It may be easier than ever for companies to buy software, but that doesn’t guarantee success for providers. In today’s digital economy, software is sold, not bought, meaning providers must take an active role in educating, engaging, and supporting buyers.
Best practices for how to sell B2B SaaS effectively—especially in digital marketplaces—can be hard to come by, which is why we’ve collected 4 strategies that are being used by some of the world’s most successful providers. Each strategy below contains important advice and tips and taken as a whole, our keys to selling B2B SaaS provide a practical roadmap to help you succeed.
SaaS Content is Key
The goal of top-of-funnel content is to educate cold prospects about the problem you solve (helping them become problem-aware), and also to put your brand on their radar as something they recognize. Whenever possible, you want to present opportunities to move these readers down the funnel
Blog Posts in the form of Expanded List Posts and Expert Roundups are great for people who are curious, looking to learn about what’s new and relevant, or looking for inspiration in the topic area that’s related to your business.
When you use Ultimate Guides types of content, it’s important that you map them to the core use cases of your product/services to get the best results.
Bring your A-game by crafting a winning content marketing strategy.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM doesn’t require much description. It’s a software solution that assists businesses in managing the interaction with their customers and developing long-lasting, meaningful relationships with them. By using efficient and useful CRM software, you can easily interact with your vendors, customers, and other people who are involved in your business chain. It helps businesses provide excellent experiences to your customers and develop your brand’s trust in them.
In this way, if you add it into SaaS, you get amazing results that can help you increase your customer base and improve your efforts in doing business. The main reason behind combined SaaS CRM is vested in the cloud, which means that there is no requirement to invest a lot of money in setting up the hardware and its maintenance, so it becomes a helpful solution to reduce the business cost and increase your ROI.
Related: SaaS Sales: How To Effectively Sell Software Subscriptions
Prioritize BOFU
Many software-as-a-service (SaaS) content marketers will tell you to prioritize TOFU (top-of-the-funnel) content. Why? Because many marketers assume that to create a customer, they must start at the beginning of the sales funnel. First, they need to capture attention, generate interest, increase desire, and finally, compel action.
Consequently, these marketers prioritize creating TOFU content to bring people into the funnel. They then focus on MOFU (middle of the funnel) content, and finally, they make BOFU (bottom of the funnel) content. What’s more, many marketers tend to focus on creating leads at the top of the funnel, relying on the sales team to convert those leads into customers.
This model works well when selling enterprise-level SaaS products with established sales teams. However, SaaS companies targeting small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) typically rely on automated sales funnels, and in this scenario, it’s the marketers who need to close sales.
As logical as all that sounds, experience has taught me that prioritizing TOFU content is nowhere near as effective as prioritizing BOFU content.
Related: Examples of Exceptional SaaS Marketing from 3 Notable SaaS Brands
Data is King
Rolling out a comprehensive data integration strategy for your SaaS company has many benefits.
Big data is a main driver for integration capabilities. Big data is about aggregating all the data available within a company to improve decision-making. Big data tools are used for Business Intelligence (BI), analytics, dashboards, data enrichment, user profiling, and much more.
Conclusion
Perfecting your SaaS sales strategy is a marathon, not a sprint. Remain patient throughout the process as you learn more about your product, your target customers, and your sales reps. We hope that the strategies we presented are going to help steer you in the right direction. The more time you invest into your SaaS efforts, and the more you optimize for your unique qualities and goals, the closer you’ll get to achieving high-momentum growth.
