How to Write a Brilliant Business Plan for a B2B SaaS

Executive Summary

In this consultative guide, I want to share some of the more important aspects of creating a highly effective marketing strategy as part of your business plan to raise funds for your B2B SaaS business.

In broad terms, traditional digital marketing does not work, unless you want to become another statistic! 

The current average Annual Recurring Revenue – Full Time Equivalent (ARR-FTE) is only £90k per person, and that’s up to those turning over approx. £45m.

By embracing live streaming and various online channels, you can revolutionise your business growth and reach your total addressable market more efficiently than traditional methods like telesales and cold calling.

Remember, everyone thinks they are a marketer and know everything about marketing, including your potential investors.  You need to present a different approach and narrative to help explain what has gone wrong in the past and how it’s not going to affect your B2B SaaS growth.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Switching to Live Streaming for a B2B SaaS  
3. Email Marketing and Social Media Advertising
4. Content Creation: Copywriting, Visuals, and More
5. Pivoting to Digital Selling
6. Monitoring Customer Success & Online Effectiveness
7. Business Plan - Budget Projections
8. Key Takeaways
9. FAQs
10. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Most businesses believe the marketing landscape has evolved significantly over the years, but that would be wrong!  Most B2Bs are still operating in the same way they did seventy years ago, i.e., using telesales to find prospects and maintaining a one-to-one strategy ratio throughout the business.

The critical issue for any business plan is to not appear as an ‘also-ran’.  Everyone believes, and indeed is very convincing, that their SaaS offering will become the next ‘Unicorn’.  The trouble is, there is so much evidence to prove the contrary, you really need to pull out all the stops to secure your investment.

Keep in mind; 40% of all business who receive investment fail.  75% of all business who receive investment fail to achieve the targets they set themselves and 95% of businesses who receive investment fail to achieve an ROI for the investors.  So, what is going to make your SaaS worth investing in?

Apart from the amazing product-fit your SaaS provides, it’s never going to get off the ground unless you can reach your total addressable market (TAM), and for you to do that at a reasonable cost that keeps you profitable.  No one said you had to maintain the same burn-rate as everyone else!

Every founder/CEO wants to build a successful business and the only way is to maintain a healthy ratio between people and profitability, thereby keeping your ARR-FTE high.

Poor financial returns are the key indicator to poor marketing performance.  Do not be swayed by smooth-talking, sycophant CMOs telling you what you want to hear. Marketing automation, demand generation, ABM and pay-per-click do not work. According to Demandbase, 100% of business owners like you and me hate filling out forms and revealing what we’re thinking, for some telesales department to start pestering us, imploring they send one of their salespeople to tell us how to run our companies!

The current inherent problems with B2B marketing are revealed in the average tenure of CMOs over the past few years, being as low as between nine to eighteen months.

We have developed an alternative approach and workflow that will change the Profit & Loss and budget projections of your business plan.

In this guide, I’ll briefly explain some of the key components of a winning marketing strategy that should help secure investment for your business and fast-track your success, as it will resonate with the investors, give them something different to think about and they’ll know you are approaching your market differently to everyone else.  They might even learn something too!

2. Switching To Live Streaming for a B2B SaaS

At the centre of this alternative business plan strategy to raise investment for a B2B SaaS platform is the need to embrace live streaming.  But before you start thinking it’s too complicated; there are millions out there using the iPhones to go live every second of the day, therefore it’s only a matter of corralling the right people to get your production looking spectacular.

Live Streaming has become increasingly popular due to its ability to reach and engage potential customers more efficiently into your marketing strategy allowing you to showcase your offerings and establish personal connections with prospects, which ultimately leads to increased sales and business growth.

Bear in mind, typical sales and marketing strategies can be extremely costly simply because many B2B marketers are unsure what they need to do to attain exposure at scale without spending vast amounts of money on Google Pay-Per-Click, which as I mentioned, does not deliver the results.

Live streaming on most social platforms is free, therefore it’s only a matter of acquiring some cameras, mics and lights, oh, and having a plan.  That’s where we come in, more on that later.

Whilst there is a significant cost implication, and I mean it costs so much less than any other strategy, there is the more creative aspects to it, which needs to be presented, and that is what you’re going to say and do.  Below are some suggestions for your shows: -

As you can see there are no limits to what you can present to your total addressable market.

3. Email Marketing and Social Media Advertising

Sales is a numbers game.  You have no option but to begin with the most complete highest number relating to your chosen market sector. You need to be concise, e.g., if you want to sell to SMEs, there are four categories, 0-9 employees (5.8m), 10-49 employees (212,000) and 50-249 (36,000).  Above 250 (8,000) are classified as Enterprise, so I guess you won’t be going after them.  It’s now your marketer’s job to break them down to the exact market size/segment you’re going after.  This is your Total Addressable Market (TAM).

