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SaaS Consultant: How to choose the right one

The world of SaaS grows exponentially every day, however, it is still difficult to find the perfect SaaS marketing agency or a SaaS consultant for your business. The reasons for this are twofold: if, on the one hand, a lot of SaaS consultants want to tap into the potential of SaaS, on the other hand, not every marketing consultant is experienced enough to understand all that SaaS entails.

In order to find the right professional to guide you in your marketing endeavors, we’ll go through a few tips that will help you get out of this maze – while increasing your ROI steadily and surely.

1 – What Does a SaaS Consultant Do?

The roles of a SaaS consultant are diverse, but they all focus on improving your sales numbers, brand awareness, and customer retention. The tasks that allow you to reach these goals will be further described below:

  • Update marketing materials. There’s a reason why your marketing materials can’t be eternally recycled. SaaS products are constantly evolving and adding new features, so your marketing materials need to reflect those changes. Other than that, there is also a need to constantly analyze the performance of those materials. Are they converting enough? Do they really represent the best you can achieve? If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, then it’s time to change.
  • Take care of company branding. Your business and your products need to have a coherent branding that is easily recognized not only by your customers but also by your prospects. Your SaaS consultant should guide you into a cohesive visual language and a tone of voice that users can identify. They should be able to bring your brand to a top performance.
  • Engage current customers and prospects. It’s not important just to keep new users coming, you also need to make sure your current customers remain engaged with your brand. After all, it’s a lot easier to keep the customers you already have than to attract new ones. Nonetheless, all of them are extremely important for your marketing strategy. Engagement makes your business thrive by keeping your products on the top of your users’ minds.
  • Keep your customers returning for upgrades or other services. When you have a product with a long lifecycle such as SaaS, you need to make sure you’re maximizing the revenue you get from each of your customers.
  • Develop a strategy for all your channels. Your strategy needs to connect your social media, your website, your blog, and every possible channel you’re in. Every time you do something just as small as writing a tweet, you need to make sure it reiterates the positioning of your brand.
  • Use social media expertly. Social media gives you a lot of chances to improve your relationship with your customers and generate buzz around your brand. The right SaaS consultant will be able to come up with different ideas for your social media that enhance the way you use this channel.
  • Write content based on SEO. No matter what product you have, SEO is essential for any online business worth its salt. Keyword research and content writing should be part of a SaaS consultant’s daily tasks.

2 – When to Hire a SaaS Consultant

Usually, we don’t recommend hiring a SaaS consultant unless you’ve already got an idea of what you require for your business to grow. That professional can help you set your goals for the long-term and short-term, but it usually takes a bit for a startup to be able to invest in an adequate SaaS consultant.

Nonetheless, if you reckon your company needs to grow, a SaaS consultant can help you define how you are going to act in order to achieve the goals that matter the most for you. The right consultant will help you with customer retention and keeping a raving customer base, because both are essential for growth. The right consultant will also give you tips about how to get into new markets, which will make it easier to expand your business for maximum profit.

If you are uncertain about which KPIs you should use to measure your performance, require a strategy to guide your marketing efforts, or even if you’re just after marketing training, the way to go is through hiring a SaaS consultant.

3 – Tips For Choosing the Right Professional

Now, you probably have a lot of commitments and can’t afford to spend days researching the attributes you should look for in a SaaS marketing consultant. Do not worry about a thing. In this article, we’ll give you eight tips for finding an adequate SaaS consultant for your business. Read on to find out!

3.1. Choose a top-line focus or a bottom-line focus

This decision will usually depend on you, even though your consultant might be able to help you figure out where you should focus your strategy.

A bottom-line focus is related to reducing your costs and expenses and maximizing profit according to the resources available. It will also look at ways to improve the quality and operational efficiency, increasing your ROI through constantly reiterating your processes.

When it comes to top-line focus, it is based on increasing profit by launching new products or services, managing social media, and other channels through which customers engage with you. Top-line strategies focus on getting awareness and growing your brand through communication and engagement.

Which one suits your company better, top-line focus, or bottom-line focus? The thing is, it takes a bit of reflection from your part to figure this out. A SaaS consultant can help you with both, however, you need to know beforehand which issues do you wish to tackle. You know your business better than anyone else.

3.2 – Check them out on LinkedIn

We always mention LinkedIn when advising you on how to look for marketing professionals or agencies, and for a good reason. First of all, usually, a marketing professional’s LinkedIn profile is pretty pumped, but even if it’s not, there are several things you can look for to learn a bit more about them.

What kind of recommendations do they have from former colleagues? What is their specialty? Do they have any SaaS businesses as previous or current clients? Do their recommendations relate to the kind of services you’re after?

