David Clark
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As with any SaaS organization, your annual contract value or ACV is going to dictate which strategies make the most sense to acquire customers. This means that with a higher annual contract value, you can spend more on expensive Google Ads, for example. Inbound lead generation strategies are more important for SaaS businesses with lower ACV that cannot justify the high cost of outbound lead generation. Even for a higher ACV, inbound is more sustainable and gives you more options in addition to outbound channels.
In this post we will look at six strategies that, in our experience, can successfully increase lead generation and deliver high ROI.
1. Inbound Marketing & Content Promotion
Inbound marketing focuses on attracting, converting, closing and delighting the prospects. The initial step is to attract prospects to your business, preferably through your site. The absolute best approach to attract people to your product is to create remarkable content. This should be valuable, actionable and intriguing content that enables your prospects do their jobs better and addresses their unique pain points and challenges.
However, as more companies continue to adopt content marketing as a strategy, this space may become increasingly crowded. Beyond creating remarkable content, you need to promote it to focused influencers and audiences. Create a content-promotion methodology that will empower you to reach your target audience at their digital watering hole, so to speak. Outline what additional resources need to be created in addition to the content itself, such as a SlideShare presentation to accompany a whitepaper for example. Incorporate this process into content production so once your campaign is finalized, all the pieces are set up for your marketing team and other individuals to appropriately share it. Keep in mind, don’t promote content just for the sake of promoting it, ensure that you are adding value to the conversation.
Also, create an influencer outreach list that you can use to share your content.
2. Website Conversion-Rate Optimization (CRO)
Website is the first impression your organization makes on a visitor. It should be clean, responsive, actionable and built with the user in mind. Your site is also where the entirety of your content lives; it is a library of your remarkable content, and like a library you can showcase your best work. Utilize this for your potential benefit. Discover areas on your site where visitors tend to focus and add CTAs promoting your highest-converting content. Small percentage point increases from visitor-to-lead conversion rate can deliver profits farther down the funnel.
They key to CRO is providing basic and logically relevant next steps for visitors to take throughout your site and to continually test and optimize your your funnel.
3. Real-Time Support Via Live Chat Support Reps.
VTL Design found that 92% of users loved live chat after real-time communication with a customer support agent and 63% of users would like to come back to a website that offers live chat to assist with questions. Moreover, it supported them in making a purchase decision.
A live chat support on your website can boost your lead generation efforts through the following:
- Real-time communication
- Improved customer service
- Reduced bounce rate
- Higher probability of lead generation
- Ability to build customer trust and loyalty
- Cost effectiveness
Live chat also offers robust reporting capabilities that enables you to track visitors’ activity on the site and feed data to the sales team, and to internally audit the effectiveness of the program and make ongoing improvements.
4. Marketing Automation, Lead Nurturing and Management
Since your website is generating leads, your focus can shift to moving them down the funnel. This is accomplished through a combination of email marketing, content marketing, content promotion, calls, and chat support reps. Marketing automation makes these processes more productive, effective, and measurable.
Automation can assist you learn more about your leads as people, and how they collaborate with your business. Set up work processes for premium content offer downloads, expired trailers and other key attribution exercises that have driven leads to purchase in the past such as viewing your pricing page. Incorporating automation into your lead-nurturing strategy will help keep a lead alive longer and improve the probability that they will convert to a paying customer.
5. Closed-Loop Targeting Based on Lifetime Value
Closed-loop focusing on leads is going beyond tracking the sources of your website visitors, likewise recognizing whether they took the action you most desire. This kind of targeting gives you a 360-degree perspective on your campaigns and where your most (and least) profitable customers are coming from.
A great place to start is with monthly cohort analysis of your new customers or free-trials to define which strategies are driving leads to acquisition and which channels are bringing customers with the best lifetime value for your company. Segment these partners by channel, campaign and persona to start. Use these insights to build a highly targeted and optimized marketing strategy for new possibilities that builds off the same strategies that generated the best customers you have today.
6. Customer Success
The responsibilities of marketing and sales no longer end when a deal is closed, but instead shift to keeping customers happy and educated. Frequently, your customer base is an opportunity for second-order revenue. Here is the place referral programs and partner networks come into place.
Despite cutting-edge marketing strategies and tools, verbal exchange is still, by far, the best type of marketing. Friends referring friends or colleagues referring colleagues, either way you can encourage your customers to suggest your product by offering added features, discounts or trials of premium product.
The other procedure would be to execute partner networks similar to HubSpot. By partnering with your customer base success, you can motivate customers to sell your product for you with included advantages. Benefiting from your happy customers can be a strategic way to generate greater ROI.
Which strategies and channels are most effective for your B2B SaaS company?
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David Clark
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As the world faces new challenges created by an uncommon global crisis, many organizations are awakening to the reality that business change can happen anywhere, at any time. And while organizations will be unable to control crises, what they can do is ensure they’re prepared to viably and productively lead their teams through those difficult times, emerging stronger on the other side.
The pandemic has highlighted just how rapidly things can change. Businesses have been compelled to change from conventional on-site operations to remote working approaches. The truth is that many organizations, and managers, have been completely unprepared for these changes. Crises can’t be predicted… but they can be acknowledged, and they can be prepared for.
