My goal is for the article below is to be one of the top 3 most useful articles you’ve ever read about growing your SaaS business.

Every week I’ll keep sending killer content on scaling your SaaS business…

This week, the featured article is my formula for building a CAC-based paid advertising, content marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales growth machine for your recurring revenue company…

I call it The SaaS Growth Formula.

So, let’s jump right in to the good stuff below…

Let me know what you think!

-Ryan Allis

The New SaaS Growth Formula
By Ryan Allis, Founder of SaaS Circle & Former CEO/Co-Founder of iContact

There’s a simple formula I use every time when I’m helping SaaS companies grow…

I’ve used this formula to:

• Grow iContact to $50 million in annual revenue and 70,000 paying customers and then sell it for $169M
  

• Help the growth-oriented SaaS founders and CEOs I’ve worked with like Derek Johnson of Tatango, Brandon Bornancin of Seamless.ai, Gabe Padva of Revenue Accelerator, Marc Castro of Datalyse, and CC Puan of Green Packet build a sales growth machine.

I call it, The Growth Formula.

I’ve used it to grow my businesses and have also shared this formula with the CEOs I coach -- and have seen really good sales results -- often seeing sales growth above 100% in the year after implementation.

The Growth Formula is a simple Go-To-Market (GTM) framework for growing your business using digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales efforts.

I call this the NEW Growth Formula because I’ve recently (today for the first time, actually) added in step 2 — building a Content Marketing Machine into the article. This is critical to establish clear dominance, authority, and omnipresence in your niche.

Many SaaS companies never take off and pass the $10M in sales mark because they rely only on customer word-of-mouth and the sales efforts of the CEO and founders, who then get exhausted and burnt out. That’s a formula for disaster and slow growth.

Implementing the four elements of The Growth Formula will help you rapidly scale your company by building a scientific and scalable system of lead generation through digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales efforts.

If you take the time to truly understand this formula -- AND actually implement it in your business -- your company’s sales will take off -- and instead of growing sales at 10-20% per year you can grow at 100% per year or higher.

So, take ten minutes and read the below… it will be worth it.

What is The Growth Formula?

So what’s the formula for SaaS sales growth? Let’s get to it.

The Growth Formula has four components.

In shorthand notation, the formula is shown as:

G(f) = SA + CM + IS + OS

Here’s what this means:

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Content Marketing + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales

Understanding each of the four areas in depth is critical to accelerating the growth of your company. Let’s break down each component.

If you want to grow, implementing all four of these disciplines properly is absolutely essential. And I know you want your business to win… so let’s dive in.

Below I’ll describe how to set up a profitable paid advertising campaign across all major ad platforms (for both cold traffic and retargeting), how to create a killer organic content marketing machine, how to build an in-house team of sales reps to respond to all the warm leads you’ll be getting from paid ads, and how to set up a scalable outsourced or in-house SDR-led outbound sales campaign.

Here we go...

Step 1: Scalable Advertising - Growing Rapidly By Investing in Profitable Ad Spend

The first part of The Growth Formula is Scalable Advertising.

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Content Marketing + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales

Regardless of whether you’re a B2B company (selling to businesses) or B2C company (selling to consumers), the foundational element to growth is scalable advertising.

Without it, your lead volume will never be high enough to get past $10M in annual sales -- a common place that many companies plateau at.

I call it “Scalable Advertising” because it is profitable advertising that is done with rigor, clear tracking, and an analytical mind. When you advertise with rigor and tracking set up properly, you can know immediately if a campaign is profitable or not.

Many CEOs I talk to don’t understand how to scale their advertising. They either don’t advertise their SaaS products and services at all, or if they do, they throw money at Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, or agencies without clarity first on what they can afford to acquire a customer.

Knowing your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC) is essential BEFORE you spend a dime on ads.

So here’s how you figure out how much you can spend to acquire a customer.

There are two key elements you must know to set the foundation for scientific advertising:

1. Lifetime Value (LTV) = How much a customer spends with you during the lifetime of them being a customer.
   

2. Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC) = How much you’re willing to spend to acquire an incremental customer up front. This should be a percentage of your lifetime value, roughly between 10% and 33% of your total lifetime revenue from the client, depending on how fast you want to grow and your profit margins.

