The goal of this presentation is to present a set of tools that startups can use in order to implement their marketing & sales processes, from initial contact with a prospect all the way to customer service. For each step of the marketing & sales process, a subset of existing solutions is presented, with a short overview of its features and use cases. If you're looking to build the marketing & sales machine at your company, this presentation is a good place to start!

1. Sales & Marketing Tools
for B2B SaaS companies
September 2015

2. B2B SaaS companies are faced with a myriad of choices when it comes to the
tools and solutions to implement as part of their marketing & sales processes.
This presentation presents a selection of the leading tools on the market to
address each step of the marketing and sales cycle.
Although geared towards B2B SaaS companies, many of the tools presented
here will also work for traditional software/service companies.
Note that each of the solutions presented here is useful on its own, but the
combination of several tools in the right sequence is where the real magic
comes from.
Introduction
Interested in a free 30-minutes review of existing tools & solutions?
Get in touch: consulting@guillaumelerouge.com

3. Overview
Content
Mktg
Lead
Gen
Sales
Dev
Lead
Nurturing
CRM Analysis
Customer
Service
The sales & marketing process at a modern B2B SaaS company usually
comprises some or all of the following steps:
For each step, several solutions exists in order to make your life easier.
The goal of this presentation is to review existing tools and how they can be
used in combination in order to make sure your company has an effective
sales & marketing process in place. Whether you already have a well-defined
process or you’re starting from scratch, I hope you’ll discover interesting tools!

4. Content marketing

5. Content marketing
The goal of content marketing is to make sure that people who are
experiencing a problem that your product solves find out about you.
Let’s say you’re the worldwide specialist in a very specific area. How do you
make sure that anyone who needs help with it knows about you? That’s
where content marketing comes in.
Content marketing is about creating and delivering the right pieces of
information, to the right audience, at the right time, using the right
combination of channels in order to maximize effectiveness and reach at the
lowest possible cost.
This section looks at a small subset of tools and services that will help you
create and deliver your content.

6. Mark Suster:
PR is an insanely valuable activity in early-stage companies. Very few investors
understand this and even fewer startups. When you’re an early-stage business
every dollar matters and because many startup teams these days are very
product & technology centric they often miscalculate the importance of PR.
I believe PR is often not tangibly measurable and for quant-oriented people this
is hard to accept.
The benefits of PR are exactly that: immeasurable. They are silent. They don’t
show up in a calculation that says I spent $7,000 and I got X-thousands inches of
press. It doesn’t work that way. [...] In the write up of our success I was quoted
as saying, “If I had $1 dollar left to spend on marketing I would put it to PR.”
Press Relations (PR)

7. A content management system (CMS) is the solution you’re going to use in
order to manage your website and/or your blog. Using a CMS is strongly
recommended in order to make it easy for you to publish content online.
Recommended solutions include:
● Wordpress: after starting its life as blogging software, Wordpress quickly
evolved to become a versatile content management solution.
● Drupal: a powerful content management platform, Drupal is the go-to
solution for heavy duty sites. The White House’s website runs on Drupal.
● Squarespace: the goal of Squarespace is to offer a simple and easy-to-
use online publishing platform for companies of all sizes
Content Management System (CMS)

8. Scripted:
A white paper is a factual, informational analysis that uses data and research to
convey the benefits of a product, strategy, or service. White papers provide
credible answers and solutions, in addition to showing factual information.
White papers are usually downloadable pieces of content that live on a
company’s resources section. [...]
White papers are unique because they one of the largest drivers of generating
leads for B2B companies due to the fact that most white papers are gated
content. White papers also generate newsletter and email signups and can be
syndicated for publication in multiple platforms. [...] White paper downloads are
most commonly tracked by marketing automation software.
White papers

9. Social networks

10. Social networks
Although technically a subset of content marketing, communication through
social networks has become so important that it deserves a section of its
own. You should look at social services both as a distribution channel
for your content and a tool for SEO.
Until recently, managing your online presence across many services could
prove very time consuming. Happily enough, a new generation of applications
recently emerged that makes it downright easy to post articles on several
networks and manage communication with your users.

