Top Lead Generation Tips for SaaS Companies – Use SMART Approach

Retaining existing customers and keeping them happy is a must, but whether you’re a startup or a profitable SaaS company, your business won’t be able to grow without a steady stream of new leads. That’s where lead generation – the most effective way to gain a large volume of new potential customers and increase the quality of the prospects on your marketing lists – comes into play.

However, even lead generation won’t help your business thrive without the right strategies. Savvy SaaS companies are using SMART goals to keep their growth strategies on track. Are you one of them? If not, stay tuned because we’re about to unveil top lead generation tips for SaaS companies to help yours stay ahead of the curve and competition.

After all, you need to work smarter – not harder.

What Is SaaS Lead Generation?

Lead generation is a digital marketing strategy that helps boost visibility, credibility, trust, and interest from a targeted audience – potential leads. It’s the process of driving traffic from high-quality prospects, leading to high-value customers and more revenue for your business.

SaaS lead generation (lead generation for Software-as-a-Service companies) is all about meeting your potential customers (aka your prospects) where they are and showing how your software satisfies their needs and solves their problems. It’s the first step in a long customer cycle and a strategy that aims to capture the interest of potential customers, fuel sales, and grow success.

To reach your full potential, you need to make the most out of SaaS lead generation and nurture the pipeline from top to bottom of the lead generation funnel. It comes down to nurturing leads into software users, paying customers, and repeat revenue by converting web traffic into quality leads to maximize your marketing ROI as a SaaS company.

How Can a SaaS Business Benefit from Lead Generation?

Any company without a lead generation strategy is a sitting duck as its revenue and growth will mostly rely on the whims of a target audience that may or may not know it even exists. Maximizing growth and revenue is a daunting task without any leads to turn to. If you want to grow your B2B SaaS business, you need leads – quality leads.

A steady flow of leads will allow you to refine and grow your SaaS business into a successful venture and SaaS lead generation is what makes it possible. There are numerous benefits of lead generation, but here are some of the most important ones to spark your interest:

· Expanded market and pool of customers

· More visibility and brand awareness

· Increased following and organic online reach

· Higher quality leads that are more likely to become customers

· Increased efficiency and cost-effectiveness

· Greater growth potential, more sales, and increased revenue.

Success-Driven Lead Generation Tips for SaaS Companies

SaaS (Software as a Service) is one of the booming business sectors today. However, for B2B SaaS companies, lead generation is fiercely competitive – grabbing your slice of market share is harder than ever. Unless you’re a globally renowned tech giant, customers aren’t going to show up at your door just because you have a great solution to offer, and cold calls, emails, and untailored ads won’t get you very far.

To make it in today’s crowded digital environment, you need to reconcile your SaaS lead generation strategy for your business to stay in the game for the long run and have a brighter future. However, this might be easier said than done. In order to tap into all the potential of lead generation, you need a killer approach to your lead generation strategies that will do all the legwork for you.

Enter SMART goals!

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PlayMedia is the digital marketing agency that will take you to the top, and help you grow your business through dedication, transparency, and a unique, highly individual approach.

Mladen Maksic CEO
Play Media

Be Smart About It – Use the SMART Approach

Any marketing endeavor without clear goals in place is a waste of time, money, and resources – a luxury no company can afford. However, choosing the right objectives is not always an easy task. A lot of companies fail because they pursue goals that are unclear, too ambitious, or irrelevant to their business or simply because they are unsure of where to focus their efforts in order to accomplish their ultimate objective.

Smart people focus on the right things. Savvy business owners focus on working smart, not hard. And they use the SMART approach to SaaS lead generation. Since SaaS lead generation is all about defining your goals to attract, engage, and convert potential customers, SMART goals can help you set realistic objectives for your company to work toward.

After all, it’s the secret sauce in the recipe for online business success and the ultimate lead generation tip we can offer SaaS companies out there hunting for their piece of the market pie.

