• A successful SaaS marketing plan needs to align with long sales cycles, complex buying committees, and recurring revenue models.
• Mid-market and enterprise SaaS buyers expect high-value, solution-specific content, not surface-level messaging.
• Cross-functional alignment across content, paid, marketing ops, and other teams is what turns marketing strategy into revenue.
• Attribution, CAC, and LTV metrics should be the backbone of your measurement strategy, not vanity KPIs.
• A plan is only as good as its ability to drive compounding growth. Prioritize testing, iteration, and feedback loops.

Let’s be honest: most SaaS marketing plans are either too generic to be useful or so bloated they never get executed. A great plan doesn’t just list marketing tactics, it builds alignment across departments, drives pipeline, and adapts to the complexity of mid-market and enterprise go-to-market motions.

Whether you’re scaling a $20M SaaS company or managing marketing operations for a publicly traded platform, this guide is designed to show you how to build a modern SaaS marketing plan that actually drives outcomes, not just activities.

Need a partner to lead cross-functional strategy and execution? Explore Directive’s SaaS marketing services.

Why SaaS marketing planning looks different for mid-market and enterprise

At Directive, we’ve specialized in SaaS for nearly a decade. While our work now spans a broad range of B2B organizations, SaaS remains our core DNA. We’ve helped hundreds of software companies scale pipeline, improve CAC efficiency, and operationalize full-funnel strategies. And we’ve seen firsthand how SaaS marketing shifts dramatically as companies grow from product-market fit to mid-market momentum and then to enterprise scale.

Mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies have:

• Longer sales cycles (60–180+ days)
• Larger buying committees (multiple stakeholders, departments, technical and business)
• Higher contract values (meaning higher stakes per deal)
• More complex implementation timelines
• Multi-product or multi-solution offerings

That means your SaaS marketing plan has to do more than generate leads. It has to:

• Create demand across business units and roles through targeted marketing campaigns
• Educate and enable across the entire customer journey
• Align deeply with sales stages and objection handling, integrating sales team efforts
• Support multi-channel nurturing and multi-threaded outreach using marketing automation

Bottom line: Your SaaS marketing strategy needs to act like an integrated growth engine, not a disconnected channel plan.

Step 1: Set marketing goals that match business outcomes

One of the biggest mistakes we see across mid-market and enterprise SaaS teams is over-focusing on surface-level metrics. It’s easy to get fixated on MQL volume, impressions, or even demo form fills, but those numbers often mask deeper issues. Without tying these indicators back to revenue, efficiency, and lifetime value, it’s nearly impossible to tell what’s actually working.

In mid-market and enterprise SaaS, marketing exists to drive pipeline growth, not just MQLs. But too often, marketing teams are still evaluated on volume instead of revenue contribution.

Start by aligning your SaaS marketing metrics with the organization’s revenue model:

• What’s the average contract value (ACV)?
• How much new pipeline needs to be sourced per quarter?
• What is your current customer acquisition cost (CAC) and payback period by segment?

Once you answer these, your goals might look like:

• $5M in net new pipeline from marketing-sourced activity
• CAC below $7,000 for your enterprise tier
• Reducing CAC payback period from 12 months to 9 months

Marketing in 2025 doesn’t just fuel growth for a specific channel, it aims to improve overall revenue efficiency for the organization.

Step 2: Deeply understand your buyers and buying process

Enterprise marketing doesn’t fail because teams don’t have personas built out. It fails because those personas aren’t connected to real buying behavior. Understanding who your buyer is isn’t enough anymore – you need to understand how they buy, what internal friction exists, and who really makes the call. This is where surface-level audience insights fall short and where strategic, full-journey intelligence becomes essential.

Enterprise SaaS buyers don’t behave like DTC shoppers or even SMB decision-makers. They move slower, require more validation, and often engage in multiple sales conversations before buying.

To create a meaningful SaaS marketing strategy, you need to:

• Conduct win/loss analysis and interview closed-won and closed-lost deals to find patterns (who are our best customers?)
• Map the internal buying process (security, procurement, legal, IT) and when each gets involved
• Align persona messaging to both functional and emotional drivers (e.g., “saves time” vs. “helps me prove ROI to leadership”)

It’s not just about building buyer personas – it’s about understanding how influence is distributed across the deal. That insight should inform your content marketing strategy, ad segmentation, and nurture strategy.

Step 3: Build an integrated full-funnel strategy

You can’t afford a fragmented buyer experience in enterprise SaaS. But most marketing strategies still treat channels like silos, with separate goals, teams, and messages. The problem? Your buyers don’t care who owns what. They’re judging your credibility, consistency, and presence across every interaction. Integrated cross-channel planning isn’t a luxury anymore – it’s a requirement.

In many companies, marketing channels are still planned in silos. That leads to fragmented journeys, inconsistent messaging, and inefficient spend.

A full-funnel SaaS marketing strategy integrates:

• Paid search to capture high-intent buyers already in market
• SEO and content marketing to educate and influence early-stage researchers
• Paid social and social media marketing to create demand, seed ideas, and drive retargeting audiences
• Lifecycle marketing and email marketing to move leads through education, nurture, and expansion

An enterprise-grade plan doesn’t just check boxes. It’s built around:

• Unified campaign themes across all touchpoints
• Shared KPIs across teams (content, paid, ops, sales)
• Feedback loops that drive iteration every sprint or quarter

At Directive, we’ve seen firsthand with our clients how aligning channels like content marketing and paid advertising around shared revenue goals leads to faster wins and stronger long-term positioning.

Step 4: Create differentiated content by audience, vertical, and solution

Enterprise SaaS content isn’t just about education, it’s about enabling decisions. When the stakes are high and the solution is complex, buyers need confidence. They want to see that you understand their space, can solve their exact problem, and are trusted by people like them. Generic content can’t do that, which is why differentiation through content is your competitive edge.

Your content needs to reflect the complexity of your solution, the nuance of your buyer’s pain, and the competitive context they operate in.

Strong content strategies should include:

• Segmented landing pages tailored by industry, job function, and use case
• Solution-specific nurture sequences that align to sales plays
• Enablement content co-created with sales to answer the most common objections
• Competitive comparison pages that highlight differentiators in plain language
• Owned benchmarks, data studies, or proprietary insights to position your brand as a thought leader

As mentioned previously, while many of these pieces may seem over-the-top, they are quickly becoming the status quo for leading SaaS organizations like our clients.

Step 5: Align execution across content, paid, ops, and sales

Most execution issues aren’t caused by bad strategy, they’re caused by misalignment. The best ideas fall apart when teams are working from different calendars, briefs, or success definitions. Especially in enterprise orgs, where departments are often siloed, alignment isn’t something that happens naturally. It has to be deliberately engineered into your marketing plan.

What alignment actually looks like:

• Shared Asana or Monday board with all campaign deliverables across functions
• Weekly standups with stakeholders from content, paid, ops, and sales
• Live campaign retros where attribution, lead quality, and sales feedback are discussed together
• Unified reporting capabilities (preferrably automated)

Directive’s clients benefit from unified teams that combine strategic direction with agile delivery. It’s how we move fast without sacrificing clarity on next steps and strategy.

Step 6: Measure performance and optimize with precision

Measuring enterprise marketing isn’t as simple as generating generic reports – it’s about uncovering actionable insight. Yet too many teams get stuck in dashboards that overemphasize clicks, views, or campaign attribution in isolation. What really matters is connecting spend to revenue, identifying friction in the funnel, and creating a system where insights lead directly to optimizations across all channels. Precision in measurement isn’t just helpful, it’s foundational to making the adjustments you need.

Enterprise marketing performance can’t be tracked in a spreadsheet. You need:

• Full-funnel dashboards showing spend, channel-specific metrics, and revenue
• Attribution models flexible enough to show sourced and influenced revenue
• Cohort analysis to understand customer lifetime value and churn by acquisition channel
• Segmentation that allows you to filter by industry, persona, or deal size

Powered by this data, your marketing strategy should be driven by:

• Clear insight into which channels are producing best-fit customers
• Understanding where pipeline stalls and what content accelerates it
• What changes or strategic adjustments were the most successful from a revenue standpoint

Marketing (and leadership) can’t afford to wait 12 months to know what’s working. With the right data and dashboards, your team can pivot in weeks, not quarters or years.

Final thoughts: The best SaaS marketing plans don’t sit in a deck – they drive real results

Modern enterprise marketing leaders aren’t looking for more campaigns. They’re looking for repeatable ways to turn spend into revenue.

That’s what a successful SaaS marketing strategy does:

• Aligns go-to-market strategy with measurable outcomes
• Connects teams across the SaaS marketing funnel
• Identifies and scales what’s working, and kills what’s not
• Evolves as your product, audience, and market shift

If your current plan doesn’t do that, it’s not a real plan – it’s a to-do list.

Want a partner that thinks like your CMO — and executes like your in-house team?

Working with a SaaS marketing agency isn’t just about outsourcing execution. It’s about gaining a partner with:

• Proven playbooks across dozens of SaaS business models and verticals
• Real-time insight into what’s working across the market (not just your silo)
• Cross-functional teams that can scale strategy, content, paid advertising, and marketing operations, without handoffs or bandwidth issues
• A strategic lens on revenue growth, not just lead generation

Directive acts like an embedded growth team. We bring benchmarks, velocity, and ROI clarity to every part of the funnel. So instead of wondering if your marketing efforts are working, you’ll know exactly what’s driving pipeline, what needs to improve, and how to scale it.

Whether you’re refining your digital marketing strategy for a single product line or need to operationalize marketing across multiple regions or verticals, we’ve done it before – and we’ll bring that knowledge to your team from day one.

Get in touch with our team for more information on our SaaS marketing services.

Appendix: Additional Considerations for a Successful SaaS Marketing Plan

Beyond the core steps, successful SaaS marketing plans also incorporate:

• Customer retention strategies: Given the subscription nature of SaaS, retaining existing customers through exceptional onboarding, customer success initiatives, and proactive engagement is as critical as acquiring new ones.
• Referral marketing programs: Encouraging satisfied customers to refer others can lower acquisition costs and increase trust among prospective customers.
• Account-based marketing (ABM): Particularly effective in enterprise SaaS, ABM targets high-value accounts with personalized campaigns aligned with specific business needs.
• Continuous competitor analysis: Staying aware of competitors’ positioning and messaging helps maintain differentiation in a crowded market.
• Marketing budget optimization: Allocating budget strategically across channels based on performance data ensures efficient use of resources and maximizes ROI.
• Leveraging marketing automation: Automating repetitive tasks like email nurturing, lead scoring, and campaign management increases efficiency and enables personalized engagement at scale.
• Integration of product-led growth tactics: Combining marketing efforts with product experiences such as free trials or freemium models helps demonstrate value and accelerate adoption.

