5 Steps to Building a SaaS Sales Funnel That Converts

Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, we talk about building a sales Funnel for your SaaS product.
You can be getting a ton of traffic to your website and you may even have a great product, but if you don't have a sales or marketing funnel, then you'll never really be effective at converting all of that traffic into customers.
Today I talked to a sales funnel expert who helps us understand what exactly a sales funnel is.
And then we deep dive into a step by step process for designing and implementing your own sales funnel.
There's a lot of practical information in this episode that you could start implementing today, so I hope you'll enjoy this one.
All right, Today's guest is a sales funnel expert.
He specializes in building strategic and automated online sales funnels that help his clients generate more revenue.
He's created millions of dollars in additional profits for his clients.
He's worked with some of the world's leading entrepreneurs, as well as SaaS companies like Crazy Egg and Clicktail.
And in this episode, he's going to share his expertise on how you can build a better sales funnel for your SaaS business.
So today I'd like to welcome Jeremy Reeves.
Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Jeremy Reeves (01:46.320)
Thanks.
I appreciate having me on here.

Omer (01:48.080)
So before we get started, tell me a little bit about yourself.
What's your background and how did you get to where you are today?

Jeremy Reeves (01:54.920)
Sure, that's a good question.
So I started basically just writing direct response copy for people, you know, so you guys all have copy on your websites?
You know, I essentially think of myself as like a salesman in print.
So instead of calling people up on the phone and trying to sell them on, you know, whatever it is, I do it with words, either in direct mail or mostly, you know, online through on your website and your emails, things like that, and even doing things like creating webinar scripts and, you know, anything that kind of sells whatever you're selling, you know.
So I started off with that as just a copywriter, and then about two years into it, this is maybe around 2010 or so now, a lot of my clients were saying, Jeremy, you know, your strategy mind, you know, your kind of knack for strategy is really impressive.
It's just as good as the copy that you're writing, you know, why aren't you charging for that?
You know, and when your clients come to you and say, why aren't you charging for this?
It's a good sign that maybe you should.
So I started thinking about it and I started charging for like, you know, marketing consultation services, things like that.
And I eventually realized that what I was doing, kind of the way that my mind worked was seeing the whole picture, you know what I mean?
And that's kind of where I ended up with being a sales funnel expert is because the sales funnel.
And we'll get into like exactly what a sales funnel is.
But a sales funnel is basically when you combine really good strategy with really good sales copy.
You know what I mean?
Because I always say if you have good strategy but your copy isn't good, you're not gonna do as well as you can.
You're not gonna maximize your roi, you're not gonna maximize basically anything.
And if you have really good copy, but your overall marketing strategy's off, then again, the same thing you might do okay, but you're never gonna hit that grand slam, you know what I mean?
So I kind of focus on melding those two and we do that essentially through automated sales funnel.

Omer (03:53.110)
Okay, good.
So let's start by just explaining to the audience and maybe folks who aren't familiar with the concept of a sales funnel, what exactly are we talking about here?

Jeremy Reeves (04:04.230)
Sure.
So a sales funnel is going to look a little bit different for everybody.
But essentially like if you just look at it in a really, you know, bird's eye view, basically what a sales funnel is, is it's an automated process that takes people from where they are.
So in this, maybe they're just browsing around Facebook and maybe they're, you know, maybe they just saw you on some kind of article or something like this, a podcast.
So they're, they're there, there, they have a problem and it's taking them from that point all the way through the process, through your sales funnel to the point where they buy your, you know, your SaaS product.
And then also it's basically it's converting, you know, visitors to prospects or leads and then converting those leads into customers.
And, and then converting, then there's like the back end sales funnel that converts, you know, one time customers.
And in your case, you know, with the SaaS company, it's going to be having them stay on your, you know, stay in the continuity longer.
You know, if you have, if you have like things, you know, that like different packages.
Like for example, if you have like a $99 a month and then a $250 a month and $500 a month or something like that.
It's.
You can build sales funnels, taking them and trying to upsell people throughout those various levels.
But essentially it's kind of just a mix of various pages and emails and things like that that takes them through that process and it does it in an automated way.
There's all kinds of crazy stuff you could do.
For example, you can actually track for a SaaS company.
I know one of the things you can do is, is if you look at how long people stay on, you know, you'll find factors.
So, for example, if someone, if someone joins and they never log in, they're very much more likely to cancel within the first, you know, month or whatever versus somebody.
If you get them logged in.
And this is basically like client onboarding.
If you get them logged in, you get them.
If you get your software integrated into their life, then they're much, much, much more likely to stay with you for a longer period of time.
And you can build sequences and various automated emails that go out based on what your users are actually doing.
So if they hit certain pages, if they log in, it could trigger.
Or if they don't log in, it could trigger a sequence that says, hey, we noticed you didn't log in.
What can we do?
Can we help you?
Can we call you Blah, blah, blah.
So there's a lot of different ways that you can use it.
You can, you know, but that's kind of.
I hope, I hope that gives at least like a bird's eye view of what it is.

Omer (06:43.040)
Yeah, that's great.
Thank you.
And I would say that even if somebody's listening to this now, and let's say they are getting traffic to their website through blog posts, for example, and from, from the blog post, people can arrive at some page which maybe lets them sign up for a free trial of a product.
And then once the trial has ended, maybe they get some kind of emails through maybe some autoresponder which.
Which kind of tries to get them to sign up for the full product.
That's already a funnel.
It's probably a very basic funnel, but they already have something like that in place.
And hopefully what I want us to kind of explore more is, and give people insights into is just how sophisticated a sales funnel can really get.
And what are some of the things that people.
Maybe some of the opportunities out there that people can tap into that they're not even thinking about today?

Jeremy Reeves (07:48.480)
Yeah, definitely.

Omer (07:49.920)
So let's.
Let's start by maybe when you work with a client, maybe walk me through what are the main steps that you go through, from first sort of interaction with that client through to having a fully automated sales funnel up and running.

