- So you've got a plan to grow your SAAS business,
but you're getting revenues,
but it's not quite as fast as you want to get them.
The growth is not quite right.
What do you do?
So in a prior episode,
I talked about how to actually build a go-to market machine,
how to build a growth strategy for your SAAS business.
In this episode,
I'm gonna dig a little bit more
into how to diagnose stock growth.
If things aren't going as fast as you'd like,
what do you do?
What questions do you ask?
I'm gonna them to dig into that in this video, intro,
(update music)
What's up everybody welcome to Unstoppable I'm TK.
And on this channel,
I help you navigate the path to the next digit growth
for your SAAS business.
If you're new to the channel, welcome,
be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon.
So you get notified every single time I drop an episode.
It's about two to three times a week with the TK Energy.
Also, if you're already part of our community,
if you're part of my SAAS Go-to Market Coaching Program,
welcome back it's really great to have you here.
So on this episode,
I'm gonna dig into a little bit
around once you've actually created a growth strategy
for your SAAS business.
This is something that I covered in a prior episode,
I'll link to it below
if you haven't seen it yet,
you don't have to go to it right now.
What do you do if growth is unsatisfactory?
What do you do if growth is stalled?
What do you actually do to diagnose a stalled SAAS business?
Now the word stalled like you may like it you may not,
it may be on satisfactory growth or stalled growth
where your company's dying.
Any one of those cases,
this video is gonna be helpful for you
because I wanna dig into exactly the questions to ask,
to diagnose what's going on with your growth strategy.
This is a set of questions I learned to ask
from working with countless SAAS businesses, SAAS founders,
and also building and exiting my own SAAS businesses.
So as you know, every great SAAS business
is built on these three pillars.
You have your Product Strategy, your Market strategy,
and your Go-To-Market Strategy.
And in that prior video,
I walked you through exactly how to craft a strategy
for your market, product and Go-To-Market.
Again, if you missed it, I'll link it below
you don't have to go there now.
So in this video,
I'm gonna go through the same thesis
and the same thought process.
And we're gonna dig into what questions to ask
for each pillar of your SAAS business,
to help you diagnose growth.
So if you're excited to dig in go and smash that like button
and let's dig right into it.
So the first one is your market strategy.
I like to start over here
because if you're not in a great market,
nothing else matters.
You can have an amazing product.
You can have an amazing team
an amazing Go-To-Market strategy.
You can raise millions of dollars,
but if you don't get into the right market
and serve that market's important urgent problem,
then none of it will matter.
If you're unsatisfied with growth
the first place to look at is your market.
Now, the first thing I would look at
when I look at the market,
when I'm talking about this with a CEO
who were working with to help kickstart growth,
the first thing we'd look into
is who are the direct competitors in this market
that are absolutely killing it
or close to it?
Here's the thing I used to hate competition.
When I started ToutApp
there was really no competition.
And then pretty soon a whole bunch of competition arrived.
The biggest one was Yesware.
And I absolutely hated the fact
that there was a direct competitor.
Looking back though, it was one of the best things ever.
The best thing you can ask for
is to have one direct competitor
that you're just gunning for.
You're going head to head.
It propels the internal team,
but more importantly,
it tells you that it's something worth fighting for.
There's a market to actually go after.
Now beyond Yesware, Outreach came out, SalesLoft came out
and now there are a billion
different sales engagement tools.
But what's really important for you to hone in on
to really understand if you're in a good market or not.
Is, is there a competitor that's absolutely killing it?
Because if there isn't,
then one of two things might be true.
The first one is that it's too early
the market is just too early,
meaning there's not really a market yet.
It doesn't mean you're wrong,
it's just too early.
And there's a different playbook for that.
The other thing could be that look,
there is really just no market, right?
There's no market here.
There's nothing to solve here.
There's no important and urgent problem here.
So you better figure out where your market is
and what urgent problem you're solving
'cause right now isn't anything.
So I used to come at this,
you know, as like baby TK,
I looked at it as like