The post The Complete Guide to Building a SaaS Marketing Plan That Drives Results appeared first on Directive.

That means finding the right balance between building brand awareness and targeting the specific users who can become real leads for your pipeline. Your content should educate and nurture your audience about your service. But how you approach them depends on where they are in the B2B sales cycle.

To better accommodate the elongated B2B sales cycle, it’s important to distinguish between demand generation and lead generation campaigns.

Understanding the B2B Sales Process

Before diving deeper into demand and lead generation, it’s essential to understand the broader sales process that guides these efforts. A structured sales process is a series of defined steps that sales teams convert prospects through, from initial contact to closing deals and beyond. Unlike the often shorter and more straightforward business to consumer (B2C) buying process, the B2B sales cycle involves multiple stakeholders, longer decision-making timelines, and more complex negotiations.

Sales teams convert prospects by carefully navigating each stage of the sales funnel, using tailored sales strategies to address the unique pain points and business goals of potential buyers. This structured approach helps sales professionals align marketing and sales efforts, improve sales efficiency, and ultimately close more deals.

B2B Pain Points: Demand Vs Lead Gen

So, what exactly is the difference between “demand generation” and “lead generation”? To put it simply, the first deals with driving interest and awareness for your service, while the second focuses on collecting contact info for your sales team to follow up with.

• Demand Generation: the focus of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and/or services.
• Lead Generation: the action or process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for a business’s products or services.

It’s important to note that lead generation is going to be tough for any B2B marketer who hasn’t properly launched a demand gen campaign. Without the initial traction of demand generation, your audience won’t be educated enough for you to convert them into leads.

Don’t put the cart before the horse.

Now, just because you’ve distinguished between demand and lead gen doesn’t mean it’s easy pickings from here. In B2B marketing especially there is a constant debate over how to target your campaigns.

Do I target my exact buyer with account-based marketing or do I go after the larger audience in the hope that my end buyer finds me?

It may seem like an easy solution to publish content that generates demands and leads (ideally). But the best search marketing campaigns aren’t built off blindly waving your hands and hoping for the best. They are built on deliberate, data driven decisions.

Roadmapping Your Buyer’s Journey

Publishing content without carefully researching where your end-customer is reading and converting is a great way to waste time and resources.

You not only need to create content and ads that cater to your end customer. You also need to place these assets on the right channels where your end customer is researching. This means knowing the difference between an entry level searcher in your demographic and a conversion-ready user. Each will be engaging with different content on different platforms. And you need to be able to reach both.

When it comes to successfully targeting different campaigns to different level users, the rule is always the same:

Segment, Segment, Segment.

The more you can target the unique offer of your campaigns to specific users, the more success you’ll see. You should be tailoring dedicated campaigns to generate demand, nurture mid-level leads, and convert bottom-funnel users. Each campaign is comprehensive and self contained to include its own:

• Psychological breakdown of value and offer (find the sweet spot between value and convenience for specific offer)
• Keyword research to target specific market segment (either broad level keyword for demand gen or long tail for lead gen)
• Unique content that targets specific pain points or questions
• Dedicated landing pages (if necessary) with focused CTA for the specific market segment

Where your user is in the buyer’s journey will determine how aggressively you market your services. Early stage is for relationship building, late stage is for closing and collecting contact info.

It’s key you know at what point to make the leap from demand gen to lead gen. For the most granular picture of your buyer’s journey, integrating your marketing and sales data may be your best bet.

Integrating B2B Marketing & B2B Sales

In B2B, marketing and sales can often become blurred into one larger digital marketing strategy. Marketing works to fill the pipeline with conversions for the sales team. Sales works to provide Marketing with real time feedback on how their content is nurturing/engaging leads.

What we didn’t realize is that B2B executives aren’t reading Moz and Wordstream. These are blogs that fellow digital marketers read to better their own skillset. We were creating content and promoting it (spending hours and money) just for our competitors!

It wasn’t until our sales team noticed that the leads we were converting from these campaigns were unqualified, non B2B, digital marketers that we corrected. Now the content we created was targeting the actual accounts we were chasing. Our posts went from looking like Moz SEO Guides to this:

Creating content and campaigns about your end customers, for your end customers, and promoting it to your end customers. That is how you directly engage with your ideal audience. Integrating your marketing and sales teams towards an Account Based approach should streamline your entire team towards the right goals. Consistent and data-driven communication between marketing and sales is a MUST in B2B.

Now that you know the need for targeting your campaigns to unique points in the buyer’s journey, let’s see how to do it.

Top of Funnel: Building Brand Awareness

Campaigns that focus on the top of your funnel usually fall under demand generation. These campaigns usually target users who are recently beginning their research into a pain point or problem.

Beyond the psychological intent behind beginner level searchers, it’s also important to identify where they are reading. For example, at Directive Consulting most of our top-funnel content consists of guest posting. This isn’t just guest blogging for link building’s sake. We actually target industry leading thought leader blogs to post authoritative content.

We focus our top-funnel campaigns on high-volume, broad primary keywords like “B2B Marketing.” This way we can target any of the entry level search queries who have yet to dive into the long-tail. Amassing as much market share as you can for these early stage queries is a great way to generate demand. The more your brand pops up, the more your user will associate it with the solution.

When it comes to B2B, often times you need to educate your users on the actual need for your service. You actually have to generate the initial demand for your supply from scratch. For this reason, you need to be careful with what copy you use. You don’t want to push jargon-heavy content or ads towards early stage users. The high-friction level will just bounce them off without interest.

Case in point: we ran into this same issue ourselves. While trying to generate demand for our Comprehensive Search Model, “Share of SERP,” we noticed we were targeting the wrong end of the funnel. Most entry level users don’t know that “SERP” stands for Search Engine Results Page. We changed our copy to look like the screenshot above.

Be wary of bouncing earlier users away by focusing too much of your language on the end conversion. It may seem like a great way to target late-stage buyers and market your expertise.

But awesome content doesn’t always have to be expert content.

Middle Funnel: Educating On the What & the Why

The middle of your funnel is where demand gen crosses over into lead gen. This is where you’ll see strategies like lead nurturing and drip cadences. Psychologically, users in the middle of your funnel are already aware of their need for your service. Ideally, they’ll already be aware of your brand as well.

Your job here is to convey the value of your unique branded service/solution. And this is where B2B lead gen gets tough. Nurturing leads today has become a balanced dance between clever marketing and value-driven sales.

The golden rule of lead nurturing sums it up well:

Help, don’t sell.

For middle stage users, you need to convince them that you/your company are the most helpful solution. Not the best, or the highest ranked, or the most expensive – the most helpful. The more delightful and personalized the experience, the more inclined your user will be to convert. For help with lead nurturing you can check out Pardot’s infographic below for a step-by-step guide.

It’s important to keep in mind that this is where most B2B campaigns see the largest time discrepancy. It may be the case that you first interact with your user right when they sign a new 6 month contract. That’s okay.

This means you have 6 whole months to nurture that lead until they are ready to sign with a new agency. At that point – your name should be at the top of their list. As I said at the beginning of this post, B2B marketing takes time. And playing by the rules of the elongated sales cycle is necessary to build your brand and naturally fill your pipeline.

Bottom Funnel: Distinguishing Brand Value

Pipeline marketing is a big buzz word in the B2B space. But the truth is that pipeline marketing only really refers to lead gen campaigns that focus on the middle and bottom of your funnel. So, regardless of which cylindrical metaphor you choose, the bottom is going to look the same.

The bottom of your funnel is where your most qualified users will be lurking. These are searchers who have interacted with your site before, whether ads or content, and have returned for more information. Ideally, they will have been touched at least through one, intentional market interaction by this point.

This is where your full-blown lead gen campaigns kick in. Here you will see things like gated content and form fill outs. Explicit CTAs that encourage conversion and focus the on-page experience towards a single goal tend to perform best here. Emphasize conversion in the experience more than helpful insights. At this point you are less worried about nurturing and educating your users and more worried about getting their contact info in hopes that your sales reps can get ahold of them.

It’s time to close. Which means whatever you are offering in this late-stage interaction needs to be top-notch. If you are looking to convert a user, the asset you are leveraging must match the amount of personal information they have to give you.

Finding the right balance between your form submission field and the actual piece of gated content is the key to converting leads en masse.

Leveraging Sales Tools and Data-Driven Decision Making

To successfully navigate the B2B sales cycle, it’s crucial for sales leaders and sales managers to equip their teams with the right sales tools and technology. CRM systems, lead generation software, and sales enablement platforms help sales professionals manage customer interactions, track leads, and analyze sales performance.

Data-driven decision making allows sales teams to optimize their sales efforts by identifying bottlenecks in the sales funnel, improving lead qualification processes, and tailoring sales pitches to address specific pain points. Continuous sales training and sales coaching further empower sales reps to handle objections effectively, align sales and marketing strategies, and ultimately close more deals.

The Importance of Post-Sale Follow-Up and Building Customer Loyalty

Closing a sale is just the beginning of a long-term customer relationship. Effective post-sale follow-up ensures customer satisfaction, addresses any concerns, and opens opportunities for repeat sales and referrals. Building customer loyalty through ongoing communication and support helps businesses achieve sustainable business growth and maintain a competitive edge.

Tracking Long Term Growth & Daily Inputs

While you should be targeting each stage of the buyer’s journey with unique and dedicated campaigns, that doesn’t mean they are isolated to themselves. Your campaigns should feed into one another to naturally transition your user from one stage to the next.

The more point-by-point you can map out this journey – the better you’ll be able to optimize your site for the ideal behaviors.

All in all you should be setting monthly and quarterly goals the reflect your segmentations, respectively. Splitting these long term goals into smaller segments will make task management easier.

You’ll have a better sense of what daily inputs are feeding into your long term growth goals. This way, you can allocate your time and resources to expand on the features of your campaigns that are working best. Or you can re-allocate resources to stages that may need more attention.

The more granular your tracking and the more segmented your campaigns, the more valuable your insights will be. And the more efficient your optimization strategies will become.

Takeaways: Know Where You Are & What to Ask For

Every user works his or her way through the search engines with an individual intent and individual needs. Especially if you are new to the B2B space, not every user is going to know who you are or what you offer.

It’s vital that you can build the initial demand and awareness for your brand. But its also necessary that you craft campaigns to capitalize on the demand you generate.

The better you can whittle down the targets of your campaigns (regardless of which stage), the better they’ll perform.

Educating, qualifying, and converting the right leads in your target audience all starts with three simple questions: “Who are you looking for?” “Where are they researching” and “What do they want?” Answer these questions – and you’ll know the exact who, what, when, and where of your campaigns.

The post The Complete Guide to Navigating the B2B Sales Cycle appeared first on Directive.