11. Buffer allows you to post to multiple social networks at
once and to manage your post schedule.
It makes it easy for your company to maintain a vibrant
online presence across a broad range of services.
Buffer

12. Agorapulse lets you easily manage your online presence on the main social
networks. You can schedule posts, run contests and reply to messages from an
unified inbox that groups all the messages directed to you across your accounts.
Powerful analytics tools lets you assess your progress and you can even
benchmark your competition right from the app!
AgoraPulse

13. Lead generation

14. Lead generation
As its name indicates, the goal of lead generation is to identify leads for
the sales organization to go after. Lead generation can be accomplished
through 2 categories of techniques : inbound and outbound. Inbound
techniques are closely related to content marketing, which was covered above.
Outbound techniques focus on identifying potential leads through a variety of
means and getting in touch with them. If you’re interested in finding out more
about this topic, Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross is the reference book on
the subject.
This section will focus on a couple tools that can be used in order to identify
and contact the right prospects for your product/service. They assume you
already have an idea of what your ideal customer profile looks like.

15. Slideshare is an online platform
you can use to publish slides
(actually, it’s the very platform
that is hosting this presentation).
On top of great SEO, Slideshare
offers a built-in tool to collect
leads. Upon downloading your
presentations, users get
presented with a lead capture
form that they need to fill in order
to access your content.
Slideshare

16. LinkedIn offers
powerful search tools
in order to identify
potential clients.
Using LinkedIn Sales
Navigator, you get
access to a powerful
search engine and
direct messaging tools
in order to identify and
engage prospects.
LinkedIn

17. Salesloft Prospector is a great tool in order to create lists of potential
prospects. It lets you collect leads from any web page and takes a stab at
guessing their likely email address and phone number on your behalf!
Salesloft Prospector

18. Rapportive is a nifty Gmail plugin that
allows you to see information about your
contacts right inside of your mailbox.
What’s a little less known is that you can
use it in combination with email format
generators in order to identify the email
address of a specific prospect you’re
targetting.
Once you’ve found the right combination,
their LinkedIn profile will magically show
up on the right! Pretty handy.
Rapportive

19. Sales development

20. Sales development
Topo:
Sales development is one of the most important processes an organization
can build to deliver a seamless, efficient revenue machine. Sales
development is a phone-based team that identifies, connects with, and
qualifies leads. When a lead is qualified, they then pass the qualified lead to a
sales person who takes over for the rest of the sales process.
From Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales
Development: “Put simply, SDRs (Sales Development Reps) pass the
baton between marketing and sales”.
This section looks at several tools that can be used by SDRs.

21. Slaesloft Cadence is built for sales development representatives who want to
make sure they’re never missing a beat in their interactions with their
prospects. The solution helps you create your own email workflows and tells
you when to send your emails, while keeping a human touch.
Salesloft Cadence

22. ToutApp helps you understand
how well your outreach email
perform through a combination
of tracking, templating and
analytics features.
You get more visibility into how
prospects interact with the email
you send them, as well as alerts
so that you can get back in
touch with them when they have
you at the top of their mind.
ToutApp

23. Cirrus Insights is a nifty plugin
that lives into your inbox and
helps you keep your inbox in
sync with Salesforce.
Conversations with prospects
are automatically logged into
their Salesforce profile, contacts
are synched with your address
book and your calendar is kept
updated as well.
In short, Cirrus helps you
remove friction when using
Salesforce in combination with
email on a daily basis.
Cirrus Insights

24. Lead nurturing

25. Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is the fiefdom of marketing automation solutions.
The goal of these solutions is to make it possible to segment leads
according to a set of characteristics they have in common and to
address them with the right messages, at the right time.
In an ideal world, once you’ve captured a lead, you will present them with
relevant pieces of information that will help them understand the value of your
service and drive them towards a completed sale. These solutions use email
as the preferred means of communication with prospects, trying to build a
relationship with them.
Although by no means identical, solutions in this section have a significant
amount of feature overlap. You’re probably better off implementing only one
of them at the same time.

