If you want to get more clients for your SaaS business, you need to be aware of the best outbound channels. There is a post for you on the basics of main outbound channels your team can use to get new clients for your business and how those channels work in general. We will figure out what you have to know and what kind of metrics you can get to make those channels successful for your team.
There are three main outbound lead generation channels that are being used by SaaS sales teams all over the world to generate clients for their business. They are email, LinkedIn, and cold calls. Let`s explore each of them in order to choose the best for your campaigns.
Three Main Outbound Channels
Email is a perfect lead generation channel for young SaaS businesses because of one reason. It provides a perfect balance between the amount of time and effort you invest in generating opportunities and the number of opportunities your business actually gets for your sales team to convert them into deals.
How does email lead generation work in general? First of all, you start with generating your ideal customer profile so you have to identify your ideal customer profile. Then you should make it sharpen and create a value position for this ideal customer profile. After that, you create content for this email campaign and prepare a set of email templates based on the ideal customer profiles that you have. Finally, you basically upload those templates into an email automation platform on the value propositions that you’ve created. It is only up to you to find prospects that are the perfect fit for the value propositions that you outlined and start the campaign.
You actually have to invest some time into the research because you have to find prospects that are the best fit for our campaigns that are the best fit for your value propositions. Therefore, your best interest is to invest some time into the creative part of an email campaign and a lot of time into the manual research. If you want to make the campaign successful after that it’s pretty much up to the value proposition and the targetings that you use for your email campaign until you start getting demos and appointments. In general, email campaigns are pretty straightforward. There are a bunch of metrics you need to track in order to make those campaigns successful. Those metrics are email open rates, email response rates, and conversion rates for people you have a conversation with.
The next lead generation channel is LinkedIn. It is a super powerful B2B lead generation platform that allows you to look into all the prospects that are the best fit for your business and reach out to them. The only thing with LinkedIn is that LinkedIn doesn’t allow automated actions on the platform. Therefore, you need to either find a workaround or a signed person to do perspective manually. There are two strategies of lead generation on LinkedIn that you can use.
The first lead generation strategy is very old. It is based on connection messages you send to potential customers of your business. In order to have to find potential customers for your business, you have to form a list on LinkedIn. It is necessary to form a value proposition as short as 300 symbols because you are going to send as a connection request and send connection requests to all the potential buyers of your platform or service. The only issue here is that the number of that connection requests is limited to 300 per week. Therefore, you are only able to reach out to anywhere around 400 people per month with an acceptance rate of 20 and a response rate of 5 percent. You are going to have anywhere around 20 conversations which are not sufficient for you to generate a lot of demos.
The second strategy is to connect with people through email. LinkedIn has built-in functionality that allows you to send people connection requests without going on their LinkedIn page. The only thing you need to have is their email. So, what you do is you go to LinkedIn and you add people from your contact book. You actually paste emails of your potential customers to the field and send them the invitation via email. LinkedIn actually sends an email on behalf of you to connect with those people on LinkedIn. They get the emails and accept the invite and after that you are able to reach out to them. The number of this kind of connection request is limited to 75 per day which brings us to over 1 000 prospects per month. It allows you to have dozens of conversations and dozens of demos at the end of the month. The only downside of this method is that you are not able to fully automate this action unless you are using platforms like Dripify or TypoCRM. However, they are going to end up super expensive as soon as you would like to start doing evolving prospecting.
Cold Calls
Cold calls are extremely popular and the sales team has been using them for hundreds of ages. With the invention of the telephone, some sales leaders think that call calls don’t work others consider cold calls to be pretty much the best strategy if you would like to generate new customers for your business. Both are right to some extent. However, the only issue with cold calls is that cold calling is super time-consuming.
Therefore, as soon as you would like to get some results out of cold calling you would need to assign a full-time person to do that for you. This person would need to make anywhere around 100 to 150 calls every day. The reason for that is a mess as a good cold calling campaign has a conversion rate of anywhere around 10. Only 10 of calls are going to be answered by a real person and your SDR or you are going to speak with a prospect. Only about five percent of those calls are going to be converted into a conversation a demo or a discovery goal. It comes down to about two thousand scores per month and ten percent of those calls are being answered. So, we have 200 conversations and five percent of those conversations are being converted into a demo or discovery call. In conclusion, we have 10 demos or discovery calls throughout the whole month of cold calling which is not very suitable for a young SaaS business.
Takeaways
There are three main outbound channels you and your sales team might want to use to generate new clients for your SaaS or software development business such as email, LinkedIn, and cold calling. Email provides a perfect balance between the time and effort you invest and the number of opportunities you get. However, you have to be very careful about your targeting and prospects. LinkedIn is super efficient because you are able to reach out to your prospects directly. You are not going to end up in spam and you will definitely have their attention. But you are able to reach out to only a small portion of prospects every day which doesn’t allow you to generate a lot of opportunities. Cold calling is also a great way to develop your SaaS business. As soon as you have a person to dedicate to it full time, you are going to get some results over time.