Jeremy Reeves (08:14.970)
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question.
So basically when we work with somebody, obviously we do a lot of, we have kind of like the coaching side of things where we're essentially working with you.
You know, like I get on the phone with you, we do through email and stuff like that.
And I kind of just like tell you, hey, okay, the next thing we should work on is this, you know, give you examples, templates, things like that.
And then the majority of our business is actually done for you.
So we're actually building the pages, building the emails, writing them, you know, implementing the funnel, that kind of thing.
So in that kind of sense, basically what we do, the client comes on and I talk to them first.
You know, we have like a 30 minute kind of strategy session to figure out, you know, if they're a good fit.
So if they're a good fit for our services, then we start.
And the first thing that we do is, I call it like a, basically we do a mix research essentially.
And that's kind of a mix of.
We go out and we do anywhere from like a couple days to up to a week or sometimes even more just researching the market and the product.
Right?
Because the first thing you have to know when you're doing this or not.
And by the way, this is all very, very applicable to, even if you're not planning on hiring anybody to do this for you, you should be doing this all yourself.
So we'll go out like when we're really trying to find out the pain points of the market.
You know, we're going to go through competitors websites, we're going to go, Amazon is a big one, you can look at books and essentially just find books that are in your topic, you know what I mean?
They're usually, for example, if you're selling some kind of email software, for example, go and look up books about email marketing, you know what I mean?
And read and you're going to look for in the one star reviews, the one and two star reviews, you're going to look for things like frustrations that the marketing is going through, pain points, things that are, think of it as when they wake up in the morning and they're getting frustrated, they're getting stressed out.
What are those frustrations that you're solving with your software?
So that's the first thing is looking at the frustrations, the pain points, the negative side of things.
And because you want to talk to those pain points and then explain by flipping it around and talking about the benefits of your, you know, your service, how you solve that problem.
Because everybody coming to you, everybody that does business with you is coming to you because they have some sort of problem, okay?
And your solution solves that problem for them.
So you have to tell them, you know, how you do that.
So then you kind of switch it around and you look at the four and five star reviews.
You don't want to look at three, but threes, by the way, you're looking for emotional triggers.
You know, you're looking for the people that get really riled up on each side of the coin.
And so you're looking for, you know, the benefits.
So what when, you know, think of your ideal customer, you know, what are the problems they're having?
What are they coming to you for, right?
And then think of, okay, well, how do we solve that problem that's unique from our competitors?
You know, this is, this is starting to get into like finding your USP or unique selling proposition.
What is it about your software that's different from your competitors?
So you start, you know, writing all that stuff down.
You start figuring out exactly how it's gonna change the life of someone that's going to use it.
So for example, I just, I just, I can't even think it's content IO, I think it is, or content something or other.
One of my employees got it for me and he's using it.
But it's basically like an outreach tool, you know, and.
Cause we do a lot of outreach to various purposes in various businesses.
And I got it because it saves us a lot of time and that translates into money and it saves a lot of stress and it gets better results.
So you think of all those things and how.
One of the big things that I see with SaaS companies is you tend to talk a lot about the features.
And that's good.
You have to talk about features, but you have to translate those features into real solid benefits that it's going to give the person that's buying it, you know, so, you know, instead of just saying, oh, it's, you know, we have this feature, it's.
Well, we have this feature which.
And then you talk about how it changes that person's life.
You know, how it's better, faster, easier, whatever it is.
And yeah, so that's kind of the first step, and that's a big step, is just understanding the product, understanding the market.
And then what we do.
And at this point, before we even start that we've already mapped out exactly what we're going to do for them.
And that, of course, depends on budget, it depends on where they're at in their business and all that kind of stuff.
So let's just say, for example, that we're going to do.
We're going to do some sort of lead magnet, which.
A lead magnet is some sort of free giveaway to give people to get them onto your list.
And I'll go into the buyer's journey a little bit later here.

Omer (13:15.450)
Okay, cool.
So let me.
Let me just stop you there for a second because I think the lead magnet will.
There was a few things that I just wanted to ask before we move on to the idea of the lead magnet.
Was it Content IO or Customer IO?
Is.

Jeremy Reeves (13:27.610)
Is that.
I can't.
I'm trying to think of the.
I can't even remember.
I know it was a.
It was an outreach tool.
Content Marketer.
Content Marketer IO.
That's what we just used.
It's awesome.
By the way, if anybody does any.
Or is it connector?
No connector IO.
I think it is.
All right.
I'm on their website now.
So if you go to Content Marketer IO, there's.
If you scroll down and you click on connector, that's what we've been using.
It's awesome.
If anybody does any.
Any outreach, it's.
I would highly recommend that.
I have no stake in that whatsoever.
By the way.
They're not a client or anything like that.
We just started using it.
It's really cool.

Omer (14:06.020)
Okay, got it.
So, yeah, I'll include the links in the show.
Notes that I'm not familiar with this product, but yeah, I'll check that out, too.

Jeremy Reeves (14:12.940)
Yeah.
Cool.

Omer (14:13.860)
Okay.
So basically what I heard was that you spent some time doing market research, product research.
You talked about Amazon as one potential place to find that information.
The one, and start one and two star reviews there about books related to that topic are going to tell you about some of the pains, frustrations and problems that your potential customers have.
The four and five star reviews are going to tell you about the.
The potential benefits or, you know, the desired outcomes that people want from.
From whatever solution you can offer.
And I assume when you said researching competitors, you're doing the same thing.
You're looking at the website, you're looking at the copy and you're trying to figure out what are the pains that this copy is speaking to.
What are the benefits it's speaking to.
Is that the kind of thing you do there with competitor research?

Jeremy Reeves (15:14.740)
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's a little bit of a mix of, you know, you're going to find some competitors are doing really well, so you want to, you don't want to copy them, obviously, but you want to sort of look at it, look at their websites, look at everything they're doing.
Not to just completely just, you know, copy it, because that's, that's just kind of weird.
But to look for the things that they're doing right and do that in your business and then also look for the things that you don't like about them and then don't do that in your business.
And then also the other thing is if you actually go through their sales funnel.
So I would recommend picking maybe three.
I usually do three.
It's a good number.
Go through three competitors and actually go through their funnel to get ideas for things that you could sell or ways that you could position different offers.
You know, for example, like different pricing plans and pricing structures or you know, how they take people from one, maybe one version of their software to a higher level version or something like that.
You know, you'll start getting ideas that you can use and then you kind of use those ideas again as inspiration not to just copy, you know, because nobody likes that.

Omer (16:22.900)
Okay.
So it would be like signing up for a trial of the product, seeing what kind of emails follow up they send, maybe during the trial, what kind of emails or follow up they do when you're coming to the end of your trial, that kind of stuff.

