THE IMPORTANCE OF SAAS TOOLS
We are blessed to live in an age where scaling SaaS companies have a virtually endless supply of business apps available on the market. No matter your size or your goals, there is a very high chance that you have a wide selection of powerful, feature-rich tools at your fingertips. With so many SaaS tools in fact, some business leaders can become bewildered by the sheer number of choices out there.
In such a diverse market, most SaaS tools are unique and full to the brim with powerful features that will aid your business’ operations across the board. With so many tools available it may feel like you need to hire someone just to sift through the market to find the best tool for you!
That’s why we’re here. We’ve compiled a list of the best SaaS tools on the market to do a lot of the heavy lifting for your business. Take a look below at the areas we’ve covered, and the areas you should consider when looking for the best SaaS tools.
TOP THREE MARKETING TOOLS FOR FAST SCALING SAAS
It's often thought that SaaS products sell themselves. This couldn’t be further from the truth! Marketing is such a vital component of a SaaS company reaching out and accelerating their growth. How do you get onto the path to success without your customer base?
To maximize marketing efforts, SaaS companies need to focus on a range of factors:
Increasing brand awareness
Identifying customer problem points
Developing nurturing funnels
Ensuring current customers’ satisfaction as well
With the recommended tools you’re about to see, you can address all of these factors with ease.
Looking to find the key components to build a powerful website for your SaaS company? Hubspot can do just that, and then some! With Hubspot, you can optimize your website for all devices, drive traffic and convert more visitors. It’s an immensely popular system in which you’ll find SEO tools, content management, email automation, and much more. The beauty of Hubspot is that it is designed to be integrated with the other marketing tools you use on a daily basis.
HubSpot CMS is crucial for your SaaS business if you are looking to create blog posts, landing and site pages, and emails in a matter of clicks. Offering pre-built templates or the ability to build one from scratch, your content will be hosted on HubSpot CMS, supported by a supreme content distribution network. If you feel your SaaS business needs to improve its management and optimization of content, look no further than HubSpot.
No true marketing setup is complete without a strong SEO tool, and the one stop shop for all things SEO is of course SEMrush. Offering more than 40 tools as part of their package, you’d do well to find something SEMrush cannot offer digital marketers. While specializing in SEO tools, many of their features are designed to aid content management, advertising, social media management, competitor research, and much more.
Site auditing is a big part of SEMrush’s portfolio, and it can be an invaluable tool if you know what you’re doing with it. Simply put, conducting a site audit lets you identify any problem areas which may be hindering your website from ranking highly on Google. Once identified, it's about fixing these mistakes and ensuring you don’t run into the same pitfalls again. For the sly ones among you, site audits are also a great way of monitoring competitors’ progress and seeing if any of their processes are causing them to pip you in the search results. I won’t tell anyone if you steal some of their methods to benefit your own company!
Another vital string you need in your marketing bow is a solid email marketing strategy. Just like a solid social media tool, an efficient email marketing process will help to drive customer engagement. Unlike social media tools however, email marketing is a far more niche approach, and can target individuals with relevant content designed to maximize engagement.
One of the best options to utilize this form of marketing is Campaigner. With a user-friendly email builder which is displayed perfectly across all devices, emails can also be automated, saving your business a great deal of admin time. Campaigner Experiments also let you test each element of your email, including call to actions and subject lines.
You can even test which ‘send times’ click best with your customers.
TOP THREE SALES TOOLS FOR FAST SCALING SAAS
Now prospective customers have heard about your product thanks to the great marketing strategy outlined above, you actually need to sell the product!
Now, how can you expect to sell your SaaS product to a growing number of clients if your sales management strategy is not sufficient. In order for this to be realized, you need the right tools!
A successful sales strategy should include:
Upselling to existing customers
Collaborating with the marketing team
Utilizing technology for inside sales
Let's have a look at some of the most effective tools for SaaS firms to scale up the right way.
Through Salesforce’s CRM software, you can build your SaaS business on one central, secure, and scalable platform that's easy to customize and upgrade with the tool’s intuitive UI. Salesforce gives you the power to sell, service, and market with pre-integrated apps on AppExchange, the world's largest business app marketplace.
With powerful analytics tools, Salesforce drives your decision making using your own data. Spot opportunities, predict outcomes and get recommendations with understandable AI models. With this sort of information, this makes it much clearer to understand how you go about achieving your set goals and the resources you need to do so.
The Salesforce mobile is another huge pull. Allowing visibility between teams on any device, employees can work on the move, files can also be shared and collaborated. For the remote working world we now live in, it's a great benefit that no worker will be hindered no matter what device they’re working from.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an intuitive tool designed to aid sales teams for establishing and maintaining customer relationships. This LinkedIn tool allows users to enhance their sales closure, to increase their company’s revenue. Sales teams can reach out to customers with extensive search and filter features. LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides your SaaS business with detailed insights into leads and prospects so the sales team can gain a better understanding of their customers and what makes them tick. This is made much easier with LinkedIn’s personalized schemes, allowing you to break down these insights further to better focus on individuals in each sales outreach campaign.
Picture this. The year is 2022, and GDPR-compliance is the hot topic. Wouldn’t it be nice if SaaS tools available on the market could assist with the ongoing efforts to remain compliant?
