Growing SaaS MRR with Inbound Sales: 3 Examples

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies continue to disrupt different dimensions of the global economy that has seen a shift from the use of hardware to software. The change has been fuelled by the advancement in technologies that have created a vast customer base for SaaS companies.

Having access to invaluable performance metrics significantly affects the decisions that SaaS businesses are able to make. While some have experienced skyrocketing success, others aren't automatically guaranteed the same results.

Your company needs to have a marketing strategy for growing customers whilst improving the monthly recurring revenue. Inbound sales methodology is a key strategy that has been adopted by SaaS companies that have reported an increase in leads moving through the sales process.

Below are three real-life examples that have reported positive outcomes with inbound sales.

Leveraging inbound sales when the customer is king

At its inception, Effectly aimed at helping its clients become customer-centric. In the first three years, the company concentrated on its three major clients before embarking on an expansion strategy. The goal was to attract more visitors to its website, nurture them into leads and convert them to customers through inbound sales.

One of the strategies that Effectly identified as crucial for inbound marketing was building blog posts, webinars and eBooks. After leveraging HubSpot, Effectly reported an increase in web traffic by 10X, from 200 visitors a month to 2,000, with leads increasing by 20X.

Furthermore, Effectly has managed to organise seminars and workshops where they have reported closing of up to $100,000 contracts at these events.

In the future, the company hopes to increase web traffic to 5,000 visits per month. The impact of adopting inbound sales is a driving force behind the growth of Effectly's monthly retained revenues.

Improving sales efficiency

EZ Texting is a voice and texting solution catering to businesses across various industries by helping them with promotions, communications, and alerts to customers. The company was overwhelmed by adopting a prioritisation strategy from the high volume of signups and activities from its customers, thus requiring a CRM strategy that was efficient, easy to scale, and fast to implement.

By leveraging HubSpot to optimise and customise on its system to create important data access points, EZ Texting reported increased engagement with their contacts while increasing its headcount to deal with the overwhelming demands.

This increased engagement allowed for the sales team to utilise inbound sales tactics to further grow their sales pipelines spurring on the company’s growth.

Unifying marketing and sales teams

PayTrail, a Finish payment SaaS provider allows ecommerce stores to provide customers with a wide range of preferred payment options, including payments to Finish banks. Over €6 billion worth of transactions have passed through PayTrail's,systems from its 10,000 customers.

By 2013, PayTrail struggled with heavy collection point solutions, including Formstack for forms, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck for social media, Pipedrive for its CRM, WordPress for its blog, APSIS for sending emails, and Drupal for its CMS. Since the tools did not integrate efficiently, it became increasingly difficult for the Paytrail team to create cohesive campaigns.

PayTrail needed a solution to track leads and see their ability to convert leads to customers. HubSpot's platform offered the solution through its marketing methodology that enabled the company to harmonise the inbound sales and marketing teams to work in unison. Through HubSpot, PayTrail identified the difference between inbound and outbound marketing strategies that allowed their customers now enjoy a frictionless experience.

The bottom line

For many SaaS companies, increasing inbound leads is the first step towards success with inbound sales. A well-laid marketing strategy helps in improving your website traffic, which is a key metric for evaluating how your company is performing.

To increase the inbound leads, you can establish an online presence on search engines using blogs, social media, and website architecture. Off-site strategies where you identify potential leads and provide them with educational information that will divert their attention to your landing pages and CTAs will go in line with your on-site strategy.

These activities produce a wealth of content and insight into buyers’ behaviour and responsiveness to your content, allowing sales reps to work on their inbound sales approach. 

For many outbound sales teams, this change is a welcome adaptation to the sales process, empowering them with a better understanding of a prospect’s pain points and plenty of content proven to advance clients from a lead through to a sale. By making their sales, inbound sales reps can reduce the number of cold calls they are making and instead work within a sales strategy that uses lead scoring to highlight the leads that need their attention and when. 

After successfully adopting inbound marketing to generate and convert leads, the final stage involves changing leads to customers. At this stage, you will be finding out who among your leads is ready for the final proposal, make negotiations, and officiate a sale. Inevitably, only a fraction of your inbound leads will convert to customers, making it essential for you to leverage your inbound marketing toolkit to ensure you are tracking your information and closing each sales opportunity.

Keep up with the marketing trends

Inbound marketing methodology for SaaS companies aids in the organic lead generation, in turn, improving your Arr and MRR.  If you are looking to change your marketing strategy, working with an agency like SpotDev makes it easier to realise the results including increasing the number and quality of leads that you have been struggling to achieve on your own.

We are platinum HubSpot experts and SaaS industry specialists. To this end, we provide a free guided demo of HubSpot Sales Pro for those not on HubSpot. For existing users, we provide an Inbound Expert Sales Programme, which includes onboarding to pro, training, and support for setting up and getting started.

Further Reading

4 Highly effective SaaS marketing strategies