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SaaS-Marketing-Tools
SaaS Tools

Tools That Are A Must for SaaS businesses to Skyrocket Their Performance

To improve performance & productivity, SaaS businesses must focus on utilizing quality tools. To perform different tasks, run different marketing campaigns and for many sales & marketing operations, different tools are required, such as CRM tools for managing leads, as well as for marketing & sales operations, Marketing automation tools to streamline the company’s internal processes, Web analytics tools to monitor website traffic & data analysis, Heatmap tools for website visual analysis, product analytics tools for tracking how users interact with your product and different marketing tools for various marketing activities.

I am listing down all those important tools with the reasons & benefits why SaaS businesses must start using such tools:

  • CRM/Marketing Automation – From managing leads & contacts to sales & marketing operations to pipeline management to marketing automation to email marketing to the landing page to form creations to integration with other platforms to insightful reporting, there are many ways CRM/MA tools help and SaaS businesses must take advantage of it. Here is the list of some of the best CRM/MA tools:
    • HubSpot
    • Zoho
    • Pipedrive
    • Freshworks
    • SendInBlue
    • MailChimp
    • Salesforce
    • SAP
    • Marketo
    • Monday.com
    • SharpSpring
  • Web Analytics Tools – If you are marketing your business across different marketing channels and not monitoring what is working or what’s not, then you are just throwing your money in the air. You need to have access to insightful data about your marketing campaigns & their performance to make a better decision out of that which will help you plan your business & marketing strategy in a better way. Check out the list below:
    • Google Analytics (GA4)
    • Matomo
    • Adobe Analytics
    • Google Search Console (GSC)
    • Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)
  • Heatmap Tools – Gain visual insights about what your visitors are actually doing on the website in real-time, as well as by watching recorded videos using heatmap tools. Additionally, you can also connect your website forms to see the actual conversions and which channels contributing more or to check if there are any issues on the form itself, what causing abandonment, and what can be done to fix these issues or to check the website issues, such as scrolling, responsive, and navigation issues or to check where users are clicking more on the website & across different pages. All these metrics will help you craft your strategy well. Check out the tool list below:
    • MS Clarity
    • Hotjar
    • Luckyorange
    • Mouseflow
    • Crazy Egg
  • Product Analytics tools – Such tools are designed to track how users interact with the SaaS products, as well as have web analytics features too. In other words, a product analytics tool is a combination of both web analytics & product analytics tools. Check out the list below:
    • Amplitude
    • Mixpanel
    • Kissmetrics
  • Customer data platforms (CDP) – CDP acts as a common database of users’ or customers’ data, data is pulled through multiple sources or you can say through different analytics platforms to group together all in one place to have a granular data view that could help make a better business or marketing decisions. Try CDP tools, such as Segment or CleverTap for your SaaS business to understand your data better.
  • Business Intelligence tools – BI tools are intended to collect and process large amounts of data, both structured and unstructured data. Data from online and offline sources are fed to such tools to generate meaningful data that help make better decisions. You can try out some of the best BI tools:
    • Tableau
    • MS Power BI
    • Yellowfin BI
    • Domo
    • Zoho Analytics
    • Qlikview
    • IBM Cognos
  • Marketing Tools – There are a variety of marketing tools available to execute different online marketing activities. Check out some of the best tools for marketing listed below:
    • For SEO, I would personally recommend SEMRush or ahrefs and Screaming frog
    • For email marketing, MailChimp or SendInBlue is a good option
    • For content marketing, try Buzzsumo for research purposes
    • For social media, Buffer & Hootsuite are good for automating posts, planning content calendars & reporting
    • For paid media, SEMRush offers great reports for paid campaigns, as well as spyFu a good option too
  • Productivity Tools – Slack, ClickUp, and Airtable are tools that help you manage your projects better, as well as keep you updated on tasks management and make internal communication easy.

Conclusion

To grow faster & make better decisions, SaaS businesses must utilize analytical/automation/productivity tools available for different company tasks and there is no limit. There are a variety of tools available for different purposes that SaaS businesses must take advantage of. I have listed down all the important tools in this blog so check those and find what suits best for your SaaS business.

crm-tools
SaaS Tools

7 Free CRM/MA Tools That You Can Use for Your SaaS Business

Using CRM & marketing automation tools can help SaaS businesses automate their sales & marketing tasks, as well as run marketing campaigns, reporting & streamline company internal processes. Doing such tasks manually kills productivity, requires more manpower and there is always a possibility of human errors that can make your tasks even more difficult as it’s hard to identify those errors and it might take hours to find & pinpoint such issues.

Use these 7 free CRM/MA tools to improve your SaaS business performance:

• Zoho – Zoho is a free CRM software that allows a single user to use its platform for free up to 5000 contacts, after that, it starts charging so it’s a very good platform for MSME businesses. To track more leads (>5000), consider upgrading the plan.

Additionally, you get access to many different features, such as sending in-person emails, sales & marketing dashboards, deals, automated workflows, list creation, reporting, and integration with other platforms which are all included in the free plan.

