Sales & Marketing Toolsfor B2B SaaS companies

September 2015

B2B SaaS companies are faced with a myriad of choices when it comes to the tools and solutions to implement as part of their marketing & sales processes.This presentation presents a selection of the leading tools on the market to address each step of the marketing and sales cycle.Although geared towards B2B SaaS companies, many of the tools presented here will also work for traditional software/service companies.Note that each of the solutions presented here is useful on its own, but the combination of several tools in the right sequence is where the real magic comes from.

Introduction

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Overview

ContentMktg

LeadGen

SalesDev

LeadNurturing CRM Analysis Customer

Service

The sales & marketing process at a modern B2B SaaS company usually comprises some or all of the following steps:

For each step, several solutions exists in order to make your life easier.The goal of this presentation is to review existing tools and how they can be used in combination in order to make sure your company has an effective sales & marketing process in place. Whether you already have a well-defined process or you’re starting from scratch, I hope you’ll discover interesting tools!

Content marketing

Content marketingThe goal of content marketing is to make sure that people who are experiencing a problem that your product solves find out about you.Let’s say you’re the worldwide specialist in a very specific area. How do you make sure that anyone who needs help with it knows about you? That’s where content marketing comes in.Content marketing is about creating and delivering the right pieces of information, to the right audience, at the right time, using the right combination of channels in order to maximize effectiveness and reach at the lowest possible cost.This section looks at a small subset of tools and services that will help you create and deliver your content.

Mark Suster:PR is an insanely valuable activity in early-stage companies. Very few investors understand this and even fewer startups. When you’re an early-stage business every dollar matters and because many startup teams these days are very product & technology centric they often miscalculate the importance of PR.I believe PR is often not tangibly measurable and for quant-oriented people this is hard to accept.

The benefits of PR are exactly that: immeasurable. They are silent. They don’t show up in a calculation that says I spent $7,000 and I got X-thousands inches of press. It doesn’t work that way. [...] In the write up of our success I was quoted as saying, “If I had $1 dollar left to spend on marketing I would put it to PR.”

Press Relations (PR)

A content management system (CMS) is the solution you’re going to use in order to manage your website and/or your blog. Using a CMS is strongly recommended in order to make it easy for you to publish content online.

Recommended solutions include:● Wordpress: after starting its life as blogging software, Wordpress quickly

evolved to become a versatile content management solution.● Drupal: a powerful content management platform, Drupal is the go-to

solution for heavy duty sites. The White House’s website runs on Drupal.● Squarespace: the goal of Squarespace is to offer a simple and easy-to-

use online publishing platform for companies of all sizes

Content Management System (CMS)

Scripted:A white paper is a factual, informational analysis that uses data and research to convey the benefits of a product, strategy, or service. White papers provide credible answers and solutions, in addition to showing factual information. White papers are usually downloadable pieces of content that live on a company’s resources section. [...]White papers are unique because they one of the largest drivers of generating leads for B2B companies due to the fact that most white papers are gated content. White papers also generate newsletter and email signups and can be syndicated for publication in multiple platforms. [...] White paper downloads are most commonly tracked by marketing automation software.

White papers

Social networks

Social networksAlthough technically a subset of content marketing, communication through social networks has become so important that it deserves a section of its own. You should look at social services both as a distribution channel for your content and a tool for SEO.

Until recently, managing your online presence across many services could prove very time consuming. Happily enough, a new generation of applications recently emerged that makes it downright easy to post articles on several networks and manage communication with your users.

Buffer allows you to post to multiple social networks at once and to manage your post schedule.It makes it easy for your company to maintain a vibrant online presence across a broad range of services.

Buffer

Agorapulse lets you easily manage your online presence on the main social networks. You can schedule posts, run contests and reply to messages from an unified inbox that groups all the messages directed to you across your accounts.Powerful analytics tools lets you assess your progress and you can even benchmark your competition right from the app!

AgoraPulse

Lead generation

Lead generationAs its name indicates, the goal of lead generation is to identify leads for the sales organization to go after. Lead generation can be accomplished through 2 categories of techniques : inbound and outbound. Inbound techniques are closely related to content marketing, which was covered above.Outbound techniques focus on identifying potential leads through a variety of means and getting in touch with them. If you’re interested in finding out more about this topic, Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross is the reference book on the subject.This section will focus on a couple tools that can be used in order to identify and contact the right prospects for your product/service. They assume you already have an idea of what your ideal customer profile looks like.

Slideshare is an online platform you can use to publish slides (actually, it’s the very platform that is hosting this presentation).

On top of great SEO, Slideshare offers a built-in tool to collect leads. Upon downloading your presentations, users get presented with a lead capture form that they need to fill in order to access your content.

Slideshare

LinkedIn offers powerful search tools in order to identify potential clients. Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you get access to a powerful search engine and direct messaging tools in order to identify and engage prospects.

LinkedIn

Salesloft Prospector is a great tool in order to create lists of potential prospects. It lets you collect leads from any web page and takes a stab at guessing their likely email address and phone number on your behalf!

