lifecycle marketing automation

Increase Revenue with Full Lifecycle Marketing Automation

Looking to transform your B2B SaaS company’s growth? According to Jon Farah, founder of pblc, lifecycle marketing and marketing automation are the keys. He shared his strategies to increase demo bookings pre-purchase and enhance retention post-purchase on the latest episode of the Hot Pursuit Podcast.

Driving Demo Bookings in the Pre-Purchase Phase

Pre-purchase automation sets the stage for successful conversions. Educating prospects and aligning with your sales team increases demo booking rates. Implement these key strategies in your pre-purchase automation:

  1. Align with Sales. Jon emphasizes, “Sales alignment is 90% of the deal.” Collaborate with your sales team to understand prospect pain points and common objections. Craft targeted content that addresses these issues before the demo call.
  2. Educate and Provide Value. Create a welcome sequence for new leads. Focus on informing and educating rather than selling. Jon advises, “Top of funnel, we’re very much focused on know, like, and trust.”
  3. Use Event-Based Triggers. Jon recommends, “Trigger content based on action or inaction.” Set up automation workflows that respond to specific prospect behaviors, ensuring timely and relevant communication.
  4. Personalize Middle-of-Funnel Content. As prospects engage, shift to more targeted content. Jon suggests, “We’re making clear value propositions, creating problem-solution alignment, showing proof of results, and potentially doing some competitor analysis.”
  5. Implement a Recapture Automation. Jon shares a powerful strategy: “Once the sales team marks a lead as cold lost, we wait two months and then enroll them in an automation that essentially says, ‘Hey, you may have been testing one of our competitors. We’d like to reintroduce ourselves.'”

Enhancing Retention in the Post-Purchase Phase

Post-purchase automation maximizes customer lifetime value.

These strategies ensure successful onboarding, drive feature adoption, and cultivate super users:

  1. Focus on User Onboarding. Create automated sequences to guide new users through your product. Jon states, “We’re using Customer.io to ultimately onboard users from all of the ICP categories and encourage them to use the baseline features of the tool.”
  2. Drive Core Feature Adoption. Identify your product’s key features and create campaigns to encourage their use. Jon explains, “We’re driving them to actually execute the revenue-driving activity.”
  3. Aim for Organizational Penetration. Jon recommends, “Look at how to get users across our customer’s organization to engage with the tool so that it’s embedded in the way their whole organization operates.”
  4. Develop Super Users. Analyze your most engaged users and create automation to replicate their journey. Jon advises, “Understand which of our super users we want to like, how they got there, and how we can recreate that for other users.”
  5. Gather User Feedback. Use automation to collect and act on user feedback. Jon suggests using this to “enhance and optimize the tool as well.”

Start Small

Implement these strategies to impact your demo bookings and customer retention. And remember there’s no reason to overcomplicate things. Jon recommends starting with your CRM’s built-in automation features. Then you can expand from there.