Jeremy Reeves (16:38.110)
Yeah, exactly.

Omer (16:39.150)
Okay, cool.
Okay, great.
So other than Amazon and looking at competitor websites, are there any other sources of research that you would recommend?
I mean, you don't have to list them all, but are there any others that you kind of think come to your mind, say, yeah, you know, that's proved to be a particularly useful one from my experience.

Jeremy Reeves (17:00.000)
Yeah, yeah.
So two other ones would be.
And there's a lot, you know, it always depends on the market, the industry, that kind of thing.
But two of them that kind of apply to everybody is one would be doing surveys.
So if you already have an audience.
I do two main surveys.
One is to people who came to your website and they didn't buy.
Okay.
And you say, hey, you know, why didn't you buy?
Or you could do something like you could do a survey asking them their biggest frustration they're having.
You know, things like that.
I actually just got them actually.
Tomorrow I'm going to be looking through.
We just did one for one of my clients and we're looking through the responses to, then tweak all the emails that they have to really nail down the pain points and things like that.
So there are surveys, that's one.
And then the other part of the surveys is buyer surveys.
So you basically want to find, when you're doing surveys, you want to do it on each end of the spectrum.
So one is why people didn't buy and then the other one is you survey your buyers and you say, hey, why did you buy?
You know, because you'll find out.
A lot of times we'll find with our clients will, if they're having a hard time struggling with, you know, their usp.
Like what's, what's why, why are people doing business with me?
You know, when you ask your buyers, they'll tell you and you'll find things that you're like, oh my God, I mean, I didn't even realize I was doing that or portraying that.
But then you ask your competitors or your, sorry, your, your customers and you'll find out they'll, you know, maybe you come across a certain way, maybe you're a very transparent kind of business or they love the personality of the business, they love your like company culture or you know, whatever the case is.
And you'll find things that you don't even see yourself because you're, you know, you're so close to the business.

Omer (18:38.900)
How long of a survey do you make this is it like one or two questions and are they like fairly open ended, like why didn't you buy or why did you buy or do you kind of do it more like, you know, multiple choice responses.
And you're trying to categorize these responses.
What's the preferred way of doing it in your experience?

Jeremy Reeves (18:58.570)
Yeah, yeah.
So here I just, I just.
While you're saying that I opened up the one that I'm going to be looking at tomorrow, the responses.
So for this one, it's a company that helps their clients form entities.
So like an llc, an S corp, that kind of thing.
So we did this, this is the, we still have to do the buyer's own.
But this is one to people who basically they have a two step process for doing business with them.
So the first step they give like their name, their first, their first name, their last name, their email and their phone number.
And then the second step starts like actually creating because they have like an automated kind of way of creating the entity.
Right.
So people who, and there's a good percentage, it's like 60% of people who do step one, which is just the first name, last name, email, phone, Number they never end up actually finishing step two.
So we sent out and they have a whole thing like they call them and all that stuff, but I won't get in that right now.
We could later if you want to, but so we sent a survey to the people who did step one but not step two.
And so we did three questions.
They're all open ended.
They're all open ended questions.
You want to do open ended because multiple choice, it kind of limits you to what you think they're thinking.
And a lot of times that's not the case at all.
There's been a lot of cases where I've done these for people and something totally like that we didn't even think happened.
And it was like a big, it was a gold mine that we found essentially.
So the three questions are, the first one is what's the number one frustration you've come across while trying to form an entity?
The second one is what would we need to do to show you why we're the best option for forming that entity?
So it's basically, you know, what can we do to show you we're better than our competitors?
And then number three is why didn't you finish forming your entity with us?
And then it says, please be honest, you know, we can take it.
So as you can see, like you're getting very, they're giving you real like kind of solid gut responses that you can then use and we'll use the answers again.
I haven't gone through these specific ones yet.
That's on my plate for tomorrow actually.
But we'll use the answers from these to then go back and look at the funnel and say, okay, what can we tweak throughout the funnel?
Not just in the emails like I said before, but everywhere, like across the whole funnel, especially the first one.
What's the number one frustration?
That's the big one.
If you were to only do one question, you always want to find out what's the number one frustration people are dealing with that you can try to then solve.
Those are the three questions.
It's usually only a couple between one to three.
I don't like going over three because it starts really dropping off in terms of how many people actually fill it out.
And then you want open ended questions and you want questions that are going to elicit emotional responses.
You know, if you just say like something like, you know, are you happy with.
I'm trying to think of an example.
There's so many different people listening this.
I'm trying to think of something that's applicable to everybody.
Uh, you know, are, are you, you know, are, are you frustrated with, you know, whatever your, your email response rates or something like that?
You know, they're, they're just putting yes or no.
So you're not going to really be able to tune into their emotions.
You know, you might have some people where they're only a little bit frustrated.
You might have other people where it's eating a hole in their gut.
You know what I mean?
Um, so it's, I always do open ended questions.
You get really, really good responses with that couple questions.
And, and also I try not to give, I try not to give any incentives because then you'll get people who are doing it just to get whatever you're going to give them.
So when I can.
That doesn't work in every case because sometimes you might only have a list of like 100 people because I usually shoot for about 100 minimum responses and this one actually we got, let's see, 112 so that, that hit our minimum.
I usually shoot for like 100, 150.
And then it's good because under 100 and you're not really getting enough data and then over 150 and the answers start to become really repetitive.
So I hope that, that answers.

Omer (23:07.060)
So you mentioned two other potential sources of research and the surveys was one.
What was the other one?

Jeremy Reeves (23:13.620)
This one depends on your industry.
If there's like trade journals or magazines or things like that.
But in a lot of your cases with sas, it's probably going to be blogs or podcasts.
But go through and what you want to do is look at, doesn't necessarily have to be a competitor, but look at the main topic of the thing you solve.
So going back to the, you know, if you have some kind of service SaaS product that helps with email marketing, for example, look at email marketing blogs, right?
Or blogs that talk about marketing and just find the email marketing posts.
So look for email marketing posts and look for the ones that are the most popular, the ones with the most comments, the most shares and, and read through the comments.
And you can also do, just look at, you know, if you're, if you kind of just want to do like a little quickie, you can just look at the ones with the most shares and I think it's.
Is it Buzzsumo that you can do that?
I'm pretty sure that's.

