Accomplishing sustainable growth for a SaaS company means consistently getting new customers and keeping them around for as long as possible. While this sounds so simple, finding new, better opportunities for growth and acquiring customers in the crowded SaaS industry can be greatly challenging.
While other businesses tend to focus on acquiring new customers through short-term marketing promotions, SaaS customer acquisition requires a more delicate approach. Convincing a prospect to sign up for the latest SaaS tool without preparing a great software demo presentation and building a relationship is the most inappropriate you can do. As a result, your chances are not too high, and you will look desperate.
Your prospects must know how your SaaS products will help them before signing up. So, demonstrating your product’s value can be a long process. Here in this blog, we present to you what customer acquisition means in SaaS and how you can best approach its four major stages.
What is Customer Acquisition in SaaS and Why It Is Difficult?
The process of generating new customers in the business is called customer acquisition, which is one aspect that drives revenue growth during the company’s early stage. In SaaS businesses, customer acquisition is the main goal across different market stages. If you manage a SaaS business, you will most likely agree that the more customers, the more revenue.
SaaS solutions usually have a fair sales cycle compared to other businesses. As a matter of fact, the average length of the sales cycle of SaaS companies is nearly three months, and that is such a long time to be chasing down a prospect and asking them to avail something from you.
Here are some factors that can lead to the extended buying process and the reasons why prospects took too long to decide:
- High cost: SaaS solutions are not that cheap. Even with lesser expensive tools, recurring charges can add up. This can be a factor that your prospects are considering too.
- Privacy concerns: SaaS solutions are based via the cloud. This is why prospects can sometimes be unsure about allowing an unknown software tool to process their customer’s data via external servers without learning more first.
- Too many options: The SaaS industry has already been established for many years. Expectedly, there are a ton of different options when choosing SaaS solutions, and this factor can be a barrier to customer acquisition.
- Complexities: Many SaaS tools are purposely designed with complicated use cases and deep sets of features to solve complex problems for which prospects might not even know the extent of their needs.
Depending on whichever stage your relationship you have with a prospect, you should make sure to use nurturing tactics, both internal and external messaging) to effectively communicate your value to them. That is why you have to reinforce your demo presentation to understand your prospect’s needs better and wants before they sign up for your SaaS solutions.
Deliver a compelling demo presentation with the best interactive demo software like Demostory.io. The impact of this amazing software is far beyond the demo itself. Not only can the software help you deliver an excellent demo, but it can also help you to optimize your overall sales and customer acquisition process.
Track Your Prospects through Different Stages of Customer Acquisition
There are currently four unique stages your prospects go through before deciding to purchase and becoming your SaaS customer.
1. Awareness
Awareness is precisely what it sounds like – prospects are becoming more aware of your brand. This means they found you through one of your blog posts, or you are mentioned on your media. Generating more prospects at this stage means increasing your overall brand awareness. Here are four main ways you can do this:
- Getting in front of your prospects
- Boosting organic traffic by improving your SEO tactics
- Promoting your SaaS products through paid ads
- Encourage current customers to invite others
The priority level for any tactics above might vary depending on your target audience. But it is best to implement them to a certain extent to reach the most targeted audience possible.
2. Engagement: Educate your prospects and be a resource
Now that you got the attention of your prospects, the next you do is to attract leads into your customer acquisition funnel. To execute this effectively, you need to get their contact details. Once you have their contact details, you can start the real lead nurturing process with more direct forms of communication.
3. Exploration: Convince prospects to convert
The final stage is exploration before leads may take the plunge and convert. During this point, they will move beyond just reading your blogs and content, and they will start giving a genuine interest in your SaaS product offering.
Nurturing the exploration stage is all about showcasing the many benefits of using your SaaS solutions and convincing prospects why they should be a paying customer. Only a great demo experience can make the convincing part easier. A web-based demonstration software can showcase the very best features of your SaaS solution, giving solid proof that your software does what you claim it can.
4. Conversion and Retention: Keep your prospects coming back for more
While the final stage is the “Conversion and Retention” phase, it is more about the latter. This is the same phase in which leads have already been converted into paying clients. The goal is to ensure your prospects will stick around and continue to be your paying customers.
There are many tactics you can use to enhance your customer retention. Further, many still revolve around the idea that happy and successful customers do not churn. We have already mentioned how crucial customer success for free trial users is to demo the true value of your SaaS solutions to convince them to sign up. A similar idea applies to the actual users too.
So, the more successful they have with your SaaS solutions, the more likely they will return.
Demostory.io – The Key to Successful SaaS Customer Acquisition
Tackling the SaaS customer Acquisition process is not for the faint-hearted. It requires a ton of work and, most essentially, a deeper understanding of your clients and their needs to create and deliver a smooth live product demo that works. The more you deliver your demo, the more likely your prospects will turn into paying customers. To be clear, the sales demo or product demo is the most critical piece in the customer acquisition process of your SaaS company. It is one unique opportunity to show off the value of your SaaS solutions to your prospective customers.
A new generation of virtual demo software is now rising, providing demo advantages over general tools. Demostory.io is the leading specialized browser for live demos that offer some pretty advanced features, allowing you to tell a story, engage with your prospects, and deliver a very impressive live product demo.
This amazing demo software tool can help craft a custom demo strategy to ensure your sales reps never miss a beat, pushing them to become top performers. The better the demos are executed, expect a boost to your SaaS customer acquisition.
To learn more about Demostory.io, get started with a demo for free.