How to Calculate Your Company’s Lifetime Value (LTV)

Here are three examples so you can learn how to calculate your own company’s lifetime value (LTV):

Example 1: Subscription Business ($50/Mo.)

For example, if you run a subscription business in which customers pay you $50 per month and on average stay around for 36 months before canceling, then you have a Lifetime Value (LTV) of $1800. Knowing that you make $1800 in sales from an average customer -- you can then decide how much of that amount you’d be willing to spend to acquire a customer up front. Depending on your margins and how fast you want to grow, you may choose to spend as much as $600 up front in advertising costs to acquire a new customer. If you want slow growth, invest around 1/10th of LTV into S&M. If you want fast growth, invest up to 1/3rd of LTV into S&M.

Example 2: B2B With Large Contract Sizes ($75,000)

As another example, if you sell to businesses and your average Annual Contract Value (ACV) is $75,000 and your customers stay 2 years on average before canceling, then you have a Lifetime Value (LTV) of $150,000. Depending on your margins and how fast you want to grow, you may choose to spend as much as $50,000 up front in advertising costs to acquire a new customer.

Example 3: Consumer Retail Ecommerce ($65/order)
As a last example, if you sell retail products to consumers and the average order is $65 and an average customer purchases 3 times in a year, then you know you will make $195 in sales from a single customer in a year. Depending on your margins and how fast you want to grow, you may choose to spend as much as $65 up front in advertising costs to acquire a new customer.

If you operate a subscription business, tracking customer retention is easy. You simply use a tool like BareMetrics (or the subscription tracking tool within Stripe) to track your paying subscribers, MRR, and ARR.

Once you’re successfully tracking customer retention, you can estimate the lifespan of each customer using this formula:

Customer Lifespan = 1 / Churn

If for example your customers cancel their accounts at a rate of 3% per month, then the number of months of life of an average customer (their lifespan) is:

Customer Lifespan = 1 / 0.03 = 33.3 months

Once you know your customer lifespan, you can multiply it by the average amount you earn per customer per month to calculate the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer (as I wrote about in the section on Scalable Advertising).

The whole science of Customer Retention revolves around how to increase the Lifetime Value of your customer.

Lifetime Value = Average Revenue Per Customer x Lifespan

So for iContact, we had $50 per month for 36 months on average and generated an LTV of $1650.

To increase your LTV, you work on increasing Average Revenue Per Customer (through cross-selling and upselling) and on Customer Lifespan by improving customer retention (through providing a great product/service to your customer and working to anticipate their upcoming needs).

Once you know how much a customer is worth to you, you can decide on how much you’re willing to spend to acquire a new customer. This is called your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC).

So, if you have a business, take a few minutes now to calculate your Max CAC.

And don’t forget to take a moment to join our weekly SaaS CEO mastermind here. We meet every Wednesday!

What To Do As a Venture Backed Company?

Venture-backed companies, or those with lots of cash in the bank, who want to grow at 100%+ per year often will spend 25-35% of the lifetime value of their customers up front in customer acquisition costs across channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Adwords, Google Display Network, YouTube, affiliate marketing, radio, television, and direct mail. They will either hire an in-house team or an external agency to manage their advertising campaigns.

I own the agency Hive Digital and recommend using them for SEO/PPC as I’ve trained the team in my CAC-based advertising model.

For a SaaS company focused on growth, we recommend spending about 1/3rd of total customer lifetime value upfront on sales and marketing to acquire the customer.

While investing in customer growth like this eats up cash up front (and requires a healthy balance sheet), these companies are purchasing an ever-growing annuity stream of revenue--and these companies are usually valued as a multiple of their revenues. At the end of the day, growth is what matters for venture-backed companies -- and a company growing at 100% per year will be valued 4x higher than a company growing at 50% per year.

What To Do As a Non-Venture Backed Company?

If your company isn’t venture-backed (90% of SaaS companies aren’t) and you’re managing cash closely and don’t have a huge buffer to fall back on, start by setting your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC) at around 10% of the lifetime value of an average customer, and then building up as you go.

• If for example you get an average of $150 per month for 30 months from your customers before they cancel, then you have a lifetime value of $4500 and you can spend around $450 in upfront advertising costs to get an incremental new customer -- while still maintaining a healthy cash balance.
  

