5 Unlikely Obstacles Hindering SaaS Conversions

Want more conversions?

Well, it's possible.

However, the first step is realizing that conversions are people. And those individuals desire a remarkable customer experience.

The key is to remove barriers in the sales cycle. This includes cumbersome checkout processes and poor follow-up sales procedures.

Your SaaS team must perform better. It's one of the best ways to crush the competition.

“Successful sales people, and successful sales teams, exhibit a superior ability to eliminate the common barriers that would otherwise prevent their prospects from making buying decisions,” writes Bob Apollo, managing partner at Inflexion-Point Strategy Partner.

“They take pains to identify how and why their prospects choose to buy, and what they need to do to straighten the path and remove the obstacles that might stand in their way.”

Earn more sales. Solve these five obstacles blocking your SaaS conversions:

1. Too Many Steps to Sign Up

Do you remember that classic Tootsie Roll commercial? The one that challenged kids to answer the question: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

Kids would literally waste an entire afternoon counting their licks.

Your SaaS team should ask a similar question. How many clicks does it take for a customer to convert?

People don't enjoy time-consuming tasks. And if they're ready to buy, prospects don't want to spend the next 15 minutes clicking through all your useless sales steps.

“Asking your users for a lot of information even before they've seen your app could backfire.

Marketers tend to get greedy with information, but the more info you require, the more friction you introduce. If you're asking for more information up front, make sure to justify each action to eliminate friction,” states Sadhana Balaji, a product marketer at Chargebee.

So, limit the number of steps it takes for a prospect or free trial user to sign up for your service.

According to MarketingSherpa, “by optimizing step one of its sign-up funnel, 1-800-DENTIST lifted conversions by 23% in less than a week.”

Moreover, as you decrease the steps in the process, consider eliminating the multiple add-on features during initial setup.

Studies show that “contrary to economic belief that more choice is better, confronted with too much complexity, we make bad decisions, or stick with what we have already got.”

Thus, overwhelmed prospects may just abandon their sale completely.

Save the customer time and boost your revenue. Remove the 12-step signup process.

2. Treating Every Prospect the Same

People are different. We don't think the same. We don't eat the same foods. And the needs of a 20-year-old woman are different from an 80-year-old man.

This concept holds true within your target audience. Prospects are buying your products for different reasons. Some may desire the all-in-one platform, while others love the 24/7 email support.

Use your customers' differences to your advantage. Start segmenting.

Segmentation helps your team sell specific product benefits to different users.

“If you are looking for segmentation ideas, a great place to start is by asking the sales team about the various roles and buyers they speak to on a regular basis…Use the information you gather from sales to create segmentation strategies that will resonate with your audience,” states Anna Talerico, executive vice president of ion interactive.

The goal of segmentation is to customize the shopping experience. You want prospects to feel like you're talking directly to them.

Graphic design tool Snappa sends targeted emails to their subscribers based on their position in the sales funnel. Here's an example of their process flow diagram:

“Marketing leaders must have a single view of the customer that allows them to engage in two-way, personalized conversations across technologies, locations, and physical objects at mass scale,” says Joydeep Bhattacharya, author of Seo Sandwitch Blog.

Don't get stuck selling everything to everybody. Differentiate your message.

3. Nurturing Like A Used Car Salesman

Research reveals that “65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing campaigns.” Without a clear path, your SaaS team may be causing more harm than good.

Poor lead nurturing results in unethical sales practices, missed deals, and negative brand image. No one wants 10 voicemails in a day from a salesperson.

Rather, strive to educate and build a relationship with your prospective user. That means informing them about your product, not selling.

“It's about giving the right content to the prospect at the right time, and you can only do this by watching for signs that they're progressing through the buying cycle. This is done through lead scoring…,” says Sarah Burke, content writer and marketer at Spokal.

Learn where the buyer fits into the sales process. Then, adjust your lead nurturing efforts accordingly.

The image below details the types of content that fit the buying cycle. Top of the funnel prospects may desire video, while the bottom of the funnel consumers may need quotes.

