12 Best Practices for B2B SaaS Lead Generation
Just having an excellent product isn’t enough to generate SaaS leads. To acquire leads and close sales in this industry, you need to employ a number of strategies. In this post, we’ll provide you with a variety of scalable B2B SaaS lead generation techniques that you can use to expand your customer base. The bottom line is that you need leads to grow your B2B Saas business. Your sales team can only hone your SaaS into a successful enterprise if they have a steady supply of leads. Here are some strategies to turbocharge your B2B SaaS lead generation. How to Scale B2B SaaS Lead Generation As a SaaS marketing agency, our goal is to remain competitive by being able to scale your lead generation capacity quickly in order to ensure long-term success. Here are 12 practical methods we use to scale up your lead generation. 1. Use software discovery and review platforms. Every new lead that comes into your business is at a particular stage. Leads are sorted into three categories: hot, warm, and cold, and each strategy is tailored to suit a certain kind of lead. Businesses and individuals can use review platforms to identify the best technology stack to run their operations by gathering reviews around software solutions. A good example of this is G2. These platforms are now well-positioned and are trusted by millions of decision-makers to find, buy, and review software. For B2B SaaS lead generation businesses, this means that millions of potential warm leads are at your disposal if you build, promote, and grow your business profiles. These platforms are being used by decision-makers to seek out a solution. By displaying at the top of their searches, you can start a conversation with highly motivated buyers that just need a little nudge to convert. 2. Draw in new users with SEO. The search engine results pages (SERPS) are where businesses with an excellent return on investment (ROI) hope to stay. Every day, over five billion Google searches are conducted, which has a significant impact on businesses’ ROI. Increasing organic traffic is not simple, which is why search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial. SEO is about matching search intent and providing the best possible response to a user’s query. If you can accomplish that, you’re already ahead of the game. Congratulations! Your SEO plan may be developed by defining what end users require and how your tool provides a solution for them. You will know the problems they want to solve and how your solution helps them if you know how they think and what they value. For instance, you have a product that uses data to help fintech companies identify their opportunities. You might want to create a series of articles describing how fintech companies can use data to gain an advantage over their competitors, detailing the best times of year to reach out to potential customers, and so on. The key is to focus on the needs of your ideal customers—once you do that, creating SEO content will become second nature. 3. Make use of interactive tools and lead magnets. Invite people to sign up for a free trial or purchase, and then provide them with a downloadable lead magnet or interactive tool. When companies think about e-books or gated content, they often mistake them for lead magnets. However, the most effective lead magnets are those that help their users work more efficiently, effectively, and faster. For instance, a checklist might aim to simplify a complicated procedure or work smarter with data using great tools. These tools can help you increase the number of subscribers you can nurture with your email workflows, as well as generate organic traffic, build backlinks, and strengthen your brand. A good example is Ahrefs. They developed a free Webmasters Tools site that helped them gain over 8,000 backlinks and attract around 3,000 organic visits per month. Interactive tools will also help you increase engagement with potential customers as they get to connect more with your site. Using interactive tools will also help you establish a closer relationship with users before they commit to converting into paying customers. 4. Use real-world examples. Content is critical to attracting users, but making those users turn into customers requires more effort. Businesses are under a lot of pressure and want to make sure that the solution they pick is right for them before they commit to it. Case studies provide a real-life example of how a customer solved a problem and how your solution helped. They can help you develop empathy with your audience by letting them see themselves in the story, get quick answers to their questions, and get a sense of what it is like to use your solution. Especially if the case study is in the same industry as theirs. 5. Create data-driven content to gain authority in your niche. When you’re producing high-quality original content, the top of your list of priorities should be content based on research facts. These are excellent pieces to build authority, acquire high-quality organic links to support your SEO, and—if the data is useful or the result is controversial—increase brand awareness through several outlets. If you’re a B2B SaaS lead generation company, you already have a lot of data about how your users interact with your tool, so you can begin there. Using this information, you can gain insights into the subjects your potential customers care about. Beyond just producing blog posts, you should also produce podcasts or newsletters to grow your audience and establish yourself as a subject matter expert in your field. Before signing on for a longer project, make sure you have a thorough outline. These kinds of efforts take longer than usual because they require more planning. To make a solid plan, answer the following questions: 6. Use podcasts for your outreach campaign. According to LinkedIn, podcast listening among senior-level decision-makers accounts for 44% of all listeners. This means that you need to be present among decision-makers to succeed.