• If for example you get an average of $100,000 per year for two years from your customers before they cancel, then you have a lifetime value of $200,000 and you can spend around $20,000 in upfront advertising costs to get an incremental new customer - while still maintaining a healthy cash balance.

Over time, as your sales grow (assuming your prices are high enough and you’ve built in enough margin for your company), you’ll start to build up a larger and larger cash balance in your business.

Accelerating Your Growth As You Build Up Your Cash Balance

As you build up your cash balance, if you want to continue to accelerate your growth you can:

1. Slowly begin to increase your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC), and begin using your higher cash balance to invest in faster growth.
   

2. Take on capital from sources of non-dilutive revenue-based financing companies like FounderPath, ClearBanc, or Indie.vc for additional capital
   

3. Take on a long-term loan from a bank or through a loan marketplace like Fundera or Lendio.
   

4. Use your higher revenue growth rates to explore raising a round of venture capital funding (usually you’ll need at least $1M+ in ARR and 50%+ annual growth rates to catch the eyes of most venture investors).

Calculating Your Actual Customer Acquisition Cost

Once you know your desired Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC), start by doing a test yourself (or via an agency) of some advertising campaigns and be sure you spend enough of a test budget to be able to acquire at least 2-3 customers so you can determine what your actual Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is. You’ll need to allocate a test budget large enough to actually get a tracked paying customer from advertising to be able to calculate your CAC.

You’ll want to establish what your:

• Lead Acquisition Cost (LAC) - the cost to get someone to fill out either an interest form, book a demo, download a lead magnet, join your email list, or start a free trial.
  

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) - the cost in advertising spend of an incremental new paying customer. As long as your CAC is lower than your Max CAC, you’re in business and it’s time to scale!

For example, let’s say you spend a $10,000 test budget across Facebook Ads and Google Adwords to determine what your actual LAC and CAC is. From this $10k spend, let’s say you get 50 leads and 5 new customers. This means:

Ad Spend: $10,000

Lead Acquisition Cost (LAC): $200

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): $2000

Let’s say you sell a B2B product that costs $12,000. Now, you’ve discovered a way to spend $2,000 to get $12,000 in up front sales. Most business owners would spend $2k to get $12k in revenue, especially knowing that you can upsell and cross-sell that customer on other products and services. You’ve found a scalable campaign!

You can calculate your Lead Acquisition Cost in a matter of a few days and you can usually calculate your Customer Acquisition Cost in a month or two (it depends on how long your sales cycle is).

Once you find a scalable advertising channel, ramp up the spend by about 20% per week, continuing to track the LAC and CAC each week.

Don’t Give Up On the First Few Tries - The Holy Grail is Finding a Profitable Scalable Channel

Be sure to not give up if you don’t find a profitable channel in the first try. It can often take trying multiple agencies, multiple ad networks, many weeks ensuring tracking is working correctly, many landing pages, and many offers to get a profitable and scalable model working. Once you get it working however, you’ve discovered a major source of leads and revenue growth that will substantially increase the value of your company.

Even brand marketing these days is done scientifically, based on the lift in awareness and purchases within zip codes and viewing areas. If a company spends $500,000 on a brand campaign in Miami, they track the change in sales from the area (in-store or online) and are able to pretty closely tie spend to results.

At iContact, the year before we sold the company to Vocus, we were able to spend $2 million per month in mostly online advertising to acquire 4,000 new customers per month at a $500 Customer Acquisition Cost. Those customers paid us an average of $1,650 over their lifetime -- and using this method we reached 70,000 paying customers and sold the company for $169 million.

PRO TIP #1: Be sure to turn on retargeting ads right away. I like to spend about 5-10% of my total ad budget on getting people who’ve already come to my site (and downloaded lead magnets, etc.) to come back.

PRO TIP #2: Create a lookalike audience on Meta using your current and past customer lists and active prospect lists to show your ads to people who are similar in terms of demographics/psychographics/and work roles. Start with a 0.1% overlap for maximum similarity then expand it over time.

PRO TIP #3: We’ll get to this later — but re-use the email list you build in the Outbound Sales step with Seamless.ai, Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Uplead to BUILD AN AD AUDIENCE on Meta and LinkedIn. You can actually upload the email list of cold leads within your target market and show those people ads. You’ll appear OMNIPRESENT to them at a very low cost ($1 to $3 per click for highly qualified B2B leads). Send them to a landing page with a compelling lead magnet to get unheard of qualified and engaged B2B leads for $20 to $40 each.

