For anyone in the SAAS industry, you will know that B2B SAAS marketing and selling is about clear metrics and solving for blockages that inhibit growth. Before that, you need to build a sustainable machine that drives your funnel and optimizes what falls out of the funnel.

The Basics

Here are the basics you need in place:

1. You need a good web site. Buyers want to be pre informed on your product before they engage. Highly responsive and engaging, they want to see what you’ve got before they take the next action.
2. Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). Start this as early as you can to ensure you are able to recycle interest if the buyers don’t engage on their first visit. If you don’t have a CRM system, you will waste money on treating each lead as a once off. Buyers often stay in the market and can be nurtured via various methods until they feel they are educated enough to purchase.
3. A Nurturing Machine. The Nurturing Machine is an educational way to inform potential buyers of what your product or service can fix for them. Nurturing can take the form of Electronic Direct Mail (EDMs), Webinars, White Papers, Tools for ROI calculation, Case Studies (Video and Written) and other educational methods of informing your buyers. Some CRM systems have add on products that can be connected to the CRM, for example Salesforce CRM has various products that can be connected to it to enable nurturing like Pardot. Some CRM systems have a nurturing capability built into the platform like Mailchimp.
4. A Digital Marketer. Critical to your success is a digital marketer that understand Social Marketing and driving constant engagement. If you are in a Start-up and think you can’t afford a digital marketer, outsource this function with key metrics. One day a week, three days a week, you really cannot afford to be without a digital marketer.
5. Social Engagement platforms. The obvious social media is LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and many other platforms. The takeaway here is they deliver a constant feed of leads if your digital marketer knows which markets to tap.

Intermediate

Once you have these systems in place, think about next level acceleration. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Webinars. Connect a webinar engine to your Nurturing platform and commence running webinars. Record them for re-use. Keep the content (like PowerPoint presentations) so that you can reuse the content over and over. The recordings are used internally so that a person performing the webinar can review the recoding, then execute the webinar having understood the content and theme.
2. Event Platform. Connect your Nurturing platform to an event booking platform if you intend participants to book in for webinars or customer days. Make the booking system available on your web site.
3. Buyers Guides. Your buyers want to be informed and know they can trust you. Give them a Buyer’s Guide, surprising how many people engage passively with Buyers Guides.
4. Fresh Content. For search engines and customers to find your site relevant, you need fresh content. Establish minimum metrics for fresh content and measure this as a key metric.

Advanced

Here are a couple of other interesting advanced tools to:

1. Ever thought about how many people visit your web site and leave without engaging. In B2B SAAS, it normally looks like about 1% to 3% engage (request a demo, pricing etc.). The rest don’t. There are tools out there that can back solve visitors and drive this rate up to sometimes double-digit figures with very low incremental cost. Double or triple your leads for not much else, worth thinking about.
2. Buyer Trigger Events. There are tools out there that can setup up alerts for buyer trigger events. Too complex to explain here but a very fast emerging field.

Summary

At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, these systems are The Machine. If you have The Machine built, next level is Instrumenting The Machine.

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Author: Lyle Potgieter SAAS-Know-How.com