How We Do Enterprise SaaS Growth Marketing to Boost User Acquisition

SaaS acquisition is a delicate process. Buying into a new SaaS product is a commitment for users — often an expensive one when you’re talking about enterprise SaaS solutions. It’s not as simple as a user signing up and buying in — there’s a lot of relationship-building and framing that needs to happen before users are willing to take the plunge.

This leaves lots of enterprise SaaS marketers stuck in a cycle of overspending on acquisition with no meaningful ROI in sight.

If that sounds like you, you’re in the right place. In this guide, I’m going to walk you through nine of the growth marketing strategies I use to drive user acquisition for clients here at SaaS Camp, so you have a blueprint to follow for reliably growing your SaaS.

Let’s go.

Enterprise SaaS user acquisition is hard—but why?

This is an important question. You need to understand the root cause of the challenge before you can start addressing it with growth marketing tactics. In the process of helping 100+ startups boost their user acquisition, I’ve boiled this difficulty down to three core problems:

Good SaaS products solve user problems — but not every user will understand the problem you’re solving. As you can probably imagine, it’s pretty difficult to convince people to use a complex solution when they aren’t even sure if or why they need it.

In my experience, this is a bigger issue for enterprise SaaS — problems and solutions are much more complex. It’s easy to lose people when you start diving into technical details that they aren’t able to connect to their business.

Another challenge with enterprise SaaS is the price point.

Lots of enterprise solutions cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per year, which means you need to target decision-makers who have budget authority and convince them your product is worth the high price tag.

It doesn’t help that you might be targeting 6-10 decision-makers, either. It’s much harder to convince a large group of people than it is to convince one or two.

This one is simple — competition. With 40,000+ SaaS companies globally, you're bound to face direct and indirect competition.

Given how many variables there are in the acquisition process, it doesn’t always matter if your solution is the best. Decision-makers are often overwhelmed with decision fatigue and will go with the most familiar solution to save time.

There you have it… the three main challenges that B2B SaaS companies face when it comes to enterprise acquisition. Don’t get discouraged, though—there are some silver linings:

1. Everyone faces these issues.
2. There are proven strategies to overcome them.
3. When you do overcome them, you give yourself a major competitive edge.

Case in point — I recently helped Powerleads.io overcome these challenges to book 16 product demos in 3 weeks.

An ideal customer profile (ICP) shouldn’t be a box you tick at the beginning of the process and forget about. It should be an ever-evolving set of criteria that you come back to again and again to guide your decisions.

So, what exactly is an ICP?

You’ve probably heard of this concept before, so I’ll keep this brief. An ICP is a generalization of your ideal user—someone who gets real value out of your product. It includes as many shared characteristics as possible (job title, company size, etc.) to help you target the right companies and people.

There are two kinds of ICPs you need to be thinking about for enterprise SaaS:

• Company-Level ICPs
• User-Level ICPs

If your product has an existing user base, that’s the best place to gather the data you need to fill in these blanks. If you don’t, you’ll need to use a combination of outreach and third-party research to sketch (and then fine-tune) your target persona.

So, you’ve created your ICPs — now what?

There isn’t one, single action you take. ICPs exist as mental guidelines that help inform all of your decisions as you work to acquire and retain customers. For example, say you have an idea for a piece of content — your ICP will tell you whether it actually covers a problem your ideal user is likely to face.

Related: How to find IDEAL Customers and Product-Market Fit for Your B2B SaaS

A hybrid customer acquisition system (HCAS) is just a more concise way of saying an acquisition system that relies on outbound and inbound methods across multiple channels.

As a quick refresher, outbound methods involve actively marketing to people, like through cold emails and ads. Inbound methods rely on customers coming to you—think SEO-friendly content, social media engagement, and forum posts.

Why is hybrid the way to go? There are a few reasons.

• Outbound acquisition generates great data. While you’re validating your idea or retargeting your ICPs, you need to be interacting with people and getting feedback. Outbound is also a great way to get a few case studies under your belt. The downside is that (on its own) outbound acquisition is slow and time-consuming.

• Inbound acquisition is highly scalable. A single blog post or Reddit thread can generate lots of leads. The downside is that it takes time to build up domain authority, credibility, and trust with your target audience.