“I won’t glance twice at a LinkedIn message if there’s no incentive attached to it. Sorry, not sorry, but I don’t have time for a pitch if I can’t also use the time to order new golf balls on Amazon with the gift card I got from that intro call,” Anonymous (from an internal poll). 

This response isn’t isolated. Your pitch, your hilarious email, your clever turns-of-phrases aren’t worth the digital ink they’re written with if you don’t offer more. Potential customers are busy. And in this “dynamic world of B2B SaaS marketing, where strategies and tactics evolve faster than we can keep track of,” people will still argue that gift cards simply don’t work. (Editor’s note: I tried to use as much jargon as possible in this sentence for effect. FOR EFFECT!)

• “Gift cards are cheap meetings!”
• “They’re not real marketing!”
• “Worst hack ever!”

Calm down.

Yes, the reputation of a gift card has become one that marketers love to hate. But why?

“I genuinely hate gift cards too, they can feel icky. But the biggest ick of all is losing a deal I could have won,” Directive’s CEO, Garrett Mehrguth chimes in. “Marketers love to hate on gift cards. But in the last 36 months, I drove $15M+ in revenue for Directive giving away Amazon gift cards.”

Gift cards may not be the preferred go-to, but honestly, they work. And without them, B2B may not be what it is. 

Let’s explore this a bit more. 

What are the Real Objections to Gift Cards?

If you have to pay someone to listen to you, does that make what you’re saying less valuable? Or does it perhaps show your listener you value their time? 

Some marketers say that gift cards devalue a meeting, and actually lead to lower conversion rates. Maybe, though, this argument instead hides a deeper sentiment. Maybe marketers think they’re too good for this. 

Looking closer, though, gift cards are not about lowering the value of a meeting or compromising quality—they are a strategic incentive to drive action. They serve as a catalyst to move prospects from apathy to engagement. 

The Getting-Going-With-Gift-Cards Plan of Action

ACTION 1

Know Your Audience, Serve It 

If you want your gift cards to actually work, you need to be specific with your messaging. This means you must target one audience with a focused value proposition, and consider your product’s unique selling points to that audience. Now, hone in on a singular title in a specific vertical like a Director of Demand Generation at SaaS companies with over 200 employees.

Boom.

A simple yet focused approach.

Why does this work? With a narrow focus, you increase the relevance of your message, shortening the time to value for your prospects. You are not attempting to be Salesforce overnight; instead, emulate the success of more niche-focused companies like Gong by offering precise solutions to a well-defined audience.

Directive’s VP of Strategic Engagements, Drew Choco, knows this. He says, “Marketers should use [gift cards] because it allows you to generate sales meetings from a platform like LinkedIn, where there is no search intent.” Drew elaborates, “If you have a specific niche that you are going after, the best way to get in front of them is on a channel where you can actually control firmographics, technographics, etc. This is also a great way to control ACV, because again, you have control over the types of accounts you’re reaching out to.”

Further, Drew explains, “A lot of people who take the call are actively looking for our services. I hear a lot of, ‘What intent data are you using to target me?’ The reality is, they likely saw our ad a number of times, but chose to respond because they were actively looking for what we do, and get gift card out of it.”

ACTION 2

Send Gift Cards to Qualified Audiences Only 

Not all potential customers are created equal. 

Your gift card strategy should reflect this. The key to success is manual verification of your Total Addressable Market (TAM). Map out and verify every account you plan to target, ensuring they align with your ideal customer profile.

When you’re only advertising to your manually-verified audiences, you can rest assured your budget won’t go to waste. The goal of all of this direct response advertising is to get the right person from the right account into a sales moment. You know what doesn’t get people to a sales moment? Whitepapers.  

Who’s your audience? We can help! 

Check out this Customer Segmentation & Personas Worksheet to get you headed in the right direction!

ACTION 3

Target Champions, Not Decision Makers

What’s that saying? My enemy’s enemy is my friend? This is sorta like that. Sorta. 

It doesn’t seem intuitive, but targeting C-level executives directly isn’t going to do what you think it’s going to do. Why? C-level execs empower their direct reports and trust them to make the right choices. This means, you should be talking to the teams of the C-Levels, or, as we call them, the champions.

Champions could be more receptive to incentives like gift cards. All you have to do is gain their trust. This bottom-up approach can lead to higher conversion rates and stronger relationships with key stakeholders.

“I’ve been approached a million times by my CEO saying, ‘What do you think about this tool, Will?’” Directive’s Director of Content Marketing, Will Price details. “I’ll come to him with a business case for a tool or solution, but rarely does he champion something. I just need his signature on the contract. Trust is a crucial thing.” 

ACTION 4

Think Bigger, Use Video

Think for a second: Have you ever seen an insurance company advertise an eBook? Or a car company promote a data sheet? That information is readily available. Yet they don’t leverage these assets to bring people to a sales moment (CALLBACK!). No, instead, they use creative, compelling commercials to capture attention.

One time, a salesperson sent us a video of himself playing with his puppy. There was a gift card attached, too, but honestly, the puppy sold it, and we hopped on that call. 

Film a 30-second live-action commercial that highlights your product’s value and promote it alongside your gift card. 

PRO TIP: Make sure your budget is small enough that you don’t need to prove ROI directly to the CFO immediately. This allows for sustained engagement without constant scrutiny.

Additionally, set up retargeting audiences for those who engage with your video ads. These audiences often become your top-performing segments, amplifying the impact of your gift card campaigns.

How do you get started with video?

“Worry way more about what to say and way less on the production value of it,” Directive, Director of Video, Mike Farnham says. “Sharpen that axe most of the day, then chop the cherry tree.” 

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Gift cards work. 

“Gift cards may not be the magic carrot,” explains Mia White, Directive’s Director of Strategic Engagements. “But whatever aligns with the ideal customer to move them from apathy to action.” 

Gift cards have outperformed other approaches we’ve tested, including Allbirds, Yeti Coolers, donation matching, discounts, and credits. And they’re easier to send. 

If you’re in a moral quandary about using them, just remember, there’s no prize for being “anti-something.”

The gift card is not the value proposition itself; it’s an incentive to drive action. When executed thoughtfully, it can be a powerful tool to create meaningful interactions and conversions.

Do what works for your organization. 

The post Without Gift Cards, B2B Would Fail (+ a worksheet) appeared first on Directive.

In fact, 86% of software buyers use peer review sites when buying software.

However, when it comes to growth marketing, directories can often be a marketer’s afterthought to Google ads and paid social.

Directories are a high-intent channel that can help sellers find and convert more buyers. Bottom-of-funnel advertising should focus on gaining a share of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for high-intent keywords. Then, with third-party directories, you can effectively capture high-intent traffic.

Let’s go through how to pick the right directories, whether it’s worth spending money on them, and how to optimize and measure your performance.

Maximize your presence with the right directories.

The right directories for your tech company are typically the ones that rank high on your key buyer search terms.

Most of the traffic on directories comes from search. Therefore, if a directory isn’t ranking high on a key buyer search term, then it likely won’t drive strong results.

Ensure the directory ranks high on a search for “best (your primary software category).” At PartnerStack, we ran a 3-month pilot on a directory that doesn’t rank on the first page of our primary buyer search term, “best partner management software.” They told us to expect 150-250 clicks/per month, but we got 35 clicks/per month and one bad lead/per month. Therefore, we ended the pilot and re-focused on our top 3-4 directories.

You will also need to consider the category fit of a directory.

Still have more questions? Join Society, our exclusive Slack community dedicated to marketers in the tech space.

Once you select your directory or directories of focus, then you need to decide if it’s worth investing in.

Determine if investing in directories is right for your company.

Before advertising on directories, you need to determine if it’s the right fit for your business.

In general, if your buyers turn to online search, directories will be a strong channel for your software or tech company because they dominate search for commercial intent search terms.

Directories offer 2 main growth solutions:

• Buyer intent data subscriptions: vendors get account-level intelligence on category, product profile, and comparison views.
• Cost-per-click (CPC) auctions: vendors bid to rank higher in a directory category page and pay per click to their site to generate leads.

Let’s explore each of these options.

Directories with buyer intent data subscriptions.

Directories like G2, TrustRadius, and PeerSpot offer buyer intent data subscriptions. Recall how 86% of software buyers use peer review sites to research and evaluate solutions? Now imagine if you knew which potential customers were researching and evaluating your solution and others like it. Enter buyer intent data.

While these directories provide a link to your site that you can track, the sites are designed to keep the buyer on the directory, making access to the buyer intent data much more valuable.

Buyer intent data can work well for software and tech companies with higher average contract values (ACVs). Since each prospect carries a greater weight, fewer but higher quality leads are preferred. Lower ACV companies, on the other hand, may benefit more from directories with CPC auctions.

Directories with cost-per-click (CPC) auctions.

Directories like Gartner Digital Markets sites (Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice) and Clutch offer vendors the option to bid in a CPC auction to rank higher on a category page. The auction functions very similarly to a Google search ad auction. It’s pay-as-you-go, offering the flexibility to start and stop as you like.

CPL on directories can be relatively high, but the cost per customer acquisition (CAC) can be relatively low because of the intent on search.

In fact, according to Directive’s benchmark data from partnerships with over 200 software and tech brands and over $100 million spent on ads, they’ve found that directories had the highest cost per lead but the best LTV:CAC.

However, the math on directories doesn’t work for every company.

To determine whether it’s right for you, use this handy PPC calculator by Gartner Digital Markets to calculate your max CPC.

If you don’t know all the numbers, use their benchmarks as a guide but play it conservatively (i.e. use a number lower than they suggest). After all, it is in their best interest for you to bid.

Also, remember that your ACV, sales motion (product-led or sales-led), and market position all play into your conversion rates.

For example, suppose a newer vendor has a sales-led motion (i.e. your CTA is “contact us” or “book a demo”) and has a 5 or 6-figure ACV. In that case, your conversion rates will be a lot lower than a market-leading vendor with a PLG motion (i.e. CTA is “get started” or “free trial”) with a 3 or 4-figure ACV.

If you do decide to advertise in directories, optimization is imperative.

4 ways to optimize your ad spend on directories.

Advertising on directories is a highly effective way to reach your target audience and generate revenue for your business. However, to get the most out of your investment, you need to optimize your ad spend. There are 4 ways you can optimize your ad spend on directories:

1. Get more reviews to increase conversion rates.

Gartner Digital Markets found that products listed on Digital Markets sites with 50 or more reviews can increase pay-per-click (PPC) conversion rates by 4.6%.

If you’re just starting, aim to get 10 or more reviews and a rating of 4.2 or greater before bidding.

Need help getting started? Here are a few ways you can collect reviews.

2. Personalize your copy to attract the right customers.

If you’re running pay-per-click advertising on a directory, you want to deter the wrong buyers from clicking on your listing as much as you want to encourage the right buyers.