Image Source

Moreover, lead nurturing is built on trust. If buyers don't trust your brand, it's time to add some social proof to your sales message.

“Trust badges are also known to increase conversions. Getting a BBB seal can put people at ease knowing that you've been vetted by one of these organizations. You'll also want an SSL certificate to show that your payment gateway is secure and trustworthy,” writes Sid Bharath, an entrepreneur and growth hacker.

Sell with the intention to build relationships.

4. Value is Unclear

Studies indicate that “91% of organizations said they aspire to be among the customer experience leaders in their industry, yet only 37% had started a formal CXM (customer experience management) initiative.”

To jumpstart your CXM program, figure out what value you offer your users. It should be clear and concise.

Aim to make an emotional connection between your product and the consumer's needs.

Invision's value proposition is simple. The SaaS offers people the opportunity to design and collaborate efficiently. They want their customers to design with confidence.

Kevin Dewalt, a startup founder, investor, and advisor, suggests offering incentives to portray value. He states:

“Offer additional purchasing incentives to customers who complete Acceleration events to get them to convert early. Examples of purchasing incentives are coupons, annual contracts, or special offers. Or simply tell them to enter a credit card now so they don't lose service.”

Take control the customer experience. Show the value of your service.

5. Redesign Your Sales Page

Adobe reports that “38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content/layout is unattractive.”

Customers want eye-catching websites. Your design must grab and hold their attention.

In addition, with loads of information at buyers' fingertips, it is rare for someone to call a sales department.

So, if customers don't like what they see, they may just leave. That's why your sales page must explain your product and address your consumer's concerns.

“As buyers spend more of their time self-educating before contacting sales…the pricing page of SaaS websites has reached critical importance in the buyers' journey for enterprise SaaS sales..,” writes Brian Devaney, inbound marketing strategist at New Breed Marketing.

Unbounce's sales page is an exemplary example. It tells prospects what they will receive and the prices. And the layout is clean with ample white space.

Evaluate your sales page. Is it time to change the copy or the layout?

No More Barriers

Eliminate the roadblocks in your sales cycle. Gain more users by improving the overall experience.

Ditch the multiple steps to sign up. Stop mass selling with one message. And revamp your sales page from the customer's perspective.

Get rid of the obstacles. Start converting.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

Un-Acquire – The Counter-Intuitive Way to Build an Early Customer Base

Churn. Lost deals.

Those are dreaded words at any stage of the company. For a very early stage company, these events are even more impactful. Behavioral economics tells us about 'loss aversion' mindset. As founders, we hate to lose deals. We hate to turn down customers. It's classic 'loss aversion' at play. But, just as you launch your product into the market, you need to be cognizant of such biases and be courageous enough to say 'No' to certain kinds of customers.

By doing so, you'll not slow down. Instead, you'll avoid churn and bring the right customers into your customer development journey.

In your early stage, your customers have a profound impact on the trajectory of your product & your company, because:

• They can impact what gets built


• They have a direct impact on your acquisition channels, the cost of acquisition and hence your precious little runway.


• This one's more important – Each customer is representation of a potential market segment or a niche.


• If you choose to say 'No!', it brings focus. You'll spend time, money and your product bandwidth to keep the 'Yes' customers happy. You'll avoid 'spray and pray'.

Now that we've established that deliberately flushing out prospects from your funnel is good & even important, let's see some of the criteria we've used for our own company, when picking our first 50 customers.

Your product's performance should not be affected by factors that aren't under your control

Let's say you are building a lead-generation software for tech sales reps. A staffing firm company may be a bad first customer because it's a business with very little differentiation and would not excite a prospect that much. However well your lead-gen product discovers new prospect opportunities, being an undifferentiated offering, response rates are going to be poor.

You need to have an idea of the kind of customers to whom your product in its “as-is” state is going to give superior results. Only then are they going to engage deeply with your product (which is essential for you to derive insights for your product roadmap) and hopefully become your source of 'word of mouth' appreciation.

