Michael Sharkey and his brother Chris started Autopilot (visual marketing SaaS) in 2012 to help businesses grow through automation.
After two years they hit 2,500 customers, 24,500 free trial sign-ups and 21% MoM revenue growth…
How?
This post explainsâŚ
Letâs face itâŚ
Most B2B SaaS leads are rubbish.
Us #saasmarketers hand the sales team a bowl of dirt (of course, they are all great leads in our opinion) and they have to filter for gold.
At my current business, we created two Slack channels for inbound, marketing-generated leads:
- #hotleads
- #hothotleads
And we have a running joke with the sales team that actually, most of them are not that hot.
So what happens to the 90% of marketing qualified leads/free trials that enter our systems and never respond to outreach from sales?
Welcome to The Machine
First popularized by Digital Marketer in 2015, The Machine is an email marketing structure that nurtures, segments, converts, and up-sells leads that come in your system before they hit The Bucket.
Now most SaaS businesses nurturing processes look more like this:
Leads come in, and if they donât convert or sales canât get in touch they go straight into The Bucket and maybe get an email next year about a new product launch.
But I understand, we have 100 things to work on and The Machine is a complex, advanced system that takes months to implement.
Which is why Autopilot has implemented a simplified version that can be set up in a matter of hours.
1. Send a âtop of the funnelâ awareness email every week to everyone in The Bucket. If a lead doesnât click thatâs fine, the lead stays in The Bucket.
2. If a lead does click through, they receive a âmiddle of the funnelâ email with a customer story, case study or invite to a webinar.
3. If a lead then interacts with this content, send another email with an invite to a free trial or demo with the sales team.
This means that leads that donât engage only receive high value, content emails designed to educate the market and donât get pitched regularly.
They stay in The Bucket because they havenât expressed enough interest to leave.
The best part?
This all happens automatically, giving us #saasmarketers more time to head out to gather moreâŚ
What did we learn?
That you may have a valuable gold mine of leads sitting your Bucket waiting to be nurtured.