For example, at PartnerStack, we were finding success with ads on the directory Capterra but had too many leads that weren’t the right fit for our solution. Too many small non-SaaS businesses were clicking on our profile and eating up our budget.

Therefore, we revised our profile copy to highlight who we’re ideal for—mid-sized B2B SaaS companies.

This revision improved our lead-to-opportunity rate by 29% and generated more revenue from less spend on Capterra.

3. Bid for the right rankings to get the best ROI.

There’s a premium to rank 1st in a directory auction. Everyone wants to be the first. However, oftentimes it isn’t worth the money; at least from a measurable ROI standpoint.

Instead, bid to place high enough to make it into a buyer’s consideration. As a rough guideline, aim for the top 5. If you stay in that 2-5 rank range, you’ll likely get the best bang for your buck.

4. Make the most out of your rankings with custom landing pages.

To make the most out of the money you spend getting buyers to click on your profile, you must convert them to the next step. As with Google search ads, the best practice is to direct the buyer to a landing page with messaging that aligns with the category page from which they came from.

Directory site, Capterra, says a software company’s average click-to-lead conversion rate is 7%. However, keep in mind that it’s blended across their customer base. Therefore, a relatively higher ACV product with a sales-led motion will likely have a lower rate—nearer 3% in my experience.

Regardless of the benchmark, what matters most is how you improve upon your conversion rate.

Now that you know how to optimize your directory ad spend, you’ll want to know how to measure its revenue impact.

How to measure the revenue impact of directories.

Software and tech marketers know all too well the limitations of attribution.

Attributing the actual value of directories is, unfortunately, the same.

The standard approach to attributing leads from directories is simple: track how many people clicked on your profile link on the directory, and then attribute leads, pipeline, and revenue to those clicks.

While this is necessary to show revenue impact, it greatly undersells the value of directories.

You probably know intuitively that many buyers go to directories to research and then come into your funnel marked as another source. But, how many?

To give you a sense, we dug into it at PartnerStack.

We picked 50 recent inbound leads to review manually. We cross-referenced “How did you hear about us?” data from our contact us form, lead source attribution, and G2 buyer intent data.

We found the following about our leads:

• 2.5% mentioned G2 in their “How did you hear about us?” form response
• 6% were attributed to G2 (source=G2) in our system
• 20% showed G2 buyer intent within 30 days of the inbound request

In other words, 3.5x more leads were influenced by a directory (G2 in this case) than what we had attributed and used to measure channel performance.

Almost 10x more leads were looking at us on directories than what the “how did you hear about us?” data was telling us.

In other words, those who put “internet” or “online research” as how they heard about us often actually came through G2.

Therefore, if you can break even with directly attributable ad spend on directories (i.e. the revenue you generate from tracked clicks through your directory profile), it’s well worth the investment considering the added boost you’ll get from other buyers who will find and consider you but get marked as another lead source.

Attract your target customers with directories.

Directories are high-intent channels that you can leverage for growth marketing at your software or tech company. Once you’ve decided that spending money to rank on directories is right for your business, you’ll need to determine which directories are right for you. You’ll also need to choose which type you should invest in. Once you do, it’s imperative that you optimize and manage your spend for the best ROI.

Start converting high-intent demand into Customer Generation with personalized performance marketing strategies that leverage the power of directories, today.

Joe Kevens is the Director of Demand Generation at PartnerStack, as well as the Founder of B2B Saas Reviews. He has over 10 years of experience in the B2B tech industry at companies like Eloqua, Influitive, and PartnerStack.

With an education in Marketing and experience on the front line in business development, he’s curious about what makes B2B SaaS buyers tick. That curiosity has often led him to the voice of the customer, which he leverages in his day job as a demand gen marketer and writes about on his site, B2B SaaS Reviews.

The post 86% of Software Buyers Use Peer Review Sites to Make a Purchase. How Discoverable is Your Brand? appeared first on Directive.

According to a thought leadership paper by Impact, “On average, partners contribute 23% of overall company revenue. With an average partnership revenue growth rate of 17.5%… the importance of partnerships will only continue to rise.”

The foundation of an agency partnership is a combination of marketing, sales, content, and events. How you dedicate time, resources, and budget to each of these will dictate your success and credibility. 

New to partnerships in general? Even better. This Agency Partnership FAQ is intended to be followed as a guide. 

Define Agency Partner 

An Agency Partnership is an incredibly dynamic way to increase your marketing reach, earn referral business, variable revenue, provide value to current clients, and explore potential clients you otherwise may not have been able to reach. It all starts by aligning your business goals to those of an organization within a similar industry or that can help support your outputs, ideology, and existing client goals, etc. 

To initially determine which partners might make sense for your company, try posing a question to your account strategists regarding their clients’ challenges. Once you know, do a little research on solutions in the form of auditing their current tech stack and finding areas of opportunity for potential partners. 

Make sure a new partner can be viewed as a customer-led decision for your business and clients. Customer Generation is the methodology Directive takes with its own clients, as well as when considering forging a new partnership. It’s based on the premise that modern marketers have a responsibility to look beyond bringing in marketing qualified leads to drive real customers, based on customer insights and needs to bring forth valuable sales qualified leads. This approach is highly effective for partners and clients. 

For example, A client may have the goal of driving more leads to their website but you land on their webpage and notice that they don’t have a conversational marketing feature like the Drift chat bot to help engage prospects in immediate conversation. Introducing your client to your Drift partner for a demo assists with a referral and positions your team as true consultants on your clients business. Or, perhaps a client is interested in getting more demos booked but they haven’t automated their booking process by leveraging a platform like Chili Piper yet, so the leads come in but don’t end up booking because it requires them to fill out a form and hear back from a sales development rep. Helping connect this pain point to a solution opens up countless opportunities for growth. These are just small but meaningful instances that make a difference and can help point you in the direction of a mutually-beneficial alliance between two partners while maintaining a customer-led approach. 

Ideal Customer Profile

Before entering into any agency partnership conversations make sure you’ve fine tuned your ideal customer profile (ICP). Ask yourself, who you’re interested in gaining as a customer. What title does your ideal contact hold and how is this role best reached? Will this partner help increase your chances of gaining the new customers you’re after? This is a basic task but one that often gets overlooked when a partner might seem like the right fit at first glance. 

For example, Directive is a digital marketing agency for SaaS, with over 95% of our portfolio falling within this industry. Naturally, we gravitate towards partnering with industry leaders across various marketing technology and software solution platforms. However, we also consider which platforms our clients are on currently, as well as which platforms can help our team effectively reach and surpass client goals. 

Align Your Goals 

The common goal for agencies and software companies entering in partnerships is likely revenue generation through referrals. If this does end up being your goal, streamline your referral process so partners understand who to go to and how, when there is a lead to share. Also, make sure to determine a payment structure equipped with a commission incentive or other comparable incentive, like a product discount for clients. While referrals and leads are always appreciated, many successful partnerships are built on co-marketing efforts alone, more on that later. 

NDA & Partner Agreement 

Once you’ve determined a good partnership fit, make sure to sign a mutual non-disclosure agreement (NDA). This simple document allows both organizations to share confidential company and client information with mitigated risk that the other is going to do something that might jeopardize the integrity of the alliance. 

Additionally, you’ll want to have a partner agreement drafted that outlines the nature of your partnership, as well as expectations around lead sharing, revenue, and payouts. Think of it as a simple scope of work. 

To avoid having to create new documents for each partnership, create templates that are easily editable and always make sure to have someone from your legal team review these templates, so you are good to go when onboarding new partners. 

Account Mapping  

Now that you have a brand new partner, leveraging a platform to account map your shared clients and prospects can be the differentiator between being a good partner and becoming great partner with the key to a buttoned up strategy. 

Directive utilizes a free account mapping tool called Crossbeam, as do many of our partners. Keeping track of new and former clients can be a manual process, Crossbeam syncs with Salesforce and other CRMs to help auto-populate this information for you, so partners have your latest and greatest client roaster

Joint Value Proposition (JVP)

Once you’ve conducted the account mapping exercise, your priority should be to collaborate on a shared client. When selecting said client, do your best to ensure they are a happy and satisfied customer of both organizations. If for some reason, you don’t have any current client overlap, strategize on what you can do to co-sell your partners platform together or strategize on a plan to help them bring in new leads. The goal of a JVP is to create a story can you both share about your commitment to helping your clients achieve results. Joint case studies are a great first step towards showcasing your joint value proposition. 

Share your JVP amongst your internal teams to spread awareness about the partnership. Share this success story on the partner page of your companies website or on LinkedIn. Schedule lunch & learns, training sessions, or demos, whatever you can do to help your team members understand the value of your new premier partner. 

Co-Marketing and Co-Hosting 

Co-marketing in partnerships typically brings in the most questions. How do you co-market? The answer is simple. Start by taking the time to outline a customer-led co-marketing strategy. This is pivotal when planning your co-marketing tactics. If your co-marketing efforts don’t appeal to your client base, you won’t get what you need from the partnership. The fact is, co-marketing can be anything from a co-authored blog post, to a paid media campaign featuring content regarding your JVP, partnerships thrive when a little risk is taken, partner agencies and softwares should be willing to think outside the box to reach their ICP’s most effectively.  

Co-hosting events can be a great way to participate in a sponsorship that alone, your team may not have been able to secure due to budget or resources. Align on which conferences and upcoming events are taking place that you both share a presence at or want to attend. Determine how you may split the expenses when co-sponsoring a booth or an after-conference happy hour. Co-hosting always makes waves virtually, consider roundtable events, webinar experiences, and virtual summits. You’ll be surprised at how much more dynamic your reach is when you’ve combined efforts.

Conclusion

Your partner program should always be centered around your main goal, whatever it may be. Make it a priority to touch base with your partner every month, discuss new opportunities for overlap, co-sell to a prospect that your partner is hoping to close, send monthly emails announcing your new partnerships. Do what you can to spread awareness and build credibility together. It’s common to have partner overlap amongst other partners, and when that happens I say the more the merrier. 

Please don’t hesitate to reach out regarding any of the agency partnership FAQs listed above, these are all different lenses through which Directive looks through every day. It would be our pleasure to connect with you about any questions you may have.

If you’re interested in joining our partner network, please feel free to book a discovery call here.

The post Agency Partnership FAQ – 7 Things You Need to Know appeared first on Directive.

Regardless of where you are on your marketing reporting journey, there’s one thing that you need to get right in order to be good at marketing reporting and/or marketing attribution. That one thing is… Opportunity Contact Roles (OCR).

What are Opportunity Contact Roles?

In Salesforce (SFDC), when you create an Opportunity, there’s an automatic relationship created between the Opportunity and the Account. These are automatically linked. But, there is no automatic relationship created between the Opportunity and Contacts. That’s because that relationship is a bit complicated.

