Attracting new customers is essential for the continued growth of a SaaS startup business. But it is easier said than done. Here, you need the right outreach strategy to connect successfully with these would-be customers and convince them to try your product. Let’s explore how you can build this program and deploy it effectively with the help of Virtua Solutions.
The Challenges Of SaaS Customer Outreach
To better understand why a customer outreach program is crucial for the success of your SaaS startup business, you should know the challenges you encounter. These challenges can limit how effective you are in getting new customers.
Challenge No. 1: Getting Contact Information
Arguably the first challenge you will face is convincing leads to give their information to you. There are many ways you can do it. However, trying all of these ways haphazardly can produce fewer results.
A customer outreach program helps you identify which ways would work best. From there, the program lets you bring all of these ways into a more coherent whole. That increases the effectiveness of all these tactics.
Challenge No. 2: Creating The Pitch
Successfully reaching out to and convincing customers to use your service hinges on the right pitch. After all, that is the one that grabs them in the first place. But coming up with that is no walk in the park.
The customer outreach program helps you define and build this pitch better. You bring in all the necessary tools to better understand your customer. That also includes knowing what they want from your product. With this, you don’t just develop a pitch. You also build the strategy that fulfills that pitch for your customers.
Challenge No. 3: Following Up
Once you get your customers hooked on your pitch, the next challenge is creating an effective follow-up. Here, your goal is to help customers transition from the initial trial of your service to the final sign up. That requires a more strategic approach to get customer buy-in.
On the other hand, you also want to have a strategy for recapturing prospects who did not convert. This part is harder, as you need to have additional buy-in. A good outreach program accounts for this and gives you the right approach for that second attempt.
Building Your SaaS Startup Business Customer Outreach Program.
When developing an outreach strategy, you need to overcome the above challenges. Note that there are many ways to do this. But you need a clear structure for the program to execute them effectively.
The Elements Of Customer Outreach Your Startup Business Should Know
One essential aspect you should be familiar with is the various elements that make up your outreach program. These elements serve as the strategy’s foundation and determine its direction. As such, you should clearly define each before proceeding.
The Customer Profile
When creating the outreach strategy, your SaaS startup business needs to be very specific in the customer profiles it defines. For example, if your SaaS product is geared towards businesses, you want to define the following parameters.
- Revenue size
- Number of employees
- Organizational structure
- Products the company sell
- Any mutual goals that you and the customer might have
All these details serve as the ideal customer profile you want. From there, you can begin matching potential customers. Note that you don’t always have to find the perfect match. But you still want to get close to the ideal figures.
The Persona Map
Another element that you want to have for your outreach program is a persona map. You might confuse it with the customer profile. But the persona map defines the actual people you will engage. Here, you need to list the following details.
- The buyer’s responsibilities
- Their long-term goals (list at least two to three)
- Ways how your startup company can help them achieve these goals
- Ways you can help their daily activities
You can draft these personas based on your customer research. Direct interviews with possible clients would give you the best results.
Hierarchy Of Personas
One thing to remember in developing your outreach strategies is that not all your personas are equal. Some will respond to you faster than others. As such, you want to organize everything to direct the flow of your outreach program better.
To do that, you need to create a scale based on several metrics, most notably:
- How aligned your solution is to their business
- The size of budget
- The influence of the customer within the organization
Using these criteria, rate each of your customer personas. This ranking will tell you how many resources to assign for each outreach effort. You can also determine what tactics would work best for each.
Once you have organized everything, you can determine how to go about each persona. For higher priority ones, your main team should be the ones working. Meanwhile, Virtua Solutions can help with connecting with the lower-priority personas.
The Right Values Proposition For Your Startup Business
Demonstrating the value of your product is always the main point of your customer outreach effort. But one thing to know is that value changes depending on where the customer is at in their journey. As such, your outreach effort needs to adapt to these changes in value.
Here, be more proactive in understanding what these changes could be. Talk with them even during your initial engagements to see what other potential value they might want to get from your product. Use the information you get to further enrich the customer profiles and persona maps you have. You can also encourage them to make suggestions. This strategy helps you better personalize your outreach efforts since the idea is already coming from them.
Streamlining Your SaaS Startup Business Customer Outreach
Once you have completed your customer outreach program, you might still find it not as efficient as you might want. That is where continuous streamlining becomes helpful. Review all the components of your strategy and see how you can simplify them further.
You also need to see how to improve the collaboration between the teams involved in the effort, such as marketing and customer service. Here, you must bring those teams for brainstorming sessions to align their strategies.
In all of these, Virtua Solutions can play the role of support for everyone. We will provide you with the extra capabilities to help make your SaaS outsourcing efforts succeed. Contact us today and let’s get started reaching out to more would-be customers.