This is not your typical approach to email marketing and social advertising.  Here’s why. 

The general belief is that everything you do must have a glaring ‘call-to-action’.  It doesn’t.  Business buyers want to self-serve, remain anonymous and establish an ROI before they will engage with a salesperson or company.  That’s me, that’s probably you too, so a call-to-action is wasted, as I’ll rarely click.

Your first stage is to simply let your TAM know you exist.  To do this, you acquire a TAM database, email informing them you are planning to broadcast a live show, and they can engage anonymously.  You also upload the same database to LinkedIn and pay for banner ads to appear in the same TAM newsfeeds.

Next, in conjunction with content creation as mentioned below, we have developed an approach to exploit social media advertising to boost your online presence and reach a wider audience.

We have called this Social 444 which is the process of creating multiple graphic adverts and auto posted on all relevant social media platforms to specifically promote content, not product.  This supports the fact that buyers want to learn first, therefore give them what they want.

We currently have over 300 adverts cycling every month on social media platforms.  Below is a selection to give you a better idea.

It is a well-known fact you need multiple daily adverts as repetition is the only way you can become a recognised brand to a prospect.  That’s why every business has installed marketing automation platforms (MAPs).  It clearly worked with B2Bs, even though MAPs were designed for the consumer market.

In additional to the graphic adverts, adopting the YouTube Shorts approach to communicating is an essential element of your outreach. 

Think of this in fishing terms; If you want to attract fish, you need to put out ground bait or chum if you’re into sea fishing.  The same applies to small word-bites of graphics or videos.  The more easily digestible short form content you output, the higher the likelihood you will land larger prospects.

Part of this approach is to enhance engagement across platforms and develop effective advertising strategies that resonate with your target audience.

4. Content Creation: Copywriting, Visuals, and More

It goes without saying that quality content is crucial in establishing trust and credibility with your audience. Invest in professional copywriting to craft compelling messages and make use of visual content platforms like Mid Journey , Adobe Firefly and Microsoft Designer to create eye-catching visuals that capture your audience's attention.

However!  One of the big mistakes B2Bs have made is to allow a junior copywriter to bang out multiple short-form blogs and to also gate any long-form content because they think the prospect should be grateful for the content they chose to write.  This is a throw-back to the early days of selling where the salesperson was the gatekeeper of new ideas and technology.

To keep it short; Everything your B2B SaaS is about, is to help educate your prospects. Don’t forget, they’re bright, intelligent individuals like you, and at this moment in time, all they want to do is learn, if you’ll let them.  If they like what you say and how you present your case, they will buy from you when they’re ready.

Your articles need to be between 2,000 and 6,000 words long and have bullet lists, number lists, clickable table of contents, videos, graphics, infographics, and a variety of internal and external through the document to support what’s being written.

Naturally you will have a website and it needs to be easily navigable and so on, but it is only a website.  It is a repository for your online content, and once someone has read something, tell them what you’d like them to do next – I know it’s a call to action, but they will expect it, just like you will once you get to the end of this article.

5. Pivoting to Digital Selling

It is important you do not go down the path of employing telesales or business development representatives (BDR) to make outbound telephone calls.  Currently this has an approximate success rate of 300-1, which means you may only find one new potential prospect per week per BDR.  Also, telesales does not endear your business to buyers!

Imagine the old funnel illustration and you’ve just put your whole TAM in the top.  Statistics say that between 1% and 15% of your TAM are looking to begin their buying journey each week. From the thousands in your TAM database, that equates to a significant number of businesses who will want to ‘watch’ your show.

To put this is to perspective, using telesales, will find one person per week, live stream digital selling will find virtually all of them looking – and for less cost than you could ever imagine!

Embracing digital selling and live streaming will revolutionise your business growth. You can learn more about how to pivot to digital selling and take advantage of low-cost live streaming technology to deliver engaging and interactive content that resonates with your prospects in these linked articles on this website.

One final point.  It is critical you grasp the ideology behind digital selling; it is to provide everything an informed buyer would need, enabling them to self-serve, self-educate and establish an ROI before they buy anything.  The ultimate conclusion is for a buyer to complete the transaction online, and your first contact is to follow up with the implementation strategy, if required.  Because it’s B2B SaaS, and you’re not selling consumer products, this does not strictly qualify as ecommerce, it is 100% digital selling.