• HubSpot – This one is my favorite as it offers very clean UI, amazing templates, insightful dashboards & multiple integrations with different SaaS platforms. It has no contact limits but yes, restricts on users. It’s good for both MSMEs & big companies.

You get access to many amazing features, such as creative email & landing page templates, chatbot setup, different ways to set up dashboards, different objects (Contacts, Deals, Sales, and Company), list creations, form creations, defining buyer personas, automated workflows, a number of different properties, and integration with 100+ SaaS platforms. Some of these features are included in the free plan while some you can access under a paid plan.

• SendInBlue – It is a multi-purpose tool that provides three very important features which are email marketing, CRM, and marketing automation. The good thing is that you can use the SendInBlue sign-up or subscription form on the website and leads will be stored directly in the CRM.

Later, you can put these leads into different lists for mass email marketing or run automated email or drip email campaigns to nurture your customers.

• MailChimp – It is almost similar to SendInBlue but comes with some different features and plans. It’s recognized as one of the best email marketing platforms but lately, it has added CRM & marketing automation features too that make it more powerful if you consider it from a marketing perspective as it allows you to track and automate leads, as well as running targeted email marketing campaigns.

Monday.com – It has a variety of features & tools that include marketing, sales & CRM, project management, task management, workflows, and many more that is meant to improve productivity for an individual, as well as for a whole team in a company.

• Freshworks – It’s a bit similar to Zoho but yes, there are differences in UI, features, and pricing. It has different products for different tasks, such as Freshsales for the sales team, Freshsales Suite an all-in-one CRM, Freshmarketer for marketing automation, and so on.

• Pipedrive – Pipedrive is a sales CRM & pipeline management software that helps salespeople manage their sales data with ease, as well as automate their sales tasks which improves sales team productivity.

Conclusion

SaaS businesses must take advantage of CRM/MA tools to improve their business operations & their team productivity. There are many such tools, some are very expensive while others charge a minimal amount, while others are free but have some limitations. SaaS businesses that are in a very early stage should opt for free CRM/MA tools or for those whose pricing is very low. I have written this blog keeping SaaS startups in mind who can not afford pricy tools so they can use such free tools initially.

SaaS-Conversion-Issues
SaaS Marketing

Wondering, What May be Affecting Conversions/Revenue for Your SaaS Business? Check Out the List!

Your prospects have to go through many stages before they finally convert and make a decision to pay for your SaaS product. Every stage is crucial as that encourages prospects to move further in the conversion funnel so it’s important to provide them with the right messaging to the right marketing materials to better website experience to keep engaging with them while they are moving through different funnel stages.

Any confusion will cause you to lose your prospects in no time so you need to know what may be affecting conversions/revenue for your SaaS product and how you can fix this.

Here are the points I have listed that would help you understand conversions/revenue issues for your SaaS product.

  • Product Issues – The first issue may be your product itself. If your product is not great, not solving your customers’ issues, not fulfilling what was promised then they are not going to pay for your product and you will keep losing customers.
  • Low-quality Leads – It may be that you are not generating high-quality leads and that could be the reason why your conversions, as well as revenue, are low.
  • Less Number of Leads – Even if you are generating good quality leads, not everyone is going to pay for your SaaS service or product as only 2-3% of prospects convert as per data and the rest will leave so it’s important to keep increasing the number of leads over time.
  • Poor Support – This will surely affect your conversions/revenue as prospects do some research before buying any products on the internet, as well as they may contact your support team if any confusion they have so your support must be quick to solve their issues right away.
  • No Nurture Activities – Once prospects become your customers, still you need to keep engaging with them as more engagement leads to more revenue that’s how it works. Nurturing helps to not lose customers, as well as helps:
    • Increase the average transaction size
    • Increase the frequency of transactions per customer
  • Pricing Issues – It may be that pricing is kept too high so customers are switching to alternative products or not charging enough so not making money so you need to find the right balance between both.
  • Website Issues – There are some website issues that don’t affect directly but still they do.
    • Broken links that lead to the pricing page
    • Pricing funnel issues, i.e., any error while completing the transaction
    • Transactional errors
      • Banks errors
      • Other payment gateway errors

Conclusion

There could be various reasons that may be affecting conversions/revenue for your SaaS business, other than what I have listed here so you need to keep finding those and fix them. Spend some time daily with analytical tools to track the right users’ behavior and where they are having difficulties using your SaaS product, as well as do brainstorm daily or keep a brainstorming session with your team every week to pinpoint exact issues whether your product lacks anything or marketing not working or messaging is wrong or any support/pricing/website issues. Hope you overcome all these issues, win back your customers’ trust, and grow more.

SaaS-Revenue
SaaS Marketing

How to Generate More Revenue for SaaS Businesses?

Revenue generation is a process to generate income for the business through a set of strategies that involve from setting up goals to marketing to sales to customer success. Businesses can’t survive without revenue so it should be the foremost goal for the management, as well as different heads in the company.

Revenue funnel

Not everyone who is visiting your website or has signed up for your services will start paying you upfront so it’s very important to understand the revenue funnel (also known as the sales funnel) to better engage with them and eventually convert them.