A Comprehensive Guide to B2B SaaS Lead Generation
Today, we’ll look at some ways to power your business with leads and establish some basic foundations so that you can take advantage of all the new sales opportunities in B2B SaaS lead generation. If your B2B business is a car, then leads are your fuel. No matter how well-designed, expensive, or beautiful a vehicle may be, it won’t go anywhere without fuel. You’ll need a well-oiled machine for B2B SaaS lead generation to work. The most efficient vehicles will go further on less fuel, and the ones with the best engines will get to their destination quicker. The most crucial part of any B2B SaaS marketer’s job is generating leads. If you don’t generate leads, you don’t generate business, and the company doesn’t grow. Because generating leads is such a crucial component of growing B2B technology firms, Sales and Marketing teams are often combined. According to the Holger B2B Lead Gen Report, more than half of marketers (53%) report that half or more of their budget is allocated to lead generation. What Is a Lead? When someone attends an event you organize, completes a form on your website, talks to someone at your company, or clicks on an ad you run, they become a lead. A lead is any company or person that has expressed interest in your services or products. This article is focused on digital marketing, so we won’t talk about event marketing and direct mail, although both are still significant parts of lead generation. According to Hubspot’s 2022 marketing statistics, lead generation has remained a major challenge for most companies. Source: Hubspot How Much Should B2B SaaS Lead Generation Cost? An excellent place to start with any B2B SaaS lead generation strategy is determining how much a new client is worth to your company. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is the term used to quantify this value. LTV is a metric that tells companies how much revenue they can expect one client to generate over the course of their business relationship. The formula for LTV is: Average monthly or annual revenue per customer x Number of months or years they have been a customer. You need to adjust accordingly if you charge annually, monthly, or a combination of both, as LTV depends on your pricing or business model. Some SaaS companies calculate LTV a little bit differently, you can check that model out here. You’ll then have to calculate the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC). This is the sum of money spent on sales and marketing to attract customers. CAC is a high-level metric that is not accessible to all marketing professionals unless the leadership team provides input. It includes salary, tools, and expenditures. CAC = Sales costs + Marketing costs / Number of new customers You can begin to estimate how much you should spend to acquire one client/customer by calculating this. For example, you would not spend $100 trying to acquire a customer valued at $100,000 for your company. You’d probably be underinvesting and would likely miss out on opportunities vs. competitors who spend more money. While everyone wants to spend as little as possible for a B2B SaaS lead, if you underinvest in lead generation, you will not grow as fast as you could and may lose out to your close rivals. Calculate Your LTV: CAC Ratio Simply divide your total lifetime value (LTV) by your total acquisition cost (CAC). Basically, LTV/CAC. A 3:1 LTV ratio is frequently used in SaaS businesses to determine growth. If a client has an LTV of $100k, for example, you should expect to spend about $33k on sales and marketing to acquire them. This ratio of LTV to CAC is used to measure financial health. There is disagreement about whether a higher ratio of 5:1 is desirable since it might mean that although you are very profitable, you are not expanding as fast as you could. In my view, each situation is unique, and it depends on the goods or services. SaaS businesses track their monthly LTV: CAC ratio to see how well they are doing. Source: Visible.VC Use LTV As a Guide A top-level view of budgets is provided using this method of calculation. It can be difficult for marketers to justify the spending to their leadership teams. However, LTV can be used as a benchmark to gauge where you stand, then you can decide what kind of investment would be wise. Determining the Cost Per Lead (CPL) Keeping an eye on the ROI of your B2B SaaS lead generation strategy is crucial if you want to track cost per lead (CPL). It’s probably one of the most common things used to keep track of the success of any lead-generating campaign, aside from the number of leads generated. CPL= Total expenditure / Number of leads generated For instance, an expenditure of $1,000 on lead generation that results in 10 leads, gives a CPL of $100. Your overall cost per lead across all digital marketing channels should be calculated, as well as the individual cost per lead for each channel. You can then determine which channel gives you the best value for your money. Measuring the Return on Investment of B2B SaaS Lead Generation One of the major challenges that many B2B technology firms face is having the sales cycle last for months or even years. In most technology B2B companies, a lead doesn’t close the same month it opens (SaaS is a little different at times). This valuable study conducted by Implicit showed led to opportunity conversion rates of 13% and that the average time taken to convert was 84 days or about three months. In Order to Benchmark B2B Tech Sector Conversion Rates, One Must First Determine the Conversion Rate for the Company. It is better to benchmark conversion rates against your own performance rather than look at what everyone else is doing. If 3% is good for your company, then you won’t go to extremes to get to 5% or strive for 10%.