You should be very familiar with the industry dynamics of your first few customers

Not all prospects are articulate and vocal about their wants and needs. As a product owner, we need to fill in the gaps, instigate with the right questions and deduce insights. All this is possible only if we relate with the problem space or the industry of the prospect.

If you do onboard customers without fully understanding their motivations to use the product, you won't know why they churned either (or at least you'd incur significant follow-up cost to just find why they churned).

No customer pilot should demand unreasonable amount of your or your team's time

I will again take an example to drive this point. Let's say you are building a mobile chat tool that can be integrated into any app for the app owners to provide chat-based support. There will always be a prospect that'd say that they need a web interface as well. Now, don't rush to launch a web-client just to sign up that customer.

Why? Because you decided to launch it on mobile for a reason. You have a market hypothesis that you are trying to prove. Don't get distracted and pick another hypothesis until your current hypothesis has proven there is not a market for it.

But then you might ask why turn down a customer if it's just a bit of additional work. Well, in the early stages of our companies we are severely short of time, money and other resources. If one customer draws up significant amounts of your engineering, product management and quality assurance time, something else gives. Most often, it affects your original customer development journey.

Alignment beyond the current product version

Early stage customer acquisition costs are high, because the founders are involved and it's often one-to-one selling. So it's important that such customers don't just hire your product today but also for several quarters to come. Your product roadmap and their expectations have to be in sync for a long time. One way you could be sure of this is by doing a customer interview to understand the reasons they'd buy your product. If your current product is a subset of the needs of your customer, you're in the right direction. One framework we've used to do the customer interview is the 'Jobs to be done' framework. It takes another blog post to write about it. So I'd leave it to you to read up on JTBD.

If your product is a quick fix to a bigger problem for which they need more sophisticated solutions that you don't intend to offer, your customer is going to churn out. You are better off not selling to them in the first place.

No 'Pay It Forward' customers. Only honest & real customers

We all have friends who can write checks just to see us succeed. Take their money but don't make them your customers. They never had the need for your product. They aren't going to give you insights. They are going to churn at some point. It's better to avoid 'nice' prospects that are just 'paying it forward' or 'returning you a favor'. If you don't, you'd end up being that blind man whom was led by another blind man.

At the early stage you need customers that give feedback. I can't stress the importance of getting your product hooked up with a good analytics suite from day one – start with Google Tag Manager or Kissmetrics or one such tool. But don't postpone. Observe which customers complete what actions. Bucket the core actions of your product and find out what percentage of customers complete it. Later on you may expand such analysis to cohorts.

Before you reason out a pattern, pick up the phone and talk to customers. It doesn't need to be a structured interview but one that will give you a good grasp of why users do what they do. Here's a good list of customer development resources. And before picking up the phone be sure to first read this post from Chuck Liu which covers which questions to ask in customer interviews.

Remember that just adding users isn't your goal in the early stage – The goal is to add the right kind of customers that complete core actions of your product (for them to stick around for long), give earnest feedback and are representative of a large segment.

Templates for a future customer base

You are not acquiring your first few customers to become profitable. You are acquiring them to demonstrate or experiment with 'Product-Market Fit'. So each prospect that you convert should be buying and using your product for reasons that are common to the next cohort of customers as well. Your first few customers, as a cohort, should collectively represent your market.

Please note that I use the word 'buying' as some investment that's non-trivial that shows serious intent. It could be giving their credit card information or email or even buying a few credits – whatever that fits your business. The goal isn't revenue or price discovery – so for the early customers, move them to the path of using the product as soon as possible, even if it means removing all but bare minimum friction that validates seriousness.

It's hard to predict this, but let me give an example. If you building a mobile video startup that's like Periscope and users have to upload short videos and put up on Twitter (core actions), your good first users are the ones that have a lot of highly engaged followers on Twitter. The bad users are ones that just have passive followers or no followers on Twitter.

If you know that the customer is not a representative sample of a large monetizable (or servable) market, you would be wise to avoid them.

Conclusion

In summary, be very judicious about picking your first few customers.

• Take your product to those customers that have a very high chance of success when they use your product.


