SAAS companies value increases dramatically with growth. If want to drive the value of your company, you need growth. This article addresses the fundamentals of achieving growth in B2B SAAS companies.
Unaddressed Market
The first question in this discussion is what is the unaddressed market for your product is? Is it a mature market where growth is limited or an emerging market where there is plenty of scope for growth?
Most SAAS companies are addressing emerging markets where growth is limited only by getting to the market and addressing the market.
This article deals with companies who have a large addressable market where growth is possible but the fundamentals in the company’s marketing has not been built out.
Growth Hack 1 – Optimize your Google Adwords Campaigns
Amazing story here, effectively optimizing your campaigns can yield a 10% to 100% improvement in lead rates. Leaving the campaigns on autopilot is a fail.
In my experience you need a very experienced Google Adwords analyst that can have a look at your campaign, work out where the lead traffic actually comes from, then optimize for your lead flow.
Growth Hack 2 – Driving lead rates with Organics
So, you have a Google Adwords campaign, you’ve got the campaign running but its cost a lot of $ with flat or static lead rates and increasing $ spend.
The answer is simple, drive up organic leads (not Adwords) through white papers or other content about your products subject matter.
Fresh content indexes well via on search engines but it needs to be fresh and renewed on a regular basis. If the content is static, your organic indexing will decline, lead rates fall away, growth declines.
Growth Hack 3 – Build your prospect database and re-target via EDMs
Amazing to work with companies that have attracted prospects to the web site, captured the prospects details (email, LinkedIn Identity etc.) but don’t retarget these prospects via EDMs (Electronic Direct Mail).
If the prospect was interested enough to come to your wed site in the first place, they probably are still interested but did not proceed because of a range of reasons – not ready to buy, waiting for budget, other priorities…
The EDMs can be a range of content, Videos, Tools to calculate Return on investment, Whitepapers and more.
To know more on EDMs, frequency, content options, please refer to the In-depth Article on EDMs.
Growth Hack 4 – Roll out the Webinars
Building a suite of webinars that help your prospects understand the subject matter your product addresses is critical to buyer engagement. In an unaddressed market, buyers need to be educated on what your product fixes for them so that they can build appetite within their organisations for your product.
There is no better way to help your buyers come up to speed on your products, than by engaging them in an informative webinar that is interactive.
To know more about Webinars, frequency, content, fails and more, please refer to the In-Depth Article on Webinars.
Growth Hack 5 – Primary and Secondary Funnels
In an unaddressed market, your prospects will not always be ready to buy.
The Primary Funnel are your Hot Leads, have requested a Demo or Pricing, are actively engaged with your Sales Team.
The Secondary Funnel are those buyers that were once part of the Primary Funnel but did not proceed with a purchase for a variety of reasons. Typically, they will appear as Close Lost Opportunities in your CRM system.
If you have an Inside Sales Team, get them to call the Secondary Funnel, find out what happened, why it happened and determine if the prospect is still in the market. If so, recycle the prospect by Assigning the Lead to Sales and get them to rework the Opportunity.
For more on the Secondary Funnel, please refer to the In-Depth article on Secondary Funnel.
Summary – Growth and Exit Multiples
Growth is not a mistake; it takes discipline and regular actions to drive growth. Growth in turn drives company value at a multiplier rate. The difference between 10% growth and 20% growth is worth millions of dollars.
Help a SAAS Buddy
Help a SAAS buddy out, please comment on this article 😊
Yeah that’s cool, we have some of this in place but not all of it. 🙂