Tools that you need as a B2B SaaS founder to boost up your buyers journey flow in 2023.
There are Thousands of Martech solutions in the market.
Whether you are growing or scaling your product, the marketing tech stack (Martech) will play a crucial role in streamlining your customer acquisition and retention efforts. However, considering that you want tools that will bring the highest ROI at an affordable price tag it’s definitely going to be a time-consuming task.
In this image, you can clearly see how many Martech solutions are out there in the market right now that you can choose from.
It’s just amazing how many tools are out there. But this comes at a cost it’s so freaking time-consuming to choose from all of these. And if you’re starting out, you won’t have the time to pick and choose. This ends up being a series of trial and error until you find the right tool that clicks with you.
Martech tools should help you save time & explore opportunities.
It’s only fair for us to assume that you’ll be paying a tool or a product a monthly subscription because you’re expecting value from it. And that’s what a tool that’s fit for you will bring to the table. With all of these tools in the Martech industry, there is a tool for each stage of the business. Your needs as a bootstrapped startup targeting a niche group are much different than a startup targeting a market with a larger pool of potential buyers.
Focusing on the tools that will help improve your buyers journey is all what you need.
In this article, we’ll focus on four main types of Martech tools that every B2B SaaS business needs, which are:
- A simple, scalable CMS that can manage multiple forms of content.
- A robust CRM that can help deliver a personalized experience.
- A smart analytics and data visualization tool that can help discover opportunities.
- And finally, an automation tool that can do the job for you 24/7 all year round.
We are not affiliated with any of these tools mentioned.
When the goal becomes improving a specific area, then choosing becomes easier.
Since we’re using the four types of tools to improve the buyer’s journey, we can break down the B2B buyer's journey and choose the fit stack with the four areas we've mentioned. So let us start by breaking down the journey.
A typical journey will consist of the following:
- Awareness: Driving/Attracting the audience to your website
- Interest: Make your website engaging for your audience to spend time on it.
- Acquire: They are now interested in your solution and willing to contact you.
- Activation: They have come back to your website a couple of times now, so they are about to make a decision.
- Revenue: They have now pulled their credit card and paid for your solution.
- Retention: Don’t forget about the churn rate. Retaining existing clients is much cheaper than acquiring new ones.
- Referral: Your clients love your solution, so they convince others to use it.
Now we broke down the journey. Let us start tackling it one by one and assign tools that can help you improve that area, saving you time and making you money.
1. Awareness: The starting point of your client acquisition.
You need to only achieve one thing with awareness “Get them to your website or landing page”. So only could be achieved if you make yourself known that you exist and are ready to provide them a solution that can help your market grow. And depending on how you’re going to do it, there is a set of tools that can help you out.
Cold outreach: Sales people dependent.
If you’re planning to sell your solution with the help of salespeople who will carry out the cold outreach for you, then you will need an automation solution, a CRM, and a database from that you can get the leads.
Here are our picks:
For lead scraping you can use:
For cold outreach automation you can use:
- Instantly (Cold email)
- Rafiki (Cold calling)
- Google workspace
For CRM and lead management, you can go as simple as
Or if you want a robust CRM, then you can use:
Organic search: Getting ranked and viral.
If you’re planning to be discovered organically, then content creation will be your best friend. Here are our picks
For AI generated content ideas:
- Writecream (Blogs & social media)
For keyword research
For analytics
- Google analytics
- Meta business suite
- Or you will be able to find analytics tools in the platform you’re using.
For automatic scheduling:
Paid ads: Appear in front of interested leads.
2. Interest: An engaging website means an interested visitor.
Since your website is your main point of contact with potential buyers, building an interactive website is advantageous but isn't simple. Unless you’re using the help of professionals who are always up to date with user experience and design trends, it’ll be time-consuming to do it yourself, if you don’t have the knowledge, without the help of proper tools. So these tools will help you collect the necessary data
So here are our picks:
To track what your visitors are interested in:
To communicate with your customers through your website:
To analyze traffic and ranking:
3. Activation: Interested visitors leads into interested prospects.
After you build enough interest, the visitor will be ready to act on the goal you’ve set for them. This could be booking a demo, a consultation, or a free trial. Signing up for any call to action you’ve set means that now you have their contact information and that you can start personalizing your targeting toward them by being more hands-on in the process.
Also, you now know that what you’re offering is interesting enough for them to spend additional time exploring it, and they paid for it using their information.
So here are our picks to improve this stage:
To manage your interested prospects’ data:
To keep marketing to the interested leads:
To answer questions and direct contact:
To set appointments and demos:
4. Revenue: The are now paying for your service!
After all of this, they see real value in your solution and are willing to pay you to use your software. This means that this is the second most crucial phase, the first is retention, and it should work flawlessly.
Here are the tools you might need:
For your payment solution:
To send contracts and manage them
5. Retention: Don’t forget about having a low churn rate.
It’s 10x cheaper to keep an existing client than to onboard a new one. That’s what professors taught me in business school in an intro to marketing class. So keeping your clients happy will ensure that your churn rate is low and that you are hitting your MRR every month without the need to increase your ad spend. It’s a win-win-win (You, your client, and your bottom line).
So here are the tools that can help you:
To maintain customer engagement and satisfaction:
To manage your churn rate and retain customers:
6. Referral: They love it so much that they want others to buy it.
Getting your clients to refer your products to their audience is the best way to know that you’ve nailed it and that you are on the right track. However, not everyone would want to do that even if they love your product.
So having a tool that can help you identify who will most likely act as your brand ambassador will save you tons of time and from putting yourself in awkward positions.
Here are some of our picks that can help you improve your referrals:
To get testimonials:
To identify who will most like be your brand ambassador:
Summary
As a SaaS founder, you’ll be using lots of other SaaS tools. And martech is just part of it. Thus, picking the right stack that will grow with you and not hinder it will be the best thing you could do. And this article helps you identify a little better what you might need to grow your business.
Just remember that all of these tools should work in harmony and can be easily integrated with each other. If they do not have direct integration with each other, you should check if Zapier can do it for you.
The tools we’ve mentioned in this article cover the following areas:
- Content management system
- Customer relationship management
- Marketing automation
- Analytics
These ares are meant to help you improve your buyer’s journey and this is a quick summary of all of them:
1. Awareness
To manage your interested customer data:
For cold outreach automation you can use:
- Instantly (Cold email)
- Rafiki (Cold calling)
- Google workspace
For CRM and lead management, you can go as simple as
Or if you want a robust CRM, then you can use:
2. Interest
To track what your visitors are interested in:
To communicate with your customers through your website
To analyze traffic and ranking
3. Activation
To manage your interested customer data:
To keep marketing to the interested leads:
To answer questions and direct contact
To set appointments and demos:
4. Revenue
For your payment solution:
To send contracts and manage them
5. Retention
To maintain customer engagement and satisfaction:
To manage your churn rate and retain customers:
6. Referral
To get testimonials:
To identify who will most like be your brand ambassador:
So hope this article helps you get a clear idea of the type of martech stack you might need to scale your SaaS business to the next level. And if you need help in optimizing your activation and interest steps through an improved UX/UI design, we would be happy to hop on a quick call with you and discuss it further.
