🤑 How B2B SaaS Companies Get High-Intent Leads With PR
PR is Sales
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-John
In B2B SaaS, PR is Sales. I denied this for a while. For many years, I disassociated PR from the bottom line because:
a former boss told me to
measuring the direct impact of PR with attribution software isn’t in the cards
Younger me: “PR builds awareness, helps HR, but… uhh… tying it to sales? No way. I’m not responsible for getting readers of an article to a company site.”
Today: “I was wrong.”
Now I expect emails from irate PR agencies, sooo…
B2B SaaS businesses are right to expect PR to boost demand gen.
Let me be clear, increasing the number of leads is different from expecting a PR agency to hand you qualified leads.
I know from working in-house at marketing agencies and B2B SaaS businesses that most PR firms want nothing to do with chats around how they’ll lift sales. What causes them to tremble? The pressure of being held to metrics. That’s fair. However, because agencies are on marketing budgets, and marketing serves to make target audiences aware a business is known, I feel that means PR pros are expected to impact a sales pipeline.
With me so far?
PR pros: Accept sales into your life
There’s no way around this: vendors view PR as another sales lever to pull.
It wasn’t until I worked at a B2B SaaS business that I made the PR-to-Sales connection. Although I sometimes disagreed with the weight placed on PR, I understood why they thought what they thought. Ultimately, I scrutinized how leads were a worshipped metric at the cost of not seeing our quarterly bonuses.
It went like this…
I’d watch BDRs smile and dial.
I saw them pursue “leads” our marketing team delivered. And I…
I held my breath.
Then I’d hear BDRs say these folks were not converting. They didn’t want a demo. Was it the fault of sales or marketing?
I dug into Salesforce to see how these people entered our sales funnel. What did our buyer journey look like? On rare occasions, when Sales would enter customer data into Salesforce, I could see a prospect’s first touchpoint with us was a media story. Eureka!
I could fix our misses over time. Here’s how I did it.
Reworking PR strategy to improve lead quality
I reexamined my PR strategy and got customer-centric. Knowing what makes our best customers tick would guide me on which media to target and which channels to disregard.
1. Talk to customers
After interviewing customers about what media they consumed, which topics were meh, and what media types (e.g., newsletter, podcast) they preferred, I did approach some new media outlets. This slightly changed the topics our SMEs provided commentary on. Since we secured mentions or quotes in TechCrunch and Fast Company, we already had “sexy” media logos on our site. So I hyperfocused on retail trade magazines and publications since customers said they got newsletters from Retail Dive and listened to podcasts like Total Retail Talks.
2. I got picky
I was real selective where I landed guest posts. I sought out sites with strong page rankings that either published backlinks or gave us implied links. These split efforts improved our website’s ranking over several years. Teeny tiny sites that anyone could write for were removed from our radar. They made us look small too.
3. Married content marketing with PR
The best ideas for content were regularly gifted to us by customers or what we found in proprietary data. We quickly decided on topics based on customer comments or stats. We were also lifting data points from our ebooks for use on social and running PR campaigns around content; this is endless and powerful.
4. Added story arcs to case studies
We used stories to lure in customers. We used data too, but our focus was on making our customers the main characters in case studies. This little adjustment made our product more relatable to prospects and enabled us to tell emotional stories.
5. Ch-ch-changes
Our small crew weighed buyer intent data such as visitors’ activity on our site differently and overhauled our content marketing plan. It led to huge wins because we weren’t treating captured data like it was the holy grail. We took it into account but used our intuition more.
Create leads that Sales actually wants
Chasing zero or low-intent leads, many of which come from expensive co-marketing activities like sponsored whitepapers, newsletters, or analyst reports, drains Sales teams. Over time, Sales might resent the Marketing department. If that happens, oh boy.
The VP of Marketing argues that marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are solid while the VP of Sales argues they are trash. I hear this from clients more than I want to.
Hitting MQL goals means nothing if deals don’t close.
Using a PR team to speak with paying customers is one of the smartest exercises a B2B SaaS business can do. Good PR teams can ‘play’ reporter, ask hardball questions, know how to get customers to talk about what they love about a solution provider, and so on. A true 360-degree view of the type of customers that marketers should target starts to take shape. One beautiful discovery is often identifying the paid channels marketers should test. For example, if customer contacts *with decision-making power* say they don’t read analyst reports, a marketer can cut that spend.
Instead of creating buyer personas, what usually transpires?
B2B SaaS marketers opt to scan a list of webinar attendees and call them leads. With only an email address, first name, and company name, this human is viewed as an MQL. Wrong.
If they put themselves in the shoes of these “leads,” they’d see faces like this when opening lead nurturing emails…
Let me ask you 2 things:
Do you want 20 emails because Iyou RSVP’d for a webinar but didn’t attend?
Is your email address worth this bombardment?
The difference between contact info and leads
When I was back at that job I was creating some touchpoints, so I had to shoulder some of the blame for sending bad leads to Sales.
Here’s the thing, when a prospect reads about X company in Modern Retail, nobody knows when they Google you to learn more. They may wait weeks, months, sometimes years before they look you up, land on your site, and Google Analytics calls them organic traffic.
Heck yes, the dotted lines from PR to increased demand gen are hard to see, but not everything has to be seen in a Salesforce dashboard to be real and impacting the bottom line.
Do something with these words
PR makes a nonlinear impact on the total marketing-influenced pipeline.
Those surveys your team puts blood, sweat, and money into?
DON'T ONLY: let it rot on your website with a landing page and PPC campaign
ALSO: get it to a PR pro who can extract thoughts that should be sent to a publication editor to produce a byline or Q&A
In recent years, a lot of prominent PR agencies pursued B2B SaaS businesses seeing all the funding rounds and VC dough. Most came and went because they refuse to accept the truth, the truth that I denied for too long, that they are hired to indirectly increase lead gen.
"We aren't responsible for new biz," they say.
I say, put our feet to the 🔥.
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-John