How To Build a SaaS Sales Funnel: The Organic Way
You need a scalable sales funnel.
One that generates organic traffic. On autopilot. And converts it like crazy.
Into trials, demos and paid users.
A predictable level of pipeline and sales. Without a single paid ad.
That’s exactly what we built for this EdTech business...
👉 The content we created pulled in $900k worth of free traffic in one year
👉 That organic traffic converted to over $1.2M in revenue value
We’re going to break down our exact process in this article.
From start to finish.
Read to the end and you’ll know:
✅ What content to create. To generate targeted traffic for your company.
✅ How to set everything up in a “funnel”. So that traffic actually converts and boosts your monthly recurring revenue.
End to end. Content to conversion.
Table of Contents
Why Do You Need An Organic SaaS Funnel?
Problem 1: Competition
The SaaS world is cutthroat.
You’re competing against hundreds, if not thousands, of other SaaS products.
For example, there are 1,116 SaaS products on Capterra for “EdTech” alone.
Some are well known, established brands. With mighty budgets.
How do you become noteworthy?
How do you stand out in such a crowded marketplace?
Easy… give prospects an “aha moment”.
An “aha” moment is when the prospect understands how your solution fixes their problem.
A spark flies off in their brain. The synapses connect the dots.
Making you a solid frontrunner amidst the noise.
You can create multiple “aha moments” through your content. On the front end.
Like the SaaS powerhouses Hubspot, Kissmetrics and Buffer do.
But if your content doesn’t do the job on the front end?
Then your funnel should deliver it, on the backend (We’ll show you how later on ..)
Educate your audience. Think about their wants and needs. And watch the customers roll in.
Problem 2: Over Reliance On Paid Traffic Is Dangerous
With SEO the cost of acquisition decreases over time.
When executed properly, Search Engine Optimization not only gains you a flood of organic traffic..
It drives qualified leads and top-line revenue, more efficiently than any other channel.
CoBloom analyzed the 250 biggest SaaS companies. Here’s what they found on non-brand organic search traffic:
The top 10% of SaaS companies are doing something right. And it’s about time you joined them ;)
Producing content has a one time cost.
And the traffic growth is also exponential. Because we stack content on content.
Results like this are not uncommon well executed SEO...
Often, you can’t outspend your competition on paid media. So you’ll need to be smart and play the long game.
29% of new startups fail because they ran out of cash. 19% because they got outcompeted. According to CB insights.
It’s easy to see why.
Paid ads depend on unreliable algorithms and winning ads.
Imagine your cost per lead shoots up from $100 to $200 overnight. Rendering your ads unprofitable.
How do you report that to stakeholders and investors?
How do you let your employees know their jobs are on the line?
The stakes are high.
Building a storehouse of Evergreen content is a safer bet. For the long run sustainability of your company.
So, let’s get building!
We’re going to show you how to create content that leads to conversions. The entire funnel.
How To Build a SaaS Sales Funnel - The JourneyEngine Way
There are three parts to this:
Acquisition - how do we pull leads into our sphere?
Activation - how do we convert those leads?
Analysis - how do we learn from the data? To optimize / repeat.
Let’s dive in…
Part I: Acquisition
Our framework focuses on organic acquisition (SEO). That’s worked best for our clients. To generate impressive results, at scale…
““JourneyEngine gave us the turbo boost we needed to hit our aggressive growth goals. Organic SEO has become a channel that delivers a predictable level of pipeline every month.””
We use quality content. As our method to pull cold leads into our world.
Here’s why:
✅ Evergreen content will always attract traffic. People are already searching for solutions. You don’t need to rely on hype or trends.
✅ Gives readers an “aha” moment from the very first touchpoint.
✅ Introduces your brand the right way. You’re offering value and making a great first impression.
✅ Allows us to push interested prospects through a funnel. At scale.
The key to success in SEO is QUALITY content. Period.
Well researched. Well written. Keyword dense. And compelling asf 😍
It’s worked for big fish like Hubspot and pipedrive. And it’ll work for you too.
But how will you know where to start? What should this content even be about?
Map the SaaS Sales Funnel Stages to Your Content
Every Google searcher has a different level of awareness. We refer to this as their “Journey Stage”.
There are FIVE stages in the SaaS user journey. Your audience will be looking for a different type of content in each of those stages.
Let’s break this down…
Your SEO goal is to capture your entire market of prospective users.
Get in front of them during every stage of their journey.
Reach those in the market right now (the 2%) ..
.. and those who are likely to buy in the future (the 98%).
The perfect piece of content will help move readers to the next stage.