• Choose those customers whose industries or problem spaces you know very well.


• Avoid customers for whom you've to put a lot of additional resources to make the pilot work.


• Pick customers who'd have a need for your future product, not just the current version.


• Choose those customers who are representatives of large enough segments that you can go after.


• And finally, don't do your first few deals with friends who are doing it just to make you happy.

If you follow these principles, your customer base would be completing the core actions in your product at a rate that's healthy. You'd have better insights and better demonstration of stickiness with your early stage investors and you'd have set the right base for acquiring new customers. The return on your learning will be high.

About the Author: Ashwin Ramasamy is the founder of PipeCandy – an intelligent prospecting tool auto-discovers new prospects & helps you reach out to them with the right message at the right time. PipeCandy is currently in private beta & the essay above is based on our experience with onboarding customers.

How B2B Marketers Can Get Better Targeting and Deeper Insights

Knowledge about your customers' preferences at specific moments is critical to unlock the marketing potential of contextual intelligence today's digital marketplace provides. By studying and applying buyer personas and qualification to marketing processes marketers can learn more about customers' preferences. Personas can be leveraged across several departments such as sales, marketing, advertising, and customer service. But the task of actually creating the ideal buyer personas for your business can be a daunting one.

However, B2B marketers are faced with the uphill task of making sense out of data from several systems, both online and offline, internal and external. They are grappling with the fact that the always-connected buyer's behavior and preferences are constantly evolving, and marketers need to maximize the value of customer data in near-real time for better targeting and personalization, as well as to build lifetime value.

Identifying the right buyer persona requires the consideration of several attributes (demographic, psychographic, etc.) in order to make conversations relevant. Just like in the B2C environment where customer expectations of personalization and targeted content most relevant to them are now critical factors in accelerating their decision making, similarly B2B buyers also expect the companies or brands they interact with to know them well and identify their needs and goals. 

Technology to the Rescue AKA a Data Management Platform (DMP)

A data management platform (DMP) combines online and offline data from first-party proprietary systems, and second-party and third-party audiences to provide marketers with a central platform that stores and helps provide insight regarding audience and campaign data that is used for optimizing campaigns and media spend across channels. 

It is also deployed against cross-channel campaigns to better inform, for example, nurture programs within an organization.

With the help of a DMP, a marketer can manage and analyze audience profile data to better inform ad targeting through modeling, implement retargeting campaigns for better direct response, and optimize site performance using customer behavior data. It also enables marketers to add analyzed audience data into marketing automation systems, for example, to help B2B marketers receive a more informed view of their customers. 

Download Audience Data Management: Driving Top-of-Funnel B2B Prospects Through Digital Advertising and learn more about how B2B marketers can get better targeting and deeper insights by utilizing a DMP.

Relationship Building : How to Expand Business Network

Relationship Building : How to Expand Business Network written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit: Pixabay

A relationship building activity in business is a far cry from building personal relationships. Yet, business relationships do have some similarities that clearly require good interpersonal skills and communication. When it is time to expand a business network, it takes a bit of planning and design to affect seamless relationship building activities. To learn how to build a relationship of this nature, there are several precursors to define. These include:

• Existing business visibility


• Business reputation and branding


• Type of target market


• Significance of the business as part of a community online and off

How to Build a Business Relationship

Networking is defined by a host of inclusives. These can be business and industry associates, a loyal clientele, links to community organizations and a well-structured plan of public relations. To learn how to build a relationship, a business must first study the “reflection in the mirror” of the business image. What does that reflection say about the business? Is it customer friendly or somewhat detached and indifferent? The importance of the steps to learn how to build a business relationship can be a catalyst to greater expansion of the business network. For example, the first step to build business relationships is “outreach.” This simply implies the method by which the business intends to draw together a close relationship with clients. Other steps of outreach to clients can include hosting onsite programs or online programs. It can also include special events.

The most important feature of outreach is “familiarity” with each client on an individual basis to learn their needs and their buying impulses. When the business is familiar with its clients, this is a free exchange in which clients also become familiar with the business. This leads to a reliable clientele of buyers.

