Use the less travelled route to win new users for your SAAS

B2B Lead Gen is hard. 

Really hard. Many SAAS spend huge budgets with Google, LinkedIn and Facebook. 

There are other ways of Demand Gen that needn’t cost a king's ransom and get's you "off the travelled road".

At the center of all marketing should be your customer. 

I am assuming you have a working product of your SAAS (which people are paying for), know the market you serve well and understand your ideal potential customer. 

Have a good, long think on this. 

How well do you really know your ideal customer….?  

1. Are they a CEO, CTO, a Growth Manager etc? 
2. Who is the real customer in a big organization?
3. How old are they? 
4. What are their interests? 
5. What is the big problem they are trying to solve? 
6. What are they doing right now to solve this problem?
7. Are they using a competitor of yours? Which one? 
8. Do they need to be educated on how or why they should use a product like yours? 
9. How much is solving their problem likely to be worth to them?

A very useful exercise is thinking of every single problem your customer is looking to solve. 

I mean every single one. 

Start off by creating two columns with “Problem needing to be solved” and “Objection for solving this”.

Write down every possible objection for each of those problems. 

Think hard on what the underlying objection might be. 

For example:  “My company needs new accounting software, but as the CFO, I feel vulnerable learning a new system, particularly if it’s unproven with my staff”

Add a third column in your list to make Problem, Objection and Solution. 

The more problems and objections you have, the more solutions you can offer! 

Go to town on your solutions. Write down everything you could offer if money was no object to you or your customers. 

Often this ends up being something like personalized service (for example, one to one training from start to finish). 

This is exactly what we want. People want their problems solved with the minimum investment of time and effort from themselves. 

Think of all these objections and solutions which can be automated or documented. 

This is your secret weapon to adding value to the product you create and how you market it. 

You should be able to clearly identify your ideal customer avatar, know the problems they are trying to solve intimately, and be able to show without doubt that you can fix them. 

With this information, let’s get into the specifics of how to drive more users to your SAAS. 

White papers and case studies that actually provide value.

Yawn. We have all heard this one, but 90% of white papers are thinly veiled sales decks. Add value. Give away recipes. Ask yourself, “if I received this, would I forward it to 10 people?” 

If not, go back to the drawing board. 

Advertise in your clients newsletters

Are you a SAAS with hundreds of clients? If so, start a program of advertising in your clients newsletters. If your clients are happy, they should be happy to provide social proof as well as getting paid for it. This works even if you have dozens of clients. 

Use B2B review sites 

There are tons of review sites out there across all industries. Some good ones are G2, Capterra and Trust Radius. Use a Partner Management tool like Everflow to track the success of your activities. 

Use Partners that own comparison sites

I have seen first hand how this can work wonders. Companies like https://trafficpointltd.com/ run many comparison sites are spending their hard earned money in driving both PPC and SEO. They are looking for certain clients in clusters where they can get efficiencies in buying for shared verticals. This works for you if you are a smaller player and can appear alongside bigger names. 

Categorize your CRM into Customer Avatars

If you are using a CRM like Salesforce or Hubspot you need to start categorizing your contacts into customer avatars (this can be based on broad verticals like “Fintech, Ecom, Insurance” etc but it's best to go back and think what potential problem you can solve for them. 

All touch points, whether providing case studies, feature releases, interesting competitor signed etc, should relate back to the customer and his/ her problems, objectives and solutions. 

If a new big client has signe that is a competitor to Prospect A, it can address the objection: “we don’t know your company and don’t have the resources to conduct an audit”. At a stroke, a marquee client can do that for others. 

See some other ideas on Lead Generation for SAAS and B2B here and here