Thousands of success stories across industries have proven how the role of SaaS for omnichannel strategies benefits sales. If you come to think of it, SaaS companies themselves can also learn from omnichannel when it comes to selling their products and keeping their customers happy in the long run.
Omnichannel strategy streamlines sales messages across different channels, making each channel and message interdependent and correlated. With a unified strategy for your sales efforts, your sales message is louder, clearer, and more understandable for customers.
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Using omnichannel for SaaS sales
Just like any other business, SaaS needs a sound omnichannel selling strategy that would keep its sales running consistently. However, compared with the others, selling for SaaS isn’t a one-time thing. You need to constantly engage with your customers, continue to please and serve them as they use your products, and go beyond to make sure they’d still want your service for the long haul.
Selling products is tough, but proving value and constantly engaging customers to keep them subscribed is a challenge all SaaS businesses face. Although with these great challenges come great opportunities too. This is why SaaS still stands as one of the most lucrative industries, with new and traditional business models testing the waters on how SaaS businesses can improve their productivity or boost their sales.
Omnichannel workflows you can do with Aloware + HubSpot
The Aloware and HubSpot team-up ceaselessly work together to combine features that support and promote omnichannel selling. Using the five stages in the SaaS customer cycle, we’re bringing you these sample workflows that you can apply to make your omnichannel strategies better for your SaaS business.
Prospecting Stage
For SaaS, the average sales cycle takes around 3 months (84 days) and this usually starts with prospecting. Doing prospecting right is crucial in moving more quality leads through your pipeline and overall hastening SaaS customer acquisition.
A good prospecting strategy requires certain tools necessary to speed up processes. With Aloware and HubSpot combined, you can be more efficient with prospecting. Here are some of our customers’ most-used workflow strategies that might help you as well.
Workflow 1 – Enroll contact lists for Power Dialing
There are multiple ways to enroll contact lists to start power dialing from Aloware. For one, know that you can automatically create lists just by visiting sites and pages with your client’s contact numbers. You can do this by installing Aloware’s Chrome extension that detects numbers from pages and gives you the option to add them to your power dialer list.
Syncing HubSpot contacts to Aloware can also be done if your CRM is in place. By integrating HubSpot with Aloware, you’ll be able to import contacts from HubSpot, or trigger workflows to automatically add and sync all contacts. This saves you the time and effort of manually listing contacts and segmenting prospects to get in touch with.
Workflow 2 – Broadcast SMS to specific contact lists
Your customers love SMS, and you should too. Adding SMS to your workflows during the prospecting stage gives your sales messages a 98% chance of being opened. Compared with emails, SMS is a more convenient and immediate channel for your customers.
SMS sales campaigns are made easier with Aloware, and if integrated with HubSpot, your contacts can reap the same benefits too. Set up SMS broadcast sequences from either Aloware or HubSpot’s workflows, and start sending text messages at scale. It comes with parameters like time schedules, agent lines, and sending frequency.
Product Demo Stage
Providing live demos can save your SaaS business during the early stages of its sales cycle. At this stage, you’ll have a chance to showcase your products and features, connect with clients to understand their needs, and show in detail what they can do more with your product offerings. With this, you’ll need help in organizing demo schedules, appointments, and reminder prompts.
Workflow 3 – Send appointment schedules for demos
Appointment reminders are great chances to connect with your customers on channels that will require their immediate attention. With Aloware and HubSpot combined, you can easily set up your message template and create workflows across different channels. For example, you can set up an appointment reminder via email a day before the demo schedule. If they didn’t respond to the invitation, you can add an SMS workflow prompting them to accept the invite.
Follow-up Stage
At this stage, it’s your make or break. Did the customer like your product? Are they looking for something else they didn’t find? Can you still convert them? These questions can only be answered through one thing: follow-ups.
Follow-ups open up the chances of converting a reticent lead into a sale. However, every salesperson should know how to be careful about it. The last thing you want is to come off as annoying. Good thing that with a sound omnichannel plan, there are ways to strategize effective follow-ups for SaaS sales.
Workflow 4 – Trigger auto follow-up via SMS
Setting up automated SMS triggers through HubSpot or Aloware is one of the very popular tactics for follow-ups. The great thing about SMS is that you can automate everything without sounding automated. Also, inserting other channels of communication is understandable since SMS has limitations that both leads and salespeople are well aware of.
