Lead Quality in SaaS

After spending hours, days, even months tinkering with your SaaS marketing strategy, are you seeing the results you want to see? Are your marketing efforts bringing in good leads at a high volume? Odds are, because you’re reading this article, it’s probably not working as well as you’d like. Don’t worry! We’ve got you covered. We’re going to go over some basics about leads, talk about how to measure lead quality, and give you tips on how to generate qualified leads for your B2B SaaS company. Let’s get started. 

What Is a Lead in SaaS?

As we all know, a lead is a person who expresses interest in your product or service and who may turn into a customer in the future. But who exactly is doing the buying? With B2B SaaS leads, understanding who your target leads are is an important part of your sales strategy. We’re firm believers in persona based targeting— mapping out your ideal leads’ demographics, geographies, intent, motivations, challenges, goals, and more! It’s not enough to simply have leads coming in, you need to understand who your leads are and what’s attracting them.

How Do You Generate Leads For B2B SaaS?

There are hundreds of lead generation ideas for SaaS companies, and many of them work well. Here’s the catch: BIGGER isn’t always better. We’ve seen it time and time again that B2B SaaS companies focus on the wrong goal for lead generation, going after quantity rather than quality. Bogging down your sales team with unqualified leads quickly becomes ineffective and inefficient. 

But wait! There’s another catch! The best scenario is bigger AND better, right? And that’s exactly what we go after (and achieve, to toot our own horn just a little bit).  Statwax has helped many B2B SaaS companies with their lead generation efforts using data to achieve results like three straight months of all-time highs in lead volume, SQL volume, and closed customers. That three months of all-time leads? Those weren’t just any leads. They were quality leads that had been brought in due to the closed-loop analytics system. We designed this process to show our client exactly where to invest their marketing dollars to maximize their results. 

What Does “Quality Lead” Mean?

A quality lead is someone who is more likely to convert into a paying customer. Lead quality in SaaS is vitally important for making sure that your team can allocate their time and budget to nurturing leads that will actually lead to revenue. As we talked about just above, wasting time on nurturing leads that won’t turn into paying customers is an exercise in futility. 

How Is Lead Quality Measured?

There are several approaches to lead quality analysis and a variety of lead quality metrics to be aware of. We’ll get to our recommended approach in a minute, but first let’s review two traditional approaches. 

A basic way to measure lead quality is using the BANT formula. This stands for: 

B – Budget. How big is their company and what is their spend?

A – Authority. Does the person you’re talking to have the authority to make a purchase?

N – Need. What problem are they trying to solve?

T – Timing. Where are they in the purchasing process? How urgent is their buy?

Going through these steps in this order, sales can come up with a crude determination of lead quality. A variation on this is the CHAMP formula. This stands for: 

CH – Challenges. What problems do they have and is your solution the right fit?

A – Authority. Is this someone who can pull the trigger on buying?

M – Money. Do they have the right budget for your solution?

P – Prioritization. Are they wanting to move quickly? 

Unlike the BANT formula (which looks at needs third), the CHAMP method puts the customer’s needs first. The thinking here is that the most qualified leads are the ones who genuinely need your solution. 

These approaches rely on sellers’ intuition and instincts about leads and are often more manual processes rather than automated ones. We take the guesswork out of lead quality with customer journey mapping and analysis and predictive modeling. You can have deeper insight into what leads you’re attracting, when they’re entering your sales funnel, and understand where they are in their purchasing process. Our data analytics and integration team use predictive modeling and customer data integration to show where and how to get more of the right leads. 

Common Lead Quality Metrics

Metrics that sellers use to determine lead quality range from basic website KPIs to examining historical data on wins. Commonly used metrics may include: 

• Website metrics like bounce rate, time on page, number of visitors, etc.
• Click through rates (CTR) that give information about who actually clicked on links in the lead generation channel you’re monitoring. 
• Historic metrics like which channels generated the most leads that ultimately closed deals. 
• Cost per lead to understand how much both qualified and unqualified leads are impacting your bottom line (and if the ROI is worth it). 

