If there is one thing all SaaS companies have in common regardless of size it’s the quest for growth. The faster the better. It’s a competitive landscape for new companies looking to scale. One thing that is within your control, however, is the tools you use to maximize results and team productivity.
There are a plethora of SaaS apps to help accelerate your own SaaS growth. The best thing about these products is the scalability – you can always upgrade the subscription depending on the workload. In this article, we’ve listed 13 essential apps every SaaS startup should consider using to run the business smoothly.
We’ve broken it down into 7 categories:
- Marketing automation
- Landing pages creation & optimization
- CRM
- Customer support
- Customer behavior analytics
- Project management
- Integration management
1. Marketing Automation – HubSpot
HubSpot began as a CRM tool – it offered a convenient way for marketers to track leads, nurture them according to their buyer persona, and then pass them onto the sales team. Over time, Hubspot’s product grew into an all-encompassing system, with additional tools like the HubSpot Marketing Hub, HubSpot Sales Hub, and HubSpot Service Hub.
As you can guess these systems have an endless count of features, but we’d like to focus particularly on the Marketing Hub. Developed to help companies boost website traffic and convert more visitors into leads, it offers a range of valuable features.
HubSpot basically assists your marketing efforts in each stage of the customer lifecycle. It allows you to automate your email drip campaigns without any code. You can select triggers, conditions, and actions so the right emails are sent to the right segment of your audience at the right time.
The core HubSpot CRM tool is free for everyone, but the Marketing Hub starts at a price of $45 a month, and like all other HubSpot tools you can upgrade according to the company’s needs.
2. Marketing Automation – Marketo
Adobe’s Marketo is an extremely smart tool, that uses AI to help create campaigns, personalize content and build audiences. According to Marketo’s website, the two key features of this software are lead scoring and lead nurturing.
But what makes Marketo so suitable for B2B SaaS companies is its advanced analytics functionality. It integrates perfectly with other marketing apps, social media channels, and CRM tools. That way Marketo is able to “turn your data points into conversion campaigns and applies a clear ROI to your efforts,” according to growth marketing expert Fung-Lin Wu.
3. Marketing Automation – Mailchimp
MailChimp is arguably the most popular email marketing software among starting businesses, mostly thanks to its generous freemium plan. In recent years, MailChimp gradually moved from being a dedicated email tool to a marketing hub for small businesses, that includes a landing page builder, a website builder, a social scheduling tool, and a creative assets tool. In this article, however, we’re going to focus on the features related to customer messaging and marketing automation.
MailChimp’s free plan allows you to create campaigns and trigger emails to nearly 2000 subscribers. This makes the software suitable for SaaS startups that generate a lot of content and are geared towards building their mailing list.
Another advantage of MailChimp is its great reporting tools. You can easily track the performance of your campaigns based on metrics like open rate and CTR, as well as get Google Analytics reports, social media stats, and more. However, there is also a downside that should be noted: It is possible to create simple, linear workflows in MailChimp, but they cannot be branched according to users’ actions.
If you’re looking for a more sophisticated system that to move prospects down the funnel, HubSpot is probably a better fit.
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4. Landing pages Creation & Optimization – Unbounce
Once you have generated some interest in your amazing software, you’re going to need a way to turn those leads into actual customers. This is where a well-designed landing page becomes invaluable.
With designers and engineers often being scarce or extremely busy, marketers in small startups are often required to wear many hats. Unbounce is a great tool to help you with just that. You can create custom landing pages for your campaign without being proficient in Photoshop or having to code.
Another key benefit of Unbounce is how easy it is to run A/B tests and optimize as you go. If you A/B test 2 pages against each other, you can then configure the goals you want to track as conversions – whether it’s a form submission or a click on the CTA button. Switching between hats has never been easier.
5. CRM – Salesforce
There are a few high-quality CRM tools you could use, but Salesforce is the undisputed CRM market leader. There are several reasons Salesforce managed to cultivate such a large following. Firstly, it offers more features than nearly all of its alternatives – those include contact management, workflow creation, task management, collaboration tools, customer engagement tools, analytics, and an intuitive dashboard.
Sounds amazing, but what about the price? If this is the first thought that crossed your mind, you are not alone. There is indeed a perception that Salesforce is considerably more expensive than other CRM tools for the small business market.
That’s not necessarily the case. It all depends on what you want from your CRM system. Salesforce’s lowest-priced product, Salesforce Essentials, will cost you $25 a month and works perfectly well for simple contact management. You can always upgrade as your company grows.