26. Marketo is the poster
child of marketing
automation solutions.
It includes a lot of
features around lead
targeting and scoring.
Using Marketo, you’ll be able to setup lead capture forms on your website as well
as landing pages. Once captured, leads will be added to specific campaigns
(based on criteria such as their size or location). Lead activity on your website &
marketing collaterals will then be used to generate a score indicating hot leads.
Marketo

27. Hubspot is a fully
integrated platform that
started its life as a tool
to manage content and
generate demand.
It has now evolved into
a full-fledged solution
that spans use cases
ranging from content
management to
marketing automation
and CRM.
Although it now spans the full marketing & sales
cycle, Hubspot’s heritage still shows up in the app:
you can still create your website using the solution.
Hubspot

28. As its name indicates,
Mailchimp is focused on
email delivery. While
simpler than Marketo and
Hubspot, Mailchimp is
great if you want to get
started with email
marketing. It offers tools
to create beautiful emails
and make sure they’re
delivered to your users at
the best time.
Through customer profiles, workflows and analytics
tools, Mailchimp has outgrown its initial scope to
become the reference solution for email delivery.
Mailchimp

29. CRM

30. Customer Relationship Management
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution is the heart of
your sales & marketing organisation. It holds the master data about all
of the leads and commercial opportunities you’re pursuing at any point
in time as well as the list of deals you’ve closed.
While smaller organisation often use a combination of Excel documents as
their CRM when they get started, implemeting a real CRM system is key in
order to enable the growth of your company. Note that there are a lot of CRM
solutions out there, only a small subset is presented here.
Besides a CRM system, you need to make sure that you put in place tools
and processes that will allow your sales team to perform effectively. Creating
a sales playbook that embodies the sales knowledge of the organisation can
be very helpful in this regard.

31. Note: as with Hubspot, Salesforce offers many
features beyond its core CRM component.
Salesforce
Although not the most
ergonomic nor the most
user-friendly CRM
solution, Salesforce’s
huge advantages are the
breadth and depth of its
feature set and the fact
that it’s already integrated
with pretty much every
platform out there. You
may not be thrilled, but
you can’t really go wrong
when choosing it.

32. Close.io aims at making the job of salespeople as easy and painless as
possible. A full-featured CRM solution, it focuses on the needs on the individual
sales person by featuring leads and opportunities using smart views and
integrating with email and phone systems.
Close.io

33. Pipedrive is a powerful CRM solution that is built around a pipeline view of all
the deals you’re currently working on. This helps your team in implementing a
consistent sales methodology that deliver consistent results.
Pipedrive

34. Somewhat counter-intuitively, You don’t need a CRM! is a CRM solution that’s
built for smaller teams. Its core promise is that it will make the management of
your sales cycle as simple as possible. It integrates with third-party solutions.
You don’t need a CRM!

35. Analysis

36. Analysis
Above all else, SaaS is a numbers game. In order to be successful, you
have to understand a number of key concepts that will help you pilot
your activity. This section aims at presenting a number of such tools.
The first step is to understand how people find you online. Once they find
you, it’s very important to have a good idea of how people interact with your
site so that you can make sure your goals are met.
If everything goes well and subscriptions start flying off the shelves, you’ll
need to be able to track your business’ performance and make sure that all
your charts go up and to the right.
Used on their own or in combination, the services outlined in this section
allow you to do just this - and even more!

37. Google Webmaster
Tools helps you
understand how the
Google search engine
sees your website.
It’s a treasure trove of
information you can use
to improve your organic
search rankings and
make sure people find
you online.
Google Webmaster Tools

38. Google Analytics is the
reference solution when
it comes to logging and
analysing traffic to your
website. It helps you
understand what content
does or doesn’t perform
so that you can optimize
it towards your goals.
Google Analytics

39. Kissmetrics gives you
visibility into the behavior
of people on your site.
You can setup funnels
and understand how
people move (or leave!)
your site compared to the
way you expect them to
behave.
Kissmetrics
The service also gives you the ability to look at user cohorts so that you can fix
issues as they arise. If a recent cohort is not performing as well as expected,
you can understand the reasons why and fix them.

40. You’ll be able to track your numbers at one glance and act as soon as needed
should things go astray. Increase your MRR, keep churn under control and you’
ll be on your way to building a fast-growing, sustainable company!
Chartmogul
Chartmogul provides
you with subscription
intelligence without
any setup. All you
need to do is connect
the service to your
payment backend
and look at the
resulting analysis.

