Key Takeaways:
- Your SaaS go-to-market strategy should focus on generating leads and nurturing them into customers for your SaaS product
- Start refining your strategy by looking at metrics like contract value, cost of acquisition, and total return
- Forecast your revenue to know how much management help you’ll need once the leads start rolling in
- Know your audience and say the right things to them – it takes carefully crafted content to turn a name into a lead
Put your value proposition in front of your potential leads and make sure you’re talking numbers and results, not just benefits
Having a fantastic software-as-a-service product is awesome (congrats!) but it isn’t the end-all, be-all of success. You still need a plan to bring it to market by boosting awareness within your target audience, turning those audience members into leads, and nurturing those leads into paying customers.
Your SaaS go-to-market strategy is your blueprint for a successful product launch, and you should take it seriously. It takes a refined, thoughtful strategy to present your product in an appealing way to the right audience at the right time. The SaaS market is constantly evolving and growing, which means it’s important to be mindful of the way you present and sell your product.
From its inception, SaaS as an industry has grown from $31.5 billion to almost $172 billion in 2022. Businesses that don’t launch their product with a solid strategy for lead generation and nurturing are at a disadvantage in such a competitive market.
Don’t let your business get caught with its pants down. Instead, put your product above the rest by putting real thought into your go-to-market strategy framework. We’ll dive into three tips for putting together an amazing SaaS go-to-market strategy below.
What Is a SaaS Go-To-Market Strategy?
Your SaaS go-to-market strategy is your plan of action for bringing your service to market. It includes your target audience, your messaging, your marketing channels, and how your service delivers value to your target customer. It’s how you’re going to generate leads and nurture them into customers. Finally, it’s how you’re going to manage the spend related to customer acquisition, ensure a return, and forecast your revenue success.
3 Tips for Maximizing Your SaaS Go-To-Market Strategy
It takes thought to demonstrate a strategy that’s thorough and ready to support your product launch. Here’s how you can build a strong SaaS go-to-market strategy framework:
#1: Measure the Right Metrics
Your performance metrics are by far the most valuable tool you have for informing your strategy. If you’re not in the know, you’ll be unprepared to handle the leads you acquire, and you’ll lose more of them than necessary due to poor nurturing. Some important numbers to measure include:
- Total Monthly Media Spend
- Prospective Cost Per Lead
- Prospective Lead to Close
- Average Total Contract Value
- Potential Monthly Return
- Potential First Year Return
This data can help you understand how to prepare your sales team for the influx of leads. The average person can probably support about 30 leads without automation. Let’s say you’re investing $3 million per year and turning that into 3,200 leads per year, which works out to roughly 62 per week. At that rate, you’re going to need an additional person on your team to handle lead nurturing. If you’re investing even more, you need to grow your team or add automation tools.
#2: Know Your Audience
It’s critical to know who you’re targeting by having a clearly defined client profile. What size company are you targeting with your product? How much spending do you need from each client, ideally, to hit your revenue forecast? What’s your client’s biggest pain point and what does your product do to deliver them value? The better you know your audience, the more likely your messaging will speak to them directly.
#3: Put Your Value Proposition Out
Don’t just tell your audience about the benefits. Show them with numbers and results how they’ll get value out of investing in your service. Tell them how your product actually performs in the wild by showing how it reduces costs or increases revenue for the businesses that use it. Case studies are a valuable tool for showing a clear value proposition.
No matter where you’re at in the launch process, a go-to-market strategy is essential. Otherwise, you’ve created an amazing product that might not be seen by anyone that matters.
Final Thoughts About Your SaaS Go-To-Market Strategy
Your SaaS go-to-market strategy framework isn’t quite the same as a normal marketing framework, so you can’t approach it in the same way. Your value proposition includes service, since your software only has true value for the customer when it’s updated and maintained regularly, and your messaging has to reflect that.
Plus, you’re not marketing directly to individuals – you’re marketing to a company, so your sales team has to know how to identify the right stakeholders to approach (like decision-makers who actually have the power to buy your SaaS product). Your strategy also has to take into account the company size you’re targeting since this affects your revenue forecast.
Finally, outbound marketing tends to be more successful with B2B audiences instead of B2C. Since your go-to-market strategy targets companies instead of individual consumers, you can utilize tools like cold emailing that are simply more successful with business audiences.
Boost Results and Cut Costs With Blueprint
Consider using an all-in-one omnichannel advertising tool like Blueprint in your go-to-market strategy. Blueprint works by connecting five points of the ad buying ecosystem to make it easier to execute your paid media strategy. Those points include:
- Audience targeting and intelligence
- AI-driven media planning and projections
- Automated media buying and analytics
- Automated program setup
- True omnichannel analytics
When you use Blueprint to power your go-to-market strategy, you’re receiving proprietary intelligence that tells you not only which ad platforms to invest in but also what audiences to target with each message. The presence of multiple data sources, attribution models, and testing frameworks ensures you have a complete understanding of your media investments at all times.
Businesses that use Blueprint report up to a 40% increase in e-commerce revenue, a 43% decrease in cost per MQL, and a 95% reduction in cost per signup. You can work miracles for your SaaS go-to-market strategy by using Blueprint to simplify growth and transform your results. Go beyond cross-channel intelligence by contacting Model B today!