Retaining customers is essential, but converting prospects is equally important. You won’t be able to grow your business if you don’t have a steady stream of new customers.
All of your marketing leads to that one moment where your prospect finally decides to purchase your product. In this post, we’ll share must-know sales techniques to increase your conversion rate and grow your SaaS.
Let’s go.
Nurture and Don’t Try to Convert Initially
When a prospective customer lands on your home page, your initial goal shouldn’t be to convert them.
The majority of prospects won’t buy during the first engagement with your brand. Instead, seek to gain their trust. You’ll do that by offering educational content which explains their problem to them.
Create Customer Personas
Creating customer personas is essential to closing more sales. If you don’t know who you’re speaking to with your marketing, you won’t be able to effectively personalize your message.
A customer persona is a fictional document that you create for each type of customer you’ll work with. It contains basic demographics to help you visualize who you’re speaking to. But a customer persona should also list that customer type’s problems, goals, and how you can help them achieve those goals. Your customer persona should act as a reference guide for all of your marketing (including paid and content).
Personalize Your Content and Approach
After you’ve built individual customer personas, it’s time to create content to reach each of your customer types. Your product may offer the same list of features, but each customer type has different needs and unique motivators to act. One prospect may be motivated to purchase after reading a case study. Another prospect may need a case study and a demo to understand the value of your product.
Don’t just try the same sales technique with each customer. Switch it up and see what works for each.
Focus on the Problem, Not the Product
You won’t get many sales without demonstrating empathy. When you can show a customer that you fully understand the problem, you can win them over.
This is why it’s important to focus on the problem. Discuss it, dissect it, and explore what happens if the problem is left unchecked. This way, when you hit them with the solution (a.k.a. your product), they will be more likely to trust your recommendation for how to solve their dilemma.
Create a Drip Email Campaign
In a drip campaign, you send an automated set of emails to your prospective customers. There are several goals to these emails:
- Nurture your prospective customers – Educate them about their problem.
- Build trust – Show your prospective customers that you’re a dependable and useful resource for them to learn more about their problem.
- Stay top of mind – A steady stream of emails allows you to gain your prospective customer’s attention.
You can set up a drip campaign through your email marketing service. Drip emails will allow you to deliver non-stop value to your prospective customers during their trial period.
Send Out a Personal Plea
While a drip campaign will help you nurture your prospective customers, don’t let it get too generic. Mix up your polished emails with a more personalized note. A personalized email, written from the founder or someone on your sales team, can do wonders when it comes to connecting with your prospective customer.
Ask them how they’re enjoying the trial. Invite them to reply to your email with meaningful feedback. And when they reply, be sure to respond right away. Even if their reply is less than complimentary, your response can win them over.
Pick Up the Phone
If you have the bandwidth to do it, have someone on your team personally call prospective customers on the phone. Everyone is focused on online tactics, but a good ‘ole phone call is just simple enough to work. A five-minute phone call will definitely set your SaaS apart from your competitors and make your prospective customer feel special.
Incorporate Video
If you don’t have the time or the staff to call each individual prospective customer, consider creating personalized videos instead.
Using a video tool like Bonjoro, you can record personalized video messages and send them to your prospect at a key milestone (during their trial or at a certain point in their customer’s journey). Like a phone call, this unexpected video can make your prospective customer feel both special and excited to do business with you.
Shorten Your Trials
Long trials make it difficult for you to close sales. First of all, prospective customers are more likely to disengage with your trial after a while. This is especially true if you’re not constantly nudging trial users back to your app. (And when your trial is lengthy, you probably won’t contact users as frequently.)
However, with a shorter trial, you’ve built in a sense of urgency that keeps your prospective customers engaged with your software. They want to try everything before their time expires.
And when it expires, don’t offer to extend the trial. Instead, give them a one-on-one consultation. This deepens your engagement and allows you to personalize your plea with the prospective customer.
Share Case Studies and Testimonials
Let’s go back to customer personas for a second. When you have different customer types, you also need different case studies. To justify the purchase, a prospective customer will need to see how your product can help them succeed. You can do that by offering a case study that showcases that customer type’s unique pain points and how your product solved them.
Aim to create a case study for each type of customer that you have. If you don’t have case studies yet, you can share testimonials that highlight different problems.
Give Your Prospective Customers a Choice
Customers may hem and haw over one choice, but if you offer different options, they’re more likely to bite. For example, you should offer annual plans in addition to monthly plans. And give a discount for purchasing those annual plans, too!
A discount indicates a greater value, which is a powerful motivator for most prospective customers.
But be careful with discounts. Make your discounts, like the one for annual pricing, transparent and available to all. You shouldn’t just give out discounts to people who’ve initiated a cancellation or extended a trial, for example. Not only does this devalue your product, but it can undermine the trust that you’ve built with your prospective customers.
Follow Up
Following up is the key to your lasting success.
It takes, on average, between 8 to 12 interactions with a company before a prospective customer is ready to purchase. Your goal should be to show up on their radar multiple times during their initial consideration stage. You can do that through emails, phone calls, and retargeting ads on social media.
It doesn’t really matter how you stay in front of your prospective customers, it just matters that you do.
If you offer a free trial, make a plan to stay in touch with them during the trial. Then, after the trial has ended, set another follow-up plan in action. Load them with case studies, comparison tables, and personal plea emails.
Also, be prepared to tackle buying objections (once again, referring to your customer personas for guidance). Make a list of the most common buying objections and then create counter-arguments to those objections. You may not win them all, but you’ll be able to appeal to some.
Final Thoughts
By incorporating the above sales techniques, you’ll convert more prospects into customers and successfully grow your SaaS. If one technique doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to try something else. Experiment to find what sales tactic works the best for your company and audience.
Before you go, check out these related posts:
- Tips for Launching Your Next SaaS Product in 2021
- How to Convince Your New Customers to Upgrade
- Cold Emailing Tips for SaaS
