Empower your team with the best b2b saas funnel for teams

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hey y'all Shelby though I'm here with my latest blog seven tips for B2B SAS marketing teams uh here at om we work with a lot of B2B SAS teams it's one of the niches that we specialize here or specialize in here so just wanted to write a quick blog on a few tips that we have really come across as we work with those teams things that we've learned and just share it with y'all so without further Ado I'll go ahead and jump in first tip I have here is having a proper digital Foundation this is just number one for anything that I will ever say um if you don't have this foundation in place where you are tracking user and conversion data you're going to have a tough if not impossible time finding out what strategies are working because you're not seeing where your leads are coming from you're not seeing where your conversions and your users are coming from and you're Flying Blind um and when you're Flying Blind you're really just doing whack-a-mole marketing which is something that you should not strive to do so really work to get that proper digital foundation in place before you really even dive into anything else and if you don't have it up get into it because it is really one of the most valuable things that you can have in marketing even if you're really not doing a lot of marketing um efforts whether it's paid or organic it's still very useful to see how you're doing uh we do have a little blog here that I've linked here within this blog that you can access should you want to learn a little bit more about that then we have exploring numerous ad platforms this is tip number two uh for SAS businesses I've heard this argument before it can be very very tempting to only advertise on Google Search captera and G2 and just call it a day and I get it Captain G2 are some of the biggest uh software platforms out there for searching and finding reviews and things like that and then Google searches of course Google search that one's basically a no-brainer for any marketing team unless it's ridiculously expensive which I have also seen in the software space so that's something to be aware of and that is also sort of a lead-in to finding different platforms to test because you can find some really really good results whether it is building engagement or brand awareness and brand um loyalty or or just um Affinity things like that uh whether that's on Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Twitter Bing um and any other AD platform Under the Sun it can be really surprising to see what ad platforms work for certain industries it's it's it's something that I have constantly been surprised about in my career so I definitely recommend testing it um if you have a limited budget this might be tough but if you do have some wiggle room or just curious to see how some portion of your marketing budget will work somewhere else I highly recommend testing it on the other platforms if you're not on Facebook test a little bit on Facebook just a little bit on LinkedIn try for different um marketing objectives like conversions and uh traffic maybe even like page likes if you're trying to get brand awareness up um it can be really really surprising to see how well your ads perform on a previously on top uh Network platform so I I really recommend it tip number three this is sort of in the same vein of what we were talking about before is working with reps to maximize performance um this is basically a free service that is sometimes offered to companies that spend typically a certain amount of money um I don't think they say what those specific amounts are but you'll sometimes be uh paired up with a marketing rep either on Facebook Google LinkedIn Bing I think I've had a rep before um so it's really just a great way to get a free second opinion um they'll be assigned to your account they typically change out quarterly so you'll get to work with different people get different insights and it's usually a very good experience you you set a Cadence with them you can work with them either on like a monthly or bi-weekly sometimes even a weekly basis and the advice here I've definitely gotten mixed results here there's been some Reps for some platforms that have been Stellar there's been others that have not been so good it really does depend on the rep but um they can do things like catch problems in the account that you might have overlooked um and they also you know sometimes you get some ineffective or unapplicable advice but there have been a lot of times where they give me just like a slam dunk that you know they just say this advice to me I'm like oh my gosh why didn't I think about that that is genius so definitely recommend it it's free it doesn't take a lot of time I would absolutely take advantage of this if it's offered to you moving on to tip 4 is building a sales and marketing funnel for long sales Cycles sales reps in your team will probably have a good idea of how long it takes for them to close a deal it really depends on the team the offering of your services and the size of the business that you're trying to work with I've I've learned that big businesses move very very slow so although some deals May close in a week or two if not a few days many can take over a year to close I've definitely had a few clients where they've had some deals that have been floating around for like one or two years or so and they're still talking they're going back and forth occasionally maybe once a month or every other few months um it's just very slow it's taken a long time to make those decisions so that's why it's really important to keep these longer sales Cycles in mind when building your uh your marketing and your sales funnels so it can be really attempting to avoid sending a lead too much material because you don't want to poke a Sleeping Bear so to speak you know you don't want to have this very very slow but very very hot lead um and then just really annoy them because that is is a Surefire way to lose them but when you consider that these are often really really busy leaders in these organizations giving them some well-timed reading material and resources that are very very valuable to them can really get you in their good graces um and even if it's things that aren't necessarily related to your business like news in the industry that they're in or or you know just giving them that bite-sized chunk of information to read at their Leisure it can really help them with being more aware of your brand so do be careful to weigh your options here because it can really depend on the role of the person you're emailing the industry they're in the timing of your Communications like you of course want to avoid sending things during the holidays um but it can be really valuable I also recommend including your ads strategy