Omer (24:07.150)
Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Reeves (24:07.870)
So yeah, yeah.
So, so you could go, you know, just go to Buzzsumo and you could, you could kind of type in.
So I'm going to go, I'm at Buzzsumo now.
I'm going to type in email marketing in their little thingy here.
So this one's about how to engage email subscribers from the moment they sign up, how I reduced my monthly email Marketing expenses from 369 to 64, blah, blah, blah.
So you can go through all these and then just read those articles.
And again, the same thing with Amazon.
You're looking for the responses, the comments that are emotional and you're trying to find out what the frustrations are and then what they're looking to kind of get out of the email marketing solution.
And then you just, you know, you, you, number one, you revise your copy in, you know, on your pages and your emails, things like that, to reflect that.
And then also you can come out.
If it's a big enough kind of aha moment for you, you can actually then create new features to overcome.
So if people are saying, you know, I, you know, I really am looking for something that helps solve problem X, yours doesn't do that well, then you can create a service or a feature in your service that solves that problem and then you have kind of an extra advantage, you know, going forward.

Omer (25:19.400)
Okay, perfect.
Great.
So we talked at length about research as being the first step.
And so let's say we've gone through this process and we've gathered a lot of useful data which tells us about both the, the pains, frustrations that our potential customers have as well as the benefits and what they, what are their desired outcomes.
So we're, we're building a good picture of that.
So what do we do next?
Earlier you mentioned something about a lead magnet.

Jeremy Reeves (25:47.980)
So I have like a little, I have a framework, you know, for the three stages.
So I'm going to take you through that if you don't mind.

Omer (25:54.660)
Yo, sure.

Jeremy Reeves (25:55.660)
You know, building your, building a business is just like building a house.
If you don't have your foundation in place, if you have cracks in your foundation, the more and the faster you scale, the faster that foundation is going to crumble under your feet.
You probably hear a lot of the time that people kind of grow themselves to oblivion.
They scale so fast that they blow the company up.
That happens a lot.
But what also happens is if you don't have all this in place and you try to scale, it never works because you never took the time in the beginning to find out what's going to allow you to scale.
So for example, if you don't have anything unique about what you offer it's going to be really hard when you want to scale because you don't have your unique selling proposition in place.
You don't even know what's different about you and why people should buy from you.
So every sale you get is kind of like random luck.
So you should be able.
You have to first have your usp.
You have to know exactly who your target market is and exactly how you can help them and why your solution is different than somebody else.
And that's the whole usp.
We can talk for, you know, probably an entire day just about that, but just in kind of like a sentence.
You want to be targeting a specific audience.
Okay.
You want to be delivering a specific solution for them.
So, like, what's the big solution that you give people?
And then the third thing is how do you do it differently than other competitors?
And that could be just look at it in terms of do you do it faster, do you do it cheaper, do you do it better so you get better results?
Do you do it make it easier for people?
You know, and that's a good place to start right there.
There are a couple other, like, kind of little subcategories, but that's.
We'll be kind of going down a whole new road there.
So that's the first thing is find out, you know, really, really nail down your usp.
The second thing is you want a lot of people, you know, a lot of, especially in the SaaS world, there's people that think of the last time that you bought something.
There's some things that you buy and it's like, hey, I just realized, I need this, I'm going to go buy it.
So for example, I was just watching.
I'm really into cooking.
I love to cook.
I just saw a thing the other day and this guy on the show that I was watching was using this digital infrared thermometer where you press a button and it puts a little red dot on your food and it tells you exactly how, like the exact temperature in the food, which is awesome.
So for that it was like, you know, it was 20 bucks.
I saw that and I'm like, oh my God, I have to get that thing.
So I went like instantly on Amazon.
I searched it, boom, bought it within like five seconds.
So that's kind of like a really short term buying cycle, you know.
But a lot of you guys probably don't have those impulse purchases.
So if you're getting people that are coming to your website and you don't, and they just, it's kind of like either, you know, they come to your website and they either just buy or they just leave.
They're probably going to forget about you.
So what you want to do is get something in place, give them something of value.
And this is called lead magnet.
Something of value that you give it to them for free.
It's going to help them, but then it gives you a platform to be able to communicate with that person, to then add value.
While you're telling them about your SaaS product, you know about why your solution is better than other people and it allows you to.
And this is where you get in.
Like when they opt in for the free thing, whatever it is, it could be a cheat sheet, it could be some kind of workbook, it could be a video, it could be a webinar.
A lot of times for higher priced SaaS businesses, if they do like some sort of a demo, it could be that.
There's a lot of different things that you can do.
But the main thing is think of what can I give to somebody for free to get them on my list?
That number one gives them value and then number two allows me to build a bond and a relationship with them and tell them about my SaaS product.
So that's the lead magnet.
And then what you want is your core offer.
You want your core offer whatever it is that you sell, kind of like your core product that you sell people.
And that's pretty self explanatory.
And then I usually start with one upsell.
Okay, So a lot of people are missing these actually.
So you'll go and let's just say that you charge.
Just say it's like 49 bucks a month, just for example.
And that's it.
People buy that.
They buy your core product and then they go to the thank you page and they're never sold anything else.
That is a huge, huge mistake.
To give you one example I have, and this isn't a SaaS product, this is an information marketing product.
But one of my side businesses, I own a company that we show guys how to dress better.
Okay, so there's we basically right now we have two products.
It's one of those, it's one of those companies.
I bought it two years ago and I kind of just bought it and you know, like ramped up the sales letter I think, or sales funnel, I think I like tripled all the metrics and then it's kind of just been like running on the side.
I don't really put that much attention into it.
But we tried something recently and so our metrics for this upsell.
Adding an upsell was people buy, it's a $27 product.
And that was one time and up until I think this is about six weeks ago we had an upsell, but it didn't convert well at all.
It was kind of just, you know, just like thrown in there.
So I said, alright, let's put like 10 minutes of thinking time into this and see if we can make it sell better.
So we tested.
Essentially they buy the initial product and it's $27.
It's a, it's a PDF showing you how to dress better.
The next page it says hey, thanks for your purchase.
You know, blah blah, blah.
Hey, by the way, we also have this video course that you know, it gives you, it's much more detailed.
You can actually see like that, you know, we actually have the guys on video and to show you the fit because when you're in with like style fit is like one of the biggest things.
So you can actually see like, okay, here's how it's supposed to look, here's how much fabric you should be able to pull off, that kind of thing.
And normally that's 147, but on this page it's 77.
And what we did was say, hey, for the next 24 hours you can get it for $77 and that kind of thing.
And that sells for $77.
And basically we sell, it's about one in six people that upsell product at $77.
So the math turns out that each person that buys the initial product is now worth about 50% more money because we added that upsell.
Okay, so think about that if you don't have an upsell.
Think about what would happen if you, if every time you got a new customer they were worth 50% more than they are right now.
That's, that's the next thing.
And we're still in the foundational stage.
And then the, the last thing is the buyer sequence.
So you know, people buy, they buy, they buy your SaaS product and you just sent, you put together a buyer's email sequence, kind of taking them through it.
And again this is like part of the client onboarding stuff.
So you know it's going to help increase your retention rate so that people stay with you longer essentially.
And then also you can, you could sell if you have other products, if you're trying to upsell them to higher end, you know, products within your own business or you could sell affiliate products.
There's a lot of things you could do with that.
Okay, so that's, that's the foundational stage.