With Opps and Accounts, it’s a 1:Many relationship. One Account has, or can have, one or many Opportunities. With Opps and Contacts, it’s a Many:Many relationship. One Contact can have multiple Opportunities, and one Opportunity can have multiple Contacts. Also… Accounts have multiple Contacts too. So, how does SFDC know which Contact(s) to associate to the Opportunity? Enter the Opportunity Contact Role.

The OCR is a standard object in SFDC that sits between the Opportunity and the Contact that allows you to connect one or more Contacts to that Opportunity and select their role in the Opportunity. Roles are usually things like, “Decision Maker”, “Influencer”, etc. And OCRs are manually associated to the Opportunity by the Sales Rep.

If an Opportunity is created as part of the Lead conversion process–when we convert a Lead to a Contact and associate to an Account–the OCR will automatically be applied… because SFDC knows which Contact is associated to the Opportunity. But, if you create an Opportunity from the Account object, then SFDC doesn’t know which Contact(s) to apply… so it’s a manual process.

Why are OCRs so important?

Now that we all know what an OCR is, we need to talk about why it’s so dang important. Well, here’s why. We market to people. And, people respond to our marketing. Not accounts. And marketing automation platforms and SFDC are designed to track how people interact with our marketing. Therefore, if we want to understand how our marketing is performing, we have to understand the relationship between marketing activities, people and Opportunities. The only way to do that is through OCRs.

Let’s use an example.

Let’s say we’re talking to a large financial institution and trying to get them to buy our product. We may have a buying committee of 3 people that are actively involved in the Opportunity. But, there are 30 Contacts associated with that Account in SFDC, because it’s a large company. The 3 people that are actively involved in the Opportunity are interacting with both sales and marketing. The rest of the 27 Contacts may or may not be interacting with sales or marketing… but if they are, it’s not in direct relation to the Opportunity. They are likely not even aware of the Opportunity.

In the situation above, if I’m trying to understand the impact that marketing has had on the Opportunity referenced above, I need to filter out any marketing engagement for the 27 people that aren’t even aware the Opportunity exists and only focus on the marketing engagement for the 3 people that are actively involved. The only way to do this is to associate the 3 people actively involved in the Opportunity with the Opportunity in SFDC via the OCR.

Once you do this, you can easily draw a straight line from marketing engagement to the person and to the Opportunity. This will then apply to any marketing influence reporting you’re doing in SFDC, a marketing automation platform or a marketing attribution platform.

Another key thing to keep in mind here is how marketing automation platforms work. Marketing automation platforms are mostly person-centric databases… meaning they focus their databases on the Lead or Contact. What this means is that in order for them to see that a person (Lead or Contact) is associated with an Opportunity–or in some cases, to even see that the Opportunity exists at all–the Opp has to be connected to a person via the OCR.

So, for reporting in the marketing automation platform, you need the OCR. To segment in the marketing automation platform, you need the OCR.

How do successful companies handle the OCR?

When you first start talking about OCRs, you’re going to get some immediate pushback from the sales team about how much time this is going to take. It’s not going to take a lot of time, but it’s still something that you need to be concerned about. Also, since OCR association is (mostly) a manual process, you can’t just rely on the sales team doing it because it’s the right thing to do. So, we need to put some things in place that help enforce OCR association. Here are some options.

One thing that you can do is to remove the ability to create an Opportunity directly from the Account object. This means that a sales user has to either create the Opportunity during the Lead conversion process, which will automatically set the OCR. Or, the sales user has to create the Opportunity from the Contact record, which will also automatically set the OCR. This will ensure that one OCR is set during the Opportunity creation process.

Another thing that you can do is to mandate OCRs on the Opportunity, regardless of how it’s created. You can make it mandatory that, in order to reach a certain stage in the Opportunity journey, you have to apply at least one OCR. This can be mandated in SFDC so that the user can’t update the stage until/unless they have an OCR applied.

Now… those are some options… but that’s not how the best orgs do it. The best orgs use OCRs to help build and operationalize their buying committees. They do research to understand what roles are represented in their typical and best buying committees. Then, they build their sales process around engaging with those roles and attaching those roles to the Opp through the OCRs. So, at each stage you have to add another member of the buying committee through the OCR, or you can’t advance the Opp. The thinking here is that, if you only have (for example) two-fifths of your buying committee engaged with the Opp, you can’t move it to the fourth Opp stage (out of five stages). That isn’t a good representation of the true stage of the Opp and means that we still need to engage more buying committee members before we can get it to that stage.

What do I get from all of this?

Once you have this in place, there are a few outcomes that you can achieve.

You’ll be able to report on marketing’s ability to source and influence Opps and Deals. It may not be super mature attribution (depending on your tools), but it’s at least a starting point and helps you get to mature attribution more quickly.

You’ll be able to identify exactly which people in an organization are involved in your Opps. This is important for both reporting and segmentation. From a reporting standpoint, you can now do conversion rate modeling and understanding how people convert from one stage to another. 

From a segmentation standpoint, you can either target these people with specific messaging designed to accelerate their Opp journey, or you can put these people on an exclusion list that excludes them from certain types of marketing. Either way, you can identify these people and take specific and intentional actions on them.

You’ll have more visibility into your sales process and how we’re progressing on deals. You can quickly and easily see how many members of the buying committee you’re engaged with on an Opp and who you don’t have.

With the above… you’ll also be able to target members of the buying committee that we haven’t engaged with. You can do this from both a marketing and sales perspective, but either way, it gives you an idea of exactly who to go after and with what message.

Conclusion

Ultimately… OCRs are something that the vast majority of organizations struggle with. Many orgs don’t understand the value and deprioritize them due to the manual nature of associating them. Other orgs understand the value, but don’t really understand how to operationalize it and get their teams to do the work. Hopefully, with the above explanation, you have the ammunition you need in your organization to get these implemented and start seeing the value that they can bring to your organization.

The post All the Fuss About Contact Roles appeared first on Directive.

Unfortunately, many SaaS organizations put too much focus and attention on gaining new clients.

Expanding your existing book of business could be a massive missed opportunity. In this article, we’ll focus on how to market your brand towards your existing customers, as well as cover a few benefits of customer marketing. 

And of course, we won’t let you leave without some strategies you can take home to try yourself. 

What Is Customer Marketing?

Customer marketing is a strategy that companies use to target their existing customers instead of spending a lot of energy trying to secure new customers who aren’t familiar with your product or service. Not only does winning new clients take a lot of extra work, it can be very expensive. Research shows that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to market to an existing customer. 

Firms engaging in customer marketing look to find ways to provide additional value, promote customer interaction and engagement, and encourage them to act as spokesperson for your company to their peers and colleagues. 

What Are The Benefits Of Targeting Existing Customers?   

There’s four primary benefits of targeting your existing clientele base with customer marketing. Each helps inform the other with more insights while also increasing the value of your existing customer base. 

1. Customer Retention

It’s a lot easier to keep selling to the same customer over and over. By retaining customers, your sales team won’t have to work as hard to secure revenue for the company. A study by Bain & Company found that improving customer retention by just 5 percent can increase profits by 25 to 95 percent.

2. Long Term Profitability

It’s critical that you get a return on your investment when securing clients. The longer they do business with your company, the better the return over the length of the relationship.

3. Brand Ambassadorship

The more interaction a customer has with your company, the more likely they are to recommend you to others. Prospective customers who come with a referral are much easier to sell products to.

4. Customer Feedback

Long-term customers have a desire to see their favorite company or brand be successful. For this reason, they are more likely to share ideas and feedback to improve the service or product. This feedback is important as you grow and evolve your product offerings.

10 Effective Strategies For SaaS Customer Marketing

Launching a successful customer marketing campaign is easy if you understand the basic principles to make it successful. There are several key things that companies need to focus on to get the most out of their customer marketing strategy. Here are some of the most effective ways to build strong relationships with your existing customers and expand the value that you both bring to the relationship. 

Show Customer Appreciation Through Engagement 

The relationship with your customers doesn’t end when you complete the initial sale. Customers expect to be regularly engaged and shown that they are appreciated. If a customer comments on your social media platforms, use that opportunity to engage with them. Thank them for using your product or ask them to share what they like about your services. This will helps show them that you value your relationship. 

Reward Your Existing Customers

Show your existing customers that you appreciate them by bringing them unexpected freebies and value. You can do this through coupons or promo codes that are not available to new customers. You can also reward them with free products or services for providing something in return, such as participating in a product focus group or survey.  

We know more than most when it comes to focusing in on the right customers and existing them for brand loyalty. By pivoting our own strategy away from dumping money into platform driven campaigns and focusing on paying our prospects instead, we saw some dramatic increases in performance and – what’s more important – actual growth. 

Keep Up the Enthusiasm and Service

Getting a new customer is exciting. Companies go out of their way to make them feel special. Make sure that this enthusiasm isn’t just reserved for new customers. Existing customers should get the same level of service and passion through every phase of the relationship. This will let them know that you care even when you have completed the sale. 

Promote Customer Success Stories

Highlighting the value that you have brought to your customers is a great way to show off your company’s value. Encourage your existing customers to write reviews, participate in case studies, or agree to be interviewed. This not only helps keep them engaged, but it generates relatively inexpensive marketing material that can be used across your website and social media platforms. 

Focus on Providing Value

Customers do business with a company because they get more value out of the product or service than they pay for it. Always think of new ways that you can continue to bring them value beyond the initial purchase. For example, you could create a mailing list that delivers important industry and product information right to their inbox. Simply creating new offers or deals can keep them buying from your company. 

If your’e interested in learning more about how to provide value to the prospects instead of the customers, you may want to check out Customer Generation as well.

Free Trials on New SaaS Products

If you are in the process of developing a new product, you might give existing customers access for free for a limited time. By treating them as a VIP and giving them special, early access, it shows that you value the relationship. It can also be a great way to gather early feedback from customers who are already familiar with your company. 

Streamline the Sign-Up and Renewal Process

Customers shouldn’t have to do a lot of work to do business with you. If the process to sign-up or renew their existing service is cumbersome, they might walk away and find a competitor that is easier to work with. 

Eliminate Confusing Calls-to-Action (CTA)

A call to action (CTA) is your way of instructing the customer what you expect them to do such as signing up for a newsletter, participating in a survey, or buying a product. Don’t assume that they know what the next step should be. By making it crystal clear, they will be more likely to follow through and continue to the next step of the sales process. 

Leverage Strong SEO

SaaS marketing relies heavily on getting a steady flow of organic traffic to your website. Having a strong SEO strategy and using the right keywords can have significant impacts on the type and quality of potential customers you attract. Too many brands use ineffective practices like “keyword stuffing”. Instead, focus on having high-quality keywords and high-authority links to help your site rank better. 

