Using Customer Data to Win SaaS Sales

Every SaaS company constantly collects a wide range of customer information - interactions, billing records, onboarding questions, requests, issues reported, tickets opened, meetings held and the list goes on. In this article we’ll share some lessons we learned while building a product for revenue teams, and list some of the best ways to leverage your data.
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in SaaS, unless your product is fully self-served which is still rare, a salesperson's touch is almost always required somewhere down the funnel. Whether your team reaches out proactively, returns on inbound leads or gets involved late in the funnel for package selection and upsell - your ability to quickly connect and understand a customer is crucial to perform.

But what does high touch mean in the context of customer information? Beyond more communication with the customer, what can a salesperson do and how does all that intel play into it?

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Knowledge is power

Your familiarity with the customer and their business empowers you to offer the best product package, at the best moment in their business lifecycle, and therefore get better results. There’s plenty of customer data to fuel your understanding:
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Checking previous transactions and past product usage can guide you to offer the next package, tracking requests and reported bugs can help understand what challenges they are facing with the product up to that point, and even checking their personnel growth against available seats or subscriptions can drive the next upsell.
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The more customers feel that you understand their needs, the more likely they are to believe your solution is a good fit for the problem they are facing. Even learning customer names, roles, and product use cases are all things your customer expects, and validating that expectation increases close rate.
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In that way, your data empowers you to personalize your approach, assure the customer, which in turn will boost the confidence of decision makers in your product. In contrast, nothing muddles a conversation like asking questions that the customer has already answered before or suggesting solutions irrelevant to their business.
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It’s always worthwhile to dive into the data and get familiar. Go through customer emails, refresh yourself on past interactions in a chosen CRM platform, or just log into an integrative workspace like Ctrl to see it all and get ready for the call.
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Customers are here for the product

The heart of SaaS is the tech itself, and understanding the exact needs of each prospective customer is critical. A customer’s tickets will let you know what bothered them in the past, feature requests reveal their future plans and needs, even onboarding polls are valuable to understand their ecosystem and original use cases.
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The more you understand their business and tech, the better you are equipped to offer prospects the perfect package. Once again, you can save a lot of time by digging into the data using an integrative workspace instead of manually checking each entry across multiple platforms.
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Better workflows lead to more sales

Customers are savvy, and the only way to gain trust in the long run is by actually owning the process - following up on every task, not missing a single due date, delivering what the customer expected, even being on time for meetings strongly affects the customers trust in the SDR and faith in the brand as a whole.
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This might sound trivial, but the more customers you and your team engage, the harder it becomes to stay on top of your accounts. Keeping track of every task and engagement across an entire stack is extremely time consuming, but thankfully a wide selection of CRMs and workflow automation solutions can make it easier - with the right tool, you can update everything on the fly even while talking to the customer, and rest easy knowing you’ll never miss a follow up.
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Tech is still about people

It’s important to remember that at the end of the day, every SaaS purchase decision ever was made by a person, and people tend to choose to be where they feel good. Having a great product and solving a real pain might be step one, but providing great sales and service experiences will really lock down your next lead or up-sell.

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