Software Sales Tips by Matt Wolach

Mastering SaaS

The 8 Best Sales Coaches for B2B SaaS in 2024

The 8 Best Sales Coaches for B2B SaaS in 2024

Do you need SaaS sales coaching?

SaaS is hard. Sales is hard. Put them together and you’ve hit the jackpot of complexity. And it’s not fun.

Even worse, trying to figure everything out on your own can not only take loads of time, but it also brings annoyance, frustration, and lost funds when things don’t work out. After all, most of trial and error is the error part.

Traveling down a path for quite a while only to realize you have to turn around and start over is possibly the worst feeling in the world. And trying to close software deals only to show little to no results is agonizing.

It’s usually at this point when a software leader asks themselves “Do I need sales coaching?”

If you’re feeling frustrations around your B2B SaaS sales and wondering if you’ll ever find a repeatable and scalable model, then a great SaaS sales coach can remove the anxiety around wondering what to do and allow you the confidence to know exactly what’s needed.

This confidence can do wonders.

Should My Sales Coach be SaaS Focused?

If you’re a SaaS company or a SaaS founder, a coach who knows SaaS and has a tremendous amount of strong experience in SaaS is critical. Think about it: there are different types of engineers for different jobs (electrical, chemical, software, structural), different types of doctors for different ailments (oncology, podiatry, internal medicine), and many other jobs with specialties within them.

SaaS sales brings its own unique difficulties and challenges, along with frameworks that are unlike anything else. A great B2B SaaS sales coach understands things like software demos, content funnels, development sprints, MRR, vaporware, and much more.

Just finding a regular sales coach and hoping they can help you in your SaaS company will not do you any favors.

What are the Benefits of Working with a Great SaaS Sales Coach?

A top SaaS sales coach can do wonders for both a SaaS leader and a salesperson themselves. Just one piece of advice using their experience can save you weeks of wasted time or tens of thousands of lost revenues.

Great sales coaches have already done what you’re trying to do, they’ve been through the wringer and experienced the challenges, then come out the other side to find success. So they know the sales tactics and sales processes that work, and they know which don’t work.

Having a guide who can show you the best SaaS sales process so that you don’t have to spend years, weeks, or even hours crafting your own that may or may not work is a game changer.

What is the Difference Between a SaaS Sales Coach and a Sales Consultant?

Sometimes the difference between a SaaS sales coach and a sales consultant can be one of semantics. Many people use the terms interchangeably and don’t see a difference. Some may see sales consultants as part of a larger run organization, whereas sales coaches are either solo practitioners or running a small team to assist them.

How to Select the Right SaaS Sales Coach for Me?

Finding the right SaaS sales coach for you is critical. When seeking a sales coach it’s important to consider a range of factors, including things like:

  • Has the sales coach done what I’m trying to do?
  • Does the coach show verified results from others who are similar to me?
  • Is the coach set up to help a company of my size (either very small or very big)?
  • Can the coach solve my specific sales problems (lead gen, closing deals, building and managing sales teams?)
  • Does the sales coach look like they are actively trying to help me or just make a buck?
  • Do I feel like there’s a personality fit with the sales coach?

Diving in and getting these questions answered will help you understand if you have found the best SaaS sales coach for you.

More than just looking at their website, many have found it vital to have a conversation with the sales coach themselves before engaging. Actually speaking with the coach and hearing from them directly will tell you if there is a fit for your B2B SaaS company with them or not.

What Can I Expect From a Top SaaS Sales Coach?

The results you can get from working with a top SaaS sales coach can be life changing, literally. In SaaS, founders and leaders who never figure out their sales challenges go out of business, at a clip of about 92%.

However, those who learn and implement a proper SaaS sales process can achieve exponential growth. The benefits to a SaaS founder for having a successful company include glory and notoriety, extraordinary monthly income levels, and phenomenal life changing payouts upon exiting their company and selling to the highest bidder.

Because of this, a SaaS sales coach who helps a company generate more leads or close more deals can literally be the catalyst to a world of wealth for the founders and the team.

*PRO TIP: Start tracking your key metrics now so you know where you need to improve: SaaS Sales Scorecard

In What Ways Does a Top Sales Coach Deliver Their Help?

