Marketing to boost the growth of a SaaS company
Our partnership with Advance B2B is very effective. We’ve been really in awe of how well they understand our and our customers’ fields. The quality of the content has been great."
Susanna Salkolahti
Marketing Manager, Visma Enterprise
Visma Enterprise is a European company that offers SaaS solutions in the fields of education and HR. In the spring of 2018, they decided to invest in growth.
“We believed that giving our growth a boost with modern digital marketing and especially content marketing was the wisest move”, explains Jukka Holm, the Managing Director of Visma Enterprise.
It was clear from the beginning that they needed a hand to get on the right track towards growth.
“Most of all we want to grow sustainably and make Visma Enterprise an industry leader. Because we’re digitalising our customer’s businesses, we need marketing to show that we have the right solutions and are the right partner for our customers”, Holm continues.
The marketing partner had to have a clear understanding of the SaaS world. According to Holm, this is what made Advance stand out.
“Right away we noticed that Advance B2B had great expertise and multiple references from the SaaS market space. They shared our vision of how marketing should be done, and I felt it was a good sign that they were doing similar things with their own marketing as well.”
In the beginning of the cooperation it was important for both parties that the focus would remain on the products that had the most potential for fast growth.
“Initially we focused on the products that we felt had the most growth opportunities. So, we began our cooperation with Advance by creating a separate growth strategy for our workforce management products”, Holm says.
Susanna Salkolahti, the Marketing Manager at Visma Enterprise, also agrees that the cooperation was started off on the right foot.
“From our point of view, the strategy phase was really great. The whole strategy was built on our marketing goals and the customer pain points Advance B2B discovered by interviewing the buyers and decision-makers of our customers. I think that this was an awesome starting point.”
Thanks to the cooperation, the amount of customers purchasing workforce management products has increased significantly: the lead goals set for 2019 were reached in the summer already. Due to this, it was possible to broaden the cooperation even further into the world of service and travel expense bills.
“In a short time we’ve seen a clear increase in the amount of leads. Also, people know the Visma brand a lot better now: they recognize our product and know what we do”, explains Salkolahti.
Holm firmly agrees with his colleague.
“I can honestly recommend Advance B2B. I think they have an awesome way of doing things and they’re clearly experts in growth marketing”, he says.
“They’re also super open to feedback and even ask for it so that they can constantly improve their ways of working. That’s really valuable for us, as once we notice that something’s not working for our business in the best way, it’s easy to start the discussion from either our side or Advance’s.”
According to Salkolahti, Advance B2B has quickly merged into a natural part of Visma Enterprise marketing, and now people from both sides are working smoothly together.
“I like the fact that Advance B2B is a part of our marketing team, and our experts can work together with them. That’s actually the best thing about the whole cooperation.”
Currently the cooperation consists of 4-week sprints. During each sprint, the focus is on different processes driving growth, like content production and advertising. After each sprint, the results and learnings are reviewed and taken into account when planning the next sprint. As an example, during the cooperation, content clusters have been created to reach and recognize new customers.
“Our partnership with Advance B2B is very effective. We’ve been really in awe of how well they understand our and our customers’ fields. The quality of the content has been great”, says Salkolahti.
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