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    The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

    4 Strategic Content Ideas to Speed Up Enterprise SaaS Deals

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    Last updated: July 17th, 2020

    4 Strategic Content Ideas to Speed Up Enterprise SaaS Deals

    There’s a tendency among B2B SaaS companies to switch off marketing to prospects once they’ve signed up for a demo. At this stage, it becomes the sales team’s responsibility to close them, and marketing continues to focus on getting more prospects into their pipeline.

    But especially in enterprise SaaS with many different decision-makers involved, all with varying levels of awareness regarding the value of their products, the process of getting everyone’s buy-in is difficult and time-consuming.

    During these long sales cycles, there is all this time and opportunity where they could use marketing to support and speed up the sales process, but they often don’t. And if they do continue marketing to those people, they’ll often deliver the same ads as before with one-size-fits-all messaging that does more harm than good (a problem we covered in our piece on remarketing strategy for SaaS).

    So lately we’ve been thinking about specific things we could do to help support our clients’ sales organizations during longer sales cycles. Our approach is to say, what are the questions and objections that these prospects are likely to have throughout the sales process? And how can we deliver them content such that we:

    • Assist in answering these questions and objections before and after demo calls
    • Take some of the weight off of sales
    • Speed up the sales cycle and ultimately close more leads

    And the beauty is that sales teams already know the questions and objections likely to come up, so all you have to do is figure out what they are, and come up with (or repurpose) content that helps to answer them.

    In this article we’ll share specific content ideas we’ve been testing or thinking about trying with our clients, and then wrap up with our thoughts on how to implement these tactics yourself.

    Schedule a Free SaaS Scale Session to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS companies grow through paid media and SEO. If you want to learn more about our approach, check out our Predictable Growth Methodology that’s the basis for what we do.

    First, A Note on Sales and Marketing Working Together

    Despite a lot of sentiment out there for sales and marketing teams to work together, the culture within many SaaS companies is still one of, “Hey, we’re sales, we’ll take care of our stuff. Your job is marketing, you send us leads and we’ll worry about closing them.”

    But for enterprise SaaS deals that can range from $50k to $5 million per year in revenue, it makes absolutely no sense for sales to single-handedly be responsible for closing prospects during long sales cycles. And compared to the budget it takes to run prospecting campaigns, the size of your actual pipeline is so much smaller that the budget required to market to them is minor in comparison. So we think leveraging marketing beyond demo signups is a no brainer.

    In fact, closer coordination between sales and marketing is essential for the content ideas that follow to have the desired effect.

    How to Repurpose Content You Already Have

    The reality of an enterprise customer journey is that there are so many different touchpoints that prospects only ever see a fraction of the content you send them when they’re MQL’s. And very often, content made for MQL’s is created to do exactly what you want content for SQL’s to do — answer questions, handle objections, and aid the sales process. So the first thing you can do is repurpose this content.

    For example, let’s say you have a 14-day email series that you send to MQL’s. In the emails, you include links to educational blog articles or customer success stories. Chances are the majority of hot prospects have only read a small portion of these by the time they become an SQL.

    So to repurpose this content, you could create omnichannel remarketing ads and push them out to your SQL’s with the only objective being for them to consume the content.

    Note: If you want to be really smart about this, you can remove CTA’s from the content. For example, if you use HubSpot, you could use their smart CTA feature and set criteria that if the person visiting a page is an SQL, show it without the CTA. That way you’re not asking someone to sign up for a demo when they already have. We see very few SaaS companies approaching journey-offer fit at this nuanced level, and we think it’s undervalued.

    Content Ideas We’ve Been Testing and Thinking About Trying

    1. Video Testimonial Remarketing Ads

    This is a tactic we’ve recently started testing for our own agency. The idea came up when we heard the CEO of one of our clients (Jordan of CartHook) talk about us on a podcast.

    He spent about 10 minutes giving us a solid tip of the hat, and we realized it would be a great testimonial to share with companies considering working with us. So we created an audiogram that we’ve been using in remarketing ads for SQL’s.

    We used Headliner to create a simple visual to pair with the audio, and then we let his testimonial do the rest. So far we’ve had several prospects mention on calls that they saw the video and were intrigued by it. And this is a tactic we think would translate really well to marketing SaaS products to SQL’s — so we’ll likely try this with our clients too.

