Your Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company has all the markers of industry-disrupting game-changing technology. You and your team are fully aware of how awesome your SaaS product is, but you might be wondering how to best support your sales team to help your company see continued growth and success.
Top 5 Ways to Focus Your SaaS Company on Customers
There are a few important things you can do to get your sales team on the right track.
1. Centralize Everything in a CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is essential to streamlining your sales and promoting growth. Every piece of customer and prospect data should be in a CRM, like Hubspot. This includes your sales processes and pipelines, client information, email campaigns, and marketing campaigns.
Everyone in the company should have access to the CRM in order to:
- reduce redundant tasks and information
- allow teams to provide better customer service
- track important analytics on your sales team’s performance
Well-managed customer profiles in a CRM will allow you to develop targeted marketing for specific groups of contacts at various stages of the buyer’s journey. Targeted marketing content that is relevant to your target personas will bring in far more leads than generic advertising or cold-calling. A global tech giant persona is going to value very different content and require a bit of a different approach than a smaller local customer might. It’s important to tailor your content so that it’s relevant to your ideal customers.
2. Focus on Helping Clients Through the Buyer’s Journey
Helping your customer is the baseline of all customer service, but this usually assumes a customer approaches you asking to purchase a product. In order to bring customers in, and introduce them to your product, you need to offer them value. You can help them make decisions, learn something, and solve problems. Education is the key element. The more you can teach your leads before they even talk to your sales team, the better.
Educating your leads can be done a few ways, but inbound marketing is most likely to be successful. Inbound marketing provides your potential customers with information relevant to the current business decisions and struggles they are facing. This means educational posts about your products and services should help them understand something new, try something new, or buy something new (hopefully your SaaS product). Your content is a chance for you to provide the research your potential clients need before considering purchasing your product. Helpful content that solves problems also builds trust.
3. Align Sales & Marketing for Better Quality Leads
Your sales and marketing teams need to work together towards the same goals. If everybody is on the same page, you’ll see consistently better sales numbers and happier customers.
Sales and marketing teams should develop ideal customer personas together. Customer personas help your marketing team tailor content to specific people and help your sales team develop a better understanding of your ideal customers before they even meet them.
Your sales and marketing teams should also brainstorm ideas for content together. Sales staff often have lists of questions they regularly receive, and feedback from customers. Frequently asked questions are an excellent basis for helpful blog posts and social media content. If a potential lead can get the answer to their question on your blog instead of having to call a salesperson, they’re going to appreciate your honesty, transparency, and efficiency, developing more trust.
With your sales and marketing teams aligned you will more easily attract new leads and experience sales growth. Your marketing team will qualify your leads with inbound marketing content. Once qualified, you can automate lead nurturing in HubSpot to provide even more relevant content to your prospects. When your sales team finally makes contact, they’ll have a good idea of who the lead is and what they’re interested in. With a better understanding of your leads, your sales team can more naturally and effectively sell.
If your marketing team does not have the capacity to develop and maintain an inbound marketing strategy, you can outsource your content creation. Your sales and marketing teams will still work closely with the outside growth agency, but you can relieve some stress knowing that lead-developing content is being produced consistently.
4. Make the Sales Process Painless for Your Customers
It’s almost inevitable that there will be some friction points for customers as they learn your software. There may be small glitches or bugs that customers come across, which testing may have missed. It’s important to identify and alleviate these friction points as quickly as possible.
5. Track Your Metrics for Sales Success
In order to focus your development, marketing, and sales on customer-centric goals, it's important to track and monitor your analytics. Develop metrics for success in customer service, and monitor the progress regularly. If something isn’t working, change it up. You can also track metrics for sales processes and sales pipelines in HubSpot, to make sure customers aren’t falling through the cracks. The metrics also offer insight into your sales team’s performance, and can identify areas where consistency is lacking.
Energize Your Team by Promoting a Customer Focus
Implementing these systems will set your SaaS company up for steady sales growth. Delighted customers will refer their colleagues and friends and they’ll become repeat customers. Word of mouth referral is still the best way to scale your company fast.
Streamlining the marketing and sales process so your team can spend more time on what they love and less time on admin work and cold calls will help your staff be happier and more productive. Happy staff, delighted customers, and more sales is a win for everyone.
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