5 Steps to Reach Decision Makers of B2B SaaS Companies

The SaaS B2B sector is considered one of the most competitive and fast growing sectors in the world, estimated to be worth $172 billion in 2022 by Gartner Research. While the industry’s growth is phenomenal, it is known to have some of the longest and complex sales processes.

In an industry where the average lead takes six attempts to connect with, sales and marketing teams need to have a clear idea who their perfect audience is before developing sales journeys.

Today we discuss the five important steps marketing teams must know to connect with their B2B prospects in the Software as a Service industry.

5 Steps to Find and Connect with the Decision Making Prospects in SaaS Companies

Reaching your ideal B2B negotiators who make the big decisions is essential to speed up the SaaS sales process while making lead onboarding more convenient. Here are our five actionable steps to connect with your perfect B2B prospects:

1. Define an Ideal Customer Profile
2. Build Your Target Account
3. Identify key Decision Makers
4. Conduct Thorough Research
5. Build Your Sales Sequence

1 – Define an Ideal Customer Profile

Before you progress with your marketing and sales campaigns it is a prerequisite to identify your ideal customer profiles. An ideal customer profile in the simplest terms is a hypothetical perfect buyer profile of an organization whose problems your SaaS solution solves.

Marketing teams answer several questions before they can identify the ideal customer profile.

Specify your industry

Before you progress with your marketing and sales campaigns it is a prerequisite to identify your ideal customer profiles. An ideal customer profile in the simplest terms is a hypothetical perfect buyer profile of an organization whose problems your SaaS solution solves. Marketing teams answer several questions before they can identify the ideal customer profile.

Organizations must identify which industries they want to focus their sales efforts and where their perfect audiences are. With 76% of surveyed organizations claiming they use SaaS automation in a recent research, ideal customers can also be dispersed in different sectors.

Size of the company

To identify their ideal customer you must identify the size of the company that you wish to target with the SaaS portfolio. Identifying this factor is also essential from a revenue perspect.

SaaS providers must identify if the targets are corporations, medium sized business or smaller startups. The several factors to consider here are the SaaS provider’s capacity to onboard leads convincingly and delivering ongoing customer support. 

Spending Budget

It is essential to research and survey while prospecting leads to know what their budget estimates are for an enterprise solution. Depending on the severity of a pain point, budgets can differ in various organizational types and sizes.

Geographical Location

Identifying where your ideal customer profiles are located is also essential to understand the issues that come with the region. The location of leads can provide access to new markets and audiences, while identifying additional use cases for the automation provider.

Market Positioning

SaaS businesses must define clearly how they wish to position their product in a highly competitive environment. Service providers must define their USPs while identifying their core benefits to the customer.

SaaS providers must determine what competitive advantage their brand will reflect. Will they compete for lowest pricing, customer support, process efficiency or a mix of advantages. The answers provide direct insight into who the SaaS provider then qualifies as an ideal customer profile.

Pain Points

To identify the ideal customer profile, SaaS providers must identify all the pain points that their service resolves for customers. Once these pain points are organized in accordance to priority or frequency, SaaS teams begin to get a clear understanding of their perfect customer profile.

Ideal Customer’s Goals

By researching the goals of your ideal customers, SaaS providers can both improve their core services while adding the necessary personalization that enterprises demand today.

When sales and marketing teams can clearly identify the goals of their prospect customers, they can better define their perfect buyer profile in addition to how the SaaS solutions helps them.

2 – Build Your Target Account

The second step to connect with your ideal B2B decision makers is through developing target accounts. Even within industry niches SaaS providers will not engage with every prospect lead, wasting time in some cases due to lack of interest.

A target account is the ideal customer profile who will subscribe to the SaaS solution. This target account is more complex to determine and marketing teams must carefully analyze ideal customer profiles to match which organizations will be their ideal target customers.

Marketing and sales generally conduct extensive research by surveying leads, researching over search engines, conducting social enterprise research and analyzing business directories to identify their target accounts. These target account lists are built up and identified as the leads with highest potential.

3 – Identify key Decision Makers

Once the target accounts are identified the sales process is further streamlined with a filtered list of high potential customers. The sales and marketing teams must now take over to research all the decision makers from middle management who can influence a potential purchase decision.

Once the top and middle management are identified it’s time for the marketing & sales teams to finally begin nurturing them through valuable content. Sales personnel should begin by networking and sharing valuable content to engage decision makers.

4 – Conduct Thorough Research

Now that you have identified the key decision makers to interact with, it is suggested to conduct thorough research. Marketing and sales teams should preferably consider skimming through social media feeds, company profiles, news and events conducted by the organization.

Researching decision making prospects provides marketers crucial insights to create more compelling and engaging content, while allowing sales teams to be more precise when negotiating with these decision makers.

5 – Build Your Sales Sequence

A structured B2B sales sequence is quite a sensitive step for marketing & sales consultants. The sales sequence defines which digital touchpoints leads interact with and engages them. To enhance their sales sequences SaaS providers must:

• Identify their target buyer profiles
• Select sales sequence triggers (e.g. a social media messages, email replies)
• Use multiple customer touch points (e.g. email, social, phone etc.)
• Provide value through content
• Increase engagement with leads
• Provide clear Calls To Action
• Monitor sales sequences on every stage of the funnel
• Improve sequences
• Automate sales sequences

Developing a clear sales strategy that nurtures and converts leads is quite complex, however, the investment in a clear sales sequence allows highly qualified conversions.

Conclusion

The SaaS B2B industry is becoming more competitive with organizations looking for ideal solutions to make their processes both efficient and effective. Identifying decision makers and engaging with them remains the most viable strategy for sales teams to make quality conversions. We hope you enjoyed this edition of our blog, for more interesting reads and updates remember to bookmark us.