Salesloft Prospector

Rapportive is a nifty Gmail plugin that allows you to see information about your contacts right inside of your mailbox.What’s a little less known is that you can use it in combination with email format generators in order to identify the email address of a specific prospect you’re targetting.Once you’ve found the right combination, their LinkedIn profile will magically show up on the right! Pretty handy.

Rapportive

Sales development

Sales developmentTopo:Sales development is one of the most important processes an organization can build to deliver a seamless, efficient revenue machine. Sales development is a phone-based team that identifies, connects with, and qualifies leads. When a lead is qualified, they then pass the qualified lead to a sales person who takes over for the rest of the sales process.From Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development: “Put simply, SDRs (Sales Development Reps) pass the baton between marketing and sales”.

This section looks at several tools that can be used by SDRs.

Slaesloft Cadence is built for sales development representatives who want to make sure they’re never missing a beat in their interactions with their prospects. The solution helps you create your own email workflows and tells you when to send your emails, while keeping a human touch.

Salesloft Cadence

ToutApp helps you understand how well your outreach email perform through a combination of tracking, templating and analytics features.You get more visibility into how prospects interact with the email you send them, as well as alerts so that you can get back in touch with them when they have you at the top of their mind.

ToutApp

Cirrus Insights is a nifty plugin that lives into your inbox and helps you keep your inbox in sync with Salesforce.Conversations with prospects are automatically logged into their Salesforce profile, contacts are synched with your address book and your calendar is kept updated as well.In short, Cirrus helps you remove friction when using Salesforce in combination with email on a daily basis.

Cirrus Insights

Lead nurturing

Lead nurturingLead nurturing is the fiefdom of marketing automation solutions.The goal of these solutions is to make it possible to segment leads according to a set of characteristics they have in common and to address them with the right messages, at the right time.In an ideal world, once you’ve captured a lead, you will present them with relevant pieces of information that will help them understand the value of your service and drive them towards a completed sale. These solutions use email as the preferred means of communication with prospects, trying to build a relationship with them.Although by no means identical, solutions in this section have a significant amount of feature overlap. You’re probably better off implementing only one of them at the same time.

Marketo is the poster child of marketing automation solutions. It includes a lot of features around lead targeting and scoring.

Using Marketo, you’ll be able to setup lead capture forms on your website as well as landing pages. Once captured, leads will be added to specific campaigns (based on criteria such as their size or location). Lead activity on your website & marketing collaterals will then be used to generate a score indicating hot leads.

Marketo

Hubspot is a fully integrated platform that started its life as a tool to manage content and generate demand.It has now evolved into a full-fledged solution that spans use cases ranging from content management to marketing automation and CRM.

Although it now spans the full marketing & sales cycle, Hubspot’s heritage still shows up in the app: you can still create your website using the solution.

Hubspot

As its name indicates, Mailchimp is focused on email delivery. While simpler than Marketo and Hubspot, Mailchimp is great if you want to get started with email marketing. It offers tools to create beautiful emails and make sure they’re delivered to your users at the best time.

Through customer profiles, workflows and analytics tools, Mailchimp has outgrown its initial scope to become the reference solution for email delivery.

Mailchimp

CRM

Customer Relationship ManagementA Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution is the heart of your sales & marketing organisation. It holds the master data about all of the leads and commercial opportunities you’re pursuing at any point in time as well as the list of deals you’ve closed.While smaller organisation often use a combination of Excel documents as their CRM when they get started, implemeting a real CRM system is key in order to enable the growth of your company. Note that there are a lot of CRM solutions out there, only a small subset is presented here.Besides a CRM system, you need to make sure that you put in place tools and processes that will allow your sales team to perform effectively. Creating a sales playbook that embodies the sales knowledge of the organisation can be very helpful in this regard.

Note: as with Hubspot, Salesforce offers many features beyond its core CRM component.

SalesforceAlthough not the most ergonomic nor the most user-friendly CRM solution, Salesforce’s huge advantages are the breadth and depth of its feature set and the fact that it’s already integrated with pretty much every platform out there. You may not be thrilled, but you can’t really go wrong when choosing it.

Close.io aims at making the job of salespeople as easy and painless as possible. A full-featured CRM solution, it focuses on the needs on the individual sales person by featuring leads and opportunities using smart views and integrating with email and phone systems.

Close.io

Pipedrive is a powerful CRM solution that is built around a pipeline view of all the deals you’re currently working on. This helps your team in implementing a consistent sales methodology that deliver consistent results.

Pipedrive

Somewhat counter-intuitively, You don’t need a CRM! is a CRM solution that’s built for smaller teams. Its core promise is that it will make the management of your sales cycle as simple as possible. It integrates with third-party solutions.

You don’t need a CRM!