SMART-ing Your Way to SaaS Success

The SMART approach is a method that helps you outline a specific set of criteria to ensure that your objectives are clearly defined and attainable within a specific timeframe that perfectly fits into B2B marketing techniques. The acronym SMART stands for “Specific,” “Measurable,” “Attainable,” “Relevant,” and “Timely / Time-Bound.” What does that look like when applied to lead generation and inbound marketing?

Your goal must be specific and measurable so you can track the progress towards achieving it, attainable so you would set goals you can actually reach, relevant to your SaaS business objectives at large, and accomplished within a certain timeline. Rather than setting an ambiguous or farfetched goal, you can use the SMART approach to define an attainable and realistic goal for your lead generation strategy.

SMART goals can, thus, help you fill your lead generation funnel, move prospects further down your sales funnel, and drive top-line growth when they successfully convert into paying customers.

Advantages of Setting SMART SaaS Lead Generation Objectives

Taking a SMART approach to lead generation as part of your inbound marketing efforts will help you control your budget and decrease unnecessary costs, broaden your company’s perspective, focus on strategic planning, make room for continuous improvement, minimize pointless risks, and ultimately concentrate on what matters most and make it happen.

In a nutshell, your SaaS business will benefit greatly from setting SMART goals when creating lead generation strategies, as it:

· Provides direction, and clarity and helps create meaningful and realistic objectives

· Helps to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and prioritize

· Keeps you and your team motivated

· Helps to retain focus on the desired result

· Acts as a constant performance enhancer tool as it identifies the areas in need of tweaking and improvement

· Gives you a feeling of satisfaction as you continue to monitor your progress towards the goal

· Saves time that could otherwise be wasted on activities that aren’t goal-oriented.

If your goal is not measurable, how will you even know when you’ve met it? Applying concrete numbers and metrics to your lead generation goals will make them easy to track and allow you to quantify your progress (or lack of) so you can stay focused on your path to success. In order to successfully pursue it, you need a highly-specific lead generation goal that leaves nothing open for interpretation, so you can chase after it with a clear focus.

Yes, goals should be challenging and not too easy to reach, but they also need to be rooted in reality if you want them to bear any fruit and avoid distress, disappointment, and demotivation. Applying attainability and relevancy to your SMART lead generation goals will allow you to prioritize goals that are actually meaningful for your SaaS business and yield meaningful and tangible results.

If a goal is set with no designated due date, will it ever really be accomplished? There’s no way around it – if you want your goals to come to life, they need deadlines! Making your SaaS lead generation goal time-bound is the key to making consistent progress within a specific time frame.

Example of Using SMART Approach to Create a SaaS Lead Generation Strategy

With that said, it’s clear that establishing SMART objectives should be part of your SaaS business’s inbound marketing strategies. Here’s an example of what it looks like in practice to help you get a clear picture of how SMART goals can directly be applied to your SaaS lead generation strategy.

For example, let’s say your goal is to increase the number of qualified leads by 25% in two months using an email marketing strategy. How is this a SMART goal?

• It’s specific – it’s clear that you should be working towards increasing the number of quality leads that have shown interest in your product or service

• It’s measurable – the goal is to increase the number of current qualified leads by 25%, in this instance, from 500 to 625

• It’s achievable – this goal is achievable by generating a targeted and high-quality lead nurturing email campaign

• It’s relevant – your SaaS company will definitely benefit from having more leads that are close to conversion

• It’s timely – the goal is time-bound as it has a two-month deadline.

You can use the SMART approach to set lead generation goals that apply to your website visitors, social media following and reach, blog subscribers, attracting or retaining leads, email campaigns, click rates, or anything in between. The options are endless – simply focus on the most relevant goals for your Saas company’s growth!

Set SMART Goals to Fuel Your SaaS Lead Generation Funnel

Creating robust lead generation strategies by setting SMART goals can help your SaaS company succeed in attaining them and use them as a ladder to climb to the top, one goal at a time.

Ensure you factor in each element of the SMART framework to set up your SaaS company for future-proof success. You will be able to quantify your progress along the way, adjust it if needed and encourage yourself as you get closer to your goal.
And, whatever you do, make sure you work smart, not hard!