Omer (33:20.630)
Okay, cool.
So just a couple of questions about that.
So I think, again, really useful stuff.

Jeremy Reeves (33:25.670)
Yep.

Omer (33:26.150)
The lead magnet.
In many cases for a SaaS business, you're not going to see a lead magnet like downloading a PDF or whatever.
Actually, no, let me take that back.
In many SaaS businesses, you won't see that.
But one thing that I see sometimes is people offering.
Either you can go to the site and you can sign up for buying the product or a trial.
And, and the free trial in itself could be considered a lead magnet.
Right.
Because you're giving something of value, getting them onto a list and hopefully you can continue to engage with them afterwards.
Other things I've seen people doing is maybe having some kind of email course which helps them educate people in solving a particular problem related to whatever topic the, or niche the, the SaaS product is in.
So, so those would be examples of two types of lead magnets.
The upsell is a really interesting idea because I think a lot of SaaS businesses, the.
Well, for any business, right, you want to acquire, you want to pay less to acquire a customer than the value or the lifetime value you're going to get from that customer.
Otherwise, if you're paying more to acquire a customer, you're going to get run out of business pretty quickly.
So there's definitely value in figuring out, well, how do I reduce my customer acquisition cost and how do I increase my, the lifetime value of my customer?
But I kind of wondered in a SaaS business, what would be an upsell?
I mean, I can see it working for other types of businesses, but have you come across anything where maybe somebody in a SaaS product has some kind of upsell?

Jeremy Reeves (35:14.650)
If you're selling for 49 bucks a month, that's good that you get the $49 a month.
But what happens is when you start to scale, let's just say that it's costing you $100 or $150 or something like that to acquire a new customer that you're getting for $49 a month.
Okay, so let's just say it's.
Let's just say it's $100 just for easy math.
So you're charging 49 bucks a month.
It's costing you $100 to acquire that new customer.
Well, that means you're not getting your money back.
You're not breaking even until month two.
Well, what you can do is on the page, so they buy, you know, buy.
They click buy now or whatever.
It is.
And on the next page it says, hey, you know, thanks for joining us.
You know, we can't wait to welcome you on our team and get you started and blah, blah, blah.
And hey, you know, we know that, you know, that you're gonna, that this is gonna transform your life the way that you do, you know, whatever you're selling.
And hey, why don't you upgrade to our yearly plan?
We'll give you three months for free.
You know, so then you're basically getting, for every person that buys that, you're getting nine months worth of, you know, worth of money up front.
So that'd be what's 50 times 9?
450.
Just so $450 upfront.
And it's good for them because they're saving essentially 25% over the year.
And that also gives you excess cash flow to help you then, you know, scale easier.
So especially if you're doing paid traffic, it gives you that money, you know, now versus waiting nine months, which is, which is a huge, huge, huge deal because a lot of people, you know, come into cash flow issues and that helps cash flow issues quite a bit.
So the first one is taking people from monthly to a yearly program.
I actually just did this.
One of my clients, he was doing that and didn't have had nothing in place for taking people up to a yearly.
And I did a really, really quick promotion for him and made him 75 grand in less than a week.
And he did almost no work.
And his customers loved him for it because we gave him a really good deal and he then used that he was doing, he needed, he needed like a little, a little kind of cash infusion.
I forget exactly what he was doing, but he was putting some into marketing and some into like improving the product.
So that's one thing you can also do.
Let's see if you have different.
A lot of SaaS.
SaaS products have different levels, you know, so there might be, you know, 99, you know, 149 and 249 or something like that.
You can, if it makes sense.
This is probably not quite as frequently used.
Depends on what the levels are.
You can try to get people to go up to the bigger, you know, the higher priced, you know, the higher priced packages.
And what I would do with that one is, is you can say, hey, you just signed up for our, whatever, our bronze package.
Why don't you try the silver?
We're not going to charge you for it, we're going to charge you for the bronze.
And then that way use the, you know, all of the features of the silver level, but you're only paying for the bronze.
And then, you know, if you love it, then don't do anything.
And you know, starting in month two or whatever will bump you up to the silver.
If you, if it's not for you, then, well, you know, then we will just leave you at bronze.
So that's another idea.
And then a third one, there's.
I worked with one client who they had, they had software that people would use.
You know, they bought it.
It was, it was like an accounting software type of thing.
I think it was like a cash flow forecasting type of, type of deal.
And so they could either.
They bought it, it was a monthly subscription, and they could either use it themselves or they could hire.
And this was the upsell.
After they bought, we put in a sequence and it said, hey, you know, do you want some help with this?
Do you want us to help you?
Like, kind of.
It was kind of like a coaching upsell, you know, do you want us to help you, you know, build your, your forecast, your cash flow models and, you know, all.
All that kind of stuff?
So, so those are three things, you know, and again, to, to kind of quickly recap.
Number one was upsell from monthly to yearly.
Number two was upsell to, let's just call it a deluxe version of, you know, of the software.
And then number three is if you can figure out any kind of service to give people, whether it's some kind of coaching or you do it for them, something like that.
Somebody actually sold me on that probably a year and a half ago, something like that.
There was a software and they're like, hey, you just bought the software, but it still takes time to do.
Why don't we just do it all for you?
And I was like, oh, God, come on.
But it made sense.
Um, so I bought that.

