4 Actionable B2B SaaS Growth Strategy Tips and Examples

4 Actionable B2B SaaS Growth Strategy Tips and Examples

There are hundreds, if not thousands of methodologies, guides, and playbooks on how to improve your B2B SaaS growth strategy, so how do you know what actually works?

SaaS organizations like Drift have seen significant growth by aligning their team around a specific growth strategy to achieve remarkable results. They connected team and department goals across the org, ungated all of their resources, and focused their efforts on having conversations directly with prospects - because that’s exactly what their product does.

We’re here to help provide you with a few actionable tips and examples to help improve your B2B SaaS growth strategy so you can drive consistent quarter-over-quarter revenue growth. 

 

What Does an Effective B2B SaaS Growth Strategy Look Like?

B2B SaaS  buyers go through a very specific process when purchasing software for their organization. There are multiple points at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel where you must consider how to move your prospects closer to a buying decision. In a B2B growth strategy, there are 6 primary levers of growth:

• Awareness
• Acquisition
• Activation
• Revenue
• Retention
• Referral

Building a full-funnel growth strategy requires alignment across marketing, sales, product, and customer success. This is why creating a growth team is essential to any SaaS organization. A growth team has visibility into how well each lever of growth is performing, and they're able to identify and remove friction in order to optimize growth.

4 Actionable B2B SaaS Growth Strategy Tips

1. Tear Down the Silos: Unite Marketing, Sales, Product, and Success Teams

One of the biggest mistakes SaaS organizations make is having their Marketing, Sales, Product, and Success teams working in silos. Customers experience all layers of the organization, and it’s important to align every team so they can work towards achieving organizational goals together.

Every team has the potential to positively impact and influence another. For example, Customer Success teams can identify happy customers for marketing to create case studies or testimonials with. sales teams can inform the product team what kinds of features prospects typically ask for or require. 

Every growth lever has the potential to improve through closer alignment between teams. When you foster alignment between departments, conversion rates go up and your growth accelerates.

What can I start doing?

Build an internal growth team with representation from marketing, sales, product, and success. Have a weekly, or bi-weekly meeting to share insights about what is happening at every stage of the buyer’s journey. What questions are prospects asking? What channels are delivering the most qualified leads that buy and stick around? What are the most common complaints that the success team is hearing? 

2. Establish Demand Generation

Demand generation involves creating awareness for your product and for your organization. Demand gen focuses on removing friction in the marketing and sales funnel, to attract and convert new customers. This can include introducing lead scoring models, nurture campaigns, and sales enablement resources to track and nurture prospects through the sales funnel.

Effective demand generation requires a closer analysis of lead data and asking questions like where leads are coming from, what content is converting, what content is driving traffic, and where the drop-off points for prospects are.

A freemium model is a great tactic in demand generation. It introduces people to your product and gives you more opportunity to convert them. Lumen5 is a video creation software that operates with a freemium model and upsells to paid plans based on what their customer needs are.

What can I start doing?

Nurture existing leads! Create a nurture or drip campaign and deliver valuable content or information to your leads to drive them to a conversation with sales. Look at your sales reports and determine where else throughout the sales funnel you can reduce friction, and create sales enablement materials to help push leads closer to a sale.

3. Introduce Affiliate Marketing

Do you have a few really happy customers? (If not, go talk to customers to figure out how to make your product remarkable). SaaS prospects always want to know what everyone else is using. 

Incentivizing your existing customers to promote your product is a great way to improve both retention and lead flow. Referral or affiliate marketing often sees very high conversion rates because people trust their network.

Referral marketing requires your team to be very in-touch with happy customers, and can only be made possible by a positive working relationship between your marketing and your customer success team.

What can I start doing?

Make a list of your happiest customers and get to know them better. Offer them an incentive to make a case study video or recommend your product to a friend.

4. Optimize Your SEO and Content Marketing

SEO optimization and content marketing will often get you the most bang for your buck. It’s a long-term play that (when done right) leads to long-term growth. 

Compounding growth. 

SEO optimization starts with looking at what kinds of keywords and content that your audience searchs for. Then create content based on those keywords. Topic clusters can help you build domain authority, which means Google trusts that you’re an expert in your topic areas. 

Content marketing influences and impacts all areas of the funnel, from top to bottom. This can come from customer case studies, testimonials, blog articles, sales enablement, and more. HubSpot and Atlassian have great blogs that crush it from a content marketing standpoint.

What can I start doing?

Establish the topic areas in which your business has subject matter expertise and can create lots of valuable content around. Then, find high-value keywords to target. Create compelling, helpful, and interesting written, audio, and/or video content addressing the intent of those keywords.

Related: How to Build a Winning SaaS Growth Strategy

How to Implement a Winning B2B SaaS Growth Strategy

Creating a winning B2B SaaS growth strategy starts with creating actionable goals or KPIs to help move the needle forward. Once you have those in place, it’s a matter of getting started and moving in the right direction. 

Now that you’ve determined the direction of your growth strategy, you have to determine the tools and teams needed to execute. If you lack the internal resources to crush your growth strategy, consider working with a hybrid growth team that can fill your strategic and technical gaps to help you build and execute an effective SaaS growth strategy. 

The growth team at Lean Labs has generated over $100 million in revenue for our partners. If you want to know exactly what we would do to plan for growth, budget for growth, execute a winning growth strategy, and guarantee results if we were your growth team, check out our free Growth Playbook. 

A Growth Marketer by day, and a dancer, Disney fan, and designer by night. With over 5 years of experience working in Growth, Marvin is passionate about helping others accomplish their goals, and is always happy to lend his expertise or experience where applicable.

5 Min Read

Growth Marketing

Jan 30, 2023