    While you may not have access to a customer talking you up on a podcast, if you can find the right customer (or customers) to provide you with a genuine audio testimonial, this can be a really powerful tool.

    2. Turn SaaS Battlecards Into Competitor Comparison Content

    Many SaaS companies use “battlecards” as tools for salespeople to handle common objections that come up from prospects and to do so in a consistent way across their sales team.

    Related: How B2B SaaS Companies Can Leverage a Hub & Spoke Content Strategy

    But often the content of their battlecards never ends up being used as marketing collateral on their site. Some of the points made might be found in their competitor comparison landing pages (if they have them set up), but often there’s room for using battlecard content to improve those pages.

    To demonstrate this, consider this common battlecard format:

    B2B SaaS Battlecard Format: Competitor Overview, Positioning, Products, Pricing, Strengths, Weaknesses, Objections, Responses.

    And let’s look at how it’s content could translate onto a competitor comparison page. Here’s a wireframe with the format we use when building these pages for our clients:

    B2B SaaS competitor comparison page wireframe: Comparison Headline, Competitor Acknowledgement, Core Differentiators/Positioning, Top 5 Benefits, Proof Points/Testimonials, CTA.

    To translate the battlecard content onto your comparison page, you could:

    • Use the battlecard positioning section to help frame your own core differentiators/positioning section
    • Use the strengths section to help create your competitor acknowledgement section
    • Use the objections and responses sections to inform the Top 5 Benefits you choose (ie. focus on benefits that handle common objections as they relate to your competitor)
    • Use the weaknesses section when choosing testimonials (eg. you might use testimonials from customers who have switched from your competitors service to yours based on those weaknesses)

    So whether you use your battlecards to create new comparison pages, or to beef up and strengthen existing ones, these pages can be utilized throughout long sales cycles to preemptively respond to prospects who are considering alternatives.

    3. Use Compelling Snippets From Sales Conversations

    Another idea we’ve been thinking about is the possibility of using snippets from real sales conversations that answer questions or objections that prospects have asked.

    For example, if you use a tool like Chorus.ai for recording sales calls, you could take highlight moments and string them together into audio content (similar to the video testimonials above) for remarketing ads.

    You’d need permission from prospects, so you’d probably want to pull from conversations where the prospects eventually became customers — ones you have a solid relationship with that you think would approve.

    In the stage between signing up for a demo and showing up for the call, this could help prime prospects in a way that reduces their questions or objections on the actual call. And in the stage between the demo and signing up, which as we discussed can be many months, this type of content could continue to help persuade prospects and their teams.

    4. Use Snippets From Customer Success Onboarding Webinars

    This idea reflects a core theory we have, something that’s a consistent theme in our Predictable Growth Methodology, which is that using marketing to show prospects what life would be like in the next stage of their journey with you is an effective way of guiding them to the next step in the process.

    So for SQL’s who are on the fence about signing up with you, you might choose to share content with them from your onboarding webinars. Often these webinars go deeper into the features and benefits of using your product, and it’s content you already have, so why not give prospects a taste of this to entice and nudge them to opt in?

    For example, Datadog could pull snippets from their weekly live demos that show how their out of the box visualizations make it easy for new users to jump in and begin getting immediate value out of their platform.

    Closing Thoughts on Implementation

    Marketing’s job is not done when the lead comes in. Together with sales, marketing can and should be leveraged to close deals even when it takes many months to close.

    Regarding implementation, the connection that we think should be happening is for marketing teams to continue deploying remarketing content to pending deals in your pipeline, and for sales teams to be notified when prospects have consumed that content — at which point they can reach out in those moments to continue talks and enrich those conversations.

    These efforts can allow you to continue framing your offering to prospects in a compelling way throughout the sales cycle, and if executed well, will help you close more leads.

    We’re excited to begin testing out some of these ideas with our own clients. If you end up using any of them, we’d love to hear how they work!

    Schedule a Free SaaS Scale Session to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS companies grow through paid media and SEO. If you want to learn more about our approach, check out our Predictable Growth Methodology that’s the basis for what we do.

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