A conventional marketing approach will focus on generating sales qualified leads. But that’s an incomplete approach if you’re a SaaS company.
A SaaS company has to market differently. That’s because realities like your SaaS sales cycle and recurring revenue model have to be interwoven into a unique marketing approach.
And that approach does not look like conventional marketing.
While a conventional marketing approach might stress how important the alignment of sales and marketing is, the product and customer success components (or their equivalents) often remain in silos.
To understand why that is, let’s establish a few principles....
SaaS products are created to solve a real problem. If you’ve already confirmed your product/market fit, then you know that your SaaS fulfills a real market need and quenches a real inner motivation thirst.
The product/market fit concept is often attributed to startup guru and software engineer Marc Andreessen.
He puts it this way: “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
Andreessen also asserts that the life of a company can be divided in two: before and after product/market fit.
After your product/market fit is confirmed, you now know your product is inherently customer-centric.
But you must continue to understand the needs of your customers and foresee future ones.
As you move into further stages, you’ll need to keep conducting research that enables ongoing delivery of your value proposition.
A customer-centric approach is essential for building successful products. And provided that your approach to building products remains customer-centric, then you can unleash other key functions of your SaaS company.
Once it’s established that your product is inherently customer-centric, then putting the product at the center of the customer experience makes a lot of sense. Your product is the means through which your customer will realize value.
A SaaS marketing approach requires putting the product at the center where marketing, sales, and customer success intersect.
A SaaS company’s primary focus has to be on helping the customer be successful by using the product. And all these areas have specific roles to do that:
Many non-SaaS companies survive and are even successful working in silos.
SaaS, however, is not that forgiving.
SaaS companies must continue to deliver on the value proposition and support the customer throughout the entire lifecycle.
You need to have an orchestrated approach to making your customers more and more successful. And this demands collaboration that goes well beyond aligning sales and marketing.
Meanwhile, your product—your customer-centric software and the solutions you offer around it—needs to be at the core of everything.
You also need continual feedback from customers about:
This is vital information that needs to translate into evolving marketing messages and ongoing sales enablement.
Conventional marketing typically stops at the evaluation process. In some cases marketing can extend all the way to the execution of the sale.
But as the diagram shows, that approach ignores an entire half of the SaaS sales funnel—which includes renewals, expansions, and referrals!
That’s why SaaS marketing must take a full funnel approach where the post-activation stages are considered just as valuable as the top funnel elements.
You cannot stop marketing to existing customers. If you do, you may be missing sales opportunities, suffering from poor activation rates, and enduring unnecessarily high churn rates.
In SaaS you must continue to engage your customer base.
A lot of SaaS companies stop marketing after customers have requested a free trial or demo.
But why? That kind of strategy enables valuable opportunities to wither—rather than thrive.
Successful SaaS companies such as Slack and Atlassian dedicate entire teams to marketing in the post-activation stage with essentially one message: “How can we help you continue to be wildly successful using our product?”
Why is that important?
Think about it like this: When you’ve already paid for the marketing, promotion, education, etc., needed to get that lead to request a free trial, they now become the most expensive lead to lose.
Yet it's not uncommon for the conversion rate of trial-to-paying users to be in the low single digits.
In fact, the biggest drop in the entire funnel can occur at this point.
Sure, there can be a variety of reasons for a low conversion rate. But when you stop marketing at the trial phase, you’re definitely not helping your conversion opportunities.
Since SaaS companies rely on recurring revenue, you need to keep on communicating your product’s story to your customers.
Marketing in essence never stops, and your post-activation efforts must focus on helping the customer be as successful as possible with your product.
Consider the diagram above: Every stage requires specific tactics and strategies. That’s because the needs of your customers change as they advance in the SaaS lifecycle from leads to activation to renewal and beyond.
Note that the diagram reflects a high-touch funnel. A low-touch funnel is similar but involves less stages at the upper level because the risk factor is lower.
Past the activation phase, communicating the value of your software throughout the lifecycle becomes critical. The customer might have made a purchase to solve one particular challenge.
But it’s now your job to show all of the additional value that the customer could extract from the software—and multiply its impact.
In other words, a SaaS approach demands that the software and the customer experience are integral to the branding process.
They comprise a feedback loop that involves:
You’ve just taken your company to the post-revenue stage.
Your primary goal is simple but critical: Create an initial group of satisfied clients—clients that form the basis for testimonials and other social proof. You’ll need to:
Now you’re looking to build your growth engine. Steps to take include:
Now you need to scale. Your marketing efforts must kick into high-gear:
Market 8 is 100% focused on helping SaaS firms establish their brand and sell more software.
We help B2B SAAS companies sell more software by optimizing their entire funnel, from lead capture to renewals.
Unlike most “full service” agencies, we dive deep to learn all about your SAAS product.
How?
We ask informed questions (a lot of them!) about your customers before prescribing anything.
That means every decision—from branding to marketing growth plans to sales tactics—is based on real data, not assumptions.
We’ve been widely recognized for helping clients achieve success. In 2016, Market 8 received two Grand Prize Impact Awards for Inbound Client Growth Story and Happiest Customers, as well as nine Hermes awards, including four Platinum B2B website awards.
If you are looking into redesigning your SAAS website, there is one major thing that you need to consider: Your website is your best salesperson at every stage of your SAAS customer lifecycle.
If you are spending money on SEM, it makes sense to maximize more than impressions and click-thru-rates; maximize your lead generation.
Marketers hear the same terms constantly, “target your audience,” “reach your customers,” “build your brand,” etc. Most marketing plans bring effective results but many fall short of their goals.
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