Outbound Lead Generation for SaaS Companies (5 Tactics)

Ziemek Bućko -

Many SaaS companies invest in inbound marketing because it can deliver:

  • Scalable growth,
  • Brand affinity,
  • Access to an opt-in audience.

This is especially true if you have a self-serve product, letting users that find you organically try the product without having to engage your sales team.

And it works. Inbound organic traffic has been a key ingredient of Hunter’s journey.

But it’s become increasingly difficult to execute inbound marketing well.

Content is now dirt cheap to produce, and so every other SaaS company has a blog with hundreds of posts. This makes ranking on Google hard and makes standing out with your perspective even harder.

On the other hand, outbound lead generation doesn’t scale as well, and cold outreach is more likely to damage your brand reputation than improve it.

But it doesn’t mean SaaS companies should neglect outbound marketing & sales.

Because with cold outreach, you can reach exactly the people you want to reach, and you’re not at the mercy of an algorithm like you are on Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Plus, it’s cheap.

Here are some specific ideas.

Contact frustrated customers of your competitors

Your competitors make mistakes. When they do, some of their users will go to review platforms like G2 or Capterra to complain. They don’t just go there to leave a one-star review—many also share the specific frustrations they had with your competitors.

Systematically monitoring your competitors’ reviews will uncover many users who grew frustrated with their lack of features, inconsistency, or poor customer support.

This is your opportunity to address their pain points directly and present your solution as a stark alternative.

Seeking out negative reviews may not sound like a scalable process, but there are tools that can help.

One example is Reechee. It lets you monitor a specific competitor across various review sites and automatically notifies you when someone leaves a bad review.

Target people based on their LinkedIn activity

Every SaaS space has its influencers. Many companies have a LinkedIn company page, and many founders are active on LinkedIn in order to generate demand.

All this social activity involves people who may become your prospects.

Some LinkedIn activity can clearly indicate a specific business need, and you can tap into that by scraping the profiles of users who interacted with a post.

PhantomBuster can help you scrape the profiles of LinkedIn users who interacted with a personal or company post. You can later target them with a LinkedIn inMail message, or with a cold email using a tool like Hunter.

Contact your website visitors

(Contact your legal team first though, because website visitor identification may be against the privacy regulations that apply to your business!)

You should have a live chat tool on your SaaS website to accommodate visitors who come with specific questions. However, many users will visit your site and navigate away without leaving their contact information.

Visiting some pages, like your pricing page or deep feature pages, is a strong intent signal that you might try to leverage using outbound.

This is an increasingly common approach, sometimes referred to as inbound-led outbound.

You can identify your website’s visitors using tools like Clearbit or RB2B, find their contact information, and contact them using Hunter.

Use your integrations

If your SaaS product integrates with other tools, then you might have an easier time selling to existing users of those tools.

For example, Hunter integrates with a variety of CRMs including HubSpot.

Using Discover, I can find over 200,000 companies that use HubSpot on their websites, I could target the ones that match my ideal customer profile with a cold email campaign.

Leverage job postings

Some job postings reveal a pressing need to solve a specific problem.

If you can pinpoint the keywords that express a need for your software, then you can leverage Signals to find and contact relevant companies on autopilot.

For instance, if your SaaS helps with keyword research, you might target companies that are hiring SEOs with that skilllset.

Here’s how to do it at scale: set up a Signal with “keyword research” as a description keyword.

This will not only find relevant job openings that are currently available but will also continually monitor our database to give you a steady stream of leads.

Wrapping up

As a SaaS company, you can source outbound leads in ways that aren’t available for other types of businesses.

I think the best thing about running small outbound campaigns for SaaS is how quickly you can test different messaging strategies for distinct market segments.

These 5 tactics are just scratching the surface of what's possible.