The sales team in SaaS companies are shouldered with the responsibility to achieve sales targets which often requires them to close the lead quickly. Much of the conversion in a sales cycle, from initial touch base to final conversion, involves communication with various stakeholders—ranging from initial contacts to final decision-makers.
B2B SaaS sales reps thus need to engage a diverse group of individuals within the client’s organization. It includes potential users, key influencers, financial approvers, and technical evaluators, each playing a critical role in the purchasing decision.
Because a typical B2B SaaS environment often has decision-makers who are not the end-users of the product. For instance, email marketing software will be used by a marketing executive but the decision on which software to buy rests on the marketing head or CMO (chief marketing officer).
What happens in such cases?
Deals stall, prospects disappear, and revenue targets remain unachieved. HubSpot reports an average SaaS cycle of 84 days. So, how to gauge whether you are on pace with the average?
By focusing on the pipeline acceleration.
What Is Pipeline Acceleration?
Pipeline acceleration is a strategic approach to gauge the velocity of your sales cycle. The outcome is insights that help unlock faster growth by aligning marketing and sales. They can then be tasked to boost prospects through the sales funnel at lightning speed.
Implementing the right tactics for sales and marketing can shorten sales cycles, boost win rates, and have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Here’s what pipeline acceleration can do:
- Ensure fast revenue growth: A shorter sales cycle translates to revenue hitting your books sooner.
- Allows improved forecasting: Pipeline acceleration over time presents a pattern, making it easier for the team to predict sales. This makes pipeline forecasting significantly accurate where resources for sales and marketing are allocated based on the forecasted revenue.
This allows —
- Shortening the sales cycle by creating a more predictable flow of leads.
- Enhancing visibility into future revenue.
- Smarter budgeting and efficient resource allocation decisions based on reliable data.
- Providing better sales efficiency: Sales efficiency isn’t just about closing deals fast. It also ensures that the efforts of your sales teams translate directly into maximum revenue, without wasted time or misdirected effort.
In this piece, we’ll explore how marketing teams can chip in to accelerate the sales cycle.
High-Quality Lead Nurturing
Once prospects show interest and advance in the sales funnel, marketing teams need to keep these leads engaged. This involves nurturing relationships with leads throughout their buying journey.
Marketing teams run targeted content and provide personalized communication to educate, guide, and demonstrate value
Often, their actions will rely on the lead score. It involves using lead scoring tools to rank leads based on their engagement and fit. This helps prioritize and customize marketing outreach for the most promising prospects.
Here’s how marketing teams can nurture leads to accelerate the sales cycle.
Email Drip Campaigns
Automated sequences that deliver personalized content to drive sales based on lead behavior (e.g., website visits, content downloads, etc.). It works by delivering relevant and timely content based on lead behavior.
When a lead performs a specific action, they are automatically enrolled in a predefined sequence of emails, text messages, or in-app notifications. Each message in the sequence is crafted to educate, engage, and advance the lead further down the sales funnel.
For example, if a lead signs up for a free trial of a software product, they might be enrolled in a sequence that includes:
- A welcome email with instructions on how to use the software,
- A series of emails offering tips and best practices for effective use,
- A case study or testimonial from a similar customer, and
- An offer for a paid subscription.
ToFu, MoFu, BoFu content
Blogs, webinars, case studies, and whitepapers that address prospect pain points and position your solution across the different stages of the funnel.
- ToFu (Top-of-Funnel) Content: To attract and engage leads with blog posts, infographics, social media content, etc. This should address industry challenges and offer helpful insights.
- MoFu (Middle-of-Funnel) Content: Leads with favorable (high) scores demonstrate that they are more interested. For them, provide case studies, webinars, and ebooks where your SaaS solution is presented as a tool to solve their specific problems.
- BoFu (Bottom-of-Funnel) Content: Equipping prospects for the final decision with demos, free trials, and customer testimonials, reinforcing their decision to choose your product.
Deliver Sales Enablement
Sales teams need the tools, resources, and knowledge to close deals effectively. While they are the ones communicating with prospects, marketing teams can work behind the curtains to create compelling sales material tailored for each prospect.
Sales enablement will help deliver warmer, more qualified leads to sales, enabling them to close deals faster and increase overall win rates.
Here’s what the marketing teams can expect to do.
Create a Content Hub
Marketers create a centralized location for sales to easily access the latest marketing content, customer success stories, and product updates. Sales reps can thus save time searching for the right content, assuring them of using the most current information.
Offer Sales Collaterals
Marketing teams can infuse much-needed creativity that interactively showcases your product’s features and how they solve customer problems.
Here’s what it includes:
- Organizing live demos (led by a sales rep) or pre-recorded for prospects to explore at their own pace.
- Visually appealing slide decks provide a high-level overview of the product, company, and customer success stories.
- One-pagers that offer concise summaries of key product information, ideal for quick reference by sales or distribution to prospects.
- Comparison sheet to put competitors’ products for side-by-side comparisons to highlight your product’s advantages.
Providing a Seamless Sales Handoff
A fast-moving sales cycle requires marketing and sales teams to break data silos. This means the information of qualified leads from marketing to sales should transit faster with clear communication and context.
Achieving this handoff requires both teams to —
- Define clear lead qualification criteria across different stages of the buyer journey.
- Gain contextual Insights beyond just contact details by including behavioral data (content viewed, questions asked), giving sales a richer lead profile.
Apart from these, marketing teams can work on a seamless sales handoff in the following manner.
Implementing Advanced CRM Integration
Integrating CRM lead management helps automate the transfer of lead data from marketing to sales so that all relevant information is instantly available to the sales team.
Such integration provides real-time updates and alerts on any activity — from opening an email to downloading a case study. Sales reps can then engage with such leads while they are still hot. It also includes triggering workflows that prompt sales actions based on specific marketing interactions or lead behaviors.
Regular Training and Feedback Loops
The marketing and sales team can attend training sessions to understand the full capabilities and information available through CRM and other tools. Such trainings encourage an ongoing feedback loop where sales provide insights back to marketing on lead information that was most useful and which needed refinements. This allows the marketing team to refine their data collection and lead scoring models.
Conclusion
When it comes to boosting revenue through sales, marketing teams too can contribute. Their involvement throughout the sales cycle as discussed above can help sales reps to move the prospect further in the funnel, faster.
Visionary brands break departmental silos where marketing teams are not just responsible for generating leads. They also need to take steps to nurture prospects with the right content at the right time, equipping sales for success, and tracking results to optimize future performance.
A better alignment between marketing and sales can streamline the pipeline, leading to shorter sales cycles, and faster revenue growth.
About the Author:
Hazel Raoult is a marketing manager at PRmention. She has over six years of experience writing about startups, entrepreneurship, and all things to SaaS.