6. Customer Support – FreshDesk
FreshDesk has all the features needed to help customer service teams streamline collaboration and automation. You can learn the customer information, add notes on the ticket, add a team member as a watcher to the ticket, send canned responses to frequently asked questions, and merge tickets that report on the same issue.
A helpful perk of this tool is Freshdesk Academy, which relieves some of the burdens of training your staff.
7. Customer Support – ZenDesk
ZenDesk is another great option for customer-service help-desk software. The Agent Workspace within ZenDesk provides customer support agents with what they need to collaborate with each other, other teams, and deliver quick personalized responses on any channel. You can easily integrate other support channels and tools such as Salesforce, too.
8. Customer Support – Intercom
Intercom is a cross-channel messaging platform to help your users learn their way around your SaaS product. For example, instead of sending a welcome email during onboarding, Intercom allows you to message the user in-app with a pop-up message. These first moments of using a new web app are often crucial for retention.
Other features include a team inbox, outbound messages, chatbots, and more. There are three plans you can choose from: conversational support, conversational customer engagement, and conversational marketing. Prices vary depending on the size of the organization.
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9. Customer Behavior Analytics – HotJar
In order to optimize your website, you need to know how users are actually experiencing it. You could use Google Analytics for the same purpose, but there are some things numbers and graphs alone can’t reveal. Like whether visitors found what they were searching for and left happily or got stuck and left in frustration. In other words, GA does a good job of showing you what’s happening on your website, but it doesn’t tell you why it’s happening.
That’s where HotJar comes in. It’s as close as you’re gonna get to actually being in your users’ heads. It allows you to look at recorded visitor’s sessions and heatmaps and see exactly how they interact with individual page elements and sections. What kind of information do they expect to find? Is it there? What do they ignore?
It’s a great solution for sourcing data in a visual and digestible way, which can later be used to build strategies for higher conversion rates.
10. Customer Behavior Analytics – CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg is another heat mapping tool that basically tracks how your visitors interact with your site. Using a mouse-tracking technology, CrazyEgg allows you to see firsthand what your users click on the most, which parts of the page are getting completely ignored, and which elements of your page get the most engagement.
While HotJar tends to be more popular among B2C companies, CrazyEggmight is a better fit for lead gen websites. All in all, both tools will provide you with valuable data for website optimization. It’s worth noting that HotJar has a free forever plan while CrazyEgg only offers a free 30-day trial on all subscription plans.
11. Project Management – Monday
Private boards: Only visible to you and the team members you invite
You can cycle between these boards, and switch between modes according to your needs. Other features include checklists, automation, and integration with various other third-party apps. There are multiple types of boards:
- Main boards: visible to all team members
- Shareable boards: boards you can share with guests, like clients or freelancers
- Private boards: Only visible to you and the team members you invite
Unfortunately, there is no freemium plan. Paid plans start at $39/month for five users.
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12. Project Management – Trello
Trello is a project management software that’s used by some of the leading businesses in the world. We’re talking about the likes of Google and Adobe. It’s lightweight and straightforward to use.
Users can create a board for each project and add new topics and ideas, set deadlines, and assign team members with different tasks.
Trello doesn’t have tools for managing and rebalancing resources across many projects, so it’s better suited for smaller teams that manage only a few projects at the same time. Features like reporting functionality and time tracking are missing entirely. Start with the free plan to see whether Trello meets your needs.
13. To Tie It All Together – Zapier
If you have been in the SaaS industry for a while, it’s safe to assume you are familiar with Zapier. It is, after all, the best tool out there to manage integrations. With more than 2,000 apps working with Zapier, there is hardly a manual process or repetitive task that you can’t automate. How does that look like in practice? For example, you can route new leads from HubSpot to Clearbit for data enrichment, and then transfer that new information to the contact’s record on HubSpot.
You could also post copies of the company’s social media posts into a dedicated Slack channel. That way, everyone is automatically notified when a post is up and is encouraged to like/comment/share.
As you see, the possibilities are abundant, to say the least. Zapier is the glue that will connect all of your web apps without any developer support.
Final Thoughts
Scaling a SaaS company isn’t an easy task. Lead generation and demand generation aren’t just about getting prospects through the door. How you deliver your brand and product, the onboarding experience, and the relationships you foster with new customers will eventually determine who sticks around.
The tried and tested software products of fellow SaaS companies will help improve and automate your business processes and workflow and give you the capacity you need to grow.
There is a reason the likes of HubSpot and Salesforce have gotten to where they are. They were some of the earliest adopters of innovative SaaS tools.
Of course, the products we listed are just a small fraction of what’s out there. If you had an awesome experience with a product we haven’t mentioned, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to drop us a comment below!
