B2B SaaS Lead Generation Done Right

There’s a lot of content out there that claims that there’s 5 growth strategies

The five growth strategies are high-touch sales, paid advertising, intrinsic virality, intrinsic influencer incentives (Twitch!), and platform hacks.

— Emmett Shear (@eshear) June 9, 2021

or 19 traction channels.

But if you’re doing B2B Saas there’s only 2: Inbound and Outbound Strategies.

1. Inbound Lead Generation is attracting users to your business.
2. Outbound Lead Generation is meeting users where they are.

How to Start

Don’t even think about making content, sending out emails without first learning about your user. If you’re starting you want to have a bias for action and learn by doing. This means that you’ll fail sometimes and you’ll learn over time what works and what doesn’t. So in order to default to action, use a barebones framework that you iterate on over time based on the success and failures of the output.

Here’s mine. This should take you about 10 minutes.

1. What is the business problem that you’re solving? Are there competitors?

2. Segment the market. You don’t want to spend weeks segmenting the market. Instead segment quickly by buying incentives. Think about your user’s economic incentives. You don’t discover incentives by what they say, you find them by what they do. Most people in business act out of fear but talk out of ego, so you’re typically getting a screwed up version of the truth if you’re not watching them and only listening.

3. What industry are they in? Where are they located? What’s their job title? What tech stack are they using? What systems are they building? What tech stack do they use? What’s their team size? What kind of spending power do they have (revenue and funding)? ← this is the most important of all.

4. Do you know anyone in your network that is in this segment? Are you in this segment?

   Typically I find that a lot of engineers will find it hard to solve problems that aren’t their own, this is because they’re not well-socialized and lack empathy. But there’s good news. This isn’t about feelings or emotionally connecting with someone. This is about understanding the bottom-line in which they operate and make decisions (and take action on those decisions) in a business. In other words, what motivates them to build vs buy? What motivates them to move jobs? To purchase other software? To buy courses? There’s always a money reason. That’s the first principle of B2B business. If you can’t figure out a money reason (hint: you can reduce it to numbers), then that’s a sign that you’re not solving a business problem.

Once you can answer these questions, you have a buyer persona for your lead generation engine. Then you’re ready for a lead generation strategy.

Which One Is Better?

It’s up to you. As you read through this article and implement different strategies, you’ll find that you’re naturally pulled to some more than others. Double down on those.

Inbounding Strategies

1. Content Marketing. This is one of the most important forms of marketing because all other variants start with this.

2. Engineering Marketing. This could be implemented by viral coefficients or free tools.

   1. Viral Coefficients are built-in features in your product that let the product market itself. SavvyCal has one of highest viral coefficients in recent B2B Saas history. A user will naturally send the full product over to someone that may not know about SavvyCal already. But by naturally using the product, a user will have exposed a personalized demo of the product to their friend.

   2. Free Tools are secondary products that are typically single page apps, lightweight, performant, and SEO-friendly that solve a small problem that after usage, shoots users into the top of your buying funnel. The HubSpot Website Grader is a perfect example of a free tool that’s been responsible for millions in revenue for the business. You’ll still need to market the product, have it rank on SEO, etc. It’s almost like being responsible for another app. But the advantage to this is that there’s significantly less of these tools because there’s significantly less people that can code vs can write blogs. This strategy works so well for us. Our Saas pricing directory is responsible for over half our page views. If you want to take advantage of this strategy but don’t want to spend the time learning how to make these work, we’ll make them for you.

3. Social Media/Community Building. I don’t know much about this so I won’t speak on it but Rosie can help you.

Outbounding Strategies

1. Networking. My personal favorite. You’re gonna favor this one if you’re a people person and love learning about people and what makes them tick. Naturally your early users are going to be passionate and identify a lot with their job. So if you ask questions and listen well, you’ll understand them and the business. To get started, it’s as simple as telling your close friends you’re working on X. Then ask yourself if you know anyone that is in your buyer persona. If not, ask yourself how to create relationships with people. You don’t have to feel that much pressure from the word relationships. Business/professional relationships are super shallow compared to real life. One meeting and an email exchange every year is good enough to keep the lead warm.

2. Cold Calling. Linkedin Sales Navigator is the place to go. Their tool easily lets you find people in your buyer persona. Then to convince them, use a “why you, why you right now?” framework. Why are you reaching out to them? And what’s happening in both your world and their world that now’s the right time? Here’s an example. Say you’re making a job board and you see that a team is hiring for engineers. Then you reach out to all the recruiting managers and tell them that you see they’re hiring and that you want to help them promote their job applications.

3. Make the ask after the meeting is over. Networking has a 30% conversion rate for me, cold calling has maybe a 5-10% conversion rate. This has a 100% conversion rate. Once your meeting is over, ask them to intro you to a friend, be very specific. They will never say no.

This Is Not A Distribution Strategy

These are lead generation strategies for B2B Saas businesses, not distribution strategies. Implementing these will fill up the top of your funnel but it’s up to you to create a sales process to convert top of funnel prospects into paying users.