Business Network Expansion Ideas

It may seem ironic that a business must rely equally on local as well as online communities to expand the business network. Putting a face to the business name is crucial to increase business reputation.

Consider the benefits of a networking event. In many industries, a networking event ensures greater real-time visibility than might be afforded through online contact alone. For example, ANTEC is a networking event attended by plastics engineers for over 70 years. It is attended by thousands of technicians, R&D scientists, professors and students and engineers, as well as tech support, sales, and marketing specialists, manufacturing managers and supervisors. This event provides exhibits, presentation of technical white papers and a host of program presenters linked to the plastics industry. Attending this international event expands the business network through exchanges of ideas and information between industry business leaders and other interested individuals. It takes nearly one year of planning that begins with publicity and registration at local levels of business. This shows the local business community the extension of each related business to the wider range of business potential.

How Corporate Responsibility is Related to the Community

Corporations have long been involved in external events and activities that show a deep sense of corporate social responsibility to the community. Many organizations are recipients of the benefits of corporate social responsibility to the community. For example, the Dow Jones facility located in South Brunswick, NJ shows its corporate responsibility to the community through its Family Center in Monmouth Junction, NJ. Another example is the corporate healthcare giant, Johnson & Johnson, each year this corporation sponsors an “Energy Coloring Contest” for children. However, Johnson & Johnson annual provides charitable donations worldwide to communities to promote women's and children's health with programs such as “Mom and Baby”, “TB Free World”, and “AIDS-Free Future.” This shows how deeply ingrained corporate social responsibility to the community has become.

On a more local level, small businesses regularly connect their businesses to networked associations like Chambers of Commerce where events like “Aligning Business Goals with a Healthy Workforce” and the “Invest in America Summit” held in Washington DC bring together leaders in businesses from local chamber members. The importance of local fundraising events by charities like Catholic Charities, Aleph Institute and Salvation Army and civic groups such as the International Lion's Club, Rotary and Elks, all provide community outreach sponsored by local businesses and corporations.

Some Relationship Building Activities Businesses

There are seven relationship building activities businesses can do to build relationships and get involved with the community. These include:

1. Inviting community leaders from the government and educational sectors to work together to identify goals and values that link businesses with the community more closely. For example, the business and community leaders might plan an annual Founders Day festival sponsored by businesses and put your local movements on social media. The community leaders could provide historical exhibits and enactments for children and adults.

2. Business could also take part in goal planning for the environment within the community. This could include restoration of areas with soil erosion or deteriorating municipal structures.

3. Businesses should maintain awareness of upcoming plans for community events like recycling programs and be willing to assist with providing speakers and programs.

4. Businesses can increase their social responsibility to the community by encouraging “Open House” events that provide all business the opportunity to welcome the public.


5. It is also important to make connections for people to network with each other. For example, self-help programs, photography clubs, book clubs and even ballroom dance clubs are a great way for people to network socially.

6. Another activity that helps expand the business network is to sponsor local athletic teams for softball, soccer, basketball or football for adults and children. Many businesses also sponsor bowling leagues and providing team uniforms for their athletic teams. Sponsorship is always a way to increase publicity and public awareness of each business.

Study the tips on building relationships and the activities that promote better business relationships between clients, vendors and business networks. With a little effort, expenditure of time and dedicated funding, businesses find they enjoy a greatly expanded business network for the long-term.

Sally Smith is a marketing manager with years of experience in marketing communication and strategic planning. The rise of the age of social media led her interest to center around digital marketing. At the present, she works for Real Estate Academy Australia, a company which offers real estate training courses in Queensland.

IBM announces Watson-powered ads that think

The new “cognitive ads,” launching this fall initially through IBM's The Weather Company, enable consumers to conduct brand-related conversations with the Jeopardy winner.



Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Influencer Marketing Is (not) Dead: How to Breathe New Life into Your Program

What's a marketer to do? We heard that influencer marketing was the next big thing. We heard about companies getting amazing results with it. But it seems you can't go anywhere online recently without seeing headlines like this:

And this:

Note the social shares on those two articles: 242,000 for the first one and nearly 50,000 for the second one. If influencer marketing is burning down, that's a lot of people standing by with marshmallows to roast.