Whenever you’re doing a deep dive into metrics, it’s important to identify which metrics are worth paying attention to and to have the ability to interact with the data. We not only help you zero in on the metrics that are worth analyzing, we also provide data visualization and dashboarding to help you make the most of your internal (and external!) data. 

How to Identify Quality Leads

One approach to identifying quality leads is to use lead scoring. This is a technique where sellers assign a numerical value to each lead based on how well it meets your quality criteria. Some categories may be given more weight, depending on what you’ve identified as important for your sales process. If your historical data shows that leads with a certain budget have a higher percentage rate of closing, then you may give more weight to leads within that budget range.

Lead scoring examples may include categories that are similar to the BANT and CHAMP formulas. Budget, authority, need, timetable, challenges…even aspects like their physical location or behavioral indicators like clicking on marketing materials may boost the lead score.

We’re here to go beyond lead scoring and take your lead analysis to the next level. We pair an ABM-style digital approach with proprietary data models and lead scoring to help you recognize, attract, and retain the right leads.

How to Generate Quality Leads For B2B SaaS Companies

B2B SaaS lead generation doesn’t have to be a dreaded task anymore. We’ll help you generate the volume AND quality of lead that you’ve been searching for. Our results are pretty spectacular, if we do say so ourselves— 100% of our clients hit their acquisition goals in 2021 with an all time high of 90% being quality leads. But enough about us! Here’s a few general tips if you choose to go it alone: 

• You’ve got great instincts – don’t use them (at first!)

Marketers and sellers are great at what they do, especially when it comes to building relationships and connecting with their customers. However, you can’t necessarily rely on your gut to actually know who your customers are, what their journey is, or even where your leads are coming from. Bias and assumptions can easily creep in without you even noticing. 

• In data We trust

Have you ever played a shoot ‘em up type video game? There’s a tactic referred to as “spray and pray” where you just shoot blindly as fast as and as often as you can and hope that you get the bad guys. For some B2B marketers, this is their approach for campaigns—throw out as many as you can into all of your channels as often as you can and hope that it gets you the leads you want. There’s a better way! The foundation of your B2B SaaS lead generation strategy should be data. For example, instead of “spray and pray,” by looking at which marketing touchpoints garnered the best-quality leads and customers you can strategically plan your campaigns and allocate budgets to the appropriate channels to get the right returns.

• It’s a TRAP 

…the good kind, we promise. You can’t trust in data if you don’t have data, so you have to create a “trap” (i.e., a process that grabs all the data from marketing and sales and ties it all together). A fancier name for this trap is a closed loop analytic process (more on this in a moment). Creating this type of feedback loop gives you all the data that we’ve been harping on. 

What Is Closed Loop Analytics And How Does It Help With Lead Generation?

Essentially a closed loop analytics process gives you a clear picture of the entire customer journey. It “closes the loop” and fills in gaps in the data flow between marketing and sales. From digital channels to website analytics to your CRM to your BI tools, a closed loop system will help you answer questions like: 

• What types of leads are we bringing in?
• What efforts bring in specific lead types? 
• What is the lead-to-milestone conversion for each marketing channel? 
• Which touch points bring in the highest-quality leads?
• Which touch points bring in the worst-quality leads? 

We use digital channels, your website or lead capture activities, CRM, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager to create this system. With a process like this, you can learn what actually played a role in bringing in your quality leads, not just any lead. You can actually see the true ROI from each channel. You can learn your true all-up cost-per-milestone (and be able to find opportunities to improve it). And, most importantly, you can optimize your lead generation efforts to get the best leads, instead of only achieving lead volume.

Statwax: Delivering Closed Leads At Scale

Excited for bigger AND better without breaking the bank? Here at Statwax we can help you build out the systems you need to be able to evaluate what works, what doesn’t, and where you should invest your resources for the best ROI. The B2B SaaS sales cycle is multifaceted and complex, with many different considerations and factors. To successfully bring in quality leads, you need visibility on how your digital spend is working (or not working) to be able to replicate the right efforts. We’re here to help you do just that. Contact us today to start your journey to a better marketing partner.