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I'm about to reveal the SAS strategy that I've used across six and seven figure SAS companies to generate pipeline ranging from hundreds to even thousands of sales qualified leads. This is one of the most successful strategies that I've seen recently as a fractional CMO working with different SAS
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businesses. But surprisingly, not many businesses are taking advantage of this strategy.
First of all, it's important to note what's shifted in the landscape because that's going to have a direct implication on what you do to drive meaningful results. So the first trend to know is that there's been decline on the efficiency of blog posts.
This is
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partly because of AI generated summaries on Google, the shift to large language models like chatbt, claude, etc. But also because of the growth of social and people's attention spans are shortening and people opting for consumption of shorter form content rather than going
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and breeding long form posts. Another key trend in BDB SAS is the shift in how people buy.
Now people are going to their groups of WhatsApp or Slack and they're asking questions of peers as to what software is the best or which vendor are they using, which freelance or agency should they recommend. I
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certainly see it in a lot of the CXO groups that I'm part of, being it CEOs and startups or CMOs in larger companies. Everyone is relying on referral to make decisions.
We mean around 60% 40% of people are still typically going through this process of going to Google review sites, shopping
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around and looking at what different options are. There's obviously shifting with large language models where people are leveraging that to do the research for them to create a relevant list of vendors for their specific challenge.
Another key shift is this movement from lead generation to demand generation where previously you'd be blasting a lot
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of cold emails to people. This isn't as effective as it used to be with estimates being around 35 to 38% in drop of efficiency compared to a few years ago.
Another key trend is this growth in productled sales. So people start using the product usually through a free trial or a free reverse demo where you give
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them a certain amount of features and after 2 or 3 weeks you remove those features and if they want to continue using them they have to pay for it. But regardless of the mechanism what happens is these people are behaving in a certain way.
They're logging in a certain frequency using different features in the product and if they fit the ideal customer profile and the ideal buyer profile or ideal buyer persona
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then sales would reach out to them and try to cross-ell or upsell. uses productled sales rather than just productled growth where it's all premium and you just log in and buy the product and sales never contact you or salesled growth websites that you go to the pricing is opaque there is no free trial option and the only way to buy it is to
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contact sales now salesled typically works better in an enterpriseled motion where you have annual contract value of 50 or 100,000 plus a year in terms of customer value where productled growth tends to be much more popular with businesses that have a much lower annual contract value of anywhere from 500 a
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month to 5,000 a month. So now that you have understand these seismic shifts that happening in buying behavior and the SAS landscape as a whole, let's talk more specifically about key channels and how they've changed in the context of your marketing strategy.
So previously we've had the paid social, paid search,
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organic search, SEO on Google and we've had cold email outbound as well as cold calling. So these are what we can call the traditional channels.
They constitute the majority of spend in terms of where advertising money goes and where most of the activity and energy is typically put in in terms of
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what a lot of marketers are doing. This includes partnerships.
So for example, HubSpot historically has scaled 40% of its revenue through its partnership model. Affiliates.
I have a client. They've scaled to 120 million turnover just through leveraging affiliate networks.
Another is community. Now this is really quite a hard one to crack, but
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companies like Figma have done a fantastic job leveraging community in order to drive growth. Then we have email marketing.
And interestingly enough, I've never seen a SAS business scale just through email marketing. That is, you need to somehow acquire all the people you're going to be emailing.
Seeing that, and there's some great examples like Lenny's newsletter, which
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is highly reputable and has a lot of highquality readers engaging with it and has grown organically just through the production of exceptionally highquality content. Another example is AppSumo.
They have a lot of readers and when you promote your app they'll take a revenue share and therefore you have access with
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built-in distribution by leveraging something like upsum. Now this is typically more suited for productled growth business that has a lower annual contract value.
I would not recommend this for an enterpriseled motion. Another interesting example is the app store.
So loom was a fantastic example of this before they were app for
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developers. They pivoted into the video recording tool that we all love.