Omer (39:42.450)
So those are great.
And I think the.
They're all good ideas.
And the monthly to yearly one is a really good one because typically on, you know, when you go to a pricing page, you will see pricing for monthly or annually kind of paying for a product.
But if you can kind of catch people when they've made the commitment to maybe pay for the first month and give them a good enough offer where they'll switch or upgrade, then that can have a lot of value both in terms of the amount of revenue you're generating from the customer, the cash flow, all the other things you talked about.
So I really like that.
The switching from tiers and the Upsell is really good as well.
I've seen some products where they kind of don't even ask you.

Jeremy Reeves (40:28.580)
Right.

Omer (40:28.940)
So when you do the free trial, they default you to one of the higher end plans.
Yeah, which, which is fine.
I don't think that it's kind of, you know, they hide the fact.
But I think the bet there is, well, hey, once people use this for a month and get used to some of the features which are only available in this plan, they might not want to go back to the regular plan.

Jeremy Reeves (40:51.530)
Yeah, right.

Omer (40:52.330)
So I think that that's kind of another way to do it as well.
Okay, good.
So that's kind of foundational.
Yeah, let's, let's keep going with the other two.

Jeremy Reeves (40:59.940)
The second stage is the maximization stage.
So once, you know, once you have your foundation in place, you have your usp, some kind of thing to get them on a prospect list, your core offer, upsell and the buyer sequence, then you want to start, you want to kind of go back to the beginning and say, okay, we have the foundation in place, we're doing well now, let's take it to the next level.
And there are a couple things that you want to do in that stage.
Number one is segmentation.
So you can segment people by their interest.
So for example, like if you're selling, I know you guys aren't, but just for an easy example, if you're selling a weight loss product, you know, you could segment men versus women, you know, and think of it that way, you're going to talk to a man way differently than you're going to talk to a woman if you're trying to sell them on a weight loss product.
Right.
So think of that in terms of your business that you know, as you're listening, you can do it by behavior.
So if they visit certain pages on your websites, you could have certain retargeting ads if they're already on your list.
You could have certain emails that go out to them based on the pages that they're visiting, things like that.
And you could also do it by where they're at in the buying cycle.
Okay, so to give you an example of this, I'm working with a client now and actually I'm working with this guy who, he basically has clients who are doctors, like hair transplant doctors.
So we're building a funnel that segments people based on where they're at in the buying cycle.
Because with that one, it's like a, like a 3 to 12 month kind of buying cycle.
So some people, some people are ready that's like, hey, you know, I know I need a hair transplant.
I know I need this specific doctor.
You know, just give me the details.
Let's move forward.
So we have one for that.
And then there's kind of the second stage where they're in like, kind of like a research stage.
You know, they're, they're like, all right, well, I know I kind of need this.
I'm trying to figure out who I'm going with.
I'm trying to get like, all the details, details, that kind of thing.
And then the third stage is people who are at the very beginning of the research.
You know, they're like, hey, you know, my, my hair.
Is my hair starting to, you know, to, to kind of recede back.
And, you know, I think I need something.
You know what I mean?
And then we, we have to, essentially, they're like, you know, that's the biggest group, but it's also the hardest to sell because you have to, you have to show them, like, hey, look, you do have a problem.
It's going to get worse.
And here are your options, and here's why a hair transplant is going to be the best option once you need it.
You know what I mean?
So that's kind of like an example of the buying cycle.
And you're gonna, you know, again, everybody's gonna have different stages of that in, you know, in this.
And then, and that's also, you know, if you're, again, if you're selling email marketing software, you can have some kind of lead magnet, like a free report PDF or video or some kind of webinar, some kind of training, you know, that talks about getting better results with email marketing.
And then, so they're in like the beginning of the buying cycle.
And then you take them through like, hey, you know, here's why email marketing is the best ROI that you can get with marketing.
And then blah, blah, blah.
And then, hey, by the way, here's why you should try our product, for example, if you're selling.
Let's go back to the email marketing example.
You know, if you're, if you have an ad on Facebook talking about, like, you know, why email marketing is a good thing.
You know, you're going to want to send them to a prospect sequence so that you can follow up with them.
It might take them a couple months or so to wrap their head around it.
And then, you know, work with you versus somebody who is ready to buy now.
And if you're doing something like with AdWords and they're searching for Your specific company name, they're ready, they're probably ready to buy.
So then you send them straight to your, you know, your main kind of sales page or your free trial page, something like that.
So that's segmentation.
The next thing is more offers.
You know, it's.
It's amazing to me now again, I've worked with, I've worked with companies everywhere from jobs just starting to literally in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The one I'm working with now, actually one of my clients is in the billions of dollars.
It's a company that pretty much everybody listening to this has their products in their house.
I'm not allowed to say the exact name just for confidentiality reasons.
But most of my clients are in like the roughly 250 to like 30 million range in there.
So it's amazing to me how many people like, if you just, if you sell more, if you have more things to offer, you're gonna make more money, you know, And I know that sounds, it sounds kind of like, oh, well, you know, we don't care about the customer, we just care about profit.
And it's not like that.
I'm not like that whatsoever.
You know, one of, one of my business philosophies is always putting the client or customer's needs ahead of my own.
So in that, like, you're always, always be thinking of how else can we better serve our audience, you know, because a lot of people are a little bit afraid to sell because they think they're going to be pushy.
They think, you know, they're going to sound annoying, you know, that kind of thing.
But if you're, if your product or your service actually helps the customer, then you should be doing everything in your power to make sure that, that they get it because you're going to help them.
You know what I mean?
So if you can, if you have other, you know, other whatever it is, SaaS products, or if you want to come out with like an information marketing product, I've seen companies do that.
If you have some kind of service, you know, whatever you can come up with that helps your customers get that end result, you know, easier, faster, cheaper, better, you know, start doing that and then just tell them about it and people will buy it.

Omer (46:19.050)
Or this could be.
Even if they didn't take the upsell and move to an annual plan when they signed up, it could even be something like that that you're emailing them.

Jeremy Reeves (46:29.620)
Yeah.

Omer (46:29.860)
With the offer again at some point.