The Revenue funnel involves 5 steps that companies want their prospects to go through before they finally become their customers.

  • Awareness, in which prospects become aware of the product or service a business offers
  • Interest, in which prospects show interest in a product or service by visiting the website or downloading any marketing material
  • Evaluation, in which prospects evaluate the company’s product or services by doing some research, as well as evaluate the other solutions in the market
  • Decision, in which prospects make final decisions about the product, a discussion starts to reach an agreement
  • Purchase, in which prospects finally buy the product or services

Key elements responsible for SaaS revenue generation

  • Define your company goals – This is the first step, define your goals clearly and avoid any confusion.
  • A well-crafted plan – Without a proper plan, it’s difficult to achieve any goal, efforts will go in vain even if you try harder so having a great plan considering your goal and success ingredients necessary to have.
  • Set up a high-performance team – Teamwork is very important when trying to achieve a company goal, so having a high-performance team is a blessing.
  • Delegate the tasks properly – Identifying your employee’s skills & abilities will help you delegate tasks accordingly which in-results, will improve team performance.
  • Team coordination (Marketing, Sales & Customer Success) – Silos, communication gaps, and conflicts affect company success, so having better coordination among the teams is necessary to achieve success.
  • High-quality data – The internet is crowded, so much data is available so it’s harder to find & target the right customers. Get the right data who you want to market to.
  • Revenue-focused marketing – Marketing through every channel is not a good idea so selecting channels based on your business type can be an effective strategy that can give quality leads, more sales & revenue.
  • Better support – Have you ever felt sad & irritated when you don’t get support on time? Same feelings your prospects might have if they don’t get proper support which will create a bad impression, which in result you might lose that prospect.
  • Negotiation – This is the most important phase as negotiation is key to converting your prospect into a customer. A bad negotiation will cause you to lose your prospect so be prepared before you get on a call or meet in person with the prospects.
  • Onboarding – Onboarding is a perfect opportunity to build a long-lasting relationship with your customers, as well as to show your company culture to them.
  • Nurture – Make sure your customers are nurtured properly which will help you build a long-lasting relationship with them & increase the customer LTV. Some suggestions:
    • Send automated emails for different interactions users have on the website, from welcome emails for signups to blog newsletters to help materials to company updates
    • Inviting them personally for events or webinars
    • Greet them at their festivals
    • Update them with new product’s features or updates
    • Provide them with some offers or coupons
    • Contacting them to ask if they are facing any issues
    • Providing them with the support materials
    • Quick response to their issues or queries
    • Provide many options to contact your business

Role of each department

  • Marketing – The Marketing department must focus on generating high-quality leads, check for MQL, and keep track of those leads where they are in the funnel. They also need to have consistent discussions with pre-sales, sales, customer success & account executives to understand their goals, issues, requirement & other feedback.
  • Pre-sales – They must be trained to explain company products or services to the prospects in a good manner
  • Sales – Once a lead is qualified from the pre-sales side, now it’s the turn for sales to engage with them by having in-person calls or meetings to further qualify them in the funnel & eventually convert them
  • Customer success – This part is important to maintain better relationships with the customers. From onboarding to help them whenever they need to provide them with the support materials to updating them with the latest product features or services will make them happy.

Ways to generate more revenue?

Increase the number of customers

Try to generate more leads as not everyone who visits your website going to be your customer; only 2-3% will become your customers at max depending on industry type so the rule is more leads will lead to more customers, and more customers will lead to more revenue.

Provide value to your customers

Even if you are able to generate many leads, it would be difficult for you to convert them into customers if they don’t get what was promised. A great product is loved by customers and that’s what brings in more money.
Businesses need to focus on providing a great product, a product that can solve users’ issues and can help them grow their businesses, something that helps and provides value to society. For e.g., Apple created iPhone, giving quality products along with better security that everyone loves.

Focus on repeat customers

Bring them back by giving freebies (Coupons, Festival offers, Combo offers at a lower price), can:

  • Increase the average transaction size
  • Increase the frequency of transactions per customer

Raise your prices

With time, companies keep improving their products or services so it costs additional expenses. Companies should charge more considering additional expenses, as well as to increase more revenue.

More engagement is key

Keep engaging with your customers even if they feel happy about your products/services, take advantage of it by encouraging them to upgrade the plan or buy other products in the inventory or to spread the word.

Role of tools in revenue generation

Data is necessary to make the right decision so with the help of different analytical tools one can analyze website & users’ data and make a better decision out of that. Some tools are:

  • Web analytics tools – GA, Amplitude
  • Heatmap tools – Hotjar, Luckyorange, MS Clarity
  • CRM/MA tools – HubSpot, Zoho
  • BI tools – Tableau, MS Power BI

Conclusion

Hope you went through all the points and understood them properly. To be good at revenue generation, you need to execute the above points properly, as well as brainstorm more ideas you can apply to that. Revenue generation is a slow process as a prospect has to go through many stages in the funnel before he/she finally converts so patiently execute that and you will get success for sure.

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