At JourneyEngine our goal is to help clients strategize and develop content that…
A. Generates organic traffic that acquires leads
B. Converts cold prospects to product users
A Detailed Example…
Project Management Software - Asana
Stage 1. Unaware: Help and educate your prospects on topics they’re interested in, but unrelated to your product or specific solution. Do NOT be salesy, just informative.
📖 Content Example
Expert guide on how to advance your career as a project manager.
Stage 2. Problem Aware: Show them how your product helps them overcome the problem. You can begin to “soft sell” your solution.
📖 Content Example
Project plan template
As you can see in the screenshot below from Ahrefs, this keyword has a volume of 7,300 searches per month and many topically related terms.
Stage 3. Solution Aware: Your content's goal is to prove why prospects should choose you over competitors. Demonstrate your unique selling proposition.
📖 Content Examples
Enterprise Project Management - Sales Page
Top project management software roundup listicle (often on third party review site)
The search volume is lower, but the prospect is much closer to a conversion.
They’ll be looking for roundups and comparison guides to help make their final decision.
Stage 4. Brand Aware: This content is where you finally push them over the line, into conversion. Give them ALL the information about how YOUR product solves their problem, in a way no other brand can.
📖 Content Examples
Home Page
All Product/Features Sales Pages
Stage 5. Current Users: Provide support for using your product. So they get the most possible value out of it.
📖 Content Examples
FAQ Section
Support pages
And there you have it.
A plan to map the right content to each stage of your user’s journey.
SaaS Link Building // Promote Content with Earned Media
Off-site promotion is absolutely critical for modern SEO (guest posts, PR placements, review sites, etc).
In the past, ranking content meant landing large quantities of low quality links. Often, from questionable websites. Unfortunately, many uninformed SEO Companies still do this, with disappointing results.
You will do things differently.
View every promotion as a FURTHER opportunity to move readers closer to conversion. While enhancing your brand.
A couple of examples:
An expert guide on "how to build a project plan" would work well as a guest post on projectmanagement.com.
Placement in a roundup of "The Best Project Management Software" will certainly have more impact from a third party site vs your own.
Prospect for high quality, authoritative websites that your buyers actually visit. And provide those websites quality content to publish.
Part II: Activation
SaaS Lead Generation // Acquire Leads With Content Upgrades
Blog posts will convert a small percentage of readers into demos or paying customers.
So what about the rest?
Incentivise them to join your email list! Where further lead nurturing can take place.
Imagine the article they’re reading is “6 Ways Modern Social Intranets Kill Traditional Intranet Software”.
A perfect compliment to that article would be a checklist. For setting up their own Modern social intranet.
Here’s what that looks like. Inside a blog post...
Readers have to submit their email address to download it.
These are also known as “content upgrades” or gated content.
Bryan Harris: from Videofruit reported 20 - 30% conversion rates on his content upgrades.
Brian Dean: from Backlinko saw a 785% increase in optin’s after he implemented them.
Two different Bri(y)an’s. Same result.
And yes - gated content still works in 2022.
But your incentive has to be worth $’s. I.e. it has to be super valuable.
Which is why content teams are essential. You need a proper strategy.
The goal is to insert relevant content upgrades into every single blog post.
So your email list grows.
Here’s what happens after they join your list…
SaaS Email Marketing // Relationship Builder Sequence
To make it rain you need to convert those email addresses into users.
That’s where a Relationship Builder Sequence comes in (RBS). It’s a welcome series / autoresponder. Designed to convert prospects who are still on the fence.
You take them from what they believe now (starting belief) ..
.. to what they need to believe to buy your product (end belief).
Across 5 - 7 emails.
Squashing every possible objection.
While developing a real relationship.
Creating a belief map is the first step.
The marketing company Wild Audience developed this concept. So credit goes to them.
Here’s what their “belief map” looks like ..
View the Full Google Doc here.
The second step is to turn that map into a series of 7 compelling emails. Utilizing copywriting, storytelling and clever triggers. To ensure maximum engagement. And the highest conversions.
Once it’s written?
We set everything up in your autoresponder. So it goes off on autopilot. Meaning, you’ll book more calls without lifting a finger.
Once people truly believe you’re the best?
They’ll be more than happy to pay for your software. And tell their friends about you.
Your sales reps will have an easier time on sales calls and demos, too. Because prospects arrive pre-sold.
Here’s the flow so far…
Users arrive on your blog post, through organic (unpaid) traffic
They convert on the blog post itself.
If they don’t convert, then...
They sign up to your email list (via a content upgrade) in the blog post.
They receive a Relationship Builder Sequence via email. Which leads to a conversion.
TWO opportunities for a conversion.