It’s time to move beyond keyword driven SEO strategies towards a more customer-led approach to organic search optimization. 

Sponsored Social Media Campaigns

Social media platforms are masters at gathering data from their users to improve their algorithms. By running sponsored campaigns, you can leverage this algorithm to help target the right audience for your product. In addition to driving high-quality traffic to your social media pages, these campaigns are relatively inexpensive. 

Final Thoughts

SaaS companies that put more focus on growing their existing customer base will have a significant advantage over their competitors. With a little bit of concentrated effort, you can start realizing the benefits of this approach almost immediately. You don’t have to deploy all of these strategies at once. In the beginning, you might choose to focus on just a few at a time. Also, each company may have a unique group of customers. Feel free to adjust any of these strategies to tailor them to your specific needs. 

The post 10 Effective Strategies to Boost Your SaaS Sales Without Chasing New Customers appeared first on Directive.

You’re tired, it’s been a long week, and you’re about to hop on a call with your account manager. In their agenda-setting email, they mentioned they wanted to “talk” about something, but were a little vague and now you’re a tad worried.

Those of us who have been in this position can probably rattle off a few landmines that may be brought up in this call. Obstacles like “Performance is down” or “I can’t do that” may await you, and you’re dreading any more setbacks or roadblocks.

But I wanted to share why those sorts of responses can be beneficial for you and your account. By the end of this read, you’ll see how proactivity, honesty, transparency, and humility can be the difference between a nice account manager and a profitable one.

1. “The Numbers Are Down”

This is probably the most common and uncomfortable topic any account manager can broach with their client. Nobody wants to see the numbers go down.

Whether it’s traffic, downloads, revenue, or any other KPI or metric your teams have agreed upon, seeing the numbers go down causes instant anxiety and, sometimes, irreparable panic.

Now, a decent account manager knows the numbers are down before you do. They can tell you why they are down, how we got here, and hopefully, what the next steps are. But a GREAT account manager knows all of that, is on the phone with you or is emailing you various solutions.

We’ve all worked with that guy or gal who likes to hide their performance and hope no one notices. Sadly for them, the numbers don’t lie. At Directive, we believe that “Ownership breeds excellence.”

What that means is by owning your actions and efforts of your current situation, you can get buy-in, trust, and the energy needed to get through challenges.

Account managers who hide results for four weeks and then hit you with a downward red arrow during your monthly reporting are all too familiar. Account managers who bring you along for the journey, offer insights and ownership along the way, and strive for better months are the ones worth working with.

Those are the people who understand the context of success and failure, can speak to positive takeaways and ensure the numbers never go down in the same way again.

2. “I’m New To This”

Most clients want to feel like they are your only client, even if they genuinely know that they aren’t. Nearly all clients want a seasoned veteran at the helm, ensuring they aren’t a practice course that may live or die based on their AM’s experience. However, there is freedom and potential within new account managers that most clients are hesitant to utilize.

New account managers are only as weak as their organizational intelligence. If the agency has done their hiring and training jobs correctly, your brand new account manager should come equipped with all of the learnings and strategies the agency has perfected over the years.

Furthermore, they are more likely to push for success, as they are trying to prove themselves to their bosses and rise within the internal ranks.

Another big bonus is the flexibility a new AM provides, as you indeed may be their only account at that moment. You’ll find them quicker to respond to an email, more likely to pick up a phone call, and happier to dive into a more extended meeting than usual. Use your new AM’s malleability to your advantage instead of hoping for the grizzled vet who may form a “my way or the highway” relationship with “hard stops” and obvious distractions.

3. “My Other Clients…”

On the flip side, an account manager with an extensive portfolio can offer insights that new ones can not. However, many clients are hesitant to believe their AM cares about anyone but them.

Why?

It’s powerful to have someone who can say, “Across our entire portfolio, we have 10+ accounts that have a similar CTA on their landing pages and their A/B test converts better 79% of the time.” Why wouldn’t you want that insight, even at the cost of a shorter weekly meeting?

I get the value of tons of attention focused solely on your project, but a busy AM can save you time by applying proven logic to your account right out of the gate…if you let them. Our most clever clients are continually asking, “What are your other accounts doing?” or “What other strategies are you trying elsewhere?”

Those clients end up benefiting from our organizational knowledge, especially if they apply to one of the many verticals we have years of experience within.

4. “Let Me Ask My Team”

I try to tell people this all of the time: nobody has ever fired us because we wanted to get it right.

Some clients love their AM because they think that the strategies, execution, and testing live and die with that person. However, that’s just not the case, at least not at an agency like ours.

Every account manager has support at the ground level (specialists), department level (SEO, CRO, PPC, etc.) and executive level (directors and leads). It would be irresponsible and sometimes damaging to have an AM agree to next steps, timelines, and capabilities without consulting them.

While your AM may have their pulse on the account like no other person at an agency, checking in with their team allows for a level of quality control and checks and balances that “Hero Marketing” does not.

“Hero Marketer” AMs often inaccurately forecast deliverables and results, usually due to their desire to please a client or smooth over a rocky conversation. Having them check with the critical people on the project creates clarity, buy-in, and better results.

This is because it’s no longer the AM and a supporting cast, it’s the agency that is delivering results!

You may get an answer an hour or so later than you wanted it, but the chances that it’s the right answer are exponentially higher.

5. The Power of “No”

This might be the toughest pill to swallow. “No” invokes a reaction, and usually not a positive one. “No” could just as easily be construed as insubordination as it can be a strategic choice, but how and why the account manager tells you “no” is the crucial part.

Being told “no” should come from a positive place. The term should be used because the team has a hierarchy of priorities and this new item just does not fit the current timetable.

Or perhaps a request is being asked for that is out of scope or not within the AM’s realm of expertise. No matter the reason, a thoughtful and insightful “no” should help your account, not hinder it.

You hired your agency for a reason, and those who aren’t confident in their abilities or feel like they aren’t delivering full value will often give you a “yes” when a “no” is more realistic. And being a “yes” man or woman is the opposite of what is essential to drive results. Value the strength and determination it takes to be firm when making decisions.

We all want vendors and partners who know what they’re talking about, but few of us prepare for the pushback that comes from a confident and intelligent individual striving for the same goals we are.

Trust that your account manager is saying “no” for a good reason. However, investigate further: Is it a resource issue? Confidence problem? Or just not feasible for one reason or another?

Final Takeaway

When I field client concerns, I  listen out for these items we’ve discussed. Churning clients is a realistic and unfortunate part of agency life, but those who churn because they aren’t willing to listen to the five things I’ve listed above are going to churn for the next agency they work with, and the next. This cycle will continue until they see what a little clarity, transparency, pushback, and perspective can do to transform their business. 

The post 5 Things You Never Want To Hear From Your Account Manager (But You Should!) appeared first on Directive.

We live in a world where it is more surprising that prospects act surprised when getting a cold call on their personal cell phone than it is that sales representatives have prospects’ personal information at their fingertips.

The reality is that desk phones are a thing of the past, emails are going to spam each day, and outside sales jobs aren’t efficient enough for most companies to justify (although I genuinely believe that anyone who is considering sales as a long-term career can learn a whole lot from starting in door-to-door sales).

Take Time to Get Personal in Sales Outreach 

So what’s the point? Sales development representatives have to get crafty with their outreach, and companies like Vidyard, Soapbox by Wistia, Thankbot, and many other services insert themselves as an extension of most sales organizations to help facilitate customized outreach at scale.

When you receive a handwritten letter in the mail, it brings all of us back to some of those special times in our lives when either grandma or grandpa sent us a letter in the mail. It feels good to know that you are cared for and celebrated.

From the mind of an SDR, it’s a constant battle between “needing to hit your numbers” and being a real human being.

To find an SDR who enjoys spending time sending mindless emails or calling on numbers they know are out of service just to hit their activity quota is to find a manager who really doesn’t care to keep his/her job.

How Does Your Sales Prospecting Stand Out?

So with all of this being said, what is the best strategy for an SDR to turn nothing into something while simultaneously bringing the human aspect into their sales prospecting?

Let’s have a look at a LinkedIn conversation I recently had with a CMO of an Inc 5000 company (I’ve found success using LinkedIn as we sell to B2B Marketing professionals and most are highly active on this channel. I by no means am an expert, merely hoping to help a few hungry SDR’s out there. PS – we’re hiring!):

Here is the initial post:

After reading this, my initial internal reaction was to get defensive.

Sales prospecting is an absolute grind. There are no promises, things happen, deals fall through, people leave companies, but that’s life. I then realized how much truth there was to this post that I initially read as someone trying to bash the SDR profession.

This happens to all of us, but instead of getting frustrated, I saw an opportunity here:

I then followed with three marked up screenshots using Skitch to show her a few tangible SEO opportunities they should be capitalizing on, as well as three other specific recommendations, and an offer to run the same type of audit for her if she would supply me with her top 3 competitors:

I booked the meeting with her, and we moved on to the proposal.

Now, I by no means am a sales prospecting expert; however, my passion lies in people. I genuinely care about my fellow men/women and strive each day as a working professional to be kind, humble, respectful, and valuable.

If you and I have a conversation and you don’t remember me down the road, I didn’t do my job, or you need to be eating more dark leafy greens.

I’ve worked with and have relationships with some stellar sales professionals; the ones who when they call, you really don’t want to hang up the phone once they get going. It’s almost like sitting at a play or watching your favorite movie.

It’s an experience, and I believe that’s what we all should be reaching for.

Make Your Sales Prospecting Techniques Stand Out 

Let’s take a look at another example from last year. I had been reaching out to this software company for a few months and decided I should show up at their office (local here in Orange County) and see what I could stir up.

After following an employee through the front door (it didn’t go down like that. I told him who I was and what I was up to and he let me in), I asked to speak to the VP of Marketing.

Low and behold, I got escorted to her office, and I gave her the low down. She didn’t have much time, but I took a look around her office and noticed a tall smoothie container sitting on her desk. I took note, left behind a case studies book and my business card, thanked her for her time, and off I went.

Now my follow up went a little something like this:

This lead to an excellent response…

…which lead to a closed deal.

In our industry, we tend to focus on prospecting our “champions.” The champions in our space are the ones that are working tirelessly, day in and day out to drive marketing qualified leads to their website through SEO, PPC, and content efforts, with the primary goal of generating more revenue for the company.

Target The Champion 

With that being said, in sales, most of us have heard of top-down or bottom-up selling. The notion is that when selling top-down, you are typically targeting the “decision maker, the one who cuts the check.

In different industries, top-down selling can lead to more massive contracts, quicker sales cycles, etc. etc. When selling bottom-up, most reps waste a lot of time on the wrong individuals leading to a much longer sales cycle, smaller contract sizes, and a lot more frustration.

In our industry (selling SEO, PPC, and a few other services), we’ve found bottom up selling typically is more effective.

