7 Things the Best Marketing Agencies Know About SaaS Sales and Clients

If you’re a marketing agency, it’s highly likely you’ve been working with all kinds of clients – from entrepreneurs and small businesses to large corporations – so you’re probably ready for any kind of challenge thrown at you.

Still, if you haven’t worked with any SaaS clients yet, don’t make the assumption it’s going to be pretty much the same as with any other client. Because it’s not. When talking about SaaS companies and businesses nowadays, “in many ways, we’re looking at the PC market in 1983, smartphone market in 2003, or the search market in 1998.”

To make your cooperation with SaaS clients a bit easier, here are 7 things the best marketing agencies know about working with such clients and use to generate SaaS sales.

1. What is SaaS?

SaaS stands short for Software as a Service.

TechTarget defines it as “a software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the Internet. SaaS is one of three main categories of cloud computing, alongside infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).”

This article will lead you through the most important aspects and provide key takeaways of taking on SaaS clients for your digital marketing agency. Of course, in order to do so, let’s first briefly examine what makes SaaS clients different from “regular” clients… and how this can affect their SaaS sales.

2. What Makes SaaS Clients Different from Other Clients

Marketing a physical product such as a phone or a car is already hard enough.

But what about marketing something that’s intangible and has no physical form? And that’s just one of the things that makes SaaS sales tricky.

What about the fact that their service is constantly changing and evolving with every new update? Plus, in most cases, they’re not asking customers for a one-time purchase but you need to make sure money is withdrawn from their card every month to pay for the service.

From a marketer’s perspective, SaaS sales usually require a longer sales cycle and a greater number of touch points before the prospect is ready to purchase.

It’s not just about the way those businesses operate, from the characteristic overuse of business buzzwords to aggressive goals and ultra-fast scaling, SaaS clients are unique in numerous ways.

3. You Need to Actually Be Using Your Client’s Software

When trying to kick off a new SaaS client, don’t fool yourself it’ll be enough to simply browse their website and social media for a bit, read a short About Me page and be ready to propose a solution to their problems and challenges.

If you really want to have an impact on their SaaS sales, you need to make sure you dive deep into their business and completely understand what kind of services they offer and what their product does and how it works.

Ideally, you would want to use their software for a while to get the hang of it. Most SaaS companies have those test accounts which they could give you access to. Or you could simply use a trial version to get familiar with their software.

In reality, as the world of SaaS companies operates at a pretty high pace, you won’t always have enough time to devote to significant software use. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for not getting more familiar with their software. Most SaaS businesses have recorded product demos and thorough help documentation you could use to get acquainted with their product.

Getting to know your client’s software is important for two things. First, the first-hand experience with the product, enables you to write a hiogher quality ad and sales copy, highlighting all the most important features. Second, it shows your SaaS clients that you’re more than willing to put in an extra effort to really understand what it is that they do.

4. Effective Lead Generation is Vital for Boosting SaaS Sales

When working with SaaS clients, one of the most important things to focus on is their lead generation. In fact, understanding how your client scores leads is highly likely to have a huge impact on their SaaS sales.

Having a strong understanding of what lead generation methods work best for your client will enable you to use their budget more effectively and create highly targeted campaigns for different customer personas, thus delivering lasting value.

Recently, more and more marketers and agencies have been using quizzes as one of highly effective means of generating targeted leads. For example, Neil Patel’s agency used LeadQuizzes to increase one of their website’s lead capture by 500%!

Why do quizzes work for them?

Quizzes enable you to get to know your target audience, segment them based on their answers into different customer groups, and eventually personalize your marketing efforts towards each of those groups.

If you’re looking to learn more about how to create your own quiz and use it to promote your client’s SaaS business and eventually increase their SaaS sales, here’s a comprehensive quiz maker tutorial for you to check out.

5. The Importance of Retaining and Upselling Existing Customers

Sure, SaaS sales is about selling web-based software to customers. But since it’s rarely a one-off sale, salespeople have to focus both on acquiring new clients and retaining or upselling the existing ones.

The fact is that most of your revenue comes and will come from your existing SaaS clients. In fact, Gartner has found that in most cases 80% of all your future revenue will come from only 20% of your existing customers.

Retaining your current SaaS clients is more cost effective too. A Forrester Research study has shown that it can cost 5x more to acquire a new client than to retain an existing one.

In addition to customer retention, most of the successful SaaS businesses focus on upselling, which holds significant growth opportunities. Still, many agencies find upselling hard because it’s sometimes difficult to know when to reengage offering something new.

The best way to make a proper judgment is to leverage the data you already have. For example, you could track how near their accounts are getting to their data or usage limits. Look for a specific reason for a customer to upgrade to a higher-level account.

In an interview to Journey to 7 Figures, Garrett Moon, the man who has built CoSchedule up to a 7-figure revenue, 9,000 customers, and 1.5M monthly page views, says that

“The reality is that as your product changes and as your customer base changes, you have to make decisions or release features that you know are only going to help a certain set of users.”

You can listen to the entire interview here.

Finally, both marketing agencies and their SaaS clients often disagree about what makes a good retention rate. Partly due to clients’ unrealistically high expectations, partly due to agencies’ inability to “reinvent the wheel” over a short period of time.

To help both, we tried to determine what the realistic retention rate for SaaS really is.

6. Giving Away Something For Free Can Boost Your SaaS Sales

Sure, if you’re selling physical goods, it doesn’t make much sense (nor it’s profitable) to give away a ton of free products. Maybe you could give away a few free samples.

But what about SaaS sales?

Giving away a service or a part of it is essentially SaaS marketing 101. The free trial is one of the most widely accepted marketing strategies when it comes to acquiring and onboarding SaaS clients.

Of course, in the world of SaaS, the free model can have many different forms and shapes – free trial, a trial with/wthout credit card info, freemium, limited version free, trial-to-paid, and so on.

7. Influencers Make Great Early Adopters

If your client’s SaaS business is still at an early stage, getting one of the major influencers in the field to be one the early adopters is imperative.

Remember when I talked above about how Neil Patel and his agency used quizzes to capture more leads? Well, to be quite frank, Neil wasn’t the only one to benefit from that cooperation.

When our LeadQuizzes 3 was still in beta, we reached out to Neil and offered him to use our software free of charge (as an early adopter), hoping to get a case study or a testimonial in return. After he said yes, we created a nutrition and dieting quiz for him, which he then added to his site with Hello Bar. The result? 500% increase in conversion rate.

What did we learn from this experience? Don’t be afraid to reach out to big names (and Neil is definitely huge in his field).

If you’d like to learn more about how how to kickstart growth marketing strategy with early SaaS adopters, here’s a great resource on the topic.