Best SaaS CRM to grow revenue

Best SaaS CRM for increased revenue growth

Software as a Service, or SaaS, is one of the fastest growing industries in recent times. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global SaaS market size is projected to grow at a CAGR of 18.7% to reach $908.21 billion by 2030.

Source: Fortune Business Insights

The right SaaS CRM can help your organization maximize its potential and achieve faster revenue growth. Learn how you can attract more leads and boost sales by choosing the most suitable SaaS CRM for your business needs.

What is SaaS CRM?

SaaS CRM or CRM for SaaS is a technology that helps SaaS businesses enhance customer relationships and boost sales. SaaS product companies have unique requirements for their customer relationship management (CRM) solution. CRM providers specializing in the industry are uniquely positioned to meet these requirements.

A well-placed CRM helps centralize your customer data, streamline sales processes, and automate tasks. CRM for SaaS also helps improve customer engagement and relationships with access to multichannel customer engagement tools and AI-powered insights for sellers.

Top 5 SaaS challenges and threats

Complex and inefficient sales tools

Many SaaS businesses rely on economies of scale to achieve profitability. However, scale is difficult to achieve with complex sales processes and sales tools that aren’t user-friendly. For small or new SaaS businesses, the best CRM software for small businesses can be incredibly beneficial. These solutions can help SaaS sellers overcome challenges such as poor lead management, lack of automation, AI-powered insights, and engagement tools, enabling them to convert leads into customers more effectively.

Poor lead quality, high customer acquisition cost

The competition is fierce when it comes to lead generation and new customer acquisition–leading to higher customer acquisition costs for SaaS businesses. According to Insider Intelligence, the average cost per lead via search ads, went up about 20% in 2021 and another 19% in 2022 while conversion rates fell by about 14% in 2022.

High churn rates

Customer retention is a big priority for SaaS sales teams to increase revenue and profitability. SaaS sales reps are under pressure to keep customers consistently engaged and develop processes to prevent possible churn.

Lack of sales insights

In the competitive SaaS industry, businesses must adapt quickly to sales trends. With a limited ability to measure sales performance and impact, SaaS businesses need help understanding how their strategies perform in the real world. Lack of insights limit sales management’s decision-making ability.

Longer sales cycles

SaaS sales teams may experience longer sales cycles due to a lack of sales pipeline visibility and limited insights on customer intent. Sales efficiency is reduced due to the inability to identify deals that are likely to close or insights on the next best action sellers should take.

SaaS CRM outcomes and business impact

CRM tools have a range of impact on SaaS businesses as they improve revenue growth and increase business efficiency.

Revenue growth

• Improved lead, deal conversion: Ensure your sales teams never miss out on opportunities with better sales visibility and AI-powered insights on leads and deals.

• Shortened sales cycle: Drive sales progress at scale with sales pipelines. Close deals without delay with workflow automation and insights on the next best action.

• Insights: Stay on top of sales performance with in-depth reporting, dashboards, and AI-powered analytics such as sales forecasting that help plan sales initiatives.

Business efficiency

• Sales team productivity Improve sales productivity with engagement tools, automation workflows, and AI-powered insights on the next best action.

• Collaboration Ensure your organization works together to close deals with a single source of truth. Bring your organization under one CRM.

• Improved loyalty, churn prevention Limit chances of churn with consistent customer engagement and stronger customer relationships across key accounts. Automate surveys and product reviews to understand customer satisfaction.

Top 10 must-have SaaS CRM features

1. Diverse SaaS business needs

Depending on their operations, SaaS companies can have varying business needs

• Their customers could be other businesses or individuals (B2B or B2C).

• The revenue models can be based on usage, subscriptions or licenses.

• Employee size and business maturity can range from startups and small businesses to mid-market and large enterprises.

• Sales strategies could include inbound and outbound sales and marketing as well as account-led or product-led growth.

It’s also worth noting that different products from the same SaaS business may use some of these divergent strategies. Given the complexity, having the right CRM that scales and adapts to your changing business requirements is a competitive advantage, allowing your business to move fast.

While picking the best SaaS CRM software for your business can be daunting, these key functionalities of sales CRM should be the most beneficial for any SaaS organization.

2. Contact management: Collect and organize your leads 

Manage customer data efficiently. Empower sellers to provide great customer experiences with a 360-degree view of customers, including website behavior, customer interactions, and past purchases.

3. Deal management: Don’t miss out on opportunities

Record revenue opportunities as deals. Assign sales reps and deal teams to each deal with all the associated information, such as conversations and AI-powered deal insights to help conversion.

4. Pipeline management: Enhance sales visibility

Streamline your sales process to sell faster with an organized view of your deals across stages. Get a Kanban view of deals on your sales pipeline, with AI-powered deal insights to help salespeople make the most of each opportunity and close deals faster.

