Do you want to improve your sales process and maximize the conversion rates for your SaaS?
Are you looking for tips to better connect with leads and customers?
Did you already try different sales techniques and various tools, but without getting the results you were hoping for?
You see, anyone who’s ever been in B2B sales knows that depending on the product or service you’re offering, the sales cycles can range anywhere from days to months or even years. And that’s a lot of time.
Every single thing your salespeople and marketers can do to speed up the decision-making on the prospects’ end without actually pressuring them too much can and will help increase your sales volume.
Sadly, most companies hardly put any effort into optimizing their sales pipelines. In fact, a recent study from LeanData shows that nearly 80% of B2B salespeople are quite dissatisfied with how their company routes leads. And over 57% sales reps believe that their existing workflows ands systems in place actually turn off potential prospects.
Don’t fall into these traps. Don’t let your business growth stall. With the right tools and an action-plan, you can optimize your sales process and put your company on a growth trajectory.
I will guide you through the 7 tools that can help you understand your customers better and improve your sales performance massively. This will be a rundown of basically all the tools we use in our team and the ways they can help you gain better insights and improve your conversion rates.
Let’s get started, beginning from the moment you and your lead first meet.
1. Making that first contact: Intercom
You likely already heard about Intercom and similar tools. With the promise of higher engagement and user retention rates, these have been implemented by an incredible number of business, be it in SaaS, eCommerce or elsewhere.
And on the user side of things, potential clients are now use to having this option and it’s become a go-to choice for them to connect directly with businesses. Social media is also often used, but for most these on-site chat options feel like a more direct connection with the company.
In a nutshell, if you’re not using chat apps like Intercom to automate answers to some of the questions your customers have, you’re missing a huge conversion rate boosting opportunity.
However, beware that you should approach automated chat apps, including extremely popular Facebook Messenger Bots with caution. Putting in too many automated replies and making it obvious to your leads that they’re indeed talking to an algorithm can happen sooner than you think. Although we fully understand how attractive this can be.
One example for this would be using the chats to simply push out marketing and offers to your site’s visitors which is simply a huge no-no.
But, when this is used by humans for humans, the boost to your sales can be massive.
Intercom, specifically, is a multi-channel, real-time support service that allows you to manage native chatting on any device. Native meaning that it’s not introducing any new apps to the end-user (your customer!) and it just works within your website, your online platform, your mobile app. Being able to respond to questions and problems instantly and natively on your platform definitely helps you provide better customer service, increase customer retention, and of course, build a better, more positive brand image.
Why is engaging with customers directly in real-time with Intercom important?
It’s the first point of actual communication with your potential users. Once you start talking, you find out what the visitor needs, and, from there, it’s a takes much less effort and time to convert them than if you were to let them decide completely on their own.
NOTE: In addition to a CRM, if you are not thinking about having a system for immediate action and reponse like this, you are missing the mark. Building a relationship with your customer IS important.
2. Managing and processing your contacts: Platformax
Let’s presume your company only gets 2 new contacts per day. At the end of the year that still adds up to more than 700 contacts! That’s 700 people that you want to keep an eye on. Just from one year. And for each one of them you need to track emails, phone calls, send follow-ups… In short, you need to track all of the activity between you and them. You can not afford to be sloppy about this.
A proper inside sales platform like Platformax massively reduces the legwork needed for this, by automagically storing everything in one place for you. Not only does it keep all contact info at your fingertips, but it also has full email integration, emails and calls tracking, enables email prospecting with automated email campaigns, provides you with sales pipeline management and so much more.
Everything your inside sales team needs in order to make a sale and not lose business opportunities for your company is already in Platformax.
I mean, sure… you can use spreadsheets or a bunch of different “free tools”, but sooner or later, it will be money on the table – opportunities will get lost.
Why is managing contacts and tracking activities with Platformax important?
Your inside sales team has to keep an overview of all the leads and potentials deals in your pipeline, all while always knowing who’s working on which opportunity and at which stage they are at the moment. Connecting with leads using Intercom is great and working on them further with Platformax is the natural next step.
3. Analyze your visitors and users’ behaviour: Hotjar
Hotjar is the still new and very easy way to truly understand your visitors and clients’ behaviour, both on your website and within your platform.
It can help you find the greatest opportunities for improvements and growth, with features like session recordings and heatmaps.
User session recordings help you identify usability issues by providing you recordings of actual visitors on your site as they click, tap, move their cursors, type and navigate across pages. In short, you can see what they are trying to do, how they are they doing it, and where they are having difficulties. It’s one step short of actually sitting next to them! Mind you, no private data can be recorded this way, of course.
With heatmaps, on the other hand, you will understand what the majority of visiting users care about and interact with on your site by visually representing their clicks, taps and scrolling behavior with heatmaps. This helps you eliminate unnecessary elements from your website that only clutter it up, or improve other elements, in order to get more engagement from your users.
Why is analyzing user behavior with Hotjar important?
Maybe you spoke to the contact already, maybe or maybe you didn’t. But, when they are within your SaaS platform, you can see what kind of actions they’re taking and if you see real interest, you will know to followup with a phone call or email. If there isn’t interest, you could see how they came across any problems, helping you troubleshoot and fix issues.
4. Lead your users through your SaaS tool: Chameleon
Chameleon is a neat tool that we use which helps us onboard users better with targeted tours through our CRM.
It makes it possible and easy to create guides through your tool’s options based on your users’ behavior. If your team of developers is strapped for time, this is an excellent way to implement a guided tour through the functionalities of your tool with no need to write any code whatsoever. Chameleon even implements with other apps, like Intercom, helping you truly make the most out of every lead that shows up.
Why is guided onboarding of users with Chameleon important?
