Business-to-business sales are at the core of every SaaS company. They are important for your growth and margins. With growing interest and investment in the space, there are almost always a bunch of companies in the same space and that means intense competition to grow. So, how does one break the barrier and attain escape velocity? And it starts with Lead-generation. Each lead gives you the chance to attract a new customer to your customer base by translating their interest in your company's sales.

Year 2020 and the pandemic has nothing but accelerated the shift to digital products and sales haven't been far behind. SaaS businesses grew by 50% in the last 2 years. So what does it mean for SaaS marketers? Extreme focus on data-driven marketing has made one thing clear. One needs to be very precise with tracking and measurement. There is room for experiments, but experiments too must have clear objectives.

B2B marketers can effectively increase lead generation and deliver high ROI, following the best practices in the trade. If you are a B2B SaaS marketer looking forward to enhancing your current efforts in 2021, I am confident that this list of best and tested B2B lead generation practices will prove more than beneficial.

We will look at some techniques in this post that can increase lead generation effectively and produce higher ROI. I would also like to add that you can launch a new lead-generation path with the best practices and these are not the last word about what to do. It is possible to view these activities as something of a template.

Let's roll:

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing focuses on attracting potential customers and turning them into end-users. This implies integrating different marketing mediums in terms of digital marketing, such as strategic content curation and marketing, social media marketing, optimization of search engines, and branding.

This is a systematic marketing technique to generate SaaS leads to bringing more organic traffic to your site by regularly posting content updates on websites and social media channels (blogging, guest articles, guides, podcasts, ebooks, etc.). Create a content publishing calendar to improve traffic is recommended. Helps achieve better ROI as well. If you are just getting started this may be a daunting task to be available on so many channels.

Lead Scoring

Once you have the leads coming in, the next thing that hits you is lead quality. Nearly 30 percent of marketers said that the key metric on which they are being measured is MQLs (Marketing Eligible Leads) or SALs (Sales Approved Leads) in a survey of Demand Generation. On the other hand, less than 15 percent of B2B marketers assume that the total number of leads or inquiries has been reviewed and evaluated. The move towards efficiency with quality of lead generation has increased significantly.

In other words, today lead scoring is almost essential. The bulk of the output of marketers is measured solely based on lead quality. That's why it has been one of the top priorities for B2B marketers to boost lead quality. Here are some of the most effective ways to boost the consistency of leads:

• Apply personalization to your marketing content.
• Quality and not quantity of content matters. Build content for stickiness and not just attract.
• Get your toolset right. Go beyond spreadsheets and wire up marketing automation early on.
• Tap in 3rd-party lead sources. Partnerships, agencies are good picks here.
• Continuously monitor and improve lead scoring.
• Have a healthy mix of outbound leads. Helps you stay closer to your ideal customer pool.

STP - Segement, Target, Position

A classic marketing technique does not fail here. Identify your customer segments using the buyer persona technique. Define the target audience, i.e. determining who are the likely businesses to benefit from your product or service. For instance, if your company is in its initial stage of operations unless you have a credible, big brand as your customer to show up in your portfolio, it makes little sense to target large-scale companies. If you can develop good brand credibility, you can start approaching the major corporations to make a lucrative business offer. Because dividing/fragmenting your audience is the cornerstone of your marketing plan, using accurate data, you need to be precise about which audience to target.

A recent study found that 71 percent of B2B companies target their customers based on geography, 59 percent of B2B sellers split their target audience based on Industry Vertical, 50 percent of companies concentrate on account-based marketing, 48 percent focus on the audience based on their online activities, and 41 percent focus on company size as the primary factor when segmenting the audience. Website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)Optimization of the conversion rate is the method of increasing the number of visitors to your website that translates to real customers.

The first impact that your organization makes on a visitor is your website. It is therefore important to provide a user-friendly, sensitive, and informative website to engage users. For your website, it is important to leave a strong first impression on the mind of the visitor through eye-catching, visually appealing graphics and original, unique content that can provide visitors with all the relevant details. On your website, map out those places where visitors appear to spend time the most and add CTAs that support your highest-converting content. Even a small percentage of an increase in the conversion rate of visitor-to-lead will yield gains further down the funnel.

Outbound Marketing

As the name suggests, it is the opposite of inbound marketing. Customers don't always keep dropping. You have to go out and seek them. Even large successful companies have to continuously keep investing in outbound marketing campaigns.

And if you are in the early days of building your market, then outbound is going to be the bulk of what you will do. The approach is to proactively reach your target segment of buyers with a clear value proposition. There are many ways to do this.

• Join groups on social and professional media that are relevant
• Conferences, workshops in the space are good starting points. Look at the presenters and attendees list. Many of these are publicly available to start your campaign.
• Blogs, Ads, search keywords give you another dimension on what your potential buyer would be looking or searching for. A big area by itself, and we will cover it in another blog.

Luckily platforms like Linkdra help you run a good outbound marketing campaign. Linkdra makes it easy to identify the best prospects based on their public LinkedIn profile, even if you are not connected with them. The steps are

• Search out your ideal customers by location, role, industry keywords, size.
• Filter the results to pick the most likely candidates. Linkdra scoring system stack ranks them to make it easier to pick.
• Craft a personalized connection request message and send. See the post on LinkedIn message Templates
• Build your contact list when they accept to add to your email marketing campaign.

Email lists and Campaigns

Email marketing is still the king when it comes to marketing channel ROI. Email marketing is also considered one of the best ways to continuously engage if the content of the email is rich and personalized.

There is intense competition for the inbox and a battle with the spam filters and so avoid a direct pitch initially. Build trust and track open rates before you switch gears.

Also, see the post on Tag-based email marketing automation with Mailchimp and Linkdra

Live Chat

Customers tend to use some other communication channel to talk live. Some industries have experienced an increase in chat growth of as much as 150%. The explanation for this rapid spike is that more than half of the customers prefer to chat in real-time over calling for help from a company. By providing your customers with the following, live chat support on your company website will amplify your lead generation efforts:

• Real-time communication
• Better customer service
• Lower bounce rate
• Higher probability of lead generation
• Ability to earn and build customer trust and loyalty

Now that you have this starting point it's time to apply them. Although these methods have been found successful in achieving outcomes on their own, some of them can still be combined to ensure that they are best tailored to your SaaS company and your audience.