If you offer a B2B SaaS product, marketing can be quite difficult. B2B SaaS products are often difficult to integrate or the majority of the people on your website may not be the decisions makers at companies.

This means that to make a sale, you need to figure out how to get all key stakeholders to try and use your product. Since your product may require development time, there’s a way to get around making people use development time to love your product and company: offer a free tool.

A free tool is not just a great way to introduce organizations to your product in a simple and low touch way, but it’s also a brilliant way to potentially generate an insane amount of very high quality leads.

Effective marketers work with the engineering team.

When marketers are given development resources and learn to work with their development team, the biggest results will happen. You will get your biggest customers and close deals when the two teams innovate together to create free tools. The two teams, working together to create free tools, will come up with creative ways to drive traffic to your website and introduce people to your brand and product.

• Give people something of value. People should actually gain something by using your free tool.

• Make a tool that is relevant to your core product. To generate the best leads, your free tool should be related to your main offering.

• Users should immediately be wowed. People should immediately see why your product is great.

User experience is what makes a free tool work. Don’t slack on it and make it so users have an immediately positive view and understanding of both your brand and core product. You need to inspire people to want to continue engaging with your company after they’ve used the free product.

Make people happy, fast.

Sales products, like LeadBoxer, often take awhile for customers to gain value from. They often require time to integrate into an existing application, which means engineers are required. When engineers are needed to get a product to fully function, that’s a massive bottleneck to user adoption. When engineering is necessary to make a product fully functional, it becomes very hard to gain customers.

An effective free tool doesn't require users to sign up for anything, read documentation, or know anything about coding. It should be easy to get started and use the free tool with almost no effort.

If something works with little effort and provides immediate value, people will be happy with your brand fast.

Provide immense value.

While a single use free tool that generates leads is valuable, a free tool that encourages people to visit your website daily or frequently is even better. If you can bring people to your website repeatedly, your brand awareness will go through the roof. When brand awareness goes through the roof traffic to your site increases. Purchases of your core product will naturally increase when your traffic increases.

People will repeatedly use your free tool if it provides immense value. Use your judgement to decide what you can create that will provide value. Just make sure that whatever you make is related to your core product. If things are related to your core product, you will get your target audience using your free tool, getting to know your brand, and ideally converting into a paid user of your core product over time.

Free tools are the best way to collect leads.

Providing a valuable tool to a sales prospect is one of the best ways to increase traction for your core product. You will get people to talk about your company more and also get higher quality leads. It’s a win-win situation for any company eager to grow.

Companies such as HubSpot and Moz have largely attributed their phenomenal growth to free offerings that generate leads. Dharmesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot, said that free tools are “marketing assets with ongoing returns.” One of HubSpots biggest lead generation sources comes from their free Website Grader tool, which has now been used over 3 million times and generations a significant amount of leads for HubSpot (even after being launched over 9 years ago!).

If you create a great free tool, it will be your single most effective marketing asset. You’ll get more inbound leads than ever before and likely get a large amount of inbound leads from high-valued enterprise customers.