Here’s the answer to your prayers!
ZoomInfo is the self-proclaimed home of the most GDPR-compliant B2B contact information out there. With their intelligent browser plugin ‘Reachout’, you can access contact and company information from Salesforce, social media profiles, and business websites. Another feature which comes with this impressive package is real-time sales intelligence. This gives you enhanced visibility and a better idea of the companies you’re trying to target. What’s more, all the CRM information you need can be updated in a matter of seconds. What’s not to love?!
TOP THREE COLLABORATION TOOLS FOR FAST SCALING SAAS
Precursive helps you to keep on top of all your tasks and projects seven days a week. With the ability to share project plans with your customers, they can prioritize their time for specific dependencies and have a clearer idea of tasks. Projects can be broken down and assigned to different teams. Real-time notifications mean you’ll always be informed about any tasks being completed or updated, ensuring no time is wasted asking around the teams for updates.
A greater visibility of your projects allows your resource planning to sync up with your project management. Precursive makes monitoring key business metrics easy, allowing you to report on key projects across the business, as well as capacity and utilization. The Precursive app is also an extremely helpful tool, significantly easing the sometimes difficult task of your team staying connected if they’re using different devices. Now your employees can complete all of their normal daily tasks whilst on the go or out of the office. Just make sure the phone’s charged! If you want to know more about Precursive, you can click here to book a meeting with us today!
As one of the most comprehensive knowledge management systems currently on the market, Bit.ai is THE place for your team to create, collaborate, and share knowledge. Users operate from a central workspace, which can be created for private use, as well as being able to invite collaborators to work with you. Create workspaces around teams, departments, customers, partners, and many more. The structure of Bit’s workspace feature enables the entire business to share and work together depending on their workflows.
Slack is the quintessential tool for revolutionizing your internal team communication. Effectively replacing email, text messaging and instant messaging, Slack provides you with a single platform for all of your communications. Make audio and video calls, and create dedicated channels so teams can focus on their projects while communicating efficiently.
Slack’s integration with other third party applications and tools is a big plus, with over 2,200 integrations! The SlackConnect feature allows you to connect with teams from other companies, meaning tedious back and forth emails are a thing of the past and projects can be worked on collaboratively all in the same space. Slack really is the SaaS tool that encourages communication and collaboration.
TOP THREE CUSTOMER SUCCESS TOOLS FOR FAST SCALING SAAS
A company’s relationship with its customers has come a very long way since just ‘making a sale’. The level of after sales service a company offers can make or break whether a customer wants to stay or look elsewhere.
Customer success is such an important piece of successfully scaling up a SaaS business because it boosts retention and increases conversions.
The scary counterpart of customer retention is churn. According to Accenture, the estimated cost of customer churn in the US is $1.6 TRILLION! Lets try not to increase this number any further, and instead we’ll take a look at the best tools on the market to boost customer success and reduce churn.
A large part of customer success is about proactively helping your customers. As such, of course customer service plays a vital role in this. Being able to help your customers at each stage of their journey is a big step to increasing retention. This is why HelpScout is such a vital piece of software. With live chat, in-app messaging and more, this tool’s standout feature is its knowledge base.
You can create a central hub with articles and answers to frequently asked questions. This all provides more clarity to customers and ensures they can find answers even when your support team is not working. It negates the need for customers to lose time and patience opening a support ticket and waiting for the answer, and it also saves time for your team who may receive fewer queries. According to HelpScout, with their software, support volume can be reduced by 20%. Not bad!
With a whole host of customer success features for SaaS companies, Gainsight helps you with task management, retention, and customer health. This customer experience tool provides your SaaS company with a centralized view of each customer, their journey and desired outcomes. An important feature of Gainsight is their capabilities of monitoring customer health. With accurate frameworks to measure the health of each customer, risks and opportunities alike can be identified sooner to reduce churn and drive retention.
Surveys and customer journey mapping, paired with impressive data science and analytics help your SaaS company to deliver the best experience to your customers. Uncover insights and trends from your customer data to get the most of this information at your fingertips and make data-driven decisions that will deliver the highest returns for your business.
As we’ve highlighted above, customer churn is a real problem area for all SaaS businesses when it comes to finances. Brightback is a SaaS tool which solely focuses on customers who are about to leave, and how you can retain them. The moment a customer hits the ‘cancel subscription’ button, this is when Brightback whirrs into action. Based on specified parameters by you, it will show the customer dynamic offers with the aim of retaining these customers.
This could be in the form of a discount popup or a request to chat from your customer success manager hoping to see if the issue can be resolved. If the customer still can’t be persuaded however, Brightback can even collect information on each customer’s reason for leaving. This data can then be utilized to reduce the chance of those same reasons occurring again and therefore reduce future churn.
CONCLUSION
Phew! I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath after ingesting a lot of information and learning about even more SaaS tools that will help you scale your business. This blog has hopefully given you some insight about SaaS tools, how they can be divided into different areas of the business, and how you can choose the best ones for you. It's now your turn to go out there and find your perfect SaaS ‘toolbox’ and witness first hand how these nifty applications will bring value to your business and help you scale.
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