Our Top B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy For More Sales Leads

You have a fail-proof SaaS product that’s changing the face of the digital workforce. 

The problem?

Not that many people know about you just yet. 

Your content marketing strategy is killer and is doing what it should. But your leads aren’t coming in fast enough with traditional marketing methods. Yes, slow and steady wins the race. 

BUT your SaaS business needs something slightly more “aggressive”. You need more qualified leads, as in yesterday.

This is where we come in. 

Here is our SaaS lead generation strategy that guarantees 1 lead per day with our hard marketing efforts.

Why SaaS companies should not just rely on inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing works. Countless stats show that it does. 

For example, Hubspot shares these metrics for inbound marketing:

• SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media. (BrightEdge, 2019) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

• 49% of users say they use Google to discover or find a new item or product. (Think with Google, 2019) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

• Web traffic is among the top two most-common measurements of success for content marketing strategies. (HubSpot, 2020) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

• 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get information in a series of articles versus an advertisement.

The problem with inbound is that you need to be patient. 

It takes time to build up a following on social media, or generate enough traffic to your landing page

(The trick is that it has to be the right target audience so that you can have high conversion rates.) 

Recent data shows only a small 5.7% of websites rank on the first page of Google within the first 3 -6 months. 

But 95% of other companies could take a year or more to start ranking on the first page of Google, even with an excellent SEO strategy.

Have a look at the graphs below. 

Interestingly, low volume keywords ranked much faster than high volume keywords, which took almost a year to reach the top 10 on Google.  

“Only 0.3% of pages ranked in the Top10 for a high-volume keyword in less than a year.”

So the point?

You can’t just rely on search engine optimization and a great landing page to find decision-makers. 

Having an outbound lead generation strategy to find quality leads right now is important if you would like more sales immediately.

(Click this podcast for an exclusive interview with Dan Martel, SaaS guru who founded Clarity.)

There are various ways to find these leads, such as:

• Cold calling
• Sms outreach
• Social selling
• Webinars
• In-person events

But at Salesbread we have found that using Linkedin, as well as email outreach is incredibly effective for finding B2B SaaS leads. (We use various marketing channels, as this ensures that we find the leads we are looking for.)

How so? 

Have a look at these case studies:

Case Study 1: LOFT

“LOFT delivers peace of mind through post-launch maintenance and support for software applications.

This includes monitoring, patching and maintenance, backups, bug fixes, help desk support, troubleshooting, content and database updates, performance improvements, and more.”

During our marketing campaigns for LOFT, we were targeting CEOs, founders, and presidents of companies.

As you can imagine, getting the attention of leaders in businesses isn’t always easy. Therefore our value propositions and personalization had to be on point to get them to reply. 

Below are the stats we received for this B2B marketing campaign:

138 Qualified Leads within 4 months = This 1.7 qualified leads per day on average.

Here are some of the replies that we received during these campaigns:

What was our strategy?

We needed to target decision-makers in the IT and tech space. WHY?

Because these people are potential repeat sources because they work with our ideal client… but do not currently offer the services of LOFT. 

The first thing that we always do at Salesbread is to build a list of prospects, saas customers, and even potential partners in order to get the most results for our campaigns. 

We built our list using Clutch, as well as Linkedin Sales Navigator. Once we had our initial list, we then refined it even more by plugging it into our client’s second-degree network on Linkedin.

Once the list was perfect, we sent out a connection request message. 

These connection request messages contained a commonality; either we mentioned a shared connection with the prospect, or that we noticed their company on Clutch and would like to connect regarding a partnership with LOFT. 

Once they connected, we then added personalization to our replies and asked for a meeting. 

This resulted in a lead rate of 38% 

Cast Study 2: DTL

Direct Tech Labs is a SaaS company that simplifies distributor and revenue growth with A.I and behavioral science. Cutting-edge A.I. software increases distributor activity and retention at every level of your organization.

Below are our stats for this outreach campaign:

85 Qualified Leads within 6 weeks

Here are some of the replies that we received:

What was our strategy?

Partnering up with DTL was interesting because they were looking to get into the top 200 MLM companies in the world. 

As you can imagine, this target market was quite a challenging one. As we were going after companies like:

• Herbalife
• Nu Skin
• Avon
• Market America
• Amway

These are massive companies that are half a billion and up in revenue and they have 10s of thousands of employees. 

There were only 200 target companies, but we were able to help DTL start conversations with corporate decision-makers, such as CEOs, CFO’s Corporate executives, of some of the largest companies in the world.  

We followed the same principle that we always do. And that’s building a list of ultra-targeted customers, and in this case, their ideal customers were decision-makers in the MLM space. 

Once our list was refined, we then sent out connection requests on Linkedin. Once a prospect connected, we then added personalization to our messages and asked for a meeting. We also ran campaigns if we couldn’t reach a prospect on Linkedin. 

The results were a success.

Our positive reply rate for DTL was: 36% 

Case Study 3: Report Mule

“Report Mule is a DIY utility to help you put reports together yourself. If you’re interested in the professional services company that’s behind Report Mule – at ITK Information Services we create media monitoring reports for companies which have a significant amount of press coverage on a daily basis.”

