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12 Tools for Growing Your SaaS Business

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By Walker Donohue

Chances are, your SaaS business is built around a product that makes processes faster and more efficient. And thanks to companies like yours, many of the formerly time-consuming activities of business strategy have become faster and more efficient.

So why aren’t you using their tools to grow your own business?

From customer service to email analytics, these twelve tools will give you the competitive edge you need to really distinguish yourself from your competitors.

1. JustReachOut.io

iDoneThis has made an art out of telling your own story on your own platform. But there are still some times when it’s really good to reach out to the press, such as when you have a big product announcement or other big news to share. Rather than rely on an expensive PR firm, though, reach out directly to reporters.

JustReachOut makes it simple by (1) giving you a list of people to get in touch with, (2) giving you a model email that you can tweak to your specifications, and (3) giving you an on demand support team to help make your pitch the best it can be.

2. AdEspresso

The days of using Facebook as a one stop set it and forget it ads platform are over, as Shawn Amos said. Long over, in fact. But the hyperbolic hit pieces and complaints seem to mostly emanate from those who think they aren’t.

AdEspresso will help you make the most of this still-viable advertising platform by doing most of the design work for you, helping you navigate the complexities of the platform and giving you the metrics that you need to improve.

3. SumoMe

The suite of tools that make up SumoMe’s catalog were developed while founder Noah Kagan was coming up with ways to drive traffic to AppSumo, his daily-deals-for-developers site. With a 1,000,000+ strong email list, their effectiveness isn’t in dispute.​

Scroll down to the end of this page, and you’ll see Scroll Box in action: notice how it politely waits until you’re done with this content to prompt you for an email address!

4. ProfitWell

The second biggest reason that startups die is because they ran out of cash, and monthly recurring revenue is by far the most important metric for SaaS subscription-based startups. Despite this, ProfitWell found that two out of five startups were miscalculating MRR, and that one out of five was actually actively manipulating it by leaving out expenses.​

Don’t sabotage yourself. ProfitWell will do the work of calculating it for you, and they have a support team that looks at each new customer’s calculations, ensuring everything is accurate.

5. Close.io

The story of this sales software came to be is almost as instructive as the product itself: the team at Elastic Sales discovered that the internal toolkit they used as part of their on demand sales team was actually more popular then the service they offered, and so they pivoted and opened up shop as Close.io.

It’s a true “secret sauce” app, complete with native VoIP calling and automation of major time-sink tasks.

6. Unbounce

Optimizing your site is all good, but without a landing page, you’re missing out on the biggest opportunity you have for driving conversions. Apparently,  44% of clicks to B2B businesses are not going to one because marketers simply don’t understand how to make them.

Landing pages are the “heart and soul” of lead generation, but they can be intimidating to make. That’s why Unbounce offers a drag-and-drop editor and inbuilt A/B testing — you can stop bugging your developers now.

7. SessionCam

Despite your analytics and your heat maps, you still don’t really know how your visitors are literally navigating your website. You don’t know if they’re jumping around random pages, scrolling up and down without a sense of purpose or clicking around where you don’t want them to.

​With SessionCam, you can watch what your customers are doing in real time and identify (1) parts of your website that just aren’t working, and (2) whether your customer’s journey is actually playing out the way you envisioned.

8. Customer.io

Retention is critical to growth. Though Y Combinator teaches startups to focus solely on getting bigger week by week, growth is nothing without the ability to keep customers using your product.

One of the best ways to get users coming back is by consistently reminding them you exist and are working to improve the product. Customer.io gives you tools to design your email drip campaigns and shows you the customers you’re on the verge of losing so you can target them specifically.

9. Colibri.io

Making good content and getting good distribution is important, but there’s another step to that process that a lot of people seem to forget about, if comments sections are any indication: engagement.

​Colibri gives you a rundown of the sites — Quora, Facebook, Hacker News etc. — where your customers are talking about your product — hashtag or not. Inject yourself into these conversations and show people that you care about what they’re saying.

10. Zapier

If you’re a marketer without coding chops, you’ve probably encountered annoying situations where two web applications you expected to work together just don’t. Say you’re composing a brilliant post in Quip, full of pictures and formatting, and then try to throw it into WordPress. No go.

Zapier works by letting web applications speak to each other. With enough time and effort, you could use it to shorten just about every workflow in your book.

11. LeadzGen

Imagine a SessionCam for sales: that’s basically what LeadzGen is. When someone visits your site, you’ll get a full rundown of their status as a customer, including extensive contact information, likelihood of making a purchase and time spent on individual parts of the site.

12. Buffer

Getting a lot of likes and follows is great, but if you’re not building an engaged audience, one who shares and retweets and comments on your content, then what you’re building is essentially just a boost to your ego.

Buffer lets you schedule social media posts of all kinds and will give you the kind of metrics you need to assess your efforts in terms of engagement: remember, quality over quantity rules, even in social media. 1,000 true fans are better than a million spectators.

These aren’t the only tools that can help you, of course. I’m sure you have some that you love. Let me know what they are in the comments!

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