Inbound marketing is the talk of the town- for good reasons too.
But, if you are trying to reach out to SaaS companies, inbound is insufficient. Though blogs and SEO are important, this will not take you to the C-suite.
Want to achieve better SaaS outbound sales? Incorporate SaaS outbound marketing techniques.
SaaS Outbound marketing includes tactics of emails, landing pages, targeted ads, account-based marketing, and integrated direct emails.
These methods can help you initiate conversations with your prospects.
Reach out to them and engage with them. However, some businesses are overwhelmed with interruptions in SaaS outbound marketing strategies.
Few even block out or opt-out of such conversations- it is essential for you to have a thoughtful approach to your SaaS outbound sales strategy.
Let’s cut through the clutter and explore the best outbound marketing for SaaS Companies.
1. Create an ICP
When it comes to scaling SaaS outbound sales strategy efforts, it’s not just about expanding your team and sending more emails.
A strong Ideal Customer Profile is required to do SaaS outbound sales strategy correctly (ICP).
An ICP, in its most basic form, is a profile that outlines the characteristics of your ideal customer.
Instead of broadly targeting all companies that might be interested in your product, you are narrowing down the characteristics of your ideal customer to ensure that you are targeting customers who are more likely to buy from you.
The ICP of a company is a clear, detailed description of their target audience’s characteristics, including firmographics such as industry, number of employees and customers, annual recurring revenue, and geographic location, as well as technographics such as current software programs and management systems in use.
Identifying your ICP is a critical component of any successful outbound SaaS sales campaign, because, without it, you will struggle to identify, target, and convert leads into customers.
When you can clearly identify what constitutes your ICP, you’ll be able to develop better messaging, write stronger SaaS outbound sales copy, and generally improve every aspect of your SaaS outbound marketing strategy.
It also ensures that your SaaS outbound sales and SaaS outbound marketing teams are working toward the same goals.
2. Discover Your Buyer Persona
Another one of the methods of outbound sales for SaaS is Identifying buyer persona. Once you’ve determined your ICP, you’ll need to define the persona of your ideal buyer.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and actual data from your current customers.
Consider including customer demographics, job titles, behavior patterns, fears, motivations, goals, and other characteristics when creating your buyer persona. If you use the information from your customer database, make sure to comply with GDPR regulations to safeguard your clients’ personal data.
The more specific you can be, the better.
Many different sources of information can be used to create a buyer persona, including market research.
Industry forums, blogs, interviews with buyers and sales staff, surveys of existing customers, focus groups, and publications in your industry will provide outside perspectives on the issues confronting your buyers.
You can also run social listening campaigns to understand what your potential buyers are saying about brands on social media, how they’re perceiving their products, and if these trends are changing over time.
- Analytics software. Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and other analytics tools can help you learn more about who is engaging with your content.
- Platforms for social media. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Quora are excellent resources for participating in industry-related conversations and groups.
Knowing your buyer personas will enable you to tailor all of your sales and SaaS outbound marketing efforts to their specific needs and pain points.
You’ll be able to create more relevant content and communications with the appropriate tone and style for each persona.
This will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of all of your SaaS outbound marketing initiatives.
3. Create a List
The third one of the methods of outbound sales for SaaS is building an email list. A contact list is an essential tool for any growing company.
It is the foundation of your SaaS outbound marketing strategy, and it is the method by which you will get your products or services in front of your ideal customer. To avoid email list decay, make sure you maintain accuracy and relevance in your email list over time.
There are numerous methods for building your list for account-based marketing, including:
3.1 Purchase a Vendor List
- This list should be based on your ideal buyer persona’s demographics and interests. If you’re looking for a more general audience, a purchased list may be useful, but it will cost more than creating your own contact lists from scratch. You also risk sending emails to people who aren’t interested in what you’re offering, which may turn them off from learning more about your SaaS.
Go for Ampliz. It has a comprehensive email list for every niche of B2B business. The list offers details on technographic, demographics, and firmographic information.
Attributed with 25+ attributes, sales reps can leverage the data to find the right lead; and make the right call for closing deals.
3.2 Make your own list
- Capture contact information from your audience by using lead-generation techniques such as lead magnets on your website and social media. To begin with, outbound sales for SaaS, include all of the major players in your industry on your contact list. This includes your customer base as well as key influencers who can assist you in reaching them.
- Find companies that are relevant to your industry and research members of those organizations to create a comprehensive list. These are the people who will make the most important purchasing decisions for you. Conference attendee lists, staff directories of companies in your industry, and LinkedIn are all good places to start building your contact list for outbound sales for SaaS.
3.3. Make Use of a Sales Platform
- Third-party tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you narrow down your search by job title, geographic location, company name, and more. Once you’ve compiled a list of prospects, you can send them warm introductions to spark conversations, even if you’re not connected with them on LinkedIn.
You may also need to do some research to determine which people fit your buyer persona to ensure you’re targeting decision-makers.
Notably, an estimated four out of every five LinkedIn users are considered decision-makers within their organizations for outbound sales for SaaS.