Step 2: Content Marketing - Building a Content Marketing Machine that Demonstrates Your the Top Provider in Your Niche

If you can produce killer content regularly (like this newsletter article for example) you can demonstrate that you know what the heck you’re talking about and that potential customers should buy from you. Why? Because you clear know your stuff.

So take a page out of my playbook and every week (religiously) write a really good high quality article or case study and send it to people. Who do you send it to?

1. Warm leads on your existing email list

2. Outbound Leads in your specific target market (people usually appreciate highly relevant and high quality content)

3. Existing customers as a thank you for being a customer

Any SaaS business should be able to build up a 10,000 person BeeHiiv newsletter within their niche within 3-4 months. If you don’t have a 10k+ subscriber weekly newsletter within your niche — what are you even doing trying to compete in that niche!? Get on it!

I find a tool like BeeHiiv to have a MUCH higher deliverability rate than a CRM tool like Hubspot or Salesforce.

Hire a content marketer if you need to. Hire a ghostwriter if you need to. Hire a designer to make it look good if you need to.

Just be consistent. Remember that the formula of success in life is vision + belief + action + consistency. It’s the consistency part people mess up with content marketing.

Post the same content each week to your LinkedIn newsletter and then get a VA team to turn a 1000 word article into many different Twitter/X threads, LinkedIn posts, and company IG account (pictures of quotes with longer descriptions).

Your job is to write the super high quality long-form piece.

If you can do 1 long form piece per week you can then apply Justin Welsh’s ContentOS system via an EA to turn it into many smaller pieces of content each week.

1 long form killer piece per week, with the right EA, can turn into:

• 1 Email Newsletter

• 1 LinkedIn Newsletter

• 3 Blog Posts

• 20 Twitter/X threads

• 14 IG Posts

• 14 TikTok Videos (15 sec max)

• 7 IG Reels (90 sec max)

• 7 YouTube Videos (3 min max)

• 7 LinkedIn Carousels

It’s all about omnipresence and owning your market and mindshare within your niche so that when buyers are ready to buy they already know who to buy from.

If you don’t like making content, get someone on your team that their job is SIMPLY TO PRODUCE GREAT CONTENT (written and short-form video) all day long.

Step 3: Inbound Sales - Building an Automated Inbound Sales System That Turns Your Leads Into Paying Customers

The third part of The Growth Formula is Inbound Sales (IS).

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Content Marketing + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales

You’ve now spent money to get valuable leads and to build a content EMPIRE -- yet the biggest cause of companies not growing is that they don’t follow-up with the leads they have. The large majority of sales happen after the 3rd follow-up.

Inbound sales involves reaching out to leads that have already come in the door from paid advertising, social media, word-of-mouth and search engine optimization through both automated methods (retargeting, drip campaigns) and non-automated methods (calls from sales development reps).

Once you get lots of inbound leads in the door from scalable advertising, it’s time to build an automated follow-up system (using your CRM system like Hubspot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, HighLevel, Drip, Ontraport, etc.).

I recommend putting all your leads on a 180-day nurturing campaign (sending a piece of automated valuable content to them automatically every 5 days for the first month after they enter your pipeline, and then every 10 days after that). Taking a week or two to develop this content if you don’t already have it is very worthwhile. Don’t skip this step!

You’ll increase your lead conversion by 50% simply by sending 30 pieces of followups.

People don’t complain about getting TOO MUCH VALUABLE content. They complain about getting irrelevant crap. If they leave your list, that’s okay.

As mentioned, be sure to turn on retargeting advertising across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the Google Display Network so that your brand becomes omnipresent (seen everywhere) at a very low cost for those who have already visited your web site. This provides AIR COVER for your sales team at a very low cost.

I recommend using a 180-day (maximum number of days available) Facebook, Instagram, and Google Display Network retargeting campaign so they see your brand everywhere (for a very low cost) while they are considering whether to do business with you. You can show your ads across mobile and web to every single website visitor and email subscriber you have for a very low cost (usually around $3 per 1000 ad impressions). Retargeting is a very low cost way of increasing your visitor to sale conversion ratio.

