B2B Lead Generation Strategies For SaaS Businesses

Business-to-business sales are important to many SaaS companies’ profit margins as well as their standing in their respective industry. That said, dealing with other businesses and improving B2B lead generation can prove to be a formidable challenge for many marketing and sales departments.

Lead generation has become an essential part of any SaaS business that targets other businesses for sales. Every lead provides you with an opportunity to add a new customer to your customer base by converting their interest into sales for your business.

The overall spend per company on software-as-a-service products is up by 50%, compared to two years ago. Customers are churning through more than 30% of their SaaS apps every year. Unsurprisingly, SaaS marketing is more intense as compared to regular marketing.

Businesses in this industry vertical usually spend about 30-50% of their revenue on Sales and Marketing. Also, SaaS marketers are known for their intense fascination with data. This also makes them prone to making silly mistakes.

For B2B marketers, there’s a small room for errors. Your competitors are adequately funded, grasp things quickly, and track your every activity. However, even if SaaS companies have lower ACV (annual contract value), they can still excel at lead-generation games.

B2B marketers following the best practices in the trade can successfully increase lead generation and deliver high ROI. If you’re a B2B SaaS marketer looking forward to bettering your current efforts in 2020, I am sure this listicle of best and proven practices for B2B lead generation will prove more than helpful.

In this post, we will look at some strategies that can successfully increase lead generation and deliver higher ROI. I would also like to say that the best practices can help you start a new lead-generation journey and these certainly aren’t the last word on what to do. These practices can be considered more of a template.

Let’s take a look at them:

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing centers on drawing visitors and potential customers to products and services and converting them to end buyers. In terms of digital marketing, this implies combining various marketing mediums, like strategic content curation and marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and branding. This is a comprehensive marketing strategy for generating SaaS leads by posting content updates regularly on websites and social media platforms (blogging, guest posts, guides, podcasts, ebooks, etc.) to bring more organic traffic to your site. Mastering with time management strategies will allow you to practice more hours that are likely to increase the steepness of your traffic curve and boost your ROI.

Concentrate On Lead Quality

In the 2019 survey report of Demand Generation, nearly 30% of marketers said that the primary metric they are being evaluated on is MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) or SALs (Sales Accepted Leads). On the other hand, a mere 14% of B2B marketers are of the view that they were being evaluated on the total number of leads or inquiries. The shift towards lead generation quality has dramatically gone up as shown by some surveys.

In other words, lead quality today is a big deal. Most of the marketers’ performance is solely evaluated on the basis of lead quality. That’s why improving lead quality has become one of the top priorities for B2B marketers. Here are some of the most effective ways of improving lead quality are:

• Improving the personalization of marketing efforts
• Improving the quality of content
• Improving data management tools/platform
• Improving third-party lead sources
• Improving lead quality metrics used
• Improving the data cleaning process
• Improving AI and prediction technology

Divide Your Audience

It is important to define your target audience i.e. specify who are the likely companies that can benefit from your product or service. For example, if your business is in its initial stage of operations, it makes little sense in approaching large-scale businesses unless you have a reputable, big brand as your client to show up in your portfolio. Once you are able to build a strong reputation in the market, you can start targeting the big companies to strike a profitable business deal. Since dividing/fragmenting your audience is the underpinning of your marketing strategy, you need to be specific about which audience to target by using reliable data.

A recent study showed that 71% of B2B businesses target their audience based on the geography, 59% of B2B sellers divide their target audience based on Industry Vertical, 50% of businesses focus on account-based marketing, 48% eye for the audience based on their online activities, and 41% reflet on company size as the primary factor while segmenting the audience.