They had a fantastic breakthrough when they put it on the Chrome store. So leveraging these marketplaces can be a great way to grow and get traction for users.
Other examples can be Salesforce marketplace or leveraging HubSpot. Now
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sometimes I hear people argue with me and say, well what about a fremium? And I'd say well premium is a mechanism for someone to experience value.
But it's very hard to get that as a mechanism for driving growth. There are some interesting examples like intercom which historically grew cuz people would use a chatbot.
They would come and experience
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it as a user. They would have a little button that says powered by intercom.
They would click that and they'd find out more about the product. Even though this is a growth loop and the product does have a free trial, premium in itself doesn't inherently include distribution.
So if you take example like a zoom, slack or notion, these are
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tools where there's two parties who engaging with it and it creates network effects. You create a document, someone consumes it, they consume it through notion.
If they like the experience, they'll go and sign up to notion too. The same thing with Slack and the same thing with Zoom.
This isn't the same as a premium model. Premium is just a low barrier method to get someone to
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experience value in the product. Premium works really well with productive breath.
However, virality isn't necessarily built in to a premium product. So, don't confuse the two.
Now, before we go into talking about organic, paid social and search, organic and paid as well as cold email, it's important to
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know that any strategy has to be underpinned by these fundamentals. The first is that you have to have a good understanding of your customers as well as your ideal customer profile and your ideal buyer persona.
You need to understand the competitive set and the category in which you operate. When I mean understand it, understand it from the buyer's point of view.
You need to
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have a view of the market and how you segment it. You need to understand how and who you're talking to in the target market.
If you're talking to everyone, your message is too diluted and it's not going to cut through. You also need clear positioning.
You need to be clear in how you communicate your differentiation and your unique selling
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point for that specific segment and how you're differentiated from your competitors in your category. Next up, you need to really nail your market offer.
That is your value proposition. What that actually means is like Loom.
So when Loom started out and they offered a tool for developers, it didn't work. There wasn't a lot of interest.
It's only when they pivoted the same
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tool, essentially the same value prop recording videos and sending it to other people repackaged and recommunicated where they connected the value proposition into their message and how they articulate the experience for the user and the value in using their product. It's only when Loom connected their value proposition video recording
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into the message and offer by launching it on the Chrome store and explaining that it's a great way to work async did that they managed to drive traction. So it was exactly the same product but the way it was packaged is different.
So you have to connect your value proposition to a great message and offer. You have a great message and offer and your value proposition doesn't solve a meaningful
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problem, you are still not going to get traction. This is what we call pre-product market fit businesses.
They haven't found the right problem to solve for the right market. You obviously have to nail your pricing and your content strategy.
Let's start by talking about paid social. You see, in paid social was shifted if you're running ads specifically on, let's say, meta.
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Previously, you could control the audiences. Now, that doesn't count anymore.
The algorithm does the optimization for you. So, instead of trying to figure out which audience you're targeting, you need to double down on creative production by focusing on including the audience within the context of your creative.
Your key focus
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is on managing to deliver and drive as many iterations and as many creatives as possible. The higher the velocity of testing creatives and experimenting, the faster your growth rate is going to be on a paid social channel.
This is a bit different than LinkedIn because LinkedIn still isn't sophisticated enough to do
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this. So, you still need to nail your audience targeting by job title and by specific companies on LinkedIn to drive a result.
The next key channel to mention and how it's shifted is Google Ads. You see, with Google Ads, you used to create ad groups and campaigns and keywords and you do lots of different tests and optimize accordingly.
The way
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it's shifted is that the key focus on driving the right conversion event and letting the algorithm find the right audience for you. If you're letting anyone convert by, let's say, downloading an ebook or white paper and put any email in, you're sending that signal back to Google.
They're just going to optimize for that very generic audience. So, you're never going to get
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the quality that you need. You have to put a more filtered signal to send into Google Ads and optimize for the right conversion event at the right depth of your customer journey in your funnel in order to get value out of that channel now compared to how it used to run historically with paid social on LinkedIn.
