This article will walk you through the customer acquisition funnel for SaaS companies. The primary goal is to help you design, analyze, and optimize your customer acquisition process.
This article will walk you through the customer acquisition funnel for SaaS companies. The primary goal is to help you design, analyze, and optimize your customer acquisition process. We'll explore different perspectives on moving customers through lifecycle stages and demonstrate how marketing, sales, and customer success teams should collaborate, including where their responsibilities lie. You'll find practical ideas to test and implement.
Your customer acquisition funnel's effectiveness can be measured by tracking how prospects move between stages. The handoff points—from marketing to sales, and from sales to customer success—are particularly critical, as they often risk losing prospects, missing data, or creating miscommunication about responsibilities, definitions, and success metrics.
Content strategy is one of the most effective ways to increase the velocity of prospects moving through stages. As we examine each step in the funnel, you'll see why analyzing content strategy from a customer lifecycle perspective is crucial. For simplicity, this customer acquisition diagram excludes references to target customer profiles, product positioning, and value messaging. These three topics require a separate discussion.
Other pieces that aren't covered in this diagram are Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). These were omitted to maintain clarity.
The customer acquisition funnel is a process of tracking and monitoring how effective the company is in attracting, engaging, converting, and retaining its customers.
Before we dive into the detailed discussion, let me answer a couple of questions.
1. Will this customer acquisition framework fit my SaaS company?
The Customer Acquisition Framework presented below is just ONE of the ways for a SaaS company to track customer acquisition effectiveness. Obviously, Slack’s customer acquisition strategy will be different from the one Salesforce uses. Companies with similar business models, product prices, and average deal size will have similar customer acquisition funnels. Please adjust and adapt this approach to fit your specific needs.
2. Why create another Customer Acquisition Funnel?
Many experienced investors, founders, and marketers have already written about customer acquisition funnels, SaaS sales cycles, SaaS metrics, and content strategy. Why do we need yet another customer acquisition funnel?
The customer acquisition framework for SaaS companies presented here has some key differentiations that are missing from other writings on this topic (based on my findings). It also highlights how content impacts customer acquisition and why Customer Lifecycle is important to track and consider when making decisions on how to grow your SaaS product faster. Here are some of the best resources for learning more about how SaaS companies design and track Customer Acquisition Funnels:
David Skok
Tom Tunguz