9 B2B SaaS Sales Strategy to Increase Business Revenue

9 B2B SaaS Sales Strategy 

The technology that helped SaaS to stay ahead of the terrestrial competition – the cloud – is now disrupting the disruptor. SaaS businesses are crying for strategies to boost revenues as they target increased lead generation and higher business growth.

Exactly what do we imply when we mention leads? By leads, we refer to web users that present themselves as potential customers. Such people profess an interest in your product or company. And they share contact information so you can respond to specific queries or provide information. Leads are usually followed up by the marketing and sales wings to engage users with customized content marketing programs.

To address SaaS growth concerns, we asked seasoned SaaS marketing professionals at Miromind to outline the most successful SaaS lead tactics or strategies. Read on to find out more about what these strategies can do for your business.

1 Create a social sharing ecosystem around informational keywords

Create white papers, eBooks, and downloadable eBrochures, focusing on keywords that highlight core USPs of your product. You aggregate customer contact details to build a social sharing ecosystem.

Offer free trials and demos in social media and use engagement analytics software to study customer responses. You create a captive customer base that is more receptive to launching new software.

Enable users to share purchase decisions within their inner social circles to broadcast their emotional high on landing cutting-edge technology. You expand your reach to new audiences receptive to your product.

Source: MarketingLand

The best way to overcome customer attrition in different stages of the sales funnel is to prolong email marketing campaigns. The idea is to resell, re-educate, and reassure customers, enticing them to come back for conversions. Ensure your emails are validated properly to boost message deliverability and improve click and conversion rates.

2 Use pipeline marketing to optimize sales funnel and increase revenues

Pipeline marketing is all about aggregating and analyzing marketing and sales data so that every stage of the sales funnel is optimized to attract and retain your target audience.

Pipeline marketing generates high-quality leads and helps you optimize live chats as an incredibly useful customer conversion tool and revenue booster.  

An effectively optimized live chat SaaS sales strategy guarantees 50 percent higher lead-to-opportunity conversion compared to other lead generators.

3 Build lasting partnerships with competitors

Don’t ignore the competition; instead, build two-lane highways to share high-quality web traffic. If you incentivize partners, they’re more likely to give you targeted access to their marketing programs and cyber assets that help you grow business without conflicting with the partner.

Use digital automation to curate content sharing, add ballast to your marketing campaigns, and improve customer outreach and serviceability.

Study competing partners and assess how they create successful touchpoints that snare top leads. What you learn will help you generate more effective white papers, and offer more creative demos and product trials. You gain by positioning more response-enabling, lead-nurturing CTAs like “Tune in to upcoming projects” or “Are you satisfied?” or “Would you prefer these alternatives?”

4 Shed the one-size-fits-all campaign and diversify SaaS sales strategy

Following a single lead generation strategy that crumbles at the first sign of a significant shift in market priorities could compromise all the time, energy, and effort that you’ve put into the campaign.

To foster a healthier marketing system, dig deeper into; 

• SEO segmentation
• Search engine marketing
• Content marketing
• Programmatic advertising
• And sales development 

The aim is to create and sustain a process that relentlessly identifies, connects, and qualifies the leads that matter.  

According to Ascend2 — most marketers prefer better lead quality

When you avoid tying your fortunes to a single do-or-die magic bullet and diversify campaign strategies, you become more responsive to change. You open yourself to new thoughts, and innovative ideas, and even if one SaaS sales strategy bites the dust, your overall campaign doesn’t miss a beat.

5 Harness the power of search engine optimization

Check out the entire infographic on SaaS SEO best practices here.

Some of the biggest names in the SaaS ecosystem (Salesforce and Slack to mention just two) created and sustained a record run in lead generation and revenue accretion. They did it merely by enhancing their visibility in search engines. Successful SaaS businesses leverage SEO. And they do it in three ways to generate leads online:

Improving search engine visibility

Realizing that search engines are the prime drivers of leads, these companies kept the spotlight relentlessly on high traction keywords, especially long-tailed keywords. Campaigns concentrated on using high-quality content to ensure that the right traffic transformed into qualified leads in the purchasing stage of the sales funnel.

