- One of the mantras I was taught
as I was growing my own SaaS businesses is,
"What got me here isn't going to get me to that next stage."
At every single inflection point of my SaaS business
as I was scaling it,
I had to revamp my go-to-market strategy.
Here's a big question though.
If you've got some revenues
and you've got a SaaS product that you know customers want,
what do you need to do specifically in terms of sales
versus marketing to actually scale your SaaS business
and accelerate your path to that next stage of growth?
In this episode, I'm gonna walk you
through the three principles
that you absolutely need to know
especially abouts scaling sales, separate from marketing,
and when you understand these principles
by the end of this episode
you're gonna know exactly what you need to do
to revamp your go-to market strategy
and accelerate your path to that next stage of growth.
Intro. (upbeat music)
(beeping tune) What's up everybody?
Welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK and on this channel
I help SaaS founders like you
grow your size business faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
Now, if you're new to this channel, welcome.
I drop an episode every single Sunday
with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches
on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon
that way you'll get notified every single time
I drop an episode with the TK Energy.
Now, if you're already part of this community
and you're part of my SaaS go-to-market coaching programs
my people, welcome back.
It's really awesome to see you over here.
So I remember when I hired my first VP of sales
we had gotten through product market fade,
we got to a million in ARR,
we raised our series A and we hired a VP of sales,
and we were talking about, okay, we were growing,
we got things moving, we hired reps.
And I remember we were having one of our early one-on-ones
and she came into the office
and she was like, 'Hey, TK, we need more pipeline."
And mind you, this was when this was still baby TK
and I was still learning all these things
about go-to-market that I teach in this channel.
It was still early in my SaaS journey.
So baby TK goes, "You don't need more pipeline,
you're only closing 20% of the pipeline.
So what you need to do is win more deals.
You don't need more pipeline."
And looking back, I kinda winced at that
because back then I didn't know
about the five x pipeline rule.
This is something we talk about in this channel
where in order to hit your number just mathematically
and statistically speaking,
you need five x amount of pipeline
to statistically stand a chance at hitting your numbers.
If you want to generate a million dollars
of net new revenue, you need $5 million of pipeline.
And this is why what got you here
isn't gonna get you to that next stage.
I learned this the hard way.
You really needed to figure out
and I needed to figure out
how do we scale our go-to-market strategy?
So not only are we scaling sales
we're also scaling marketing.
So in this video, based on everything that I've learned
in my 15 years of experience in SaaS,
I'm gonna walk you through three principles
that really help me conceptualize
what it takes as you are scaling your SaaS business
in terms of scaling your go-to-market strategy,
but more importantly, the difference between marketing
and sales.
This was one of those aha moments
that I really wanna talk about.
So if you're excited, dig in.
So principle number one, go ahead and smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm,
it just loves it when you do that
and let's dig right into it.
Okay, so this is essentially your standard customer funnel
and these three principles line up
to the stage of the funnel.
And this is the best way that I found
to explain how to scale, why you need to scale,
and how you want to think about sales versus marketing.
I'm gonna walk you through the three principles
and by the end of it you're gonna understand
why this matters.
So principle number one is for a customer
to ever buy from you, to buy your product
or to get on a sales call or anything,
principle number one is they need to know about you.
They don't know about you, then it won't matter.
One of the things that I often find
when I'm coaching founders,
they'll come to me all freaked out.
They're like, "Hey, oh my God,
this competitor raised this much money.
What are we gonna do?
It's all over."
And I used to struggle with that too
until I was like, hey, look, if you guys are raising money
then that means that it's probably a very large market
otherwise venture capitalists wouldn't be investing
in that market, which means that let's just say
you earn a millionaire ARR and your competitor
is at a millionaire ARR, but at some point you think
that this company's gonna get to a hundred millionaire ARR
or 500 million ARR or a billionaire ARR,
which means that most of the market
doesn't even know about you right now.
So don't worry about it.
Like it's okay to have competition
because the market is so big, and this is true
for all the bootstrap companies I work with as well.
People tend to underestimate how few of your ideal customers
actually know about you.
And so knowing is half the battle.
Just kidding.
I know, I just had to quote that.
Knowing is the first step in a customer's journey.
If they don't know about you, it doesn't matter.
And you'd be shocked how few people know about you.
And so when you're thinking about scaling sales
and marketing and your go-to-market strategy
as you're scaling, it really becomes a question
of how do we get 10 times the number of people
to know about us that are in our ideal customer profile?
That's one of the big things you're tackling,
whether it's sales or marketing.
The second thing, the second principle
that you're thinking about
as you're scaling sales and marketing
is once they know about you, they need to understand you.