 Below are our stats for campaigns that we ran for Report Mule: 

50 qualified leads within 37 days

Here are some of the replies that we received: 

What was our strategy?

We needed to build a list of potential customers who would be interested in using a saas program that would automate clip reports, coverage tracking spreadsheets, media briefs, and even newsletters. 

The ideal buyer persona for Report Mule were CEOs, CFO’s, founders, and account supervisors. 

Once we had built a list of an ideal target audience, we then plugged it into Linkedin Sales Navigator and filtered it by 2nd and 3rd-degree connections.

We then sent connection request messages to the right people and once they replied we then sent follow-up messages. As always our messages contain personalization; This could be a shared commonality, a compliment, or a question (CCQ method) 

We also follow up 3 times but from the word go, we always ask for a meeting. It’s important to address prospects’ pain points, and how a product can help them. 

Remember the 90/10 rule.. Speak about yourself 10% of the time for context and 90% of the time about the prospect. 

Our positive reply rate for Report Mule was 36%

Case Study 4: Joot 

“Joot is a SaaS technology that makes compliance more efficient. They provide tailored compliance services when you need extra help.

Our target prospects were:

CCO or Chief Compliance Officer at SEC traded investment firms. 

How did we build the list? Our python developer scraped the PDF files from SEC.gov and extracted the names of the companies and their CCO listed.

Then, we built a second process (using both human and AI tools) to find the LinkedIn address for each CCO worth targeting.

Plus, if you’re a compliance consultant (or a firm currently using one to handle compliance) our technology can be an even bigger game-changer.

Joot was founded to give everyone in the financial advisory industry a better way to get compliance done.” 

See our stats below: 

This gives us a positive reply rate of 43.44% within 5 weeks

Here are some of the replies that we received

What was our strategy?

We had to create a list of prospects who were in the financial space, such as wealth managers, finance, and investments. We targeted the CEO, founders, and COOs of these companies, as they would ultimately be the decision-makers for reaching out to Joot. 

We contacted all prospects once our list was perfected via Linkedin and email (if we could not connect with them on Linkedin.) 

Commonalities were our focus in the messages, as well as personalization. During these messages, we always had a clear CTA, which ultimately was to book meetings. At Salesbread, we never “sell” in our messages, but rather allow our clients to close the deal. 

We find the leads, and get our clients foot in the door to discuss their product or service further on a call. (We also offer appointment setting services if you would like us to book the meetings for you.)

Case Study 5: Polymer

Polymer provides no code, data loss prevention, which extends the capabilities of compliance, legal, and security teams. They specialize in servicing healthcare, fintech, and insurance companies. 

Our target prospects were:

CFOs, VPs, founders, and COOs in the fintech, healthcare, and insurance space.

See out stats below:

This gives us a positive reply rate of 12.8% in 8 weeks.

3 leads per day. 

See some of the replies we received for this saas marketing plan:

What was our strategy?

Polymer needed to get in touch with CFOs, founders, Chief executives in healthcare, fintech, and the insurance space. We initially had a large list of prospects, but once we refined our list to those who would be a perfect fit, it came down to about 939 prospects.

We reached out to various prospects via Linkedin messaging and Inmail. 

Once again, we researched each prospect and used personalization and commonalities to start conversations. We also mentioned pain points that prospects might be experiencing, and this led to our great reply rate. 

Side Note: Consider this first before you begin your marketing tactics…

Before you hop into our playbook, you need to consider your SaaS price points. 

Why?

Because if you are selling a $9 a month product and I’m selling a $10,000 a month product, we would most likely have different strategies.

Right? 

Remember that you need to know what you can afford before you acquire new customers.

And once you work that out, you can then go ahead and decide on how you are going to spend that amount before you acquire these new leads. 

Example:

It’s not quite like saying how much we can afford for PPC. Because when it comes to email marketing, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re going after, across the board it’s the same price.

Why?

Well, it takes the same amount of time and energy to build a list of plumbers, as it would a list of lawyers. Whereas if this was PPC, a click to get a lawyer’s attention compared to stay-at-home moms, would probably have quite different price points. 

But in this article, we are rather going to talk about how much time you’re going to bake into these campaigns and where that magic balance point is. 

What can you afford?

Depending on the cost of your company’s product price per month, you could think about having a small marketing team that handles different aspects of your campaign. 

You might be able to hire 3 or 4 people. One who does SDR, another who does prospecting, and another who does closing. If you could, you might even be able to hire one person who does qualifying calls. 

But this depends on the price of your Saas product. 

If you are selling a product in the high price bracket, then you could afford a small sales team, but if you are selling a product in the lower price field, you might not be able to do this. 

For more in-depth info on SaaS price points, click here. 

Need a SaaS marketing game plan? Let’s get in touch

If you want leads right now, and your digital marketing agency is a little slow, then give us a call. With over a decade of lead generation experience and hundreds of customer success stories in the sales funnel, we can get you leads that convert. 

Imagine what you can do with 1 guaranteed lead per day? That’s a great return on investment that happens pretty much overnight. 

Click here for a free 15 min consultation.