Enterprise sales is a unique, complex world where technology and software meet the challenges of business operations. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools need to be user-friendly but retain the complexity of powerful business intelligence insights.
The sale of custom SaaS solutions typically involves an elongated cycle. Buyers in this space are notorious for being meticulous, detail-oriented, and price-conscious. To succeed in enterprise SaaS sales, businesses need to carefully map out, adapt, and follow the buyer’s journey.
Here’s how to get started:
What is the Buyer’s Journey?
Sales and marketing teams use a buyer’s journey model to mind map the stages a potential customer goes through when deciding on a purchase. This allows these teams to collaborate on customer acquisition initiatives and coordinate their activities to convert a lead to a sale.
If, for example, a SaaS company is aware that a potential buyer is at the consideration phase of the journey, they can work with the marketing team to develop client case studies. This allows buyers to learn more about the experience other enterprises in the same industry have had with the company and outlines how they’ve used the tools to their advantage.
The journey through the sales funnel is dynamic and complex and requires a concerted effort on the part of the sales team. Buyers want clarity, transparency, and the certainty that they’re investing in a solution that will revolutionize their operations. They carefully evaluate every aspect of a purchase and require several meetings, demos, and presentations before concluding a sale.
Mapping out the buyer’s journey provides invaluable insights into customer behavior and expectations at every buying process step. This allows you to bridge gaps and prevent leads from being lost.
Importance of Mapping the Buyer’s Journey in SaaS
SaaS providers must prioritize customer satisfaction to convert a lead. This is where the buyer’s journey proves to be invaluable. With a framework for the steps, considerations, and actions a team should take at every interaction point.
The strategy can be revised and refined for each customer. In time, the process will become more intuitive, and sales teams will be able to anticipate pain points and provide creative solutions to meet their needs.
Having a framework for understanding consumer behavior is vital to preparing a winning sales strategy. It also provides rich insights for monitoring and evaluation, enabling sales professionals to measure the effectiveness of particular interventions at a point in the cycle.
A Step-By-Step Guide to the Buyer’s Journey
Step 1: Awareness
The first question a sales member should ask is, “What problem are we trying to solve?” Identifying the customer’s pain point is the natural starting point for offering a solution. While you’re identifying who you’re servicing, customers are doing the same.
They’re trying to identify who is interested in solving their problem, and in searching for a solution, they will discover that your offering exists. This is why this stage is so aptly called awareness.
But your enterprise SaaS solution doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your competitors are also vying for the attention of this one client, so the customer is aware of multiple solution providers at this stage.
To stand out at this stage, here are some helpful marketing strategies:
Create Effective Cold Outreach for Leads
Cold outreach is like casting a net in the ocean. You’ll likely catch some fish, but many more will slip away. Cold outreach is appropriate for startups that may not have the resources to invest in lead generation and customer insights. It’s also a suitable starting point for companies expanding into virgin territory, where the various consumer personas still need to be developed.
Typical forms of cold outreach outbound marketing include cold email, cold calling, and cold messaging on LinkedIn.
Leverage High-Value Content
If you’re looking to solve a problem, it’s natural to spend time gathering as much information as possible to help you find the right solution.
From a buyer’s perspective, at this point, companies that freely offer as much information as possible stand out from those merely providing a sales pitch. Not only is a pitch failing to provide customer satisfaction at this moment, but the customer cannot effectively evaluate your solution because they’re yet to define the problem.
Blog posts would be the ideal content at this juncture. They’re informative and helpful without centering sales. From a customer’s perspective, their first problem (not knowing what the problem is) is already being solved, and they are likely to continue the journey with a trusted company that understands their problem.
Calls to action (CTAs) are essential at every funnel stage as they guide the next step. At this stage, CTAs should encourage leads to acquire more information by signing up to receive a newsletter, watching a video, or joining a community.
Step 2: Consideration
The buyer officially enters the consideration phase once they’ve gathered all the information necessary to identify the problem and consider an appropriate solution. Customers try to select a service provider by considering the varying products, services, and methods. Other aspects, such as benefits, features, and associated costs, are equally important.
Sales and marketing teams need to highlight the value of their service offering and produce in-depth information that delves into the problem-solving process.
Personalized Demos Displaying Unique Value Proposition
For B2B SaaS sales, customers seek a custom solution demonstrating an understanding of their unique challenges and nuances. For this reason, general product demos won’t work. Considering that the sales cycle for enterprise SaaS is already quite long, it’s in the best interests of both parties to get to the point as quickly as possible.
Keeping the customer engaged at every stage is vital, and providing a personalized demo that addresses their most pressing needs is an excellent way to hold their attention.