Our CEO, Garrett Mehrguth, broke it down for us on LinkedIn. When a mid-market or enterprise level company is shopping the market for a new product/service, the decision maker often asks the champion to go out and find 3-5 quotes.

From there, a presentation is made to the decision maker from an individual who they trust wholeheartedly, considering it is they who will be in charge of managing, implementing, and using/communicating with this product/service on a daily basis. In essence, this is why the champion is so crucial in any sales process.

If we flip it around, we can understand how crucial it is for our product or service to be a part of that initial “weeding out” conversation.

How do we ensure that we are indeed one of the 3-5 options that are being pitched from the champion to the decision maker? We need to have marketing materials that support the champion, messaging that supports the champion and an understanding of comparison shopping.

People don’t buy things without looking at reviews. We call this the Amazon or Yelp effect, and yes, this does apply to enterprise companies making massive purchases.

Summary

In conclusion, we discussed how personalization is key when sales prospecting, how green smoothies win over VP’s of marketing at SaaS companies, and how we may just need to flip our generic sales process on its head to get to where we are capable of going.

This isn’t much of a strategy, but more of a simple understanding of how we (buyers) make decisions from purchasing a new toothbrush to a new software.

I’d encourage you to spend time trying to understand the structure of the organization that you are selling into, identifying the champion and the decision maker, and craft specific language speaking to each.

If we continue with the blanketed emails and LinkedIn messages upon connection, we will find ourselves in a position where nobody wants to talk to anybody about anything in fear of being sold. Now that’s a scary thought. 

Learn more about Directive, and how we are moving the needle in the world of search marketing here!

Author Bio: Kyle Willis – Director of Sales Development

At the young age of 4, Kyle Willis’ hunger for solving problems got the best of him. Noticing a shortage of lemonade and raspberries in the neighborhood, he started up his first venture that would propel his career in sales forward. 

In 2011, Kyle was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease, a tick-borne infection that affects the brain and the heart. After four years of unsuccessful treatment, his passion for health and fitness came to life. Kyle has had the opportunity to work with some of the leading companies in the fitness industry.

After his collegiate volleyball career at The University of New Hampshire and Rivier University, Kyle packed up his car and drove to Southern California, where he is grateful to have gained experience in real estate, logistics, fitness, and search marketing.

Today, he leads the sales department to continued success by staying on top of the latest trends and keeping it real with prospects daily.

The post Sales Prospecting: Turning Nothing Into Something appeared first on Directive.

They charge you more money than they should, and they bring in fewer clients than they promise.

Unfortunately, today’s world is crowded with lousy marketers.

As social media has found its massive online footing, everyone who’s read Contagious by Jonah Berger or Purple Cow by Seth Godin considers themselves to be a savvy marketer.

And they might know a thing or two about the industry.

But the problem is that all of that marketing theory isn’t nearly as useful as actual experience.

While marketing often focuses on theory, sales focuses on actual one-on-one, hands-on, unavoidable experience.

Which is probably why businesses with heavily aligned marketing and sales strategies experience a more effective marketing effort overall.

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Sadly, a whopping 79% of businesses don’t have a tightly aligned marketing and sales team — which means they’re losing out on all that benefit.

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As it turns out, the experience of your sales team might just be your most valuable marketing asset.

After all, salespeople deal with your clients firsthand, which means that they probably understand your customers better than anyone else in the company.

Here’s why that understanding makes them savvy marketers, whether they want to be or not.

1. Salespeople know that personal connection is key

It’s no secret that personalization rules the marketing roost.

Generally speaking, the more personalized the prospect’s experience, the more likely they are to purchase from you.

Sometimes, it’s really that simple.

When people feel welcomed by your company, they engage more, share your company with their friends, and buy your product.

Which is probably why personalization is one of the top 3 priorities for digital marketers.

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But the benefit that personalization offers is not an easy thing for marketers to tackle.

With their high-level focus, they tend to make the mistake of using a shotgun approach instead of a highly-targeted and personalized approach.

The solution?

Leveraging the knowledge of your salespeople.

More than likely, your salespeople spend a massive amount of time on the telephone with your clients and prospects. It is, after all, the most effective sales method.

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This means two things.

First, it further emphasizes your prospect’s desire for personal contact. If you offer phone calls, you’ll increase the likelihood that they’ll purchase from you; it’s one of the most personal forms of communication in today’s digital world.

Second, it means that your salespeople understand the importance of building a connection with prospects in order to make a sale.

But they don’t just understand its importance. They also understand how to do it.

They understand what it takes to immediately build trust with the person on the other end of the phone.

That’s valuable knowledge that would benefit your marketing team.

Sadly, salespeople often get bogged down by menial tasks. 32% of salespeople spend 30 minutes to an hour every day entering data or doing other manual tasks.

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Consider freeing up some of that time for your salespeople by semi-automating data entry or paying someone else to do it. That way, salespeople can spend more time on the phone with potential customers and clients and, in their free time, offer opinions to the marketing team.

All of those phone calls have dumped a massive amount of knowledge into your salesperson’s head.

In particular, your salespeople know why personalization is important and how catering to prospects individually is so powerful.

Marketers would benefit from being reminded of that lesson.  

2. Salespeople understand your ideal client better than anyone else

Knowing your ideal client is critical for your marketing strategy. Because if you don’t know your ideal client, you’ll quickly put your prospects to sleep.

Yaron Tal of 6scan had this to say: “It doesn’t matter that you think your idea is the next big thing. If your pitch is dull, unattractive, with only dry details, you’ll fail to catch the [prospect’s] attention. He’ll lose focus.”

While marketers generally have a good idea of who they think your ideal client is, salespeople actually know. So much so that they can put a name and a face to your customer avatar.

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In other words, they can help define your ideal client so that the marketing team can target them better.

After all, no one understands your ideal client better than the person who spends all day talking to them on the phone.

Salespeople deal with customer objections all day long.

They understand your ideal client’s concerns and questions.

They understand how your ideal client thinks and what consistently gets them to go from thinking about purchasing to opening their wallets.

But they don’t just understand who your ideal client is. They also understand who your ideal client isn’t.

Which is equally important for your marketing strategy.

The last thing you want is to pour marketing cash into a strategy that targets the wrong people.

Your sales team can help you make sure that doesn’t happen.

If you don’t believe me, just consider this.

The primary source of leads that turn into sales for businesses come from the sales team.

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The proof is in the pudding. And the pudding says that salespeople generate qualified leads better than the marketing team.

That might be a hard pill to swallow. But it’s true.

Salespeople know who your ideal client is better than anyone else because of their low-level, one-on-one focus. They talk to your ideal client all day long.

Leveraging that knowledge will help your marketing team ensure that they’re targeting the right people.

3. Salespeople are familiar with the negative effects of a dismal conversion rate

In the end, all that you care about is the business’s revenue.

You want to know if the marketing team and the sales team, whether together or apart, are bringing in additional cold, hard cash that your business wouldn’t generate without them.

Another way to say that, though, is that all you care about is conversion.

After all, leads take your revenue numbers absolutely nowhere on there own.

Ideally, leads will turn into conversions. But if they don’t, your business is no better off.

Luckily, your sales team is acutely aware of the importance of generating conversions.

Just think about a salesperson’s average day. They spend most of their time on the phone trying to turn cold leads into warm conversions.

This means that they know a thing or two about the importance of conversion and what it takes to convert your ideal client.

Mostly, that’s because sales is traditionally a bottom-of-the-funnel strategy.

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So most sales teams won’t even talk to prospects unless they are a pre-qualified lead.

In other words, they spend their days trying to convert your ideal client.

The top marketing priority for businesses is to turn more leads into customers.

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And the same is true for sales priorities.

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That’s because your business relies on income, which relies on conversions, which relies on salespeople who know how your ideal client thinks.

Marketers sometimes get overly focused on bringing in leads, but sales and conversion is where the real magic happens.

4. Salespeople know the power of upselling

The high-level focus of marketers has them thinking about lead generation and customer acquisition.

Often times (and unfortunately), marketers do very little to leverage the benefits of already existing customers.

Instead, they throw out social media advertising, PPC and SEO strategies that build business awareness.

But here’s a question to think about: What good is awareness of your business if your current customers aren’t heavily integrated?

In other words, if the people inside your business haven’t been tapped out, what is the point of looking to find more business?

After all, it’s far easier to sell to an existing customer than it is a new customer. There is also a direct correlation between customer retention and an increase in profit, and loyal customers are worth far more money than newbies.

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Yes. Your business will need more customers at some point. It won’t be able to survive and thrive forever on a small customer base.

But, by now, it should be common knowledge that treating your current customers well — customer retention — and upselling those customers isn’t just a strategy for leveraging existing assets. It’s a strategy for generating new customers in and of itself.

How?

Because when you treat customers well and they love your product, who do you think they’re going to tell about your business?

Are they going to immediately forget about you when they’re at work, at a coffee shop, or at home?

No.

They’re going to tell their friends, family, and co-workers about the awesome new business they discovered.

And as you know, word of mouth has always been the most powerful marketing strategy.

Salespeople are well-acquainted with the buying habits of your existing customers because of all the time they spend trying to upsell customers to the next product.

You can use that knowledge to focus your marketing strategy on the people who matter most: your existing customer.

5. Salespeople understand how a client moves through the purchasing process

Many people will tell you that the sales funnel is a clean, linear, and obvious process.

Something where people move from awareness to engagement to consideration to purchase.

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But that funnel is increasingly outdated with the way shopping happens on the internet.

People jump from one website to another via a search engine without thinking twice, and they generally trust most websites that look reliable.

Which means that they purchase from the place with the best price, the fastest delivery, or the product they want without ever seeing an advertisement that increased their awareness of the company.

The traditional marketing and sales funnel is slow, linear, and overly simplistic. Today’s buying process is difficult to predict, and customers arrive on your website and purchase your product from a variety of different avenues.

So how can you possibly determine the sales funnel that best applies to your business?

Well, your salespeople should have a lot of knowledge to contribute to your musings.

Understanding your sales funnel is important because satisfied customers tell an average of 9 people about their experience, but dissatisfied customers tell an average of 22 people about their experience.

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And a smooth funnel makes for a smooth customer experience, while a rickety one makes for a rigid and unpleasant experience.

Salespeople understand your business’s funnel better than anyone else because they spend their days selling your product to real people with real concerns and a real voice.

They know how people think about your products, the questions they consistently ask, the concerns they have, and the objections that have the potential to destroy a sale.

Your marketing team, on the other hand, is functioning via theories. They try this and that without ever actually talking to customers because their efforts are high-level and often impersonal.

But salespeople can help your marketing team make the most of their efforts and target the prospects who have a high chance of converting. It’s just a matter of getting the knowledge from the brains of your salespeople into the brains of your marketers.

