How to Sell Saas to Enterprise Clients

When considering how to sell SaaS to enterprise clients, it is tempting to rely on the currently popular inbound marketing method. After all, inbound has defined digital marketing for over ten years, finding success in both B2B and B2C environments. But, ask yourself this – does inbound account for the complexity and sales cycle length of your product? This article will use one of our clients who sells vendor management software (VMS) as a case study in selling enterprise software through a long sales cycle, and explain how using an account based marketing (ABM) approach may be more effective than relying purely on inbound’s traditional lead generation methods. If you’re unfamiliar with ABM, here is a primer. 

In summary, this article will discuss how ABM fills several gaps found when relying on inbound strategies alone. This is due to three major strengths of ABM, which are as follows: (1) a focus on relationship building throughout the sales cycle; (2) a focus on a shared responsibility between marketing and sales for a small number of accounts organized into “pods”; (3) a focus on measuring the behavior of accounts rather than individual leads. 

Limitation 1: Inbound Focuses on Awareness and Not Relationship Building

Getting people aware of a product is, of course, a matter of marketing and education. This initial period of education is where inbound shines, and why it still has a place in your strategy. Traditionally, inbound raises awareness of your product for prospective leads. It does so through value-added content such as blog articles, whitepapers, webinars, and so on. Marketers then use this content in concert with social media campaigns to bring prospects to a lead generating form or landing page. This strategy has been part of the SaaS marketing landscape for over a decade, and for good reason. You must establish awareness of your product in order to sell it, and this is not all inbound accomplishes. Quality content can also establish your company’s domain authority, and contribute to the nurturing process.

Unfortunately, in the Enterprise SaaS environment, inbound will begin to brush up against its limitations. This is because inbound has no transitional step between the creation of initial awareness and the development of long-term relationships. Yet, such relationships are enormously beneficial to selling a long sales cycle product, as we will now explain. When considering how to sell SaaS to Enterprise clients, you must remember the length and complexity of SaaS sales cycles. Someone looking to sell, for example, VMS, must contend with the sheer breadth of cross-departmental processes that it impacts. VMS simplifies email communication, security questionnaires, vendor assessments, remediation tracking, and so on. This means that each department affected by VMS must approve it. The VMS company will also need to prepare proofs of concept and personalized integration for their client’s CRM. This means selling VMS to a target account will take, at minimum, months.

VMS is, of course, not unusual for its complexity and long sales cycle. This is the case for most products in the Enterprise SaaS environment. As a rule, they require months of work and communication to make a single, if substantial, sale. As a result, the awareness raising provided by inbound strategies is not enough. While it may serve to hook in a target account early, it will not keep them interested and considering your product over the course of months. This is where ABM excels, as it focuses on building high-quality personal relationships. Once you have established these relationships, you can more easily parlay them into a sale. We will dig into exactly how to approach this in our next point. 

Limitation 2: Inbound Focuses on Marketing and Sales as Separate Departments Rather than Unified “Pods”

The division of the Marketing and Sales departments also runs into limitations for B2B SaaS companies. Traditionally, the point of lead generation is a “handoff point”, where Marketing’s work ends and Sales’ work begins. There is a bit of nuance though, as Marketing may become involved again to nurture a lead which doesn’t generate an immediate sales conversion. Regardless, Sales picks up at said handoff point and begins working on getting leads to make a purchase. While both steps in the process are vital, they are often treated as separate. 

Also, for many businesses, a fixation on lead generation has also influenced the approach of the Sales department. Due to the sheer number of potential leads, Sales often outputs as many attempts at conversions as possible. Unfortunately, if the majority of leads aren’t worth pursuing, Sales will spend much of their time spinning their wheels. Like Marketing, Sales would be better served focusing on long-term relationships with a few quality leads, as we’ll discuss in greater detail in the next point.

In contrast, ABM posits this sales process would be better handled as a collaborative project where both departments contribute throughout. The method it suggests for this approach is separating members of both Marketing and Sales into smaller “pods.” Within said pods, Marketing will identify those most qualified and interested in your product through use of firmographic data. Sales, having received fewer, higher quality prospects, can then focus on developing deeper relationships with said prospects. Pods should focus on shortlists of target accounts, divided by some relevant commonality, like location, industry, or use case. We suggest focusing on no more than 20-30 accounts per pod, though this number may change based on your product’s individual complexity and price point.

As an example of how this might work in action, an ABM pod for a VMS company might be responsible for a California-based campaign to sell VMS solutions to the film industry. Marketing would contribute to this pod through a very focused multi-channel campaign, designed to win the business over the course of 1-2 quarters. It would do so by creating a variety of digital and physical collateral, such as online advertising, inbound collateral, webinar invites, targeted physical gifting, trade shows, and conferences. To summarize, in the ABM method Marketing supports Sales in pursuing a small number of accounts through personalized efforts. They do so by creating value-added collateral for each digital and physical channel.

Limitation 3: Inbound Focuses on Generating Leads Rather than Measuring Account Behaviour

As mentioned above, inbound marketing tends to place great importance on lead generation as a marketer’s most important key performance indicator (KPI). However, the volume of leads generated loses value due to your product’s complex and niche nature. To return to our example, VMS is expensive, difficult to implement, and may take months of meetings before a final sale. The number of leads who would even consider a purchase is vanishingly small. Therefore, your leads must be quality, meaning they are both interested and qualified to champion your product through the long sales cycle. 

If lead generation is not your ideal KPI, what is? When using ABM, you must focus on measures of account engagement. This approach does still consider individual leads. But, it also considers the sum of KPIs associated with a single company, where there are likely multiple members of a buying committee. Some suggested KPIs to target include the number of quality website visits a prospect company makes (meaning they take multiple actions and remain on the site for at least a minute), total email opens/clicks/replies of the buying committee, social media interactions of the buying committee with your marketing efforts, and event registrations made by buying committee members. Basically, you want measures to track the long term engagement of an account with your business across all marketing and sales efforts. 

To this end, combining deanonymization software (like ZoomInfo’s WebSights, Clearbit, or Leadfeeder) with a sales intel database (such as ZoomInfo or Apollo) will greatly aid in surfacing interested accounts, making it much easier to gather the buying committee information. This information includes a business’ revenue, head count, industry, financials, contact information, and so on. From here, you can focus on only the prospects that are the ideal fit for your product.

This strategy may seem difficult to use at scale. But, ABM approaches scalability differently from inbound marketing. For inbound marketing, scale comes from the volume of leads generated. ABM instead focuses on generating large amounts of intent data, then sifting through it in an automated fashion to quickly identify best fit accounts. This helps one target the best leads for high-quality relationship building. In fact, 75% of marketers reported that ABM strategies helped find accounts that were the best fit for their products or offerings. B2B SaaS businesses are especially well suited to this strategy, as they rely on a smaller, but more significant, number of sales.

Luckily for you, the RFDM team are experts at applying account based marketing and how to sell Saas to enterprise clients. If you’d like to learn more, don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us!