It's a noisy world out there
and there are lots of software solutions
that they're getting pitched on.
Let's just say you're creating a SaaS offering
for VPs of sales to help generate more pipeline.
I'm making that up, but that's top of mind for me.
And if you're doing that, there's probably 50 companies
that are sending them cold emails, running ads,
going to events, trying to get their attention
promising the same thing.
So if they know about you
but they don't understand why you are different
or how you actually differentiate from the competition
or what's unique about you, then it won't matter.
They actually won't do anything.
And the third principle that you need to know
about this is then they need to trust you.
Meaning someone can know about your company,
they could understand exactly what you do,
they could understand your messaging,
the way you're different,
but that doesn't necessarily mean
that they're going to believe you.
There needs to be a trust process
before they actually fork over money to you.
And this journey that this customer is on
is essentially what sales and marketing is trying to do.
Now here's the thing,
there's essentially a line of delineation right over here.
If you only have sales, let's just at that time for us
it was just sales, meaning we had our outbound team
we had a little bit of marketing that we had gotten to
for our self-service offering
and that was generating pipeline
but the outbound team was generating pipeline.
But if you only have sales
and you don't have marketing,
then sales on a one-on-one basis
is trying to get awareness going.
They're trying to get your future customers
to know about you, they're trying to explain
what you guys do
and then they're trying to build that trust.
Now remember, sales works on a one-on-one basis.
A salesperson gets in front of one prospect.
On the other hand, marketing is one too many
and which means that it's more leveraged.
And so one of the biggest things that I learned
in knowing these three principles was, okay,
first they have to know us, then they have to understand us,
then they have to trust us and they'll give us money.
And by the way, a little caveat, some of you might say, oh
like we're product led, we don't need salespeople.
Well, that's cool.
That basically means you're limited
to about 1k per transaction, right?
That's as much as you can charge
because there's this unwritten rule
in the internet marketing world
which is no one's gonna swipe their credit card
for over a $1000, maybe 2000 if you're pushing it
without talking to a human being.
But that's fine.
But that's still sales in a sense,
especially if you start going after a larger deal sizes,
you're definitely going to need sales.
But the biggest thing that I learned is a customer
has to know us, then they have to understand us,
and they have to trust us.
And in the early days
it's very easy to brute force all three of these.
We can use our existing network, we can do outbound,
but as you start to get to a million and then to 3 million
and then to 10 million, you actually need more leverage.
You need more leverage in how people get to discover you
and know about you and how they understand you.
And that is where marketing comes in.
Marketing does it in a one to many way.
They go after different channels,
they have a compelling message, they educate the customer,
they drive awareness, they do retargeting,
and that allows sales to focus
their one-on-one conversations purely on people
that understand you and know you
and then now you're just building the trust.
And that's where the delineation happens
between marketing and sales.
Before I really put this all together,
let me just pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
Principle number one is they gotta know you.
Then they have to understand you.
Then they have to trust you.
But more importantly, these three things need to happen
at a massive scale
or a bigger scale as you scale your SaaS business.
So if you just leave it to the brute force way
of doing it, the old way, then it won't go very far.
This is why I was having that conversation
with my sales lead and they're like,
"We need more pipeline."
I'm like, "Oh, you have plenty of pipeline."
We're like, no, we...
Because we're going after a much larger revenue target
we need much more pipeline for the sales team
and we need to do it in a much more leverage way.
That's when I really started digging into marketing
and started to fall in love with it.
And so if you're starting to see the power
of this spectrum and why marketing is important
and why sales is separately important,
there's a place for each of these.
Can I just get a "yes" in the comments below?
And also smash a like button for the YouTube algorithm.
It just really loves it when you do that.
Now, if you're also at this stage where you're like, hey,
how do I actually scale my go-to-market strategy?
How do I split these pieces up?
How do I think about how people discover us
and how they understand us, separate from selling?
This is exactly what I do
in my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
You don't have to go anywhere right now.
I'll tell you all about it at the end of this episode.
I'll also link to it below.
Let's really put in the key aha moment over here.
The biggest aha moment I had
as I was having that conversation
I was navigating that stage of we had to hit a million
and we're trying to get to 3 million.
And in other SaaS businesses
I hit the stage even earlier was, oh my God,
what got us here isn't gonna get us to that next stage.
We have to think differently.
We need more leverage.
We need to do this in a bigger way.
But it can't just be hiring 20 more SDRs
or hitting up more people in our network,
'cause that taps out at a certain point.
Especially now when you have to show positive unit economics
on how you acquire customers.
And this was my aha moment, and this is when
I really started to fall in love with go-to-market.
When you think about go-to-market,
go-to-market is essentially sales and marketing combined.