Analysis

AnalysisAbove all else, SaaS is a numbers game. In order to be successful, you have to understand a number of key concepts that will help you pilot your activity. This section aims at presenting a number of such tools.The first step is to understand how people find you online. Once they find you, it’s very important to have a good idea of how people interact with your site so that you can make sure your goals are met.If everything goes well and subscriptions start flying off the shelves, you’ll need to be able to track your business’ performance and make sure that all your charts go up and to the right.Used on their own or in combination, the services outlined in this section allow you to do just this - and even more!

Google Webmaster Tools helps you understand how the Google search engine sees your website.It’s a treasure trove of information you can use to improve your organic search rankings and make sure people find you online.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics is the reference solution when it comes to logging and analysing traffic to your website. It helps you understand what content does or doesn’t perform so that you can optimize it towards your goals.

Google Analytics

Kissmetrics gives you visibility into the behavior of people on your site. You can setup funnels and understand how people move (or leave!) your site compared to the way you expect them to behave.

Kissmetrics

The service also gives you the ability to look at user cohorts so that you can fix issues as they arise. If a recent cohort is not performing as well as expected, you can understand the reasons why and fix them.

You’ll be able to track your numbers at one glance and act as soon as needed should things go astray. Increase your MRR, keep churn under control and you’ll be on your way to building a fast-growing, sustainable company!

ChartmogulChartmogul provides you with subscription intelligence without any setup. All you need to do is connect the service to your payment backend and look at the resulting analysis.

PendoPendo gives you insights into how people actually use your product. You can get detailed feature usage statistics and offer suggestions to users based on their past behavior: “What about trying our feature XXX? It’s new and you’ve not used it yet.”.This lets you base your product management choices on facts rather than on the opinions of team members.

Customer service

Customer serviceAcquiring users and turning them into customers is just the beginning.In order to build a lasting and fruitful relationship with them, you need to make sure that every interaction is handled quickly and efficiently.The best way to ensure this is to implement the right tools and to staff them with diligent people who feel deeply concerned about the success of your customers.Many solutions exist to handle customer service. Here is a short selection of the most effective and powerful ones.

Zendesk is the elephant in the room when it comes to online customer support. It’s a powerful solution that lets you handle inbound requests from users and answer them in a timely manner to ensure a high level of client satisfaction.

Zendesk

Using Zendesk, you can priorize issues, automatically assign them to agents, implement rules so that issues without answers get closed automatically as well as follow end-user satisfaction with your service.

Intercom is a tool that can be embedded inside of your SaaS application in order to handle communication with your users through various channels.

It also helps you get a better understanding of user engagement within your app. You can look at user cohorts, see how much (or how little!) people are using your app and interact with them when you notice issues or want to ask questions.

Intercom

Front is a shared inbox for your team. You can receive messages through many channels (email, SMS, voice…), assign them to someone and make sure that your users receive a timely reply through the communication medium of their choice.

Front

Fullstory Fullstory is a service that records the activity of users on your site/service and allows you to play it back so that you can see exactly what they’ve done on your site.You can use it both for sales (in order to improve your user flow) and customer support (to help debug an issue).

Internal tools

Internal toolsAll of the services we’ve seen so far were focused either on job-specific or outward facing use cases. As your sales & marketing teams grow, you will need to invest into internal communication so that your whole team works efficiently together. You will no longer be able to rely on the implicit knowledge of the founder and a couple early hires to get deals done.In order to address this challenge, you’ll need 3 components:● A way to know who should be working on what and when● A way to get answers quickly when you need them● A way to formalize your team’s knowledge and share it efficiently

I have presented one solution for each of these needs, but note that plenty of others are available on the market!

Slack Slack is a real-time communication solutions that lets your team members interact together quickly and efficiently.One of its strenghts is the integration with numerous services, effectively serving as an inbox for all your notifications.

Asana is a powerful task management solution that works across devices to help you make sure everyone knows what they have to do and when they’re expected to deliver it. The solution helps you make sure that your whole team is working in sync and that you’re not dropping the baton when tasks move between teams.

Asana

XWiki XWiki Collaboration Suite allows you to create, update and share your sales playbook so that every sales person knows how to implement and follow your company’s sales process. Thanks to the playbook, newcomers can get up to speed quickly and close more sales!

Conclusion

Towards a fully integrated processMarketing & Sales should work hand in hand to deliver the revenue your company needs to grow. In order to help your company reach its full potential, you need to enable your marketing & sales teams through the use of the best tools for the job, while at the same time making sure that data flows seamlessly between the various systems you’re using.Even though this presentation described a large number of solutions, it only scratches the surface of all the tools and services available online.Before starting to implement some (or all!) of these solutions, it is critical that you start by listing your key goals and by asking yourself what is the best combination of solutions in order to achieve them. Each solution has a significant learning period, so you need to make sure you have fully digested it before investing in the deployment of a new one.

Looking for help?

I am available for short consulting missions: strategy advice, questions about the enterprise sales cycle, tools selection, positioning review...

Get in touch:consulting@guillaumelerouge.com

Guillaume Lerougeconsulting@guillaumelerouge.com

Director of Sales & MarketingXWiki SAS