Some of your newly signed up users will have less experience, knowledge and technical skills than others. And you want everyone to start using your SaaS and not just leave confused right after signing up.
5. Have a detailed overview of their every single action: Mixpanel
When you really want to dig deep and analyze each and every action your users make, Mixpanel comes into play. It is the most advanced analytics platform out there, for both mobile and web platforms. Instead of just measuring page views your visitors and users make, it helps you analyze the specific actions people take in your application.
Anything can be defined as an in Mixpanel -a file upload, a video play, sharing a post or clicking any button. The two concepts in Mixpanel that you should understand in order to use it to its full potential are events and properties.
An event is an action someone takes in your application or on your website. You can define any event that is imporant to understanding user behaviour in your SaaS tool. Mixpanel recommends starting out with just 5 events – one being the single key metric that you would bet your company on (for Instagram this would be photo uploads, for example) and 4 other events that allow you to create full sales funnel tracking.
A property is a additional information that describes an event better. For example, Instagram might send an event called ‘Uploaded photo’ and with that event they could include a property called ‘Photo filetype’ so they could determine the type of images users upload the most. Mixpanel doesn’t inherently have this information so you need to configure property’s specific to your business and important in the usage of your SaaS tool specifically.
You can define any number of properties that you want. Your own properties will be specific to your business – ‘Photo filetype’ makes sense for Instagram, but it probably wouldn’t make sense for the events you need to track. You could have properties like ‘gender’ or ‘age’ instead. Including a variety of properties to your events adds another dimension to your data and it will let you gain deeper insights with Mixpanel in the future.
Why is tracking specific actions of your users with Mixpanel important?
Sometimes starting a correspondence with users is next to impossible and the info you get from other tools may not be the optimal solution. For example, reviewing session recordings with Hotjar can be very time consuming, or it could fail to run. Drilling down through data from Mixpanel lets you understand user behaviour quicker and simpler, with easier comparisons between different users.
6. Find out who your visitors and potential leads truly are: Lead Forensics
Depending on the volume of users you’re moving through your SaaS product, this may be more useful for some than others. In a nutshell, Lead Forensics is, as they call it, “a B2B software for turbo-charged lead generation”.
It actually lets you identify the anonymous website visitors and provides you with certain data about them. There won’t be any actual names and street addresses included or anything creepy like that, but you could find out the city they’ve connected from and the company they work at.
In case your target audience is still not clear to you or you are tring to figure out if other types of people are interested in your product or service, then the insights provided by Lead Forensics could be the perfect resource for you. You could put together statistics about interested people and companies and countries they’re coming from and better plan out the next steps in the promotion of your SaaS offering.
Or, you could get this info to your inside sales team, who would be able to call up or email the responsible person at the company in question (read how to find their email address here) and see if they truly are looking for what you have to offer. And then close the deal with them if that is the case.
Why is learning more about your visitors with Lead Forensics important?
Because even those people who just visit your site and not sign up for anything could in fact be very hot leads. Knowing the company they’re coming from makes all the difference, as you can follow-up with them directly. Or you’ll simply learn to optimize your landing pages to your actual audience better.
BONUS TOOL!
7. Growing your audience and finding B2B leads on social media: Linked Helper
You probably at least heard about the potential found in LinkedIn for connecting with B2B leads, or you might be already utilizing this channel, but the only way to not notice how lively LinkedIn has become in the past year or two would be if you were living under a rock lately. Which, let’s face it, nobody has the luxury to do (pun intended) in this day and age.
There are now various tools available to help you automate some parts of the work needed to maximize the LinkedIn potential. These make it easier to grow your connections and engage your audience and one of them that we like to use is Linked Helper. And it’s actually split into two major tools, namelz the LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Recruiter.
With these zou can hunt down thousands of targeted contacts by sending personalised invitations to your 2nd & 3rd-degree connections, it has an auto-mailing system and sequential messaging to 1st-degree connections or to specified LinkedIn Group Members, it can automatically visit your connections’ profiles and it let’s you export data to CSV or Excell if needed.
In short, Linked Helper lets you boost your profile and get hundreds of endorsements from other users in no time. And it can also invite your 1st connections to join a LinkedIn group, endorse your contacts automatically to get endorsements in return, automatically add your signature to messages and the list goes on. It’s a rather handy piece of kit if you’re looking to grow the audience for your SaaS tool on LinkedIn, really.
Why is growing your audience and finding leads for your SaaS on LinkedIn important?
Because it’s always good to get the word out there about your company and what you and your SaaS tool do as much as possible. Any potential leads that you get in touch this way are almost always more likely to be better educated than visitors brought in with PPC campaigns. Or at least someday they’ll be able to say “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about those guys, they seem to be a cool company/team.”. And it all helps in the long run. Of course, you don’t want to spam people and shove anything down their throats – just engage with them naturally, ask them what they do, tell them what you do, get that conversation going.
Maximizing sales of your SaaS with an optimized sales tech stack
Any combination of these tools could help your sales and support teams or your company as a whole, by boosting your sales process exponentially. You can use alternatives that are out there, of course, these are just the specific tools that we liked. And for us they made it possible to better understand both our users and their needs and our own platform, actually.
With this SaaS sales tech stack in place we were able to understand what are visitors are looking for the most on our website or what they are missing, or what our users are having problems with in our Platformax CRM and what options they were using the most, so we knew what we needed to update or redesign. We also engaged more in direct, real-time communication with them and both them and us like this, as it reduced the time needed to reply to their question or fulfill their request.
In short, all of this enabled a more intelligent and better focused growth for us and our users. And that’s what matters most.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this, feel free to write to us in the comments below, we would love to discuss more!
You can also contact us directly if you need help optimizing your sales process.?
Leave A Comment