The Future of SaaS Sales: The Inside Take

Despite most businesses trying to move marketing from a creative cost center to a strategic partner focused on pipeline performance and revenue, there’s still prehistoric pressure on marketing teams to prove ROI per channel/campaign.

Don’t get me wrong, ROI is crucial (particularly in highly competitive sectors like SaaS sales and marketing) but here’s the thing – sometimes, in their fervor to prove the worth of their marketing efforts through data, marketers end up chasing the wrong kind of leads, and that can spell trouble for our sales funnel.

Focusing on generating ‘leads’ in channels that are easy to attribute source and cost to might look snazzy on a spreadsheet, but in reality, prospects are being shoehorned into a B2B sales process when they’re not ready to buy.

Analysis by Passetto’s Chris Walker of Metadata’s B2B advertising benchmark report (specific to lead gen campaigns on paid social channels) provided some pretty damning results.

If you’re interested, you can view Chris’ full analysis here.

So, on average, people pay $126 per PDF download from LinkedIn. It takes on average 330 downloads (‘leads’) to generate an acquisition, meaning the CPA from LI advertising is approx. $41.5k in pursuit of the short-term lead gen number.
Talk about a cash burn simply to ‘prove’ the value of marketing to the CFO.

As a Strategic Account Exec, this budget-beholden behavior concerns me. Yes, marketers need to show they’re putting their budget to good use, but not by sacrificing quality for quantity. High lead numbers do not show a return on investment – they just show a high number. These numbers could represent squirrels for all a spreadsheet glance tells you.

From a sales perspective (especially SaaS sales), we would much rather have one high-quality lead with an interest in – or need for – the product or service, than 1,000 leads who simply filled in a form to claim a discount or gain access to a hefty 18-page whitepaper PDF that’s fueling inbound lead generation (🤦), or simply because they felt pressured to by incessant targeting because their profile “fits the bill.”

When you solely focus on the numbers game, you can end up attracting leads who aren’t really interested in what you have to offer. And guess what happens when these leads enter your sales funnel? They clog it up. They take up valuable time and resources, and the majority don’t cross the conversion line.

Quality is everything.

So, where does this leave us?

B2B buying isn’t an event that can be categorized as a lead gen form fill – it’s a journey requiring nurture and education. The best B2B experiences are being presented by those who are consistently providing content and insight, which meets the buyer where they’re at.

This can only be achieved when marketing and sales teams join forces – sharing knowledge and insight, and agreeing next steps. They shouldn’t be working separately or be forced to box-tick when it comes to proving ROI.

Generating demand and building a loyal customer base is a longer-term engagement process that requires a mix of marketing touchpoints, sales engagements and helpful, personalized content. How can marketers be expected to attribute ROI per channel when the whole concept behind demand gen is to use a variety of marketing strategies and tactics to stimulate this demand? For example, a lead’s last touchpoint might have been from a form on LinkedIn, but they could have been initially engaged through email or a search engine result.

And on the off-chance that the lead source was in fact through a form on LinkedIn (with no prior engagement elsewhere), do marketers believe that this is the type of lead that’s ready to be engaged with by a sales team – without any prior knowledge of the business or offer in question? It’s the equivalent of going on a first date then the next day, you’re being proposed to. It’s disjointed, unrealistic and particularly problematic for sales teams who are trying to get to the bottom of why exactly this lead is in the funnel in the first place. It’s too much, too soon.

How I see a way forward

It’s definitely important to have lead generation KPIs and metrics that prove that your marketing is making an impact but I honestly believe that businesses who hold a suffocating ROI cloche over their marketing team need to remove it to give marketers the breathing space and tools to refocus their efforts on better collaboration and transparency with the people they’re handing the buyer baton to: the sales team. Getting on the same page is an absolute game-changer.

But this is a two-way street – sales teams are just as responsible for improving this process and need to play a proactive part.

It’s time to stop obsessing over the sheer volume of leads and start prioritizing the ones more likely to convert. Get to know your target audience inside out – grasp their pain points, needs and goals – and serve them tailored messages that resonate with them on a deeper level, rather than casting a wide net and hoping for the best. In an industry like SaaS sales, where the pool of best-fit prospects is often small and the competition large, it’s invaluable to really understand who you’re targeting and know exactly what to say to get their attention.

How can this be done?

By taking pressure off marketers to prove ROI per channel/campaign. By championing lead quality over quantity. By improving collaboration and transparency between marketing and sales teams. By better understanding audience behavior and tracking a more comprehensive set of data points to inform next steps. By delivering a bespoke sales experience and tailored sales enablement content to each prospect that’s relevant, resonates and builds trust.

How does Turtl fit into this?

By enabling the above!

With Turtl, you can:

• Attract, educate and engage leads through compelling, informative, interactive content
• Nurture these leads by tracking and understanding audience behavior through a more comprehensive set of data points in your CRM (fed into by Turtl Analytics)
• Quickly resonate on an individual basis through personalized content to turn leads into prospects who are well-informed and ready to buy
• Prove marketing ROI by delivering quality prospects to sales who are likely to convert into customers
• Increase sales by receiving quality, transaction-minded prospects into the sales pipeline