Workflow 5 – Automate a call follow-up
You can also set up a follow-up sequence using an automated call follow-up. With Aloware or HubSpot, you can easily trigger dials by setting up call workflows scheduled at a certain time. This can help your sales team manage their time and keep track of leads that are due for a follow-up. You can even drop a pre-recorded voicemail to your contacts in case you fail to get connected.
Trial Conversion Stage
The subscription stage in SaaS businesses usually starts with free trials, but not all free trials convert into sales. Once you manage to get users into a free trial, make sure it’s designed to show them your product’s potential without giving all the value away for free.
Free trial subscriptions are almost considered compulsory for any SaaS business. Since you’re offering something for free, keep in mind to use it to your advantage too. These HubSpot – Aloware workflows will help you get the most out of your subscription lists.
Workflow 6 – Set up an onboarding sequence
Now with an actual customer, things can get even more challenging. Getting a customer to sign up shouldn’t be the end of your sales efforts. In fact, you should begin planning a better omnichannel strategy this time with the involvement of support, starting off with the onboarding process.
Your onboarding process should reflect how you can help customers understand the product fully. Using a smart omnichannel strategy, you can set up automated workflows and let them do the nurturing for you. For example, you can set up an automated email welcome message for every sign-up, with options for a call or demo schedule. Once set, you can automatically send SMS notifications to remind customers of their scheduled appointments, free trial expiration, or subscription package upgrades.
Workflow 7 – Sync free trial sign-ups to your SMS list
Not all subscribed users would convert into paying customers, however, you should not let them go once they churn. The good thing about SaaS is that it’s an ever-developing industry. Some free trial subscribers may not see your product as necessary at the moment, but you can inform them about product updates and developments. This can increase your potential of converting them in the future. Create a workflow that automatically syncs contacts with free trial sign-ups into your SMS lists. This way, you can still keep in touch with them after their free trial has ended.
Retention Stage
Keeping customers subscribed is one of the challenges for SaaS businesses. While customer churn is as inevitable as it is, the need to come up with different strategies to keep its rate low is crucial to your ROI. However, you should understand that SaaS is a customer-centric business. Every part of your business should address one thing: how to keep helping your customers.
From interface, accessibility, efficiency, and support, there should be a steady system that fulfills every part of your customer’s journey. Aloware and HubSpot can offer you tools that can address that.
Workflow 8 – Upsell and Cross-sell with Power Dialer
Maintaining your relationship with customers should go deeper as soon as they start using your products. Make yourself aware of your customers’ needs and be attentive to their business process, so you can identify gaps wherein you can help them. Offering to resolve customer’s pain points increases the chance of upselling your products and services to those who need them most.
These interactions are better carried out with an efficient tool like a power dialer. Automatically enroll new and existing customers to your power dialer list and start dialing with a click. Aloware’s power dialer also supports local presence for SaaS businesses with clients across multiple locations.
Workflow 9 – Generate reviews and feedback using SMS
Facilitating customer surveys and reviews can help you identify the loopholes in your product, service, and organization. It may not be an assurance that customers will stay, but it will surely help you gain insights to keep improving your products and keep customers longer.
Asking for these would require your customers to spend time on them. It’ll help to use a channel that offers immediate feedback with lesser effort and interaction. By using SMS as a tool to gather responses, you can send a series of short survey questions over time. You can simply automate your text messages through Aloware or HubSpot and schedule a time you should send them.
Workflow 10 – Maintain regular interaction across channels
The secret sauce for SaaS customer retention is to regularly engage and interact with customers. This lets your customers know that they are free to reach you anytime you need their assistance.
Lucky for us, omnichannel solutions are here to make our lives easier. Start planning your interactions by using different channels to reach customers. Maybe you can start sending out monthly newsletter content or product updates via email, or broadcasting sales promos, events, or milestones via SMS. You can also initiate discussions on relevant topics on social media, and provide 24/7 assistance on your phone lines. With proper use of the channels available, your omnichannel strategy will take you places.
Begin planning your omnichannel sales strategy with HubSpot and Aloware. HubSpot’s amazing CRM tied up with Aloware’s ingenious contact center solutions can move your business goals forward. For SaaS businesses, this integration can provide you with multiple ways to leverage your channels and reach out to customers automatically and at scale.
For more information about Aloware and its products, you can always contact us so we can get in touch.