How Customer Support Leaders Can Manage a Crisis Like COVID-19
1- Crisis & customer service
Every area of business operation is helpless against potential crises. However, as COVID-19 has demonstrated, customer-facing areas can sometimes receive the brunt of the impact. This is because of uncertainties over how or even if businesses will remain operating during a crisis, and this can result in significantly expanded call volumes, greater complexity of inquiries, and heavier workloads.
Obviously, managers are there to help their teams through it all. There are multiple potential crises that can make it perilous or challenging for customer service teams to continue operations from the office. Obscure viral infections aside, unfriendly climate conditions, structural damage, and even transport strikes can imply that managers are faced with supporting their teams remotely.
Customer service has long been an office-based task. And there are multiple reasons for this. Having a team together enables managers to conduct valuable employee training, analyzing real-time calls to inform and educate employees. It allows for customer service agents to learn from each other, and to team up to address and resolve issues rapidly for improved customer satisfaction and reputation.
As such, many managers don't have the any idea how to lead remote teams. It’s something that they’ve neither needed to do previously, nor particularly wanted to. But sometimes, there isn’t a choice. As the circumstance in 2020 has appeared, massive change can happen rapidly, and there is an urgent need for businesses to ensure they are prepared to handle change if they need to not only survive during a crisis, but continue to thrive.
2 - Valuable lessons in team management
Not every management technique will work for every leader. There will consistently be some level of trial and error involved in developing a remote leadership plan. However, what may be useful is to look to other organizations for guidance, learning from crisis supervisors or managers who really have ‘been there, done that.’
Empower teams
The right software solution can enable your teams to do great work through improved communications with geographically dispersed colleagues, better planning and scheduling, and superior time management. It empowers leaders to be more flexible and delegate effectively which is indispensable during a crisis, with Deloitte stating that ‘reducing the number of reporting tiers can improve productivity’ during COVID-19.
Lead with calmness
Effective customer support service teams must act with the 4 C’s: compassion, confidence, competence, and calmness. "Your core responsibility is having an architecture and framework with the ability to remain calm, not overreact, see the bigger picture and have common goals," says Mark Hutcheon, Communications Director at Williams F1 Group, speaking at the 2018 Crisis Communications Conference.
While crises might be troublesome, and while there might be various uncertainties and worries. Managers operating under crisis must lead with calmness, and must lead by example. During difficult times, employees are probably to look to their managers for guidance on how to behave. By remaining calm, customer service agents are motivated to remain calm too when conversing with customers.
3- Don’t stop once the crisis is over
These exercises from crisis managers can go far towards building up another age of empowered leaders with the knowledge and understanding expected to help teams through challenging situations and uncertainties. However, one of the greatest mistakes that managers can make is only drawing upon these exercises during times of crisis. Effective crisis management isn’t a one-time thing; it’s a continuous process that ensures leaders are ready to handle whatever’s thrown at them.
In all actuality while these exercises can be powerful aides, there’s no right or wrong way to handle a crisis situation; it all depends on the individual circumstances of both the business and the customer. The most important thing that supervisors or managers can do is to acknowledge and learn from the strengths and weaknesses of their crisis management plans, and ceaselessly adjust to lead with certainty without fail.
There’s a major distinction among theory and practice, and COVID-19 has demonstrated a number of practical flaws in theoretically sound plans. A few situations are outside of your control. How you lead through a crisis isn’t one of them.
David Clark
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Outsourcing customer support is a means of providing quality services to customers in a bid to lower costs and increase efficiency. Companies that are experiencing rapid growth and an expanding customer base are usually attracted by it. As they grow bigger, the volume of customer support requests they handle increases, hence outsourcing becomes a better option for handling customer support services.
There are many advantages that businesses can get from outsourcing customer support. Below I have discussed the top 5 advantages -
Lower Cost of Operations
The cost of hiring employees, paying for their training, and of course their salaries can take a toll on your company, especially if you are small. Apart from all these costs, you cannot ignore the infrastructure cost involved in setting up an in-house customer support department. The computers, software, internet connection, electricity bills, furniture, refreshments etc. are just a few added costs of an in-house team.
Availability of Tools & Technology
A company that handles contact center services has various software like Dialer, CRM and sales software as well as quality auditing tools. They are experienced in their tools and your customers can benefit from it. The alternative would be you buying all these software licenses and then training your employees to use it. It’s certainly more expensive and time consuming.
Scalability is Easy
If tomorrow your business grows and you need more people to handle calls or supports, having outsourced this service, you face no challenges. Your outsourcing partner takes the burden of hiring and training new employees as well as handling volume changes with ease as they have years of experience with the same.
Available 24/7/365
By outsourcing your customer support service, you can ensure that your customers are handled 24/7/365 without any interruption. Such an availability is difficulty to expect from an in-house team. Outsourcing companies can offer you this flexibility as they support other clients and have employees available in all shifts. They may have locations in other countries and clients around the globe. So they have the infrastructure and resources to staff a 24/7 support operation cost effectively.
Expert Knowledge of Multiple Domains
Outsourcing companies have employees that can handle a wide variety of processes. There are also companies that have years of knowledge with multiple industries as well and know the ins and outs of those sectors. Partnering with such a company can give your business the benefit of their expertise and experience to reach next level.
David Clark
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David Clark
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