Boosting direct traffic (and leads)

You could be maintaining different websites catering to various segments of your product portfolio, and each site could be drawing its traffic. Merging the sites may be a good idea.

You get the opportunity to redirect older customers and former clients to your new name and brand, leveraging the trust people have in your special offers. You may notice that the leads generated by direct traffic from older sources could multiply revenue accretion.  

Figuring in industry-relevant listings

Take a closer look at the online service-provider directories that figure prominently in your niche. These directories are intricately networked to businesses of all hues that could generate potential leads for you. Small firms, attracted by the web directory’s content quality and strategic guidance initiatives, would be more trusting of company listings in the portal. Prioritize your company’s listing in all relevant directories.

6 Address customer pain points

There’s a lot of information that customers willingly share; their first name, email address, contact number, their company name, or even their designation and corporate profile, if you’re offering something tangible (valuable) in exchange.

The marketing customer database, built assiduously, can become the cornerstone of a planned and segmented niche marketing campaign.

Here are 4 lead-generating vehicles that ease customer pain points:

Customizing content

We spoke earlier about data aggregation. It’s not enough to create a large inventory of customers only to shoot off a one-size-fits-all message that misses the target audience more often than it hits the right client. The need of the hour is content that is customized to address the specific needs of each customer. So how do you segment your customer database?

Dig deeper and map the customer’s journey through your sales funnel and frame content that responds to the pain point.

• Is the customer in the problem-discovery phase where he knows he has an issue but isn’t sure exactly what’s bothering him? Find out what the customer was looking for. Give him links to your best blogs, white papers that document solutions to specific pain points, and downloadable e-brochures.

• Is the customer in the consideration phase where he is aware of the problem and is researching solutions, but he’s undecided on the route he should take? If yes, are you in a position to satisfy and snap up that customer? Draw attention to trials, demos, peer podcasts, and informational videos that reveal how your solution unfolds.

• Is the customer in the decision-making phase? This kind of buyer will be looking for product comparisons, reviews, and pricing options. Use keyword-rich topic clusters to analyze your product threadbare, ensuring that there’s no room for ambiguity, and the customer sees solutions.

Maximizing value

Customers in the decision-making stage may ask you for a quote or additional information, presenting a golden opportunity that you can’t afford to pass up. Give them what they request but in a manner that packs powerful value-addition to what’s on the table. Try the following strategies:

• Outline key performance metrics that make your product ideally suited to fulfill the customer’s specific needs.

• Compare your product with those of your closest competitors to highlight that you’re better not only in terms of performance but also in pricing (customer-sensitive pain-point).

• Make an offer the customer will be hard-pressed to refuse. Start with a demo, a free trial period, and a premium pathway to serious upgrades that won’t be available to the general public.

Enabling access

If the basic features of the product are not in the public domain, people won’t know how they benefit. The no obligation, no credit information required, free 30-day trial offer is the ideal vehicle to enable customers to get the feel of your product. Ask for feedback so that you can respond with customizable solutions. This SaaS sales strategy is a lead-generating powerhouse if rightly implemented.

Incentivizing subscriptions

The free trial isn’t unbridled access to the entire range of services that you provide; it’s an entry point to your ecosystem, providing all the essential metrics that make for a satisfactory experience.

In the freemium model, the high-tech tools that guarantee an immersive experience and better business benefits provide the incentive to upgrade through paid subscriptions. You’re convincing the customer that the product or software has advanced features that fast-track scalability, flexibility, and operational efficiencies.  

7 Drive brand awareness and boost lead generation through influencer marketing

Potential leads are busy assessing, evaluating, reviewing, and validating brand messages, and rely a lot on what the experts say. Taking the cue, SaaS marketers are booking more significant profits through influencer marketing, where they use authoritative voices to engage a broader audience.

The right influencer need not be the foremost expert in the software you’re promoting. You’re looking for a person who can drive customer engagement and expand social media outreach by speaking in a tone and style that’s in sync with the target audience.

