From product trial to won deal
How the SaaS pack moves an opportunity from trial to won, routes product-qualified leads, and why no deal is marked won without a completed signature.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Software (SaaS) businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
Every software company that offers a trial has the same dashboard problem. Plenty of sign-ups, a handful of serious buyers, and a sales team that cannot see which is which until someone asks for a demo. Deals get marked "won" because a customer said yes on a call, and three weeks later nobody can find the signed order form.
Achekam's Industry CRM has a pack for SaaS and B2B technology businesses. It gives the sales process a fixed path from trial to won, and it puts one hard rule at the end of that path: an opportunity is not won until the signature is done.
The pack's words: accounts, opportunities, order forms
When a business switches on the Industry CRM, it picks one of twenty industries. Choosing SaaS changes the words the screens use, so they match how a software company talks:
| Generic term | What the SaaS pack calls it |
|---|---|
| Customer | Account |
| Record | Opportunity |
| Project | Onboarding project |
| Quote | Order form |
If you later switch to a different industry, every record is kept. The words are not cosmetic: they set what your team sees on lists, in tasks and in e-mails, so a new account executive does not have to translate between the software and the sales meeting.
Stages from trial to won
An opportunity in the SaaS pack moves through six stages:
- Trial. Someone at the prospect is using the product.
- Product-qualified. The trial has shown enough real use that a person should talk to them.
- Demo held. The account executive has shown the product to the people who will decide.
- Proposal sent. An order form with a price has gone to the account.
- Negotiation. Terms, seats or start dates are being settled.
- Won. The order form is signed.
Some stages have conditions. A record cannot move into certain stages until set conditions are met, such as a customer being named, an amount being set or a signature being done. These conditions are what make the board trustworthy: a deal sitting in Proposal sent really does have an account and an amount behind it.
Routing product-qualified leads to an account executive
Not every trial deserves a salesperson's time. What makes a lead product-qualified is your decision: perhaps a number of active users, or a team inviting colleagues, or use of a paid feature. Write the definition down so everyone applies it the same way. Stripe's guide to the SaaS business model explains the difference between low-touch and high-touch sales, which helps when deciding how much sales effort a trial deserves.
Once a lead is product-qualified, the pack routes it to an account executive by the business's own rule. You might split by region, by company size or simply in turn. The point is that a qualified trial never waits in a shared inbox while two people assume the other has it.
When a lead is converted, the Industry CRM creates the account and the opportunity at once and starts the opportunity's workflow. The account executive opens one record and finds the tasks already laid out.
Discovery, demo and the optional security review
The workflow behind the pipeline runs in a set order: discovery, a demo, an optional security-review request, the order form, and its electronic signature.
- Discovery is where you learn the problem, the team and the timeline. Record what you hear on the opportunity, not in a notebook.
- The demo should be for the people who will sign and the people who will use the product, ideally in the same meeting.
- The security review is optional because many small customers never ask for one. Larger customers often do, and leaving it until after the price is agreed is a common reason deals stall.
A workflow step can send the account a request for documents or a document to sign electronically, and the account's answer moves the task on. Nobody has to remember to tick a box when the customer replies.
No won deal without a completed signature
The rule that matters most sits at the end. An opportunity cannot be marked Won until a signature task on it is done.
That sounds strict, and it is meant to be. It stops three familiar problems:
- revenue forecasts that count verbal yeses;
- onboarding teams starting work for a customer who has not committed;
- finance raising an invoice with no signed order form behind it.
The signing itself uses Achekam's e-signing, which lets you place signature and initials fields, have people sign in order or all at once, set an expiry and reminders, and file the signed PDF with its completion certificate back into Documents.
Putting the pipeline to work
Before the first deal goes through, agree three things with the sales team:
- the definition of product-qualified;
- the routing rule, and who covers when an account executive is away;
- who prepares order forms, and who approves discounts before they go out.
From there the stages do most of the policing. A board that only shows a deal as won when the signature is done is one your finance team can plan around.
Once a trial converts, the next question is whether the account is healthy enough to renew; see tracking account health without a usage feed. If your books are not yet ready for the invoices that follow a won deal, start with moving a young company's books off spreadsheets, and keep credit notes when a customer reduces seats to hand for the first downgrade.
Write your product-qualified definition on one page this week. It is the decision the whole pipeline depends on.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
