blowing how often people respond to text messages.”
[20:25] “At the end of the day, salespeople are pretty simple animals. They’re motivated by the money, of course, but most of the good ones are motivated by good relationships with customers.”
Matt Wolach
[16:21] “You’ve got to get them [customers] from that initial interest awareness – that initial lead to engage with you, connect with you.”
[16:31] “When they submit a lead, letting it sit there for a few hours or few days, some companies leave them for a few days, is horrible. You gotta jump on them right away.”
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Craig Klein and SalesNexus, visit https://www.salesnexus.com/.
You can also find Craig Klein on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kleincraig/.
For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com/.
As part of the founding team in his first SaaS product, Matt owned the sales & marketing processes. But he struggled to sell and gain traction for the company. It took years of learning and tweaking before Matt created The Perfect DEAL Process, an innovative yet easy-to-implement method for closing more software deals. To find out more, visit mattwolach.com/about-matt.