At iContact we built up a 50 person sales team. On our sales team, we had about:

• 20 Sales Development Reps (who vetted the leads that were coming in for 15-day free trials)

• 15 Sales Executives (who closed the deals)

• 20 Account Managers (who managed the revenue once it was closed)

We were selling both our regular product iContact (that cost $10 to $699 per month) and a premium product called “iContact Enterprise” that cost from about $1,000 to $25,000 per month depending on how many emails you sent.

Under the great leadership of our former SVP of Sales Kevin Fitzgerald and Director of Sales Eric Sternkopf, due to our inbound sales team we grew the revenues of the iContact Enterprise product from $0 to $20 million.

The Steps to Automating Inbound Sales

1. Get your leads coming into a CRM system like HubSpot, Salesforce, HighLevel, Pipedrive, or Ontraport
   

2. Create an automated 180 day follow-up sequence to build rapport and credibility with your leads, sending high-quality content automatically every 5-10 days. Include information about your business and your products and services with each message.
   

3. Turn on an omnipresence retargeting campaign. Use retargeting on Facebook and Google Display Network to show ads to your web site visitors and to your leads to create the impression that your brand is everywhere online and to re-engage them in the sales cycle with additional reports, downloads, lead magnets, and more.
   

4. Have your Sales Development Reps (SDRs) follow-up immediately (ideally within 1 hour) for every lead that comes in. The companies that grow are the companies that follow-up with every single lead within 60 minutes of it coming in (during business hours). The companies that don’t are the ones that take 3 days to reply. Speed wins. Create the rule that any leads that come in that day must be followed-up with before the day is over.
   

5. Use SMS and WhatsApp when possible. When a lead comes in, if you’ve collected the mobile phone number of the lead, have your Sales Development Rep (SDR) immediately send a personal 1:1 text message to the lead to engage them immediately. If what you’re selling usually requires a phone call, have the SDR offer to get on the phone with them right then. Speed and personal connection wins.

Step 4: Outbound Sales - Creating a Growing Pipeline of Vetted Leads for $10K+ Deals

The fourth component of The Growth Formula is Outbound Sales (OS).

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Content Marketing + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales

While inbound sales involves reaching out to leads that have already come in the door, outbound sales involves generating new leads through cold prospecting (usually via 1:1 customized emails, FedEx packages, or by telephone).

Outbound Sales is mostly applicable to B2B companies with products or services that cost at least $10,000 annually (the economics simply don’t work with lower cost products). If you sell a product to consumers that is less than $10k, this section isn’t that relevant for you -- and I recommend focusing primarily on Scalable Advertising (SA) and Inbound Sales (IS).

If you sell a product or services to businesses that is $10k or higher, this section is critical, so keep reading.

In my experience I’ve found that outbound sales works well for B2B sales where the annual contract value is $10k or higher. It works even better where the annual contract value is $25k or higher -- as then there is enough margin to cover the cost of making the sale.

So how do you implement outbound sales? Well, you can build an in-house team or you can bring on a sales development agency that will do it for you and simply set up meetings on the calendars of your sales people.

I recommend outsourcing your outbound sales efforts for at least a year to get it going quickly without having to bring on additional SDRs in-house.

For outbound sales, I recommend using a company called Revenue Accelerator. I’ve used them personally for my clients and they do a really great job. They charge a monthly retainer fee plus a per meeting cost. They only make money if they are sending you vetted meetings.

How to Do Outbound Sales Prospecting

Let’s say you sell accounting audit services with an Average Contract Value (ACV) of $50k per year to companies with $10M to $200M per year in sales in the United States and that the decision maker you are selling to is the CFO and Controller.

With this example, your Sales Development Representatives (or your outsourced agency like RevenueAccelerator) would:

1. Go on ZoomInfo, Uplead, LeadIQ or Seamless, all sources of contact information for B2B sales leads.
   

2. Create a list of the prospects who fit the criteria of the people you are targeting. For example, all the CFOs and Controllers in the USA at companies with $10M to $200M in sales yields 43,267 results on Uplead.
   

3. Download this list of leads (or a smaller portion of the list you want to start with). The cost per lead usually ranges from $0.05 to $0.50 per lead depending on how many you buy at once. Seamless also offers an unlimited plan. Only download the leads you actually plan to reach out to within 72 hours. Never let lead data go stale.
   

4. Use a tool like YAMM, Reply.io, Outreach, or Hubspot (or your email inbox for slower speed) to send a customized 1:1 email to each prospect, demonstrating that they have spent time to research the person (via LinkedIn) and the company (via the web site).
   