A hybrid approach lets you capitalize on the pros of each acquisition strategy while limiting the downsides as much as possible. To help this sink in, here’s an example from my book (+240K ARR Playbook) covering an HCAS that got one founder 23 demo bookings in a week:

To summarize, we used created targeted assets (using ICPs) and posted them to forums and communities where the target market was likely to see them. These generated lists of qualified leads to feed into our outbound system. Each part makes the other more effective (and faster).

Your value proposition plays a big role in overcoming the “option overload” I mentioned earlier, and is crucial in securing your first enterprise client.

A value offer can cut through the noise and win users, but it needs to be the right offer. This takes time and data to pin down — you can’t just write a good value proposition from the jump. You’ll gather this data in the form of feedback from outbound campaigns.

This tuning process is important to understand. It usually works something like this:

1. Create a hypothesis of the value proposition you think will work best.
2. Test it in your outbound calls.
3. Follow up afterward with targeted questions about the offer.
4. Refine your value proposition based on that feedback.
5. Rinse and repeat.

When it comes to actually writing the value proposition, there are two formulas I use with clients:

"We help [ideal customer] who need help with [main problem] succeed by getting to [ideal outcome you deliver]. Unlike [alternatives], we offer [main benefit or selling point], which leads to [unique benefit].”

…and:

“[X] helps [Y] to solve [Z] problem through [A] so they don't need to [B].”

Both work well as basic starting points, and you can tweak them to fit your specific product or service.

The message-market fit formula is something I’ve slowly developed over years of watching successful (and unsuccessful) product launches. It’s a formula that contextualizes all the factors you need to drive user acquisition and revenue growth.

Interested? Here it is:

• Right Audience + Right Pain + Right Message + Right Channel + Right Timing = 20% MoM Revenue Growth

Each factor on the left-hand side of the equation is a variable you need to solve for to unlock the outcome on the right-hand side (which is based on my work with hundreds of startups). Solving for each of these variables is the hard part—but it’s possible with the right approach.

Here’s a brief summary of what you need to do:

• Right Audience: This is where you target the right people. You’ll slowly work your ICP out during the validation and initial outbound marketing phases.
• Right Pain: You need to identify the problem that your product solves and how it resonates with your target audience. This is also tested throughout the validation and outreach processes.
• Right Message: This is essentially different variations of your value proposition (which I covered more in-depth above).
• Right Channel: This is about selecting the best channels for outreach—social media, paid advertising, content marketing, etc.—that will put your message in front of the right people. The right channel is wherever your ICP hangs out.
• Right Timing: This is the tricky one. It’s about understanding the right time to reach out to users with your message, when they're most likely to be interested and respond. This will change over time as you get user feedback and learn more about their behavior. An example of good timing? When someone posts a question on Reddit that directly relates to your solution.

By putting all these elements together, you create a highly effective strategy for user acquisition.

The “better” trap is a tricky mental block to break. It happens when you see a crowded niche filled with lacking products and think to yourself, “I can differentiate my product by being better.”

There are two main problems with this thinking. First, “better” is too vague to reliably convince the average user. They haven’t logged hundreds of hours thinking about the niche, so they just don’t have a reference point. Second, being the only option is more reliable than being the best option.

So, think about how you can define your niche so that you aren’t just the best option around—you’re the only option.

Here's how you do that:

1. Instead of creating something out of thin air, start with existing demand. See what niches and product categories people are looking for, and think about how your product can fill that demand while remaining separate.
2. Take the existing category and use differentiating language. For example, “AI Chatbot” might become “Conversational Sales Platform.”
3. Don't just highlight a problem with the product — address the problem with the legacy category's business model. For example, the traditional accelerator model might not truly help startups grow, so you design a Performance-Based Accelerator that offers more personalized support.
4. Find “super consumers” who will spread the word about your new category. That is, talk to the people who are already engaged in the legacy category and understand what it takes to make them adopt your new product.

The first personal project ever tried to sell was a community platform for founders. At the time, I had no idea how to price a product, so I offered lifetime deals for just $20—usually with a 50% discount added on due to an incomplete feature set. Even with this arbitrary (and extremely inexpensive) pricing model, I was terrified to hop on calls and pitch to people.