Website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization is the process of increasing the number of visitors that convert to actual buyers on your website. Your website is the first impression your organization makes on a visitor. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a user-friendly, responsive, and informative website to engage users for an adequate period of time. It is important for your website to leave a strong first impression on the visitor’s mind through eye-catching, visually appealing graphics, and original, unique content that can provide all the relevant information to visitors. Mark out those areas on your website where visitors tend to focus the most and add CTAs promoting your highest-converting content. Even a small percentage of an increase in visitor-to-lead conversion rate can deliver profits farther down the funnel. You can achieve that by adding sticky elements to a site, such as a sticky header, or a sticky menu, which will drastically improve your visitors’ navigation and ensure that all needed buttons are within clicking range.

The key to CRO is providing basic steps for visitors to navigate your site and to continually test and optimize your funnel. For example, if a landing page has a conversion rate of 20% and receives 3000 visitors a month, then the page will generate 600 conversions per month. If the conversion rate can be improved from 20% to 30% by optimizing different elements on the page, the number of conversions generated jumps by 50% to 900 per month.

Website Visitor Identification

For any business looking at revamping their lead generation efforts, or simply adding new methods of lead generation to their quiver, website visitor identification is a fantastic addition. Website visitor identification allows you to see what companies are visiting your site and who is interested in your offerings. Many website visitors shop around but very few will leave a way for you to contact them. On average, 98% of your website visitors will leave your site without ever contacting you or your team.

Tools such as these track your site’s visitors and provide crucial data to sales teams, such as:

• Company name
• Visit details (time on page, pages visited, source/medium, etc.)
• Company information (headquarters, postal/ZIP code, phone numbers, industry, size, etc.)
• Contact information (names, position, phone numbers, emails, etc.)

Now you can follow up with warm leads that are familiar with you and your offering and have actively sought you out in the past. Putting this information in the hands of your qualified sales team will enable you to increase your close rate drastically. These leads are not being cold-called and “convinced” as they already have a need for your offering.

With tracking and privacy under a microscope, it can be difficult to gather the information that is helpful to you and your team. This is where tools like Visitor Queue help bridge that gap. All information Visitor Queue provides meets privacy laws around the world (GDPR, CCPA, CPPA, etc.)

Use Email Marketing Campaigns

Understand that emails can never die! Email marketing is still considered as one of the best ways to realize the opportunities provided the email content is not generalized. Notwithstanding the outreach and effectiveness of email marketing, it must be remembered that most promotional emails are marked spam by decision-makers of businesses. The reason for this action is that a lot of promotional emails talk about the product and services.

You can prevent landing into spam by learning how B2B businesses leverage data to enter new markets. Accurate B2B data allows you to study the persona and company to outline a personalized message that highlights their common challenges and then offers a solution. Email subscribers are not leads, but certain behaviours shown by them increases the likelihood of conversion. Entice them to take the next course of action, like signing up for a demo or free version of your software.

According to CEO Andrew Burak, and react developers from Relevant, providing a free product demo allows you to establish a strong connection with your audience while increasing your brand loyalty.

Live Chat Support Representatives

Customers prefer to live chat over any other contact channel. In fact, some industries have witnessed chat growth increase by as much as 150%. The reason for this rapid surge is because more than half of the customers prefer chatting in real-time over calling a company for support. A survey by VTL Design found that 91% of users loved a live chat and 63% of users would like to come back to a website that offers live chat to assist with questions. Live chat support on your business website can amplify your lead generation efforts by providing your customers with the following:

• Real-time communication
• Better customer service
• Lower bounce rate
• Higher probability of lead generation
• Ability to earn and build customer trust and loyalty
• Cost-effectiveness
• Epilogue

There you have it. Now you have useful information about different SaaS marketing and lead generation strategies that have been tried and tested by successful SaaS start-ups and SaaS marketing professionals. Even though these strategies have been found effective to deliver results on their own, you can always combine some of them to make sure they are ideally suited for your SaaS business and your audience.

Needless to say, the approach had better results when cold emails shifted from sounding like a sales pitch to a personalized email. You can also outsource this process to BPO company getting incredible results while saving your time.