Outbound Lead Generation Service for B2B SaaS: Best Practices and Case Studies

Date : August 31, 2021 By Andrei Iunisov

What is outbound lead generation?

Lead generation online can be inbound and outbound. Inbound online lead generation attracts potential customers to your website where the target action happens. It can be a trial request, whitepaper download or something else — the key here is that visitors themselves have the intent for call-to-actions. Outbound lead generation is opposite, businesses reach out to potential clients themselves proactively by using online tools or telemarketing. In this post I would like to describe some strategies about online outbound lead generation which I was using in my works with B2B SaaS clients.

Outbound lead generation service for B2B SaaS

The most important thing in outbound lead generation is focus. Since B2B SaaS market is very big and contains lots of segments, it is not easy to find the «sweetspot»: your target clients and their contact details. But even if you have this information from the various prospecting tools available for marketers and sales teams, the outbound lead generation can be unsuccessful because there may be no specific intent to research or buy the product you are offering. The main question here is: «How to focus the outbound lead generation efforts on the prospects that are actively looking for our or similar product?» In the current martech environment there is an answer to this question — B2B website visitor tracking software, such as LeadLander or LeadFeeder.

These tools show marketers or sales teams the companies visiting their websites. This is done with specific IP-matching technology and works only on markets where companies tend to have their own IP address sets. From my experience, it is definitely working in Western Europe, Americas and Australia — these are the regions where I was able to precisely identify the company names based on IP-matching technology. Additionally, these tools usually place a code snippet on your website pages and with this they can show you the whole customer journey on your website and the referrer.  The referring URL basically tells about the interest of the prospect (by parsing the search keyword which was used to find the website).

Outbound lead generation case study with a B2B SaaS company — Cipherpoint

Company data discovery with LeadFeeder

Now I will describe the process of the outbound lead generation service for one of my clients — Cipherpoint. It is an IT security software company selling to businesses with different licensing models, incl. software-as-a-service, so it is a B2B SaaS company.

Here is what we see in LeadFeeder which is used by this client to perform outbound lead generation — all the companies from which there were visits during the selected time period. I created several custom feeds according to our target personas:

The main feed is called «Latest HQ enterprise leads».We are looking at enterprise clients with a minimum of 201 employees (seats) with the high quality of contact data; those who visited the website for more than several seconds and did not go into the «Investor relations» section (this company is public, listed on ASX and investors are not our target audience). Additionally, there are several other feeds that separate this one by geography: APAC, Benelux and France, DACH and others. This allows our sales team to navigate quickly between target regions.

Let us take one of the companies from the previous screenshot to see what LeadFeeder offers:

LeadFeeder gives us sufficient company information: location, website URL, industry and size. The activity tab demonstrates all the visits from this company to our website, incl. source, medium and visited pages with the time spent on them. This gives us information about the interests of the prospect which can be corresponding to the pages that were visited. This solution answers to the question that I have listed above: «How to focus the outbound lead generation services on the prospects that are actively looking for our product?»

Looking for the proper point of contact in the B2B SaaS company

In order to find the proper contact, LeadFeeder allows users to search by role. In case of Cipherpoint our target persona is the IT security analyst, manager or CISO. Additionally, we are also targeting compliance executives. LeadFeeder parses the information from LinkedIn, incl. the job titles, which allows us to filter employees and find the relevant ones. The picture above demonstrates 5 relevant employees that were found by LeadFeeder. It is better to check their LinkedIn profiles in order to make sure they still work for the prospected B2B SaaS. The icon near the name highlights the email which is collected by LeadFeeder from various sources.

Follow up with an outbound lead

We have developed a special email template which we use to intiate the communication. It allows to maximize open and reply rates while minimizing the resources.

Subject: «Looking for the relevant contacts at %company_name% in regards to SharePoint security»

«SharePoint security» can be changed to «data classification» or any other product or service which was looked by the prospect during the website journey.

Text: Hello Mr./Ms. %last_name%,

I have noticed you are %job_title% at %company_name% on LinkedIn.

Recently we’ve detected a high level of interest in the attached white paper from %company_name%, I’ve seen a number of your employees spending some time reviewing information regarding our SharePoint security best practices.

I’ve looked through LinkedIn and didn’t find any person who might be directly responsible for these areas in %company_name%. Can I ask, if you have a thought about whom can I contact in regard to this topic?

We have deep experience in assisting companies by helping them find, classify and protect their most sensitive information which is under any compliance regulation. Alternatively, I’d be delighted to discuss with you on a call at your earliest convenience.

Please let me know if you could help me to find the right contact. Many thanks for looking through the message.

LeadFeeder shows that after sending these messages users regularly interact with our website:

The more emails we send, the more visits we have. Not only the visits but also the meaningful responses come to our mailbox:

This response fits exactly in the expected outcome — it gives us more information about where to look for the relevant people as a next step. Additionally, when contacting the next person in the company it is easier to get a response because the contact was referred by the colleague.

Conclusion

This method of outbound lead generation is useful not only for B2B SaaS, but also for enterprise software companies and B2B companies. LeadFeeder makes the process of finding the relevant contacts in the companies that have interest in your product relatively easy and fast. This is one of the hugest benefits of such an approach — it does not require a lot of resources from sales teams but provides meaningful results.