41. Pendo
Pendo gives you insights into
how people actually use your
product. You can get detailed
feature usage statistics and
offer suggestions to users
based on their past behavior:
“What about trying our feature
XXX? It’s new and you’ve not
used it yet.”.
This lets you base your
product management choices
on facts rather than on the
opinions of team members.

42. Customer service

43. Customer service
Acquiring users and turning them into customers is just the beginning.
In order to build a lasting and fruitful relationship with them, you need
to make sure that every interaction is handled quickly and efficiently.
The best way to ensure this is to implement the right tools and to staff them
with diligent people who feel deeply concerned about the success of your
customers.
Many solutions exist to handle customer service. Here is a short selection of
the most effective and powerful ones.

44. Zendesk is the
elephant in the room
when it comes to
online customer
support. It’s a
powerful solution that
lets you handle
inbound requests
from users and
answer them in a
timely manner to
ensure a high level of
client satisfaction.
Zendesk
Using Zendesk, you can priorize issues, automatically
assign them to agents, implement rules so that issues
without answers get closed automatically as well as
follow end-user satisfaction with your service.

45. Intercom is a tool
that can be
embedded inside of
your SaaS application
in order to handle
communication with
your users through
various channels.
It also helps you get a better understanding of user engagement within your app.
You can look at user cohorts, see how much (or how little!) people are using your
app and interact with them when you notice issues or want to ask questions.
Intercom

46. Front is a shared inbox for your team. You can receive messages through many
channels (email, SMS, voice…), assign them to someone and make sure that your
users receive a timely reply through the communication medium of their choice.
Front

47. Fullstory Fullstory is a service that records the activity of users on
your site/service and allows you to play it back so that you
can see exactly what they’ve done on your site.
You can use it both for sales (in order to improve your
user flow) and customer support (to help debug an issue).

48. Internal tools

49. Internal tools
All of the services we’ve seen so far were focused either on job-specific or
outward facing use cases. As your sales & marketing teams grow, you
will need to invest into internal communication so that your whole team
works efficiently together. You will no longer be able to rely on the implicit
knowledge of the founder and a couple early hires to get deals done.
In order to address this challenge, you’ll need 3 components:
● A way to know who should be working on what and when
● A way to get answers quickly when you need them
● A way to formalize your team’s knowledge and share it efficiently
I have presented one solution for each of these needs, but note that plenty of
others are available on the market!

50. Slack
Slack is a real-time communication solutions that lets your
team members interact together quickly and efficiently.
One of its strenghts is the integration with numerous services,
effectively serving as an inbox for all your notifications.

51. Asana is a powerful task management solution that works across devices to help
you make sure everyone knows what they have to do and when they’re expected
to deliver it. The solution helps you make sure that your whole team is working in
sync and that you’re not dropping the baton when tasks move between teams.
Asana

52. XWiki
XWiki Collaboration Suite allows you to create, update
and share your sales playbook so that every sales person
knows how to implement and follow your company’s sales
process. Thanks to the playbook, newcomers can get up to
speed quickly and close more sales!

53. Conclusion

54. Towards a fully integrated process
Marketing & Sales should work hand in hand to deliver the revenue your
company needs to grow. In order to help your company reach its full
potential, you need to enable your marketing & sales teams through the
use of the best tools for the job, while at the same time making sure that
data flows seamlessly between the various systems you’re using.
Even though this presentation described a large number of solutions, it only
scratches the surface of all the tools and services available online.
Before starting to implement some (or all!) of these solutions, it is critical that
you start by listing your key goals and by asking yourself what is the best
combination of solutions in order to achieve them. Each solution has a
significant learning period, so you need to make sure you have fully digested
it before investing in the deployment of a new one.

55. Looking for help?
I am available for short consulting missions:
strategy advice, questions about the enterprise
sales cycle, tools selection, positioning review...
Get in touch:
consulting@guillaumelerouge.com

56. Guillaume Lerouge
consulting@guillaumelerouge.com
Director of Sales & Marketing
XWiki SAS