There are a few different ways sales coaches can interact with you or your team and help your business. Many of the best SaaS sales coaches will help their clients grow through a combined approach which may include:

  • Structured online training modules
  • Group sales training sessions or roundtable discussion sessions
  • Sales tactic role plays
  • Interactive sales process breakdowns
  • Member communities
  • Email or Slack access for sales questions and guidance
  • Private sessions to discuss SaaS sales strategies or tactics

Each coach will have their own method of delivering their sales training and their value, so make sure that how they do it aligns with your time allotment as well as your method of learning.

Who is the Best SaaS Sales Coach?

You may have heard or seen some names of B2B SaaS Sales Coaches out there, but many have different specialties and can help you achieve different things. Also, different sales coaches are for different types of roles – some work for software founders, while others are better for sales reps and account executives. So let’s eliminate the noise, make your coach selection process much easier, and break down the Top 8 SaaS Sales Coaches in 2024.

1. Matt Wolach

Best For: Startup and early stage SaaS leaders struggling to close leads and grow

Expertise: Demos, Discovery Calls, Closing Deals

As a SaaS founder himself, Matt is the creator of The Perfect DEAL Process – a systematic framework for closing SaaS deals that makes it easy for leaders and salespeople to understand exactly what it takes to become incredible SaaS closers.

This proven SaaS sales process is now famously used in more than 1,500 software companies around the world, in more than 52 countries.

But it’s not the number who use it that matters, it’s the success rate which is off the charts as you can see from the reviews of the people who work with Matt.

“With Matt, we went from a 5% demo conversion ratio to a 60% demo conversion rate.”
-Camille El Hage, Cirrus Shield

Many of Matt’s clients have doubled or tripled demo close rates in just a few months, like the below:

  • Paul went from 26% close rate to 87%
  • Piotr tripled his monthly revenue from $41k to $125K in 6 months
  • Brian went from 11% close rate to 42%
  • Robby went from 18% close rate to 67%

Meet Matt: After starting his first SaaS company, Matt struggled to understand how to close interested leads. So he spent years learning how to close SaaS sales, and out of that effort came his now famous Perfect DEAL Process. Now a couple exits later he helps new founders and leaders learn how to do the same thing.

 

2. John Barrows

Best For: Sales teams and individuals from larger companies or enterprises

Expertise: Outbound, cold calling

John, the founder of JB Sales, knows the sales world in software from the inside out, including experience making 400 dials a week, to leading a self funded team from startup through acquisition, starting his own business and now working with some of the most well known enterprises in the world like Salesforce, Linkedin, Google, and Amazon.

John says these experiences have allowed him to create and share content to help others grow and hopefully not make as many mistakes as he did on their path to success. He believes that when Sales is done right, it’s one of the greatest professions in the world but when done wrong, it’s one of the worst.

John runs a great training showcasing how to prospect and make the best use of your time. In “Filling the Funnel” he walks you through tools, tips, and insights he’s used.”
-Mike, Sales Enablement Manager

Meet John: After selling himself for 25 years, John has now helped hundreds of companies find success. His courses and trainings are well suited to generate terrific opportunities for enterprise teams so they can achieve great growth success.

3. Pedro Cortes

Best For: Small and medium size SaaS companies or marketing leaders

Expertise: Landing Page Conversion, Websites

You’ve likely seen Pedro’s amazing landing page teardowns on LinkedIn, they are very popular. Pedro shows his magic publicly by posting his personal breakdown of the good, bad, and ugly of a SaaS website or landing page. With his vast experience in boosting SaaS demos through powerful conversion techniques, Pedro helps SaaS leaders improve their lead flow and demo count.

“We saw a 25% increase in Expansion Revenue from just one page!”
-Corey Haines, Baremetrics

Meet Pedro: Pedro has personally coached and worked with over 150 SaaS companies, including some of the best names in the business, helping them increase their demo flow purely from traffic they’re already receiving.

4. Chris Orlob

Best For: Sales leaders from larger companies or enterprises wanting to build great sales teams

Expertise: Building successful sales teams

Chris founded pclub.io (a shortening of “President’s Club” which is the name of the award many companies offer to salespeople and sales leaders who perform exceptionally well) to help sales leaders build top notch sales teams. He has gathered some of the best and most successful SaaS sales people to offer online courses that give people the tools necessary to achieve their goals.