5. Using the above tools, one Sales Development Rep (SDR) can send out around 100 of these customized 1:1 emails per day (or as many as 200 if they are partnered with a data research associate who writes the custom text that goes out to each lead). You can also follow the same strategy using LinkedIn InMail and Linkedin Sales Navigator. Be sure that you have entry-level SDRs sending out these messages (at $50k or so compensation packages) and not $150k per year sales executives -- or the economics won’t work.
   

6. The goal of these 1:1 messages should be to demonstrate you’ve done real research on the company and get the person to reply. Then, your SDR can build a relationship and set up a Zoom Meeting or Demo for your Sales Executives.
   

7. If you don’t want to do this in-house, we recommend using a sales development agency like Revenue Accelerator, Canada to do this for your company on a retainer + per meeting cost.

Why Outsource Outbound Sales?

Here are a few reasons we recommend outsourcing your Outbound Sales to a company that specializes in the field like Revenue Accelerator:

1. You’ll need licenses to tools like ZoomInfo, Uplead, Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Seamless.
   

2. You’ll need to hire a Sales Development Rep (SDR) or two in-house, which can cost around $50k to $60k per year per rep.
   

3. You’ll need to know how to set up your outbound reachout tool (YAMM, Reply.io, Outreach, or Hubspot) and set up separate domain names for email so you aren’t reaching out from your main domain.
   

4. Getting the lead acquisition, lead research, and lead messaging right (body content/subject lines) often takes 6+ months to learn to do right -- and that’s if you know what you’re doing.

What we find to be easier is to let the experts like Revenue Accelerator take care of the outbound sales up until the point where they generate the vetted and booked meeting.

Once the meeting is booked by the Outbound Sales Agency, it then goes onto the calendar of your in-house Sales Executive (who is generally very appreciative to be getting high-quality vetted meetings showing up on his or her calendar). You could also do these calls yourself in the beginning if your company is small, however to properly scale up your sales system you’ll need to build out both your lead generation processes and the size of your sales team.

In Summary - All Four Steps in Review

In review, there are four key parts to growth for most businesses:

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Content Marketing + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales

In shorthand notation, the formula is shown as:

G(f) = SA + CM + IS + OS

Here are all the steps to applying this formula to your business in review:

Step 1: Setting Up Your Scalable Advertising Campaigns to Generate Tens of Thousands of Leads

1. Calculate Your Lifetime Value (LTV)

2. Calculate Your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC) - 5% to 33% of your LTV, depending on your margins and how fast you want to grow.

3. Put a test budget to work to calculate how much it costs to acquire a lead (Lead Acquisition Cost or LAC) and how much it costs to acquire a customer (Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC).

4. If your CAC is lower than your Max CAC, scale up the campaign until you are acquiring as many customers as your can.

5. If you can’t figure out how to do this in-house, try a good agency like Hive Digital (I own this agency and they are good!)

Step 2: Building a Content Marketing Machine

1. Start a weekly newsletter on BeeHiiv (or via your existing CRM + Blog)

2. Send it to your customers and prospects

3. Start posting killer content weekly — one long-form epic article or case study per week. Provide IMMENSE value to build your authority and credibility in your niche.

4. Hire a VA to turn your weekly long-form article into many microposts and microvideos across LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Aim to win in all four types of content:

   1. Long-form written (1000-5000 word posts like this one)

   2. Short-from written (Many punchy 20-100 word posts for social media, using content from the long form hub)

   3. Long-form video on YouTube (3 min - sad but true that 3 mins is long form these days)

   4. Short-form video on IG, FB Reels, LinkedIn, TikTok (15-90 seconds short key points that cover just one microtopic).

5. Write once for long-form email/blog, then have your VA publish 20x throughout the week across 7 other platforms based on that initial post. You can be the person in the video or bring someone else on who becomes the face!

Step 3: Automating Inbound Sales to Close Your Leads

1. Get your leads coming into a CRM system like HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, HighLevel, or Ontraport
   

2. Create an automated 180 day follow-up sequence to build rapport and credibility with your leads, sending high-quality content automatically every 5-10 days. Include information about your business and your products and services with each message.
   