Jeremy Reeves (46:31.540)
Exactly.
Third part of this is scalability.
So in this stage you know, at this stage, you know, in the foundational stage, a lot of how you're going to make your revenue is, you know, things like referrals, you know, things like word of mouth, things like going out and being an expert.
So, like, things like this, you know, being on other people's podcasts, going and speaking in front of conferences, you know, things like that, which are great, they're really good at generating revenue, but they're not that scalable because there's only one of you, you know, and even if you have your staff going out and doing speeches and things for you, there's only one of them, you know, unless you want to hire this, like, giant army of people that goes out.
So at some point, you're going to want to think about paid traffic.
You know, that's kind of like the holy grail to scaling a business is paid traffic, whether it's AdWords or Facebook or whatever is postcards.
So you want to make sure that.
At this point, you want to make sure that your business is set up to scale both in terms of your convers, right?
So you want to make sure that.
You want to make sure that when people hit your page, they're converting into actual customers.
And then they also, the other thing is just organizationally, you don't.
You want to make sure that.
I always like to say, if you doubled your business tomorrow, can you handle that or would it break your business?
You know, so think of it that way.
And then the last thing is hybrid marketing.
A lot of people only do online marketing.
And I even.
I even say, like, you know, I'm like an online marketing expert and that kind of thing.
But in reality, I do a lot of work offline, right, With a lot of my clients, and it's more on the second, third stage.
So, for example, a couple things you can do is, first of all, you can try postcards, and that's only going to be applicable in certain cases.
So I won't go into that too much.
One of the big, big, big things you can do, and I cannot recommend this highly enough, okay?
So whatever you're doing, if you're like taking a walk, stop for a second and make sure you listen to this next thing.
What you want to do is get phone calls in there somewhere.
Okay?
So, for example, that client that I was saying before, how they have the two step, and they call the people that only did step one, but didn't do step two, they convert 50% more people by calling them.
So if they're getting.
These aren't their actual numbers.
But if they were getting 100 leads a day just online when they started adding in, you know, calling people to help them finish their, you know, the step one to step two, finish the transaction, essentially they boosted it from 100 to 150, a 50% increase.
And then they also do the same thing.
So obviously that's.
That's huge.
Huge, huge.
The same thing is when people buy, they.
They have a couple different upsells.
So, like, you, you form the entity and then they call you and there's online upsells as well, but they call you and they say, hey, you know, you didn't buy this thing.
You know, here, let me explain that a little more.
And you know, hey, by the way, if you don't buy this, you know, realize that it's going to be harder for you.
It's going to be actually more expensive.
It's going to take you more time.
And people are like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense now.
So they do that.
You know, I've heard stories of people doing between five to 10 times more sales, upselling them, you know, and think of like, if you're going to do the monthly to yearly upsell, you know, call people and say, hey, you know, I just wanted to make sure you saw the thing that you can.
Can upsell or.
Yeah, upsell.
You can upsell yourself.
You can upgrade from monthly to yearly, and here's why you should try it out and blah, blah, blah.
So the big thing there is, once you get to the stage, don't worry about it too much because it's a little complex.
You have to worry about salesman and that kind of thing.
So again, if you're not even at the foundational stage yet, do that first.
You should do this all in order.
Get the foundational stuff in place first, then the maximization.
And so the big thing with hybrid marketing is make sure.
And again, this comes back to serving your customer.
Okay?
Make sure you're not calling them, Thinking in your head, how can I make money from this person?
Think about, how can I help this person?
Okay, really good selling.
You know, a lot of people have a bad rap with, like, salesmen.
And that's only because a lot of bad salesmen talk like that.
You know, the salesmen who are bad are the ones, hey, do you want to buy this?
Oh, you should buy this because, you know, blah, blah, blah, and they're like the snake oil salesman.
Really, really, really good salesmen.
You never, ever, ever feel like you're pressured because what they do is they Ask you questions and they get you to lead yourself to a yes.
That's what a good salesman is, you know, so they'll ask you, hey, I'm trying to think of like an example, you know, alright, so you can do like this with going from monthly to yearly.
Hey, you know, hey, Omer, you know, I see you just bought, you know, product xyz, you know, and you didn't take the.
Well, first of all, you'd start it by like, hey, you know, I want to make sure you were able to, you know, log in.
I wanted to make sure everything is working properly for you.
You understand it.
So you start with that, you know, start with helping them.
You're calling to help them kind of get started with everything.
And then they say, oh yeah, you know, it's all good.
And, and then you say, hey, well, you know, I noticed that you didn't take the yearly upgrade well, you know, let me ask you this, you know, would you think, you know, do you do any stocks?
You know, do you have any money in stocks?
Oh, yeah, sure, I have some money in stocks.
What do you think is a good return in stocks?
Oh, I don't know, you know, 8, 10%, something like that.
I'd be really happy to be 10%.
Well, did you realize that, you know, if you go and, you know, you're paying it monthly, but if you pay yearly now you're saving 25% and it's guaranteed, don't you think that'd be really good in stock market?
And you're like, oh, okay, yeah, that would be, you know what I mean?
Do you see how it, like, you know, it's, it's not pushy and you're kind of leading them to the conclusion.
So, and that was just a really quick example off the top of my head.
You know, you'd have it all scripted out and all that kind of stuff.
But.

Omer (52:19.020)
Okay, perfect.
So the framework was foundational maximization.
Oh, and scalability.
We talked a little bit about that as well, right?

Jeremy Reeves (52:26.620)
Yeah.

Omer (52:27.060)
Okay, great.
So there's a lot of kind of moving parts to this.
What are some of the tools?
So if I wanted to kind of build a Funnel for my SaaS product, what are some of the essential tools that I need to have in place to be able to do that?

Jeremy Reeves (52:45.460)
So the first thing you're going to need is some kind of page builder, right?
So you're going to have your copy, whether you hire somebody like us to write the copy for you or you do it yourself or whatever the case is.
But you have to take that copy and then put it online, get it designed, put it on an actual page.
So there's three of them that I use.
Number one, obviously you can get it all custom built and that kind of thing.
That's really good.
It's the most expensive to do, but it's really good for like, you know, page speed and things not breaking and things like that.
So there's pros and cons to all this.
But if you're going to use a page builder, which makes things, you know, makes split testing really easy and you can get it done a lot faster, there's a couple of my requests recommend.
The first one is optimizepress.
Second one is Lead Pages and the third one would be Click Funnels.
Click Funnels probably isn't that applicable for, you know, for SaaS business owners.
So I would, I would probably look at OptimizePress and LeadPages as the kind of the top two for that.