6. Monitoring Customer Success & Online Effectiveness

A strong online presence is essential for attracting new customers but retaining them means applying sensible customer success strategies based upon analytics as well as direct customer feedback.

But.  And there’s a big but.  Do not rely on organic or pay-per-click traffic.  You’re selling B2B SaaS not trainers or holidays.  Yes, you need to optimise your website with essential SEO and SEM techniques to ensure you deliver the best experience to your browsers, but not to increase visibility on search engines, let me explain.

You may already have heard of Google’s ‘really useful content update’ and a variety of press releases that explain how Google keep’s changing their algorithms and now intend to introduce AI to the search results, so it will not come as aa surprise to know that many B2Bs have had their content de-indexed as it does not suit the searches Google is looking to fulfil.  This is where your own efforts to promote your content comes into play by auto posting graphic adverts and YouTube Shorts.

Finally, leverage tools like Google Analytics and Tag Manager to track your marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions.  Yep, it all sounds good, however, there’s another element to this.  We recommend you tag all your content.  Here’s what we do as an example.  Every piece of content we have is tagged Primary, Secondary, General, Product, Services & How to Buy.  This enables you to identify what content you have, what’s needed and what you don’t need to worry about.

Here are the category definitions:

1. Primary - Thought leadership, business case, whitepapers, full engagement (2,000-5,000 words)
2. Secondary - Social proof, press releases, advertorial, infographics, podcasts, video, live streams
3. General - Low visibility, readers already know you
4. Product - Explanatory, educational, and detailed (2,000 words+)
5. Services – What you do, what you offer
6. How to Buy – Make sure they know how to do this, without you having to talk to them.  That’s real digital selling.

Whilst this article is about securing investment, it is imperative you communicate your prowess in structuring your marketing as it is these elements that will launch your success.  Below is a screenshot of our own metadata showing a 'product' tag for analytics reporting. 

By following this guide and incorporating digital selling and B2B live streaming into your marketing strategy, you will be well-equipped to raise funds and achieve business success. Embrace the power of digital transformation and fast-track your progress with salesXchange.

7. Business Plan - Budget Projections

The consensus it that there is nothing new when it comes to new business development.  The proposed new product, software or service may be new, but no one has anything new to offer when it comes to generating new business at scale.  We have had twenty years of digital marketing so what more can there be - right?

I am pleased to say they're wrong.  Read our About Us page to see how we have arrived at this spectacular juncture and how we work to help you achieve your goals. 

To provide you with sound information for your business plan, we have compiled a series of spreadsheets to help you identify all the necessary steps involved in the creating the marketing plan to be included with th ebudget projections along with cost templates and activity schedules. 

It will be an interesting exercise to compare what you have been told so far against our projections, enabling you to make a fully informed decision either way.  Follow this link to our Go Live page and click on Stage 4 to download the documents.

8. Key Takeaways

1. Leverage digital selling and B2B live streaming to reach and engage prospects more effectively.
2. Utilise email marketing and social media advertising to connect with your total addressable market.
3. Invest in quality content creation, including copywriting and visual elements.
4. Pivot to digital selling and implement live streaming for increased audience engagement.
5. Do not fear separation from pay-per-click or marketing automation SaaS as you can implement your own online presence without relying on SEO or SEM.

9. FAQs

What is the importance of digital selling and B2B live streaming in a marketing strategy?

Digital selling and B2B live streaming help businesses reach and engage their total addressable market/audience more efficiently and effectively, leading to increased sales and growth.

How can email marketing and social media advertising work together?

By combining email marketing and social media advertising, using Social 444 and auto posting, businesses can reach a wider audience and create a cohesive message across multiple platforms.

Why is long-form content important for a marketing strategy?

Long form quality content that is educational establishes trust and credibility with your audience, helping to convert prospects into customers and build long-lasting relationships.

What are the key components of an effective online presence?

A strong online presence includes open access quality content, podcasts, live streams and video, all regularly promoted across social platforms, finished off by an engaging and compelling About Us page.

How can I ensure that my marketing efforts are successful?

Define a plan upfront. Review it with experts before executing it.  Continuously track and measure the success of your efforts using data-driven strategies and tools. Adjust and optimise your tactics based on the insights gained from this data. Discover peaks and troughs and adapt accordingly.  Do not let single individuals call the shots unless you’re completely confident in their abilities.

10. Conclusion

By following the guidance in this article and exploring the various resources available on this website, you can gain a unique and powerful perspective on digital selling and B2B live streaming and incorporate these ideas into your business plan.

Equip yourself with the knowledge and tools necessary to revolutionise your business growth and outshine your competition. Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity to elevate your strategy and achieve unprecedented success.  And good luck with the investors.