Someone might be brilliant on social media, but not that good when it comes to bottom-line improvements. Do a thorough research of their profile and the work relationships they have. Their LinkedIn profile is a window through which you can peek at their past and present endeavours. Make sure you get all the information you possibly can from their profile in order to be certain that their skills fit the bill for your business.

3.3 – Check out their website

If you’re after a professional and you see their website is poorly executed or just looks extremely dated, we recommend keeping on looking. There is no excuse for being a digital marketing professional that has a website that seems to have been designed in the 90s.

The reason behind this advice is quite simple: how can you trust someone to improve your online presence if they can’t show results for their own personal brand?

If their website looks alright, you need to dig a bit further. Do they have a list of benefits they offer their clients? Does that list match what you’re after for your own business? Does the content on their website make you curious? Or does it just make you bored?

Boring professionals do not know how to innovate. Keep your goals in mind when researching some SaaS consultant website.

If for some reason, that consultant does not even have a website, well, that’s a huge red flag in a digital marketing professional and we don’t recommend wasting time on digging further.

3.4 – Ask for referrals

When you start looking for a SaaS consultant, it’s easy to get lost. There are so many professionals out there claiming to be exactly what you want, but who should you believe?

An easy way to guide yourself in this maze is to ask your SaaS colleagues about someone they used before and that has given them great results. Usually, your “brothers in arms” will be ready to recommend a person based on their experience with them.

These referrals are not set in stone, because what is good for one business might not be good for another.  However, a CEO or marketing manager from a company that is similar to yours should be able to recommend a professional with the right traits.

SaaS knowledge can only be achieved by experience, so the SaaS consultants that have been making the rounds in the business will usually be able to help you.

3.5 – Look at their services

It’s not always easy to match the professional to the services you’re after. Usually, you need to know what your business requires, and only after that will you know if your SaaS consultant provides those. Usually, a SaaS consultant offers SEO services, PPC services (pay-per-click advertising such as Google Ads), email marketing, social media, and content marketing.

However, each professional specializes in only a few of those rather than all of them. From understanding your brand persona, you’re usually able to know where your users are. Your SaaS consultant will also be able to determine which channels you need to improve according to their expertise.

If you notice your users get to you through Facebook, maybe you should run a Facebook ads campaign to capitalize on those leads. You might find that SEO is what you need right now, or Google Ads, or content marketing. It’s important to evaluate your needs in order to understand which channels are best for you. And through that you get an idea of the kind of consultant you need.

3.6 – Look at their pricing

This is difficult to evaluate sometimes because many SaaS marketing consultants do not offer transparent pricing. When this happens, you’ll have to contact a few professionals in order to gauge which one uses a pricing scheme that suits you.

It’s important to be aware if your new consultant fits the budget you can allocate for marketing. Your budget might depend on a lot of factors: your company size, your market share, your operational costs…

We recommend checking out professionals that quote their price on their website. When the pricing is not clear, you might end up in a commitment without knowing what you’re buying, and that’s usually a bad idea.

3.7 – Check out their portfolio

Looking at a consultant’s portfolio is an essential step before you decide on hiring them.

You can tell a lot about a professional from their portfolio.

Usually, you should be after candidates that have experience in your industry, but that’s not mandatory in our books. If a consultant does not have your market experience, but has worked with clients from diverse other industries, that is usually a good sign.

Professionals that have a diverse clientele are usually willing to learn everything they can about every industry, and they’ll be able to research thoroughly to get you the results you need. However, a bit of SaaS experience never hurts. When you find the right fit for your company, you’ll just know.

3.8 – Look at client testimonials

Once your candidate has passed all the tests, there is one last requirement: great client testimonials.

Testimonials can make or break someone’s reputation as a SaaS consultant. Not all clients produce relevant testimonials: sometimes, you’ll find that there was nothing else the consultant could have done to make that client happy.

Putting those cases aside, testimonials are usually very telling of your candidate’s qualities. They will help you understand not only if you’re looking at a great professional, but also if their expertise matches your needs.

Always take a look at testimonials in your candidate’s website and social media (including LinkedIn).

4 – Wrapping Up

SaaS marketing is not easy to figure out. That’s why we recommend hiring a consultant early on. If you get the best SaaS consultant for your business, nothing can keep you from achieving success.

In this article, we revealed a few tips that will make the process of looking for a SaaS consultant a lot easier on you. By knowing what you are looking for, you set yourself up for success. Do not settle for a professional that is not an exact match; otherwise, you might regret it. We recommend not rushing into it and taking your time to evaluate each candidate thoroughly in order to achieve the perfect company fit.

If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS companies grow their MRR through SEO and PPC, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our team.

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Kamel Ben Yacoub is the Founder & CEO of Getuplead. He is an industry-recognized leader in paid marketing with more than 15 years of experience, including previous roles as director of performance marketing for several international SaaS and B2B companies.