About SaaSMQL

Common Growth Challenges for SaaS Companies

SaaS companies encounter several challenges when trying to grow sales pipeline and scale annual recurring revenue (ARR). We work with startups from Seed funded to Series E, and the bottlenecks is usually different, depending on the stage. We have grouped them in 4 main categories:

Generate predictable pipeline: Predictability and scalability are hard to achieve at all stages. If a startup knows that for every $1 invested in demand generation, it can produce $3 in recurring revenue, its growth would be exponential. The top SaaS companies in the world (Salesforce, Zoom, Slack, Zendesk) have all figured out how to obtain a solid ROI from their marketing investments and drive a predictable stream of new customers via paid acquisition. In order to achieve the same results, a company must have the correct processes in place, have the marketing and sales teams aligned on a common goal, and must be able to quickly test and optimize new acquisition channels.

Run targeted campaigns: Marketing budgets are always very limited, and there is no room to waste precious dollars on the wrong targets. Every company knows that there is a limited number of accounts that can really benefit from their solution TODAY, and that are ready to invest money on it. This is why Account-Based Marketing is becoming extremely popular among SaaS startups. Instead of generating thousand of junk leads that need to be filtered out by your sales team, it's much more efficient to direct all your money and resources toward those companies that are most likely to buy. This requires developing a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on your CRM data, and then build a list of target accounts that matches your best customers or opportunities.

Leverage buyer intent data: By analyzing Intent data, you can track your target accounts show strong buying signals, allowing you to target the right people at the right time. Yet, many sales and marketing teams still aren’t sure how to include this new type of data into their workflows, let alone incorporate it into actionable programs. The main issue is that this data is all scattered across different systems: new leads from your whitepapers or blogs, new anonymous visits from target accounts, new technology adoption, new open positions, recent fundings, search engine activity, etc. However, it's very difficult to aggregate all this information into one unique view, consolidate it at the account level, match it with your target account list, and do that on a weekly or monthly basis.

Track campaign attribution: This is by far the biggest challenge for every B2B marketing team. Because of the complex sales cycle, and the fact that a single sales might involve multiple stakeholders, understanding which campaigns have generated positive ROI, and which ones were a total waste of money, can be a struggle. We have been approached by clients that had spent over $100,000 on digital ads, but they had no idea if that investment generated a single customer or opportunity. In order to be able to properly track campaign attribution, it's necessary to setup the correct lead flow and automation processes in your CRM, and to select the most appropriate attribution model (first touch, last touch, multi-touch, W-model, etc.).