How can I design a funnel and sales process for self-service SaaS?

great questions - we see this situation with our clients pretty frequently at my firm. based on my own years of SaaS/tech sales, marketing and project management experience, I would say the path most likely to get adoption is actually discovered before the demo is delivered, rather than after. that is to say, your way into the client should start with you thinking back on your initial conversations about their goals and their challenges. just as you likely did during the initial conversations, now is the time to connect what your product can do during the demo with how it addresses or responds to those challenges and goals. Curtail your demo to speak specifically to the things they have (directly or indirectly) expressed. If you're unsure, there are several good leading questions you can ask that will give you indicators as to which problems your product might he able to help them solve. Beyond helping connect the dots, the value proposition you're offering here relates to what exactly you mean by a "beta" product. Beta can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Are you Beta in phase only (i.e. is your product debugged and more or less v1.0 full launch ready? Or, are you are just testing with a small group? Or, is Beta really a means of you finalizing your testing/debugging on the system prior to a larger launch?) so, how you get them to adopt (and how much or if you charge for this access) is driven by what it is your beta product is capable of doing at that point in time. There is a pretty simple selling strategy that can be developed here - you need to make sure to create the appropriate checklist and evaluate your in-roads to a potential deal based on their stated or passively observed needs, curtail the demo to meet those needs, and then evaluate your own product so that you can build a plan for getting the "close" in from that potential client once you have completed the demo. If you would like some help writing out your 3-phased plan for converting demos into deals I'd be happy to help. Schedule some time to connect and we can talk through the details then.

Most Software as a service vendors generally don't book annual deals except in highly specialized cases. Most customers prefer to be able to cancel/change anytime they choose. Also, deals done "offline" end up actually often being more trouble than they are worth to administrate especially for a $2988 ticket. Generally, companies don't view prepaying for SaaS products a year in advance as a "convenience" (to them) so if the debate is internal (not customer driven), I'd set this debate aside until it's requested by the customer. Most customers will request a discount to pre-pay annual service. Happy to talk this through with you in a call, to work through the specifics of your situation in more detail.

What is the quality of that $140 per lead? Does that lead into a $1000 sale? We often think that a lead that costs $100+ or more is an expensive Cost per lead, but if it brings high quality leads that turns into a significant profit, I'll be happy to spend more $140 to get more of these types of leads. The next is to find optimize your working lead generation channel based on specific segments (is this segment get a better ROI).

From an overall messaging standpoint, you need to figure out how to tie in your messaging around the problem that they don't know they have to messaging around problems that they *do* know they have. Your product is likely not just solving one problem, but others by extension as well. In other words, expand your value proposition. For example, I do marketing for HubSpot, which sells an all-in-one marketing software. But not everyone who would be a good fit for our software goes out and searches for "all-in-one marketing platform" because they don't know that that's what they need. But they *do* search for "how to save time on my marketing," "how to make my marketing easier," etc. which are also problems that our software helps solve. So the trick is to go after both the long-tail keywords that are very closely relevant to your product, which will have a lower-volume audience, and to also target your messaging to resonate with folks at a level maybe once or twice removed from your specific value proposition. Another best practice here is to get really good at content marketing. Make a video that your audience will want to share with others. Write some killer blog posts. Do some guest blogging on sites that are popular among your target audience - what blogs do these enterprise buyers skim every morning with their coffee? Having exciting, useful, and relevant content, and getting it in front of the decision makers of the companies you're looking to sell to, is what's ultimately going to get you noticed. Happy to share more of my experiences marketing & selling a sophisticated B2B product if you'd like to discuss further.

Do not consider this as a fixed and rigid decision. Consider this more like an opportunity to realize that you should test your pricing strategy as early as possible or at least now. Every pricing strategy you choose does work, the question is can you find your optimum? In your position, I'd recommend to make up your mind about your features first. Sit together and think about what features are necessary for which buying persona you are catering to. To simplify this, forget what I just wrote and think about the feature set for your MVP to make it work for your user. The minimum solution fit, a car can't drive without 4 tires - there you have your basic pricing model - features: 4 tires. Now common practice is offering a very low pricing model that is meant to nurture your leads to upsell them to the pricing you want, your basic pricing. This almost free or free pricing tier lacks a certain feature that is "almost crucial" - what this is in your case, I do not know, because I do not know who you are ;) Though, there is a third tier, the all feature tier which is the enterprise model. You most certainly know this, because you see this everywhere. You can read more about pricing pages here: http://conversionxl.com/10-principles-of-effective-pricing-pages/ The problem with making your pricing model highly flexible is that prospecting customers do not know what they want/need or what they are willing to pay for it as long as you do not give them a clear proposal. Though, your SaaS might have a value proposition that might be perfect for a dynamic pricing structure - I do not know that, because I do not know you ;) For example, there are relative pricing models like retargeter which pricing is based upon the number of impressions, instead of a feature set and on the use-case - off- or on-site. Keep in your mind, that constantly testing pricing models might be illegal in your region. Though, you can always conduct user interviews and simply ask about this issue. But be aware, do not make the mistake to lead an answer with a too pushing question. Do not ask blatant questions like "Does the pricing of 8$ appeal to you" "Would you buy the product with this functionality for 8$" instead ask for ranges. Ask for "Would you consider to pay a price between 5-9$", which also doubles as you already have insight in your customers potential maximal buying willingness. I'd also think about behavioural targeting - e.g. users of demographic x get displayed another price than y. This, as a matter of course, needs to be tackled very carefully and thorough. Experience helps ;) Pricing generally is a whole own universe of conversion rate tests and techniques based upon behavioural insight and cognitive analysis. Charm pricing, decoys, reframing the environment of your prices, even the size of the font of your pricing can have an impact. Heck, even just removing the currency sign can have an impact on your CR: http://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/1798.pdf In your case, one intuitive test I would drive would be bundles. Means offering separated tiers, but also a discount bundle (though the discount is still higher than the single prices you offer "right now" - reframed). I am a VP of growth and my focus is on UX and CRO and this is one of those field I am personally excited about. So, sorry for the long text ;)