Here’s a great example of great organic engagement from Oberlo.

Influencers are not only great at generating leads. But they also aid speedy conversions by convincing customers they’ve reached the motherlode. Use guest speakers in online forums, webinars, and trade fairs.

According to the 2019 Influencer Marketing Report: A Marketer’s Perspective, 60 percent of marketers favored a substantial increase in their influencer marketing budget, as against a mere 2 percent planning to downsize that investment.

8 Prepare the ground for lead generation by nurturing brand loyalty

The humongous customer database that you’ve painstakingly built isn’t truly yours. Not unless you’ve forged a loyal customer grouping. This core customer group should be confident in your capabilities and motivated enough to recommend you to their inner circle of well-wishers and potential users.  

The website hosting your product or services spectrum, the blogs that convey informational content, and podcasts and videos that present peer reviews are hunting grounds for collecting personal customer information. Any web user even remotely in contact with your content is a potential lead worth pursuing.  

It doesn’t matter if these users don’t convert in the short term. Make use of every opportunity to provide value to such users. Make them active convertible leads through targeted email campaigns. Use high-quality content that appears tailormade to fulfill the intent of individual users.

9 Use social media as your premier lead generating engine

Social outreach is not just a medium of mutual interaction, communication, and entertainment. But it’s also a valuable tool for getting product information across to potential leads. A good marketing campaign is one that educates and informs clients. It also provides solutions directly addressing client issues and generates ideas. Great campaigns encourage conversation and spark debates.

Source: Growth Hackers

When you engage your audience, you enhance the trust factor that makes people seek you out again and again.

But you should know how to use each medium to spark lead generation.

• Facebook enjoys the broadest coverage among all demographic groups and is the ideal platform for hosting videos, live feeds, and curated content that reach the audience when they are at their leisurely best.

• Instagram has over 80 percent of users following business accounts and is a fertile ground to post high-resolution images, inspirational quotes from peers and industry experts, and feedback from your satisfied customers.

• Twitter, being immensely popular across all social media platforms, is a goldmine for posting news snippets, blog links, and eye-grabbing GIFs.

• LinkedIn is immensely popular among college graduates and high-income segments. Posting, sharing, commenting, and debating news and articles is the best way of getting your content noticed by professionals during the working day.  

• Pinterest enjoys more traction among the female audience cutting across all demographics, and this provides ample opportunity for customized content marketing through infographics and step-by-step pictorial guides.

Pew Research reveals that there is considerable reciprocity among users of social media platforms. For example, among Twitter users, 90 percent follow Facebook accounts, and 73 percent use Instagram accounts.

By using multiple social media accounts, customers are better placed to spread the good word about your product or company to a bigger audience of potential leads.

The beauty of social media is that your message stands a higher chance of resonating. Resonating with readers who are crystal clear about reading what they want to read. When they want to read it. Your content stands a better chance of being heard in such a medium, and before long, the leads start pouring in.

Where Can You Get More SaaS Sales Leads?

If you’re looking for a way to generate more leads (other than using a SaaS sales strategy I mentioned earlier), then LeadFuze is the perfect solution.

It provides an easy-to-use platform that lets you create and manage your lead generation campaigns. You can use its templates or start from scratch with your own design. The system will automatically send out emails to prospects on your behalf so you don’t have to worry about it!

With LeadFuze, all of your lead generation needs are taken care of in one place. You won’t need any other software or tools because it does everything for you! And best of all, it’s affordable and easy to use – there’s no learning curve at all!

Generate SaaS leads now!

Conclusion

The SaaS sales strategy we’ve outlined provide opportunities to;

• Anchor trust in your brand
• Reinforce credibility
• And enhance familiarity with web visitors

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning algorithms now power predictive analytics tools that provide deeper insights regarding web visitors – information that can be used to customize solutions fulfilling specific needs of your targeted customer group.

All these lead generating strategies help companies to grow profitably. But the onus is on you to use and validate each approach to assess what achieves the best results for your company.