But don't panic. These two articles, and many more like them, refer to a specific kind of influencer marketing. Generally speaking: the bad kind. Specifically, the practice of writing massive checks to teenagers with a lot of followers on Instagram or Vine in exchange for product promotion. That particular economy, which converted cash to “influence” or “awareness,” was pretty much doomed from the start. You're in trouble any time you convert real money to something fundamentally unmeasurable.

But it's not fair to say that influencer marketing is dead, or in trouble, or collapsing because bad influencer marketing isn't working out. That's like declaring “Movies are dead!” because Gods of Egypt flopped at the box office. Influencer marketing works when it's done well. At TopRank Marketing, we have achieved amazing results for our clients with the practice.

The only thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from other people's mistakes. So let's take a moment to mourn the passing of bad influencer marketing-and then let's perform an autopsy to see how we can avoid their fate. Here are four ways to make sure your influencer marketing stays alive and well:

#1 – Build Relationships

In a way, the Instagram and Snapchat “influencers” are just billboards. You stand here and hold this beverage/face wash/protein powder, we give you $500. You deliver the commodity of X number of eyeballs for the money. If a rival beverage/face wash/protein powder company comes along and offers you $550, you move on.

Good influencer marketing is more than advertising using someone's social media presence as the billboard. It's about cultivating an ongoing relationship that continually generates value for everyone involved. Influencer relationships should be built with care, personal attention, and respect. Yes, sometimes you may pay an influencer for their involvement, but that transaction takes place in the larger context of the relationship.

#2 – Produce Something of Value

Bad influencer marketing can be, at its worst, just a celebrity endorsement with a different kind of celebrity. The celebrity gets paid, and the audience gets… what? The vicarious thrill of seeing that they drink the same brand of face wash as that guy on Vine?

Good influencer marketing goes beyond endorsement to create something of value for the audience as well as the influencer and the brand. That's why it works. For example, our Content Marketing World eBook series from last year rounded up advice from dozens of highly-skilled marketers. The eBooks promoted the event, and they highlighted our influencers, but they were also useful and entertaining for the audience. It's an unbeatable combination.

#3 – Recruit More than Brandividuals

One big problem with bad influencer marketing is it focuses entirely on “brandividuals.” According to our CEO Lee Odden, a brandividual is someone who is in the business of being popular. They have a huge social media presence, sure. But they may not be able to call that audience to action. A true influencer, by contrast, may be less popular by the numbers, but is credible, authoritative, and able to affect change.

You definitely can use brandividuals to help attract a crowd, and to lure in the true influencers-but a campaign that's all brandividuals may generate more buzz than results.

#4 – Make It Measurable

Step 1: Have influencer post about our combination face wash/protein powder on Snapchat. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit. It's not the most sustainable business model, right? But for a lot of bad influencer marketing, that's a pretty accurate assessment. These campaigns trade entirely on “awareness” or, god forbid, “brand lift.” Without any way to track ROI from the influencer activity, it was only a matter of time before the C-suite decided to spend their budget elsewhere.

Don't let anyone tell you that you can't measure the ROI of influencer marketing. It's not only possible; it's crucial. Start by having a specific goal for your campaign-an action that you want your audience to take as a direct result of experiencing the content. Then make sure you can track that action and attribute it to the influencer. Give them trackable URLs to share. Give them their own landing page to send traffic to. Either way you go about it, you should be able to demonstrate exactly what your influencer brought to the campaign.

If you're a teenager with a huge Snapchat following, the death of bad influencer marketing is bad news. If you're a marketer looking to partner with influencers to create cool stuff and expand your reach, there's no need to mourn. Take these four lessons to heart, go forth, and be awesome.

Need help with your influencer marketing, we can help!

 

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Localytics pushes Places notifications as key to personalization, mobile engagement

The range of use cases for location is much broader than most mobile marketers recognize.



Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.