3. Turn on an omnipresence retargeting campaign. Use retargeting on Facebook and Google Display Network to show ads to your web site visitors and to your leads to create the impression that your brand is everywhere online and to re-engage them in the sales cycle with additional reports, downloads, lead magnets, and more.
   

4. Have your Sales Development Reps (SDRs) follow-up immediately (ideally within 1 hour) for every lead that comes in. The companies that grow are the companies that follow-up with every single lead within 90 seconds of it coming in. The companies that don’t are the ones that take 3 days to reply. Speed wins. Create the rule that any leads that come in that day must be followed-up with before the day is over. Use a tool like WooSender if you must to ensure you follow-up with all new leads with 90 seconds.
   

5. Use SMS and WhatsApp when possible. When a lead comes in, if you’ve collected the mobile phone number of the lead, have your Sales Development Rep (SDR) immediately send a personal 1:1 text message to the lead to engage them immediately. If what you’re selling usually requires a phone call, have the SDR offer to get on the phone with them right then. Speed and personal connection wins.

Step 4: Scaling Outbound Sales (Just for B2B companies with $10K+ Customer Value)

1. Go on ZoomInfo, Uplead, LeadIQ, Apollo, or Seamless, all sources of contact information for B2B sales leads.
   

2. Create a list of the prospects who fit the criteria of the people you are targeting. For example, all the CFOs and Controllers in the USA at companies with $10M to $200M in sales yields 43,267 results on Uplead.
   

3. Download this list of leads (or a smaller portion of the list you want to start with). The cost per lead usually ranges from $0.05 to $0.50 per lead depending on how many you buy at once. Seamless also offers an unlimited plan. Only download the leads you actually plan to reach out to within 72 hours. Never let lead data go stale.
   

4. Use a tool like YAMM, Reply.io, Outreach, or Hubspot (or your email inbox for slower speed) to send a customized 1:1 email to each prospect, demonstrating that they have spent time to research the person (via LinkedIn) and the company (via the web site).
   

5. Using the above tools, one Sales Development Rep (SDR) can send out around 100 of these customized 1:1 emails per day (or as many as 200 if they are partnered with a data research associate who writes the custom text that goes out to each lead). You can also follow the same strategy using LinkedIn InMail and Linkedin Sales Navigator. Be sure that you have entry-level SDRs sending out these messages (at $50k or so compensation packages) and not $150k per year sales executives -- or the economics won’t work.
   

6. The goal of these 1:1 messages should to be to demonstrate you’ve done real research on the company and get the person to reply. Then, your SDR can build a relationship and set up a Zoom Meeting or Demo with for your Sales Executive.

If you don’t want to do this in-house, we recommend using a sales development agency like Revenue Accelerator out of San Francisco to do this for your company on a retainer + per meeting cost.

Want to Hire Me to Install This System in Your Business?

Let’s explore working together and see if there’s a mutual fit. I’ve recently finished up a successful four year assignment, so that’s why I’m reaching out and doing some proactive marketing to find the next right clients. You can book a 30 minute exploratory call with me here.

About this article: If you like this article and want more my free 1240 slide SaaS Growth Playbook goes into even greater detail about each stage of this process.

How to Work Together: To learn more about our B2B SaaS CEO Coaching service working directly with Ryan, visit www.hillcanyon.com.

Join the Community: For more how-to-scale-up support and content, apply to join SaaS Circle, our mastermind community for growth-focused SaaS CEOs. We offer a free two-week trial to the community for qualified SaaS CEOs and founders.

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Four Helpful Free SaaS Growth Resources

The most in-depth guide for scaling up SaaS companies from $0 to $50M in ARR. Including over 1,200 slides on every aspect of SaaS scaling.

A fourteen page in-depth PDF on we take each CEO client through a six-phase process designed to increase lead volume, customer acquisition, and revenue growth — and then scale up the sales team, executive team, and investor support as we help you prepare for future fundraising rounds (if needed) or an exit (if desired).

A twenty page in-depth PDF on how to scale a B2B SaaS Company from $1M to $50M ARR. Covering CAC-based customer acquisition, sales team scaling, venture capital markets, and preparing for the exit.

The SaaS Growth Formula was written to help SaaS CEOs who are focused on growing their company's sales - by implementing a simple formula called The Growth Formula. This formula is for companies that have already established product/market fit, already have paying customers, and are now ready to scale up through scientific and CAC-based digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales.

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