And, because LinkedIn can target people based on their job, it’s an ideal platform for reaching people who make purchasing decisions. However, when crafting such campaigns make sure to have measures in place to avoid email list decay as it’s important to maintain the accuracy and relevance of your email list over time.
Are you looking to build right email list based on your persona? click below
4. Find Your Campaign Goals
In addition to compiling a list, you should consider your goals for SaaS outbound marketing.
A common SaaS outbound marketing goal, for example, is to increase the number of leads coming into a business.
You can track this by measuring the amount of traffic your campaign generates as well as the number of new leads it generates.
Other common objectives may include:
4.1 Increasing Brand Awareness
To track this, you can use open rates for email campaigns or impressions for online ads to see how many people came into contact with your brand during the campaign.
4.2 In Response to a Call to Action
Some businesses, for example, may try to track how many people take the action they want them to take in their campaign.
If the goal is to get people to click on a link, you would track the number of clicks your campaign receives and use that as your success metric. To keep track of this and analyze marketing data, marketers opt to use the best email analytics tools to collect campaign insights, set metric targets, and even create graphs.
4.3 Conversions from Advertisements
Some businesses may be concerned with the number of conversions generated by an ad or other SaaS outbound marketing piece.
For example, if you want someone to fill out a contact form after seeing your ad, you might track how many people did so rather than just how many people saw it.
4.4 Sales
Tracking sales is especially important when running a promotion or offering a discount through your campaign.
If you offer a coupon code through an email newsletter, for example, you would track how many sales that code generates.
5. Create SaaS Outbound Marketing Campaigns
Landing pages that entice prospects and encourage them to provide contact information
Blog posts, case studies, and white papers that demonstrate your thought leadership in the outbound sales for SaaS space; convert these inbound methods into outbound SaaS sales marketing by emailing them to prospects and inviting them to schedule a call using your calendar link.
Referral programs that reward existing customers for referring new customers to your outbound sales for SaaS.
You can make the most of your content and other assets by combining inbound marketing tactics such as blog posts with outbound SaaS sales tactics.
Use outreach campaigns to attract potential customers who aren’t already engaged with your brand — and inbound strategies to keep them coming back.
6. Create Effective Cold Emails
According to recent Chief Marketer research, email is by far the most effective tactic for B2B lead generation.
One of the most effective ways to build your sales funnel is to create attention-grabbing, high-quality cold emails for outbound sales for SaaS.
Writing like you talk (be natural), always emailing a person (not an info@ email address), writing great subject lines, being concise, and always including a clear call to action are some tips for effective cold email outreach (or next step).
7. Concentrate on Value Rather than Features
People are most concerned with resolving their own problems.
This means you shouldn’t waste time listing your product’s features and capabilities. Concentrate on the benefits your product will provide to customers and tell them about them. Please be as specific as possible. Consider the unique challenges that they and their organization face every time you speak with a potential customer, and emphasize how you can solve them.
Speaking about value rather than features allows potential customers to quickly understand why your SaaS solution is relevant for them, how to use it, and how they will benefit.
8. Make a Concerted Effort
SaaS outbound marketing should not be an afterthought. Outbound strategies, as previously discussed, necessitate ongoing and active effort. They have best practices and techniques that representatives improve on as they gain experience and practice.
Having a dedicated team focused on outbound efforts ensures that you will see the expected ROI. Making it an afterthought or lumping it in with other strategies, on the other hand, means you’ll likely waste a lot of time on outreach without seeing a return.
Final Thoughts
Ignore the naysayers on the outside. We hope we’ve convinced you that outbound sales are still alive and well.
All you need to do is put the right strategies in place.
A successful outbound sales campaign includes the right people (qualifiers and closers), the right process (from lead generation to deal closure), the right KPIs, and, most importantly, the right tools.
If you’ve been thinking about expanding your SaaS business but aren’t sure how outbound marketing could be the answer.
Rather than waiting for customers to come to you, you actively seek them out.
There are numerous advantages to using outbound marketing for your SaaS, especially if you’ve previously seen success with inbound methods.
Outbound marketing is required for most companies using SaaS business models to continually attract new clients if profits are to increase and grow.
FAQs related to SAAS Outbound Sales Strategy
What is SaaS Outbound Sales?
SaaS Outbound Sales is a type of sales strategy that uses automation to find prospects and contact them with personalized offers through email, social media, phone calls, and other channels.
It’s designed to help businesses reach potential customers quickly and efficiently by leveraging data-driven outreach campaigns.
With SaaS Outbound Sales, you can target specific customer segments based on product usage, website activity, and other factors.
The goal is to close deals faster and more accurately than traditional sales methods.
What is an effective SaaS Outbound Sales Strategy?
An effective SaaS outbound sales strategy needs to consider both qualitative and quantitative aspects.
Some key elements include target audience research, lead identification, outbound campaigns, building relationships with prospects, closing deals, and post-sale follow-up activities.
Additionally, remember to measure the results of each element against the goals and objectives of your business in order to improve your approach over time.