And everything runs on it’s own.
Can you see the power of this now?
Follow these steps and you can build your own SaaS sales funnel.
Once it’s humming along the next step is to analyse the data. So we can learn from it. And keep improving.
Part III: Analysis
Reality check - your SaaS Sales funnel will probably NOT be profitable after your very first piece of content.
If it is, then you’re a legend. You should be writing this article.
But if not, your SaaS sales funnel WILL be fixed, optimized and scaled to profitability.
You just need to know exactly where to start fixing.
That’s where the third “A” in our framework (Analysis) comes in.
The Analysis phase keeps you accountable for the other two (Acquisition and Activation).
With metrics for each phase..
SaaS Acquisition Analysis
In the first section of this article, we talked at length about how to build content for every stage of your user’s journey.
Now it’s time to hold each piece of content accountable.
Reward the content pieces that get results. Kill the ones that don’t! 😈
There are two simple metrics you’ll track:
Non-Brand Organic Traffic
The first goal of your content is to drive awareness, through non-brand organic traffic (searches that don’t include your brand name).
If you mapped your keywords and content properly to the journey, Google will reward you by ranking your target keywords higher. Resulting in organic traffic lift.
What is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)?
These leads come directly from our content and promotion efforts.
If a user books a demo as a result of your blog post?
That’s an MQL.
You’ll need a dashboard to track organic traffic and MQL’s (your key metrics), broken down by site section and content piece (your key dimensions).
There are many ways to tag your content. If you’re not using a database like BigQuery, you should do this with Google Analytics Content Groupings.
The output is clean and simple. A view of how content types and content pieces are performing.
Activation Analysis
OK, so now you know which content types and pieces are driving Marketing Qualified leads.
Earlier in this article we detailed how to build a relationship builder email sequence and nurture MQL’s into “Product Qualified Leads” and sales.
Now it’s time to hold those email funnels accountable for their job.
What is a Product Qualified Lead (PQL)?
An MQL becomes a PQL once they have used your product and reached a pre-defined trigger that signifies a strong likelihood to become a paying customer.
A PQL for your business could be a user who completed a key action during their trial, completed a series of key actions, or spent a certain amount of time within the app.
The rate of MQL to PQL will help you determine whether your product features and content messaging deliver enough value to upgrade your leads to qualified buyers.
Using event data collected from Mixpanel, Segment, or another method can help you define and track the moment an MQL becomes a PQL.
SaaS Email Marketing Analysis
Your email relationship building goal is to convert MQL’s into PQL’s.
So you need to know how well each sequence and campaign converts.
Your dashboard should give you a simple view of this.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Yes, this article is on how to build a funnel with free traffic.. So there’s not actually a “spend” number associated with it.
But it’s always helpful for us to do a side-by-side analysis and compare organic traffic vs the results of your paid campaigns.
Your campaigns should inform each other. We find that holistic insight into your business makes for the best analysis in the long run.
Total acquisition cost / number of customers = CAC
How much does each new customer cost?
The Automated Data Pipeline Approach
Let’s be honest..
Marketers tend to look at data analysis as a necessary evil. At best.
It’s obvious why.
Because it is a massive time suck and a nuisance to collect all of this information. Often for questionable return.
But it doesn’t have to be that way!
Data-Driven marketing in 2022 means eliminating the tedium associated with data analysis. By building an automated SaaS “data pipeline”.
Here’s what this entails:
Automated data feeds (e.g. Stitch, Fivetran or Supermetrics)
A single Data Warehouse (e.g. Google BigQuery or Amazon Redshift)
Automated Data Visualization Dashboards (e.g. Google Data Studio or Looker)
This approach means a single source of truth for all of your data analysis needs.
You set it up once.. And all of your business questions are answered.
No more pulling data, writing/fixing formulas or formatting slides.
Find out more on how we build custom SaaS data pipelines here.
Example SaaS Sales Funnel
At JourneyEngine, we “eat our own cooking”. So to speak.
You can see one of our “live” funnels in action. By downloading the case study below.
It’s everything we discussed, in living color.
We show you every stage of the process. From Keyword Research to link building…
To Recap..
OK. So we’ve gone through the entire process we use to drive qualified leads for SaaS businesses, at scale.
In summary:
Map content types to your user journey stages
Start small, with 10 new content topics to execute
Convert organic traffic to MQL’s with content upgrades
Convert MQL’s to PQL’s with an email “relationship building” sequence
Create an automated data pipeline to analyze your content engine
There you have it!
Everything you need to build your own Organic SaaS Sales Funnel. From scratch.
Let us know how you get on :)
Or.. we can handle the whole process for you
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