“Chris is a go-getter! Chris has climbed the ladder from the trenches of business development to the motivating leader he is today. He has successful experience in every stage of being a salesman to a leader.”
-Cody Bawden, Sales & Marketing Specialist

Meet Chris: Learning sales from a guy who took Gong from $200k to $200 million? Yes, that sounds like a smart play. Chris created Gong Labs which was an incredibly successful SaaS growth program, he’s now helping sales leaders understand how to hire, ramp, develop, and retain their salespeople.

5. Greg Head

Best For: Software company CEOs in early and growth stages

Expertise: Growing a SaaS company without taking on VC money

After doing about all there is to do in the B2B SaaS world, Greg realized he could help others achieve his same success. And he’s done just that in a number of ways. Along with being the founder of the popular B2B SaaS job board GregsList, he founded Practical Founders – a, EO type SaaS CEO roundtable community to help execs work together to solve each other’s biggest growth challenges.

“Greg is a dynamic leader, able to create and share the big picture, but OCD enough to get into the mud of the weeds on the details with any of his team members.”
-Cody Jones, Ecosystem and Partnerships Executive

Meet Greg: Greg has a wealth of experience in software, from being a product manager at ACT! to a co-founder of SalesLogix (IPO 1999), to being hugely instrumental in the rapid growth of Infusionsoft as CMO. He now works directly with software CEOs to help them build big software companies without big funding.

6. Dan Martell

Best For: Software founders with overall business struggles

Expertise: Systems and process to help the business as a whole

Dan’s primary medium for his coaching, the SaaS Academy, is responsible for helping hundreds of SaaS founders figure out the correct process for running their business so it can reach scale. With a team of coaches around him to help software leaders grow, the results have been tremendous for those who have enrolled in the program.

“Dan Martell makes complex systems as simple as 1-2-3.”
-Lewis Howes, Author

Meet Dan: An award-winning Canadian entrepreneur, investor, best-selling author, and coach, Dan’s also a 5x SaaS founder with three successful exits, including companies such as Clarity.fm, Spheric, and Flowtown. 

7. Nick Cegelski

Best For: Sales reps wanting to be top of their company

Expertise: Cold outbound, cold calls

Along with partner Armand Farrokh they started “30 Minutes to President’s Club” – a podcast that shares actionable tips and tricks to help account executives generate more leads and close more deals so that they can achieve President’s Club, the term most sales organizations use for the award to top reps (which usually leads to a nice vacation somewhere). They also have a popular newsletter and they do live call breakdowns so others can learn the proper methods for selling software.

“Nick is definitely a 12/10 person and professional!”
-Taylor Strobeck, Project Engineer

Meet Nick: After selling software his whole career, Nick realized he could help others do the same. His goal is to help sales reps achieve President’s Club status through proper motivation and sales techniques.

 

8. Wes Bush

Best For: Software founders with lower price points who want to be product-led

Expertise: Product Led Growth (PLG)

Wes is the founder of ProductLed, a coaching program helping software founders who want to grow their business without a sales team. The program is exclusively for founders who’ve achieved product-market fit and initial traction and are now ready to scale.

“Working through the academy together really helped us fine tune our PLG strategy, and resulted in several small adjustments that have more than doubled the amount of paying customers we attract from our marketing efforts.“
-Will Royal, Founder

Meet Wes: Wes is the #1 leading expert on product-led growth and literally wrote the bestselling book Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself. For the last 8 years, Wes has consulted for some of the world’s leading SaaS companies like Microsoft, Keap, Vidyard and Boomi.

When is the right time to hire a SaaS Sales Coach?

Many software founders wonder if the time is right to bring on a sales coach. Do it too early and you’ll forget everything by the time you have a sales opportunity. Too late and you could make a drastic mistake with a big prospect before you’ve had proper sales training on how to handle them.

In general, the rule of thumb is to hire your sales coach about 2-4 weeks prior to talking to your first prospects. That way you won’t forget the key tactics, but you’ll also be ready when that prime opportunity crosses your desk.

Want to Talk to a Top SaaS Sales Coach Now?

If you’re ready to talk to a sales coach to determine if the timing is right for you to receive sales coaching, book a time now with Matt Wolach or a member of his team

They will uncover your primary challenges and let you know if the time is right, or if there is something else that would be recommended for you at your current state. Either way, you’ll get direction and guidance to help you grow towards your goals.