Address Pain Points with Solution-Centric Content for Prospects
While the customer now has a solid definition of the problem, an idea of what solution they’re looking for, and a list of various providers, in order to convert the prospect into a sale, they still need to gather information that separates your business from the competition.
While a purchase is still a step or two away, buyers are getting closer to making a decision. At this stage, a SaaS provider would need to start sharing more about their business.
Social proof is invaluable at the Middle-of-the-Funnel (MoFu) stage, and the ideal content consists of case studies, testimonials, and reviews. This allows the customer to see how other people with a similar issue were able to leverage your solution.
Step 3: Decision
The decision stage is where customers arrive at an ideal solution. They’re now looking for the best service provider to fulfill their needs. Buyers will start to narrow down their list of potential service providers.
An example would be a customer looking to subscribe to a video streaming service. With an infinite number of subscription-based services available, a potential customer would evaluate the differences between Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV, and Hulu, among others.
They’d evaluate the monthly cost, how often new content is uploaded, whether the most popular shows are available, and more. Consumer trust is essential at this stage, and the prospect will likely choose a provider that is familiar with and can meet their needs.
Bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) content is critical to converting prospects for SaaS vendors. At this final stage, convincing potential customers that you’re the best option requires content emphasizing features and benefits and addressing the pain points the customers are looking to solve.
Optimizing the Buyer’s Journey from a Sales Perspective
Collaboration Between the Sales, Marketing & Customer Success Teams
Aligning the sales and marketing team’s efforts is crucial to converting leads. By sharing objectives and collaborating, they can increase their reach, generate leads, and drive revenue.
For SaaS vendors, it is important to have clarity on where each potential customer sits in the sales funnel. Sending out the right information and collateral at the right time is crucial to making sales, especially because B2B sales cycles are long, and prospects have multiple opportunities to slip through the cracks.
When these teams coordinate, sales staff can provide marketing teams with pertinent information, such as lead pain points and interests. This information can be used to compile buyer personas, which lends itself to creating targeted media campaigns.
Streamline Sales Workflows with Automation
It should come as no surprise that SaaS vendors use Software-as-a-Service tools in sales automation. These tools provide deep insights that allow them to close deals while maintaining human interaction. Sales tools can be integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enabling automated workflows.
B2B SaaS vendors need to keep abreast of leads’ desires, pain points, and considerations throughout the elongated deal cycle. Automating the various areas of customer relationship management through sales tech makes it easier to segment your audience and produce custom campaigns that address specific audience needs.
A SaaS vendor might have products or use cases that appeal to in-house legal counsel, marketing teams, accounting and payroll professionals, or HR. Tracking exactly where prospects from each department are sitting in the buyer’s journey requires a sales enablement tool to automate these workflows.
With the analytics and reporting capabilities these automation tools offer, SaaS vendors have access to sales reports and can monitor and evaluate campaigns against their success metrics. This, over time, improves sales efforts as decision-making will eventually be data-driven.
Revisit & Optimize Discovery Calls & Product Demos
The final step to optimizing the buyer’s journey as a SaaS vendor is to return to your assets and optimize your marketing material. Revisiting and optimizing discovery calls and product demos is crucial to laying the foundation for a strong, successful relationship with a potential new client. These initial interactions are an investment into the client relationship.
To maximize the potential of your demos and calls, here are a few tips to follow:
Tailor your approach. Showing your lead that you understand their business, industry, and pain points goes a long way toward establishing a positive rapport. Generic pitches can lack effort, while customized pitches show a commitment to understanding the client’s context and how your solutions solve the problem.
Emphasize benefits over features. Benefits speak to how your product/service can solve customer pain points, while features are about the components that make up your product/service. A feature might be a detail about a product built on a blockchain framework, while a benefit discusses the safety and security that the product guarantees.
Analyze and adapt. Monitoring and evaluation is an essential aspect of the buyer’s journey. The best B2B SaaS vendors are relentlessly assessing how effective their discovery calls and product demos are. This leads to continuous development and improvement, ultimately improving the conversion rate.
Conclusion
The buyer’s journey is an essential framework for B2B SaaS vendors. Having a clear understanding of the customer’s journey allows sales and marketing teams to collaborate and coordinate efforts to convert leads. At various stages of the journey different content pieces and interventions are required to move prospects from the top of the funnel down to the bottom where sales are made.
Combined with the power of sales automation tools, SaaS vendors are able to derive deep insights
Even experienced sales pros could benefit from gaining direct insight into prospects’ experiences on their journey. From there, they can refine their sales strategies to align with customer preferences and needs, increasing conversion rates.