The point? I know how hard it can be to price your products.

Value-based pricing is now something I prioritize when coaching other founders. Why? Because it allows you to match your pricing with the value of what you offer. Plus, the logic is very intuitive—here’s how it works:

1. Look at the problem your product is solving.
2. Calculate how much your ICP is currently paying to solve this problem another way.
3. Set a starting price that’s 10-50% of the current cost.
4. Increase or decrease as needed based on feedback.

This approach is simple, but can dramatically increase your revenue depending on how much you’re currently undervaluing your product (and yes, it’s almost always undervalued).

To illustrate, I like to give the example of a biotech startup I worked with. They charged $100,000+ for an annual license, but in the process of working out a GTM strategy, we noticed something was off. The companies they were targeting were spending $6 to $12 million annually to solve the same problem without their product!

Even with a $100,000+/year price tag, they were still undervaluing their product by at least 6X.

For more insights on pricing strategies, explore our detailed Enterprise SaaS Pricing Guide.

Finding leads at scale is the first hurdle in outbound sales. It’s time-consuming and tedious, but it doesn’t have to be.

If you’re targeting mid-market or enterprise-level targets, LinkedIn is the place to be (and LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the tool to have). Use Boolean search strings to find the profiles you’re looking for (e.g., “software startup OR SaaS NOT agency NOT consulting”). This will help you find the executives and decision-makers you need to reach.

For an in-depth guide on optimizing LinkedIn for SaaS lead generation, explore our comprehensive LinkedIn Lead Generation Guide.

Alternative databases like Crunchbase and Apollo are also great.

Once you have a list of qualified leads, it’s time to start reaching out. We don’t do this over LinkedIn, though—too many restrictions. Use a tool like Phantombuster to scrape emails from LinkedIn profiles in bulk. Your scraping success rate will probably be around 35-65%. Download the lists of contacts and email addresses as a CSV file to plug into your CRM or email client.

I recently coached a startup called Feedbucket through SaaS Camp and used this strategy to help them 8X profits in just 11 weeks.

So… you have some leads—now what? It’s time to craft your email marketing strategy. This includes the content of your message, its timing, and other details like the format.

The first step in this process is to create a few extra email domains. These will act as an insurance policy for your main domain (in case it gets blacklisted). Choose .com domains and set up profile pictures and redirects for each domain for a deliverability boost. You’ll also want to configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, as well as put each domain through a warm-up tool.

Creating unique emails is a must to avoid spam folders. Make sure you’re always testing 3–5 variations at a time and keeping track of open rates, response rates, click-throughs, etc.

Check out my cold emailing guide for more in-depth guidance.

Lots of founders hear the praise being heaped onto content marketing and decide to go all in… only to end up wondering why nothing is happening. This is because content marketing needs a (well-rounded) process and plan, not random acts of publishing.

Luckily, it’s a lot simpler than you’re probably imagining.

I always recommend making a 6-month content plan by creating something I call a content matrix—a systematic way of transforming and repurposing real ICP problems into content that converts. Here’s the breakdown of the process:

1. List (or use AI to generate) 20 problems that your ICP faces.
2. Create a spreadsheet and list those problems in a “Problem” column.
3. List 20 content formats in the first row (e.g., story, how-to, giveaway, observations, giveaway, etc.)
4. Choose two cells per day and use the corresponding format to address the corresponding problem.

For example, let’s say your SaaS is an Amazon Ads management tool targeting Amazon sellers and one problem they face is “not knowing how to choose the right keywords for their Amazon Ads campaigns”:

This system will give you 6 and a half months of content ideas that will be tailored to your ICP’s needs.

User acquisition is tough—especially for enterprise SaaS. The tactics covered above should help you get more qualified leads, but only if you’re executing them right. Create a well-rounded acquisition strategy based on the tactics above and measure your wins.

Many of the tips covered here are covered in much more depth in my book—the +240K ARR Playbook—so check that out if you’d like to learn even more about user acquisition. And if you’re looking for more personalized guidance, you can book a call with me through SaaS Camp to start planning the best path forward for your SaaS.