here it can be really really valuable to continue to serve ads to leads that are in your funnel because they're not all the way through the funnel they haven't purchased yet they're still a lead so continuing to build that awareness there on the on the um paid platform side can be really helpful as well then for tip five I do recommend that you do some competitor research I can definitely see there being arguments against this because we do want to be different from our competitors and by looking at what they're doing it can be tempting to mimic what they're doing or to react to what they're doing but it's still really important to just take a look at the playing field and see what's going on there's no need to reinvent the wheel every step of the way because you can take a look at the keywords that they're ranking for or trying to rank for and then keywords that they're doing or that they're bidding on on the paid side you can take a look at their ad libraries on Facebook uh see what they're posting on their organic channels see what they're posting on YouTube and really any other platform you can just kind of see what their online presence and even their offline presence is looking like if they're putting out some press releases or things like that um so just getting an idea of what they're doing and and how they are performing can show you some of where your opportunities are as well there's a really good art workbook that I bought when I was still an art student and it's called steal like an artist and it it takes a lot of liberties with looking at art that you like or art that you see out in the wild and sort of stealing what you can from that and I I take that approach with with marketing when it comes to competitors is obviously you don't want to steal everything you don't want to steal like their brand colors and things like that but you do just want to see what they're doing keep an eye on them maybe once a quarter or every other quarter or so and just see if there's any changes worth noting and anything that you can steal for your own brand so then tip six we have provide leads with transitional and transactional ctas when we say transitional CTA we mean something that's a little bit more lightweight that doesn't necessarily lead to a purchase or something transactional which is a transactional CTA so this could be something like a learn more or a um uh download ebook or CTA things like that or even just joining like a newsletter that can be something valuable although it's not as common in the B2B SAS space from what I've seen unless you have a very very valuable newsletter in this space which is definitely difficult to build up but is something that would be interesting to see um and the reason that we recommend doing a mixture of transitional and transactional ctas is that not every lead is going to want to book a demo with you the first time they encounter you and to be perfectly honest they may not want to book a demo with you the 30th or even like the 40th or 50th time they see you it it's it can be really daunting to schedule a demo with a company you don't know that much about and you know just say okay 30 or 40 or of an hour or 30 you know 30 or 40 minutes or an hour of my time I'm just going to get sucked away by this demo for this product that I don't know anything about um offering transitional things like a like a case study or an ebook can be really helpful because that person in that buying role or that decision-making role can just pick that up when they're ready and learn everything they want to learn about your business all in one um just like in a lunch break or in a simple like you know on the train or whatever whatever it is that they are able to it's a lot more digestible and this is something we also covered in another blog is that so many buyers nowadays want a self-guided buying process that it's starting to make a lot more sense to give leads to Freedom uh to choose how they interact with your business until they're truly ready to speak with you because if a lead doesn't want to speak to you they're going to do everything in their power to not speak to you so it's best to just give them the resources that will help educate and engage them until they are ready to make that that um step into actually speaking with you and then number seven this is my last tip of the blog build launch and optimize and ABM strategy so this is something that is pretty time intensive it takes a bit to set up once it's done it's it's a little bit easier because it's just a little bit of rote uh performance by your sales team to just you know send out these emails if it's not automated and then make the calls and things like that so it'll typically come later in your marketing optimization process but it can be really really valuable to implement um it's something where we recommend marketing and sales collaborate on marketing and sales should collaborate just in general anyways especially if it's a very um long sales cycle like we discussed earlier but this is something where they can really learn from each other they can learn the audiences that are really good they can learn the messaging that's really good from each other um and things like that so it definitely is valuable for them to work together and you can incorporate several channels such as outbound email paid ads and organic content in the strategy um not to even speak to things like text messages and other things like direct mail or sending uh swag to them like socks or uh things like that of that nature so one of the first things that you want to do here is consider your ideal customer profile just take a look at what your best customers look like think about who they are um the firmographics of their company who who they are specifically what their role is within the company what kind of things they care about what things are bothering them that your product can solve and where they spend their time online where can you find them can you find them on Facebook can you find them on LinkedIn where are they searching things like that um answering those questions is what's going to be able to help you plan your ABM strategy because if you know who they are you know who they care about you've got your audience you've got your messaging and then you've also with knowing where they go you know where to be serving these ads so um you'll be able to reach the right audiences on the right networks and send them the right message at the right time and it can take some time to spin up like I said but we've seen a lot of success with these campaigns over the years and recommend that you try one out if you have the resources so that's it those are my seven tips if you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comment box below and we'll try to get back to you um and yeah hope you all have a great day thanks take care bye