Insight: SaaS (13) Inbound sales & content marketing

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We analyzed Freemium’s SaaS model in the previous article‘Insight: SaaS (12) Freemium is fantastic, but not for every SaaS company.’. In this article, we’ll discuss how inbound sales can be used in SaaS companies, as well as how to use content marketing to generate more MQLs.

The definition of inbound sales and content marketing

People frequently confuse inbound sales and content marketing, but the two are not interchangeable. Inbound sales make customers contact the company for deals. The inbound sales-driven growth method relies on customers taking the initiative to visit our website and contact our sales representatives as the primary source of leads. Outbound sales company goes out of their way to visit customers and call new customers to find out what they want. Inbound sales and the actual sales method do not have a contractual relationship. FAE and AE can also be used in inbound sales. The trick is to figure out where your customers come from.

For inbound sales, content marketing is the most effective marketing strategy. To gain potential customers, content marketers use blogs, social media, videos, podcasts, and FAQs. Customers are enticed to contact the company to complete the transaction through content marketing. As a result, content marketing is widely integrated into the inbound sales process.

Benefits of inbound sales

Inbound sales have a much higher lead conversion rate and NDR than outbound sales. There is a basis for the transaction because the customer has already expressed interest. Since the value of SaaS is recurring revenue, blindly expanding customers is not the best option. Outbound sales are more commonly used in traditional B2B companies. Even if the customer is not the target customer, the one-time transaction revenue can be quite profitable, and the salespeople don’t have to worry about losing customers in the following year. Inbound sales helped SaaS companies screen customers in the early stages in an unobtrusive way.

Inbound sales are increasing at a faster rate. The inbound sales have a lower impact than outbound sales in the early stages. But with brand building, has a much higher growth rate than outbound sales. Customer acquisition for SaaS must be done in batches, and brand building should be performed consistently. Companies that focus on outbound sales are likely to ignore brand development. They won’t be able to maintain high customer acquisition growth in the long run, and it will be easier to reach the bottleneck.

Customers are increasingly accepting of self-education(self-service). Before deciding whether or not to use your product, they must read enough information on your website or Google something. Any early direct contact with the customer may be misinterpreted by the customer, and it will also put the customer under a lot of pressure. Inbound sales conform to this trend.

So, how do you carry out inbound sales? Use content marketing as your primary marketing strategy.

Content marketing should consider the customer’s point of view when creating content. Many businesses devote significant resources to marketing the product’s functions (Function A, B, and C…). They took a lot of videos and put a lot of ads on them, but they didn’t have much of an impact. Now is the time to consider what your customers really want to see. Customers did not participate in the design of your product or attend internal marketing staff meetings, and they had no idea what you were talking about. If SaaS companies want to conduct content marketing, they must think from the customer’s perspective.

Customers’ entire journey from the first contact to the final transaction can be analyzed psychologically.

1. Is this a problem?

2. How to solve this problem?

3. Why should I choose your SaaS to solve this problem?

4. How to use your product correctly to achieve the effect?

The marketing can then be divided into four stages to address the four main questions they have: Awareness, Education, Selection, and Success.

Awareness is to make them aware of the problems they are facing. Education is telling them that we can solve their problems right away and provide them with a wealth of information and case studies. Selection is to explain to a customer why they chose you over your competitors’ products. Success is defined as demonstrating how to use the product after the customer has purchased it and guiding the customer to achieve the desired outcome.

These four stages require a lot of content. If your marketing only focuses on Awareness or Education, the customer’s mental process has not been fully experienced. Furthermore, the mental process of the real customer is not fixed, and it will continue to withdraw in four stages. Perhaps after the user enters the Selection stage, he discovers that a competitor’s product has a feature that he really likes, and he returns to the Education stage to re-examine your product. You will most likely lose it if you don’t have the corresponding content, so make the content of the four stages very substantial.

The next article ‘Insight: SaaS (14) The Moat of SaaS’ is published. Simply send me some claps and feedback if you enjoyed my article.