The way it's actually shifted
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is at least legion ads where people just fill in the information to get access to ebook or white paper very rarely translates into pipeline. Just because you have someone's email address and you're sending lots of sequential emails doesn't mean that they're actually interested in what you have to sell.
What you need to do is shift to creating
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highquality content that solves specific problems. It doesn't really matter if it's gated or not.
The key is on not just creating content for the sake of capturing leads, but shifting to how to carve out mental space in the mind of your prospect by creating highquality value that helps them in their
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day-to-day. The higher frequency you do that and the more volume you do that, the faster your brand will grow and the more traction you will get.
Now, it's not just about how paid social, paid search, or cold email have shifted. It's also who you're targeting that has shifted.
Now, there's access to what we call signals. These are indicators of
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the right accounts and right individuals that are more likely to be a good fit for your service or offer. One of the signals and triggers that I'm seeing that consistently performs across clients is messaging someone when they've started a new role.
For some reason, people make a lot of key decisions when they start a new role, and they're a lot more susceptible and
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open to trying out new vendors at that very sensitive time when they're reevaluating the entire strategy in this new function. That seems to be a really great spot that works across lots of different clients of different sizes across different industries.
Other very common signals is when there's a specific event that has been triggered.
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So, for example, one business I know competed with notion. When notion increased the price on a certain feature, they took the opportunity to reach out to companies who they know use notion but they compete with and they use that price hike to message them and they were able to convert more customers as a result of hitting that signal at the right time.
The key shift is that
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we're moving away from broad general targeting to a more focused hyperargeted approach that's more sophisticated and more personalized. This ties nicely into cold email.
With cold email, the shift is going from blasting lots of cold emails into narrowing down to people who have the right signals. First, you start
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by creating great organic LinkedIn posts. So, here's three examples.
Pep from CXL, Gal from Aligned, and Rand from Spark. These are three examples of fantastic organic posts that have great traction and build thought leadership.
By producing lots of organic content, you're going to pick the best performers
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and use those to amplify through paid ads. Why?
Because organic reach is still quite limited. I go into that in more detail in my video, which you can find the link to here.
In that video, you'll also have access to my talk from TouringFest where I spoke about how to build a personal brand for SAS CEOs on
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LinkedIn, but also how to expand beyond that by leveraging the paid LinkedIn ads strategy. So, they work hand inhand to amplify your brand and build pipeline with this organic strategy.
Now that you've amplified through paid ads, what you're going to do is you're going to look at engagement. Now, there's three layers of engagement.
The first is
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looking at LinkedIn ads and seeing who is engaging with the LinkedIn ads. You can see this by company level and the number of engagements by company level.
The second is the ad itself. You can see comments, likes and re-shares.
Then you look at those people and evaluate who is in your ideal customer profile segment and who is your ideal buyer persona. And
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then the third you can use a reverse IP tool like snitcher. And here you can see on snitcher different companies that are visiting as well as their behavior and how they're engaging on the website.
From my experience, prospects who spend more time consuming more content on my website have a higher propensity to convert than people who don't. Now,
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sometimes your prospects aren't going to actively engage with your LinkedIn ads. And this comes to the second part of cold email.
What you can do is you can start to cold email them even if there's no signal that they've engaged with you knowing that the conversion rate is still going to be lower. So, you have to compensate by driving more volume.
But the key and how this has shifted from
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say 2018, 2020 or even 2 or 3 years ago is leveraging AI to do the hyperpersonalization. So now we use Aentic AI to go find information from their websites, evaluate who is the ideal customer profile, which specific signals we can leverage, narrow down our
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target list and then send hyperpersonalized emails to the right prospect in the right account. Now I use a platform called Evergrowth to do this.
But you can also do this in a tool like clay.com which is also very popular. If you want information about a few more strategies, you can check out my video below on the three levels of marketing where I go with tangible examples to
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show you what other successful businesses are doing at the moment to drive growth for their SAS business.