Lead Nurturing Strategies to Enhance Demand Generation | StartUP MQL
“Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.”
- Henry Ford
If you're a startup founder, chances are you're always looking for ways to generate more demand for your SaaS product and acquire more leads. It can be tough to know where to start, but luckily there are plenty of strategies you can use to nurture interest in your product and develop a robust pipeline of leads. In this blog post, we'll discuss some of the best techniques for generating demand and leads for your SaaS product. We'll also provide tips on how to measure the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts so you can continue to optimize and improve your strategy over time. So read on for helpful advice on how to generate more demand and leads for your SaaS business!
There are 3 lead nurturing strategies any SaaS startup can use across the entire sales funnel to help create lasting relationships with prospects.
SaaS Prospect Interested Based Nurture
SaaS Opportunity Acceleration Nurture
SaaS Customer Renewal or Upgrade Nurture
We'll explore the various content ideas and marketing automation infrastructure needed to execute a successful SaaS demand generation campaign for each lead nurturing strategy.
SaaS Prospect Interested Nurture
The idea of nurturing prospects isn't a new type, but it's critical in helping to advance your customers into the sales funnel. All too often we see companies that have one generic nurture flow designed for all their leads - no matter what product or service they're interested in buying from you! This can be problematic because not only will this strategy fail at engaging with potential buyers on an individual level; there are also studies proving its lack effectiveness when used alone (without other targeted marketing campaigns). It becomes even more concerning if we take into account how many SaaS products our clients offer.
In order to nurture your prospects, you may have to take a look at their interest and what data they’re providing and how. Being consistent across forms can help develop more robust information, as well as being helpful when it comes time to segment audiences into different groups during campaigns based on their interests or implied preferences (based upon the content they interacted with).
Communicate with the Sales team to collect feedback from customers and prospects. The more you know about your audience, the better! It’s important to learn customer and prospect pain points, as they will help you effectively create targeted messages and workflows.
SaaS Opportunity Acceleration Nurture
When a prospect becomes stagnant in their buying process, it is time to accelerate the sales process by sending them relevant content that will help move the opportunity forward. To be successful at this strategy you must take into account where they are on your customer’s journey and what type of information might suit them best.
This type of nurture program requires accurate data in your CRM. Your sales team must be purposeful about keeping opportunity information up-to date and have a proper integration with the rest of their processes, including marketing automation tools for sending targeted emails that address specific concerns prospects face during different phases of the buying journey.
In this early stage of the sales process, you must focus on validating that your prospect has a problem. This can be done by providing answers, resources, statistics, and insights about the problem they are facing.
In the middle stage prospects flow further down the sales funnel as they have validated their pain point, and will continue to further educate themselves on your SaaS solution. At this point, you’ll want to confirm the SaaS solution needed will indeed address their pain points.
The final stage arrives, this is where a prospect will decide that a SaaS solutions like yours is required to resolve their pain points. You now have the opportunity to provide the prospect with support content that demonstrates why your solution is the best solution for them and why it’s better than your competitors.
Having an opportunity acceleration campaign is a great way for your company to stay on top of prospects. The emails can be configured either from the salesperson working with them or coming directly out of the marketing department, but it's essential that you create a great user experience, so communicate and collaborate before launching these campaigns so as not to have conflicting messages sent back-and forth between Sales and marketing.
SaaS Customer Renewal or Upgrade Nurture
SaaS customer renewal or upgrade campaigns are a great way to make sure your customers renew their subscription, while shortening the sales cycle. This campaign should remind them about when their next payment is due, while reassuring your SaaS solution is the best for their business. Renewal nurturing campaigns are a great way to upsell customers on newly released SaaS products, you can even incentivize monthly paying customers a small discount to switch to an annual subscription.
The longer your sales cycles, the more foresight you’ll need to plan for renewals. The best way is by engaging with current customers early, often, and before their SaaS subscription expires. This type of nurture campaign will require that you have good data capture, as well as an integration and solid infrastructure in order to get necessary renewal information into your marketing automation tool. This way it can be automated and the right emails, reach the right user, at the right time.
Be sure to review StartUP MQL’s “Comprehensive Demand Generation Playbook for SaaS Startups.” Especially if your finding this post to be useful.
Useful SaaS Demand Generation and Lead Generation Tips
When it comes time for planning your lead nurturing campaigns, make sure you include the sales team. They will provide insights that Marketing may not have thought about and can help get early buy-in on new campaigns so they are more likely to succeed.
To prevent getting overwhelmed, it is best to choose one SaaS product or industry and expand from there. Your company may offer multiple SaaS products/services but starting with something small will help you progress and scale your business.
Invest in your marketing and sales infrastructure as early as you can. This investment will save countless hours in manual processes, redundant tasks, improved response rates, and shorter sales cycles.
If you’re looking for ways to improve your lead nurturing process, we have three tried-and-true strategies that will work across the entire sales funnel. All you need is a little creativity and some elbow grease to get started. Ready to learn more? Email StartUP MQL’s founder, Vas Edelen at vas@startupmql.com or schedule a call and we’ll be happy to walk you through how these techniques can help increase leads and drive conversions for your SaaS startup. Thanks for reading!