5. Personalization: Improve conversions

Deliver 1:1 personalized experiences at scale. Customer segmentation based on behavior or demographic information, personalization tags and AI-powered lead insights help you engage customers at the right time with the right message, through the right channels.

6. Multichannel engagement: Reach customers effectively

Create organic revenue opportunities within your SaaS product with product-led growth or PLG. Drive conversions by being present on your customers' preferred channels of communication–email, SMS, Whatsapp, social media and phone.

7. AI-led self-serve: Improve sales productivity

Make selling efficient with sales automation. Use workflow templates to engage customers. Enable AI-powered sales bots on your website and products to answer customer inquiries in real time. Invoke sales rep interventions only for more complex and advanced inquiries to minimize resource requirements.

8. Enhance customer experience: Increase customer lifetime value

A better customer experience increases customer lifetime value and chances of upsell and  cross-sell. Give sellers, account managers and customer support reps complete context into the customer and the ability to personalize customer experience to build meaningful relationships.

9. Business insights: Accelerate decision making

Measure and improve sales performance. Sales reports and dashboards help you track sales metrics, KPIs and get actionable insights on business performance. Get sales and marketing attribution and ROI. Deep-dive into product-wise, territory-wise, and team-wise performance to enhance decision-making.

10. Data security: Enhance compliance and trust

Improve customer data security and privacy. SaaS businesses have a growing need to comply with data protection regulations and ensure customer information is secure. With a CRM platform that meets or exceeds industry standards for security, you mitigate any potential risk.

11. Implementation and adoption: Set up and onboard faster

Improve CRM program success with SaaS CRMs that are easy to use. Faster implementation, onboarding, and adoption can ensure sellers use the CRM for day-to-day activities, enhancing sales productivity and data quality.

Why is Freshsales the best CRM for SaaS businesses?

Having been in the industry serving SaaS customers for more than a decade, Freshworks has developed a keen insight into the needs of SaaS sales teams. Freshsales delivers advanced CRM features in an all-in-one solution that makes it easy for SaaS businesses to implement and drive sales.

1. Increase sales productivity and CRM adoption

Get a modern, intuitive, and easy-to-use mobile CRM solution with Freshsales. Sales teams can focus more on what they do best–selling, while Freshsales takes care of the rest. Limit repetitive work such as data entry and help them stay organized with tasks, notes, mobile app, notifications, sales sequences, workflow automations and insights from Freddy AI, Freshsales’ native AI copilot.

2. Attract, engage and convert seamlessly

Boost revenue growth with digital selling capabilities. Drive lead generation with webforms, Freddy AI sales bots and a conversion rate optimization (CRO) module, including event-based behavior tracking. Sales sequences and Freddy AI Insights on leads and deals such as lead scoring and next best action can help sellers follow up on prospects and convert deals faster.

3. Engage customers on the channels they prefer

Engage customers on the channels they are most likely to respond on. Enable sellers to engage and nurture customers across phone, email, SMS, and social media channels to improve conversion.

4. Build stronger customer relationships and loyalty

Set up customer lifecycle stages and segments for your customers. Identify upsell, cross-sell opportunities, and opportunities to prevent churn. Drive B2B key account management through the accounts module and improve your customer relationships.

5. Manage SaaS invoices and subscriptions

Empower sellers to quickly share invoices and quotes for different products and variants with a products module that features multicurrency, configure, price, quote (CPQ), and e-sign functionality. View and manage SaaS subscriptions from the CRM system through readily available integrations with subscription management tools.

6. Accelerate revenue growth with faster decision-making

Accelerate growth with in-depth business insights through the Freshsales analytics and reporting module. Curated reports and dashboards help you understand the performance of your sales and marketing. You can also build custom reports and dashboards with KPIs aligned with your business goals. This data is also extensible to other business intelligence solutions through marketplace apps.

7. Streamline CRM implementation, setup and administration

Implement CRM quickly. Admins get a customizable and scalable CRM in a single platform with custom fields, custom modules, and user roles. Freshworks meets class-leading security standards. With 24x5 support, onboarding services, and dedicated account managers, Freshworks is a partner in your SaaS success.

Takeaways for SaaS CRM evaluation

We hope this guide has given you something to consider as you evaluate CRM for your SaaS business. To achieve rapid revenue growth with your SaaS business, building a foundation for success is important. A SaaS CRM solution that helps you organize your business processes to improve sales productivity and customer engagement can boost sales and revenue. Your CRM solution can also act as a single source of truth for your organization by forming the basis of your tech stack. If you are looking for more information or guidance, please feel free to reach out to our CRM experts, who can help with your specific needs.