Omer (53:47.740)
Okay.
So Optimized Press is WordPress only.
Right.
So that's one thing that people should

Jeremy Reeves (53:53.300)
kind of bear in mind.

Omer (53:54.780)
And the point of using some kind of page builder software is basically that if you are driving traffic either from paid advertising or from a guest post you've done somewhere, you probably want to send that traffic to a landing page rather than just sending them to the homepage of your product because you may not be as effective in converting that traffic that way.

Jeremy Reeves (54:18.500)
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Omer (54:20.550)
Okay.

Jeremy Reeves (54:20.750)
Yeah.
And you can, you can do a mix of this.
So like you can actually have, you like your main, kind of call them your core pages on your website, custom built and all that kind of thing, you can get as kind of fancy and crazy with it as you want.
And then you can have, if you're doing things like that, like you have, you know, sending people to opt in pages, things like that, you can use these tools for that, like OptimizePress or LeadPages.

Omer (54:42.630)
Yeah.
The other one I'd give a shout out for is Thrive Themes.

Jeremy Reeves (54:47.770)
I just heard about that.
Yeah, I haven't, I haven't checked that out, but I have been hearing about that.

Omer (54:50.730)
Yeah, I checked those guys out and that's pretty impressed with what they've been doing there.
Again.
But again, it's only kind of like WordPress only, so it may not be relevant for everybody unless it's something.
If you have a WordPress blog and you wanted to kind of build something out as part of that.
But anyway, let's, let's keep kind of going.
So we've got Page Builder software.
And then I guess we need some kind of email software as well, right?

Jeremy Reeves (55:12.900)
Yeah.
So with email you're either gonna go with an email service plus a shopping cart and you integrate those or you go with a CRM which kind of combines them.
Right.
So if you're gonna go with a CRM, I typically recommend one of three.
There's Infusionsoft, Ontraport, and that's what I personally use, and HubSpot.
Okay.
So those are the three CRMs that I recommend.
Again, there's a lot of them.
If you're gonna do the email email service and then kind of integrate that with the shopping cart, you could start really, really cheaply and easily and go with something like aweber or Constant Contact or get response for the emails or.
And they're, they're all like the, I think they're about like the 30 to 50 ish dollar a month range, something like that, give or take.
I haven't looked at them in a while.
One of them that I like to use for this is, it's called ActiveCampaign.
And what I like about ActiveCampaign, I think it's about a hundred bucks a month you get.
One of the big things with CRMs is that you get if then rules.
Okay, So a really simple way to describe this is if somebody is on your prospect list and then they buy, you can set up a trigger that says when they buy, take them off prospect list and put them on your buyer's list.
Or for example, I have on my site, if you're on my list and you're getting my emails and going through my site and all that stuff and you visit my one page about a funnel day.
And a funnel day is basically like an in person consultation day that I do with clients.
If you visit that page twice, which tells me, hey, you're interested in this, it pauses your campaigns that you're on and talks to you specifically about funnel days for a couple days.
And then at the end of that then it like kind of resumes where it was left off.
So you can see the power in that.
You know, people are on a certain page and all of a sudden they're getting emails talking to them specifically about where they just were.
You know, it's kind of like if you were visiting, you know, shopping on Amazon, looking for whatever new grill and you know, 10 minutes later you get a call from Amazon talking to you about that grill that you're looking at.
You know, it's kind of freaky, but you can do it in A way that's not like it doesn't seem like you're spying on them, you know, so that.
That's for the email and shopping cart.
And then for Shopping cart, I like Samcart.
That's.
That's one of my favorites.
Samcart.
That's.
Yeah.

Omer (57:33.990)
I mean, for most SaaS products, they're probably going to be using Stripe on the back end.

Jeremy Reeves (57:41.430)
Stripe would integrate.
So samcart actually does all of the.
Well, yeah, I guess.
I guess they wouldn't.
Probably wouldn't even need that from Saskite.
Yeah, Stripe would probably be good enough for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's that.
And then.
Then the last one, I would say, is split testing.
You know, I think everybody should be split testing.
And.
And there's.
Again, there's a lot of them.
There's, you know, there's a whole bunch of different tools.
The.
The one that I like is vwo, so Visual Website Optimizer, and I actually, I think they were just on your podcast, weren't they?

Omer (58:11.290)
Yeah, yeah.
Paris was on the show actually last year sometime.
But, yeah, I mean, they have a.
A great story.
So.

Jeremy Reeves (58:17.950)
Yeah.
Yeah.
So vw, I like those guys.
I've been.
I've been friends with them for years.
I actually used to write.
I actually should again.
I wrote several blog posts for them a couple years ago.
I should actually get back in touch and do another one for them.
But, yeah, so that's kind of all the tools.

Omer (58:37.070)
Cool.
Okay, great.
I mean, we've talked about a lot of stuff here, and, you know, as you kind of said, there was some topics that we could have easily just sort of, you know, segued into and spent a day talking about.
So I appreciate you kind of going through and giving us so much information in such a short amount of time.
If folks want to get in touch with you or find out more information about what you do, what's the best way for them to do that?

Jeremy Reeves (59:06.660)
Yeah, so I would say, you know, the first thing is, you know, you guys are podcast listeners.
I have a podcast called Sales Funnel Mastery.
So, you know, you're probably on your phones, you know, right now or sitting at your computer or something.
So just go type that in into your phone or whatever and add that there's a whole bunch of really good content in there.
The second thing is just go to jeremyreaves.com and it's J E R E M Y R E E V as in Victor E S dot com.

Omer (59:34.220)
Great.
So I will include a link to jeremyreereves.com in the show notes and also to your podcast.
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Jeremy Reeves (59:46.660)
Yeah, I would say either.
Jeremyeremyreaves.com that's my email address.
So, you know, it's so Jeremy, my first name.
Jeremyeremyreaves.com okay, great.

Omer (59:57.540)
Thanks again for joining me and sharing your experiences and insight, and I wish

Jeremy Reeves (1:00:02.900)
you all the best.
Yeah, sounds good.
It was a pleasure being on here.
It was fun.

Omer (1:00:05.980)
Yep.
Same here.
Thanks, Jeremy.
Take care.

Jeremy Reeves (1:00:07.620)
Thanks.
Bye.