Salespeople know how your customers think. You can leverage that with your marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Are you tired of your undefined marketing efforts not producing the results you expected?

Are you sick of trying to get your marketing team to create processes around their efforts and be more strategic?

Well, it’s not really their fault.

Marketers are usually expected to have a high-level focus instead of a low-level, personal focus.

They’re not expected to convert a few qualified leads. They’re supposed to generate leads from the masses.

But the problem is that they don’t fully understand who the ideal client is and how to best market to them.

Why?

Because they don’t spend any time with that person. All of their communication with real people is artificial.

They struggle to put a face to their ideal client and really nail down exactly who their target market is.

This is because marketing is often based on theory.

But sales… well, sales is based on practice.

In fact, because of all that time spent interacting with your prospects and customers, your salespeople understand the power of personal connection.

They know who your ideal client is.

They are familiar with the impact of high or low conversion rates.

They know the importance of upselling existing customers.

And they understand how a client moves through your business’s sales funnel.

And that’s why sales reps are your savviest marketers.

The post Why Sales Reps are Your Smartest Marketers appeared first on Directive.

You’ve witnessed this first-hand as a B2B marketer.

The number of prospects that tell you they’ll get back to you but never do, completely ignore your pitches, or outright unsubscribe from your email list is enough to dishearten the most motivated marketer.

But you’re not disheartened, are you?

Well, if you are, you’ve come to the right place.

Inbound marketing tactics promise a return, but potentially not for years to come. Outbound strategies, on the other hand, are invasive, disruptive, less effective than inbound, and risk harming your brand’s authentic voice.

One representation of this lies in the fact that the average email click-through rate across all industries hovers around 1%-3%.

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For you — the marketer who needs qualified leads and steady income — what gives?

Marketing tactics and strategies seem to come and go just as fast as the next iPhone.

Here’s what you don’t need: a prospect list full of unqualified leads.

In fact, you need just the opposite: a list of people who are pre-qualified.

You need engaged, interested, and promising prospects.

Enter account-based marketing.

What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing might just be the next revolutionary selling tactic. The reality is that most prospects don’t respond to your emails and your offers, because — let’s be honest, here — they aren’t your ideal client.

If they were, they’d be buying your product.

This means that you don’t need to maintain a shoddy click-through rate on your advertising campaigns and email list.

You just need a better list of prospects.

Account-based marketing qualifies prospects before they ever get on your list.

In other words, account-based marketing is the sweet and promising marriage between inbound and outbound marketing. With it, you reach out to prospects, but only those who’ve you determined are most likely to buy.

This allows you to personalize the message you send to your prospects because you’re only sending the message to your ideal client.

Which is good. Because 75% of customers prefer personalized offers.

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And that same principle applies to B2B marketing, which is exactly why an increasing percentage of B2B companies are using account-based marketing.

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Account-based marketing flips the funnel on its head. First, qualify leads, determine if they’re viable prospects, and then market to them.

This saves you money on your paid advertisements since you’re targeting prospects that are more likely to purchase and it saves you heartache from that cold emailing hell you find yourself stuck in.

But how do you do it?

What’s the innovative strategy that this article promised to present?

It all boils down to 5 steps.

1. Determine who you’re going to target.

The first step in your account-based marketing journey is to determine who your ideal client is.

After all, if you don’t know your ideal client, you can’t market to them in the way you want to.

Segment generally and get increasingly specific.

Start by asking yourself these questions.

1. What industry does your ideal client work in?
2. How old are they?
3. What’s their income like?

Then, once you have some of those general demographic questions answered, get more specific.

1. What does your ideal client do on the weekend?
2. What are their hobbies?
3. Are they married? Do they have kids?
4. Do they like their job?

That might seem overly specific, but the truth is that the more specific you are about your ideal client, the more targeted, and thus successful, your marketing campaign — whether inbound or outbound.

Think of your ideal client as an individual person when you’re crafting a marketing strategy. Take into account their personality, what they like to do, what they’re struggling with, and how old they are.

The more specific, the better. Personalized emails increase click-through rate by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%.

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And list segmentation, one of the cornerstones of personalized marketing, promises a serious increase in clicks.

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But these personalization techniques are only possible once you understand your ideal client — better than they understand themselves.

Once you have your ideal client nailed down, deciding on the best marketing outreach tactic should be a breeze.

2. Decide on the best way to target your ideal client.

The way that you market to your qualified clients will be determined by who that client is and where they spend their time.

If your ideal client, for example, is 50 or 60 years old, then Facebook probably isn’t the way to go, as social media use deteriorates with age.

But perhaps direct mail would work.

On the other hand, if your ideal clients are entrepreneurs in their 20’s and 30’s, then Facebook Ads and even Instagram Ads might be the best fit.

An SEO strategy surrounding your blog is almost always a good direction for marketing to your ideal client.

There are just a few things you’ll want to keep in mind.

First, a blog content SEO strategy is a long-term game. It usually takes several years to rank the way you want to rank in Google.

Second, your rankings will only be as good as the keywords you choose to target. When it comes to inbound marketing, keyword research is going to be the crux of finding your ideal clients. Spend lots of time determining exactly what your ideal clients are typing into search engines.

Organic traffic sees a whopping 14.6% close rate.

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But it’s going to take a long time to start receiving that traffic. So definitely do it, but don’t expect many results from it at first.

And remember, to keep it account-based, do an appropriate amount of keyword research and only create content for your ideal client.

Whether inbound or outbound — depending on who your ideal client is — focus ruthlessly on that single customer avatar and don’t stray from the path.

Your qualified client will tell you how to market to them. You just need to listen.

3. Experiment to find what works best.

Your marketing strategies are worthless without proper experimentation.

What do I mean by experimentation?

Well, what I don’t mean is A/B testing.

A/B testing is the tactic of a marketer who’s trying to find subtle psychological cues that promise higher conversions and click-through rates.

But we’re not talking about the color of your CTA button or the power of using the word “get” instead of “try.”

We’re talking about account-based marketing. And account-based marketing tests don’t involve testing button copy and color. It involves testing the people who’re on your prospect list.

In other words, instead of testing your marketing strategy, you test the people on your list.

The top marketing challenge for companies is generating more traffic and leads.

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Everyone wants business. But to get more business, you need to target the people who will actually buy your product.

And keep in mind, sometimes the person who interacts with your brand isn’t the same person that will actually make a purchase.

You’re not targeting for engagement or other unhelpful data boosts. You’re targeting people who will convert.

But to target people who will convert, you need to learn as you go. Your first attempt at account-based marketing won’t be perfect, which means that you need to pay attention to who’s converting, who isn’t, and how you can iterate your marketing strategy upon that data.

On all of your channels – including who’s converting via social media.

Sadly, a shocking 60% of small business owners aren’t able to track ROI from their social media activities.

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Don’t be in that 60%. Take the time to analyze the people who purchase your product.

Because, in the end, regardless of what your customer avatar says, the person who converts is your ideal client. And you need to target more of them.

4. Follow up with leads.

Wanna know something depressing?

Regardless of how many leads a business gets, a shocking percentage of marketers and salespeople suck at following up.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. A staggering 48% of salespeople never follow up with a prospect.

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25% of salespeople follow up once and then quit.

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12% of salespeople follow up twice and then quit.

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And only 10% of salespeople follow up three or more times.

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If the fact that just under half of salespeople never follow up with a prospect doesn’t scare you enough, consider this: only 2% of sales are made on the first contact.

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Unfortunately, that’s when most salespeople give up.

This illustrates exactly why following up with leads is so important. Don’t assume that because you’re targeting your ideal client, you don’t need to follow up. That’s just as much of a lie as the idea of inbound marketing bringing in leads within a month of implementing.

Your ideal client isn’t someone who buys without forethought — that person doesn’t exist. Your ideal client is the person who is most likely to buy with gentle and appropriate prodding.

In other words, even your ideal client needs convincing.

How do I know?

Well, let’s talk about where the other 98% of sales happen. 3% of sales happen on the second contact.

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5% of sales are made on the third contact.

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10% of sales are made on the fourth contact.

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And here’s the big surprise, 80% of sales are made somewhere between the fifth and twelfth contact.

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This means that your ideal client will probably be the person who converts somewhere in between the fifth and twelfth contact. Don’t give up until you’ve hit at least 11 follow-ups with a client.

In fact, as a few rules of thumb, stick to these tricks with your follow-up strategy.

1. Keep track of how many times you’ve followed up with each prospect.
2. Follow up at least 11 times before quitting.
3. Redefine your ideal client based on the people who buy in between the fifth and twelfth contact. This is your golden zone. Market to these people.

However you do it, your business will survive on tactful salespeople who follow up graciously with the people who are most likely to purchase.

And since you’re spending less time on low-commitment, unqualified leads, you’ll be able to follow up and give the necessary attention to the people who will actually buy your product — with some prodding, of course.

5. Interact with prospects at every chance you get.

Too often in businesses, customer service and marketing are separate.

The customer service representatives sit in one corner of the room connecting with clients, prospects, and leads on a personal level, while the marketers are in the other corner, discussing the best way to reach those people.

It’s horribly ironic.

The smart marketers will consult their salespeople and customer service representatives to better understand the people who they’re marketing to.

But, let’s admit, it’s easy to get busy, A/B test everything you do, and call it a day.

And while a solid A/B test might increase conversions by a few lucky percentage points, nothing quite compares to better understanding your ideal client.

There are a few different ways to go about it.

First, live chat works wonders for connecting with the people who visit your website. If you pay close attention to these people, it will inform you about exactly who your marketing efforts bring in.

You can then ask yourself if these people are the right people. If they’re not, go back to step one and two to discover who your ideal client is and the best way of marketing to them.

Additionally, live chat allows you to discover the exact questions that your ideal client is asking. You can then use these questions as a part of your content marketing strategy and keyword research efforts.

Here are a few options for your live chat service. Check out Influx…

Kayako…

And Zendesk.

You can use the exact same strategy for your phone service and email interactions.

However you do it, don’t build a business where marketing and customer service are separate. Marketing has a lot to learn from the relationships that your customer service department builds on a daily basis.

Ignoring that fact will make your marketing journey a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.

Conclusion

You’re sick of cold emailing and unsuccessful, untargeted marketing. Of sending campaigns to the masses and getting a crappy response.

But you now know that those results aren’t a surprise.

The less targeted your marketing, the less people that connect with your message. But it’s not your message that’s the problem, it’s the people you’re sending that message to.

Most marketers aimlessly revamp their Ad Spend, button color, and landing page copy, with little to no improved results.

They sit there, wondering why that online test that said a red button improves conversions isn’t working for them.

Well, the color of your button only works if you target the right people.

Account-based marketing starts by targeting the right people.

All you have to do is start with account-based marketing.

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