If you want to grow your business and want your great product to be used by lots of customers, you need to know how to sell your SaaS product. Great SaaS products still need sales.

In this blog, I’ve put together 22 powerful SaaS sales tips that will help you to master your B2B Sales and close more deals.

P.S. Even if the 22 tips are written for Sales in B2B SaaS, they can be applied to more or less every sales organization.

#1 Always ask for something in return

A quid pro quo is super relevant in B2B Sales. Especially in the early stage (if you try hard to close your first customers) or end of quarters (when sales reps need to hit their targets) many startups offer massive discounts without anything in return. It’s way better (and more convincing) if you always ask for something in return. Here is an example: ‘I can offer you a 10% discount for the first year in exchange for XYZ (e.g. long-term commitment, a case study with you, being one of our first testimonials, for 3 intros to other potential customers…).

#2 (Good) cold calling still works

The success rate of cold calls decreased over the last years to around 1-3% (for booking an appointment). Reasons are low availability (voicemails) and more and more people prefer written communication. But on the other hand, depending on who you are targeting (and how they use phones in their daily work), it can still be an effective growth channel. Important for the success of your sales calls are:

• Knowing your ICP (ideal customer profile) and what they care about
• Be on point and don’t steal their time (no one wants to listen to an unknown caller for hours)
• Speak conversationally and not like a sales robot
• Have a great 1-sentence value proposition ready
• Prepare yourself mentally and be full of ****enthusiasm (you need to feel it)
• Talk about them and not about you (how you can make their life easier)
• Prepare for the call (quick research about the prospect) and have a great reason to call (e.g. a recent article about them; new funding; new hire…)
• Have a clear call to action (e.g. schedule a sales demo meeting)

#3 Close your first 100 paying customers with unscalable strategies

Most startup founders love the idea of having scalable customer acquisition (sales and marketing strategies) in place straight from day one. They hope they don't need to talk to the customers and spend time on manual work, instead, they want nice paid ads on Google, Instagram, or Linkedin, plus a nicely designed website with a self-service SaaS product without human interaction.

While this is of course the desired strategy for startups who’ve found product-market fit and want to scale, I would highly recommend starting manual hand recruiting your first paid customers by doing stuff that does NOT scale (e.g. Outbound Sales, phone calls, emails, etc...).

Preferably you start with customers you already know personally or are within your network. In case this is not working for you, I would suggest you start manually outreaching your target customer.