Oftentimes we find that our SAAS clients have a great product, but they have a hard time telling their story, figuring out who their ideal customer is and how to reach them. And therefore a process for consistently acquiring new, qualified leads.
BCM has many tools and tactics that we utilize for lead generation. But the first step is to perform a digital audit of your business. We need to develop your story, figure out what your competitors are up to, review what you have done that is working and what is not, meet with your sales team and see where they need help. Our first goals are to align sales and marketing and develop a horizontal message that goes across all channels. We then develop specific personas and whitespace key accounts. When we have a long range, focused plan, that we both have signed off on, we can deploy a mix of lead gen tactics:
Create fact sheets, e-books or white papers around your product. We then take this content and chunk it up/re-purpose it for different channels. EBooks are a great way to educate your market on something that is relevant to your story, product or business. During the audit, we figured out what your buyer personas, target market and existing customers would like to learn about. We use that information to develop content.
Email drip campaign. Onboarding is key to a SaaS businesses, yet users usually fall off throughout this process. We set up email marketing drip campaigns to resell the value proposition, re-educate and offer incentives for users to come back.
Live chat
If you were to rank all lead generation activities we do every month, live chat would be at the bottom in terms of quantity of leads generated and for the significant amount of energy to operate. However, it’s near the top in terms of revenue.
We found live chats contribute upwards of 25 percent of our new monthly revenue each month, which makes it the third most effective sales channel in terms of revenue. A big factor is the 50 percent higher lead-to-opportunity conversion compared to other leads.
Product Integrations: Work with complimentary SaaS products and build a relationship with partner companies to help both of you grow. Generate high-affinity qualified web traffic referred from the marketing programs and web assets of your company's partner. Pick an integration with an organization that would be most willing to promote the integration and would be most incentivized to open up their ecosystem to you
Lead Nurturing. Most people nurture through marketing automation, curated content sharing and phone calls. You have to think more about creating opportunities for touch points and discovering more about your leads. Look at implementing workflows for whitepaper downloads, expired trials and CTAs for "stay in touch" and for "are you happy/would you refer?" for customers.
Ads + Landing Pages: Ads and landing pages are an effective combination for lead generation. Google AdWords can get a little costly for SaaS companies, but it depends on the keywords you use. It’s definitely a strategy that’s worth looking into. A well-executed Google AdWords campaign targeted to the correct audience with an optimized landing page can be a winning combination to score qualified leads for your SaaS company. I feel so strongly about utilizing this combination that I’ve written a couple eBooks on how beneficial they can be for certain industries.
Meetups: Much cheaper than trade show attendance. This is one of my favorite tactic's; especially when you drive qualified attendees to the event. You can create a monthly or quarterly event that is either specific to a business use case and C-Suite Executive or the other could be helping people to understand your technology and how to leverage it's use. You are able to meet a lot of cool people in the tech industry. Make your meetup official by posting it on meetup.com.