But a lot of times people don't quite understand
what each of these functions do.
And my biggest aha moment was, okay,
sales is one-to-one, marketing is one-to-many.
Sales is great when you're looking to build trust
with the customer, but they already kind of understand
that they have a problem, they need a solution,
they have a bunch of objections that need overcoming
and they need to be able to trust you and differentiate you.
That's where sales is really powerful.
But, if you're looking to actually attract
your ideal customers, you're trying to make sure
they know about you, you're trying to educate them
on why you're different
and why this problem exists and why your solution is unique,
that's where marketing really comes in.
And this is why we always in this channel
talk about a proper go-to-market strategy.
That's what go-to-market encompasses.
And in order to make sure
that they know about you and understand you,
we always say let's have a clear ideal customer profile.
An ideal customer profile is exactly the type
of people we want to target that should know about us,
'cause we can't target everyone in the world.
Then we talk about having a manifesto.
A manifesto is essentially how we educate them
so they understand what we do, why we're different,
why this problem exists
and why they should use our solution.
And then we talk about having a Broadway show.
And a Broadway show is a consistent set of sales
and marketing activities,
the marketing activities that drive demand
and creates demand
and the sales activities that builds that trust
and converts it to revenue.
And that's why this Broadway show is super important.
This was my big aha moment.
And I think that sometimes you gotta go back to the basics.
We talk about concepts like go-to-market
we talk about sales, we talk about marketing,
but sometimes we get so mired in the details
we forget the basics.
And the basics is you have your ideal customers
and they need to first know you.
They need to understand what you do
and they need to trust you.
And in order to do this at the scale that's needed
say to achieve five x pipeline of your target number
so you can actually hit your number,
you need to have leverage.
Marketing gives you that leverage
to attract a lot of people and educate them
and then sales gives you the leverage
to actually convert it to revenue.
And that's the biggest thing that I've learned
as I've gone in this journey in scaling SaaS companies.
So to recap principle number one,
customers need to know you.
Then they need to understand you.
Then they need to trust you
and then they'll convert to revenue.
And in order to do that, you need to use marketing
in a one to many basis to actually attract them
and educate them and then sales
to actually convert it to revenue.
So now you know the key principles you need
to be thinking about, especially as you're revamping
your go-to-market strategy
for that next stage of growth.
And you're thinking about revamping your sales
and marketing machine
and where you need marketing and where you need sales.
What you may not know is, hey, TK,
how do I pull these pieces together?
Meaning what should my ideal customer profile be like?
There's a lot of different areas we can go to.
A lot of founders I work with have multiple ICPs
and are struggling with which one do I pick
and where do I target and how do I sequence it?
You might be wondering, how do I message
to these people so they know about us
and they understand us, especially
because of the competitive landscape that we have.
You might also be wondering, well,
once we have this messaging and this ICP,
how do we run the motions so that marketing is generating
and creating that demand and sales is converting?
This is exactly why I run my SaaS go-to-market
coaching program.
It's an incredible program
and we've had so many success stories on this channel
about founders that have gone through this program
and have reached so much success in terms of growth,
in terms of fundraising, in terms of profitability.
Inside of this program
I take you through these three key stages.
I help you flush out your ideal customer profile,
help you flush out your manifesto,
and that creates your go-to-market strategy.
And once you have your go-to-market strategy,
I then teach you how to take that manifesto to your ICP
on a consistent basis through key marketing functions
so that way you're creating demand and acquiring demand
and then how to streamline your sales process
so you're actually converting that demand.
You also have companies that are product led
and so that means you need even more marketing
to actually make sure that they trust you as well.
And that's something I cover inside of the program as well.
So if you're interested in working together
to revamp your strategy and accelerate your path
in the next stage of growth and just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
All the details will be in there.
Inside of that page you'll get all the details
around the program.
And then if it sounds like it's a fit
you can just fill a little form to book a call with us.
The better the fit, the better the results in this program.
So we can always get on a call to understand
where you are with the business,
make sure that you're a fit and we can actually help you.
And then we're off to the races.
You and I start working together directly.
It's an incredible program.
So if you'd like to work together,
just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
Also link to it below.
Also, if you got value from this video,
please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
Just loves it when you do that.
I also drop an episode every single Sunday
with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches
on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon
and you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode.
And also, if you have a fellow founder, a team member,
if you're part of a WhatsApp group or Slack group
who can value from this video,
we wanna help as many SaaS founders as possible.
Seriously, that's why I do this.
So please share it with them,
it'd just mean the world to us.
And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business.
When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK and I'll see you next episode
or inside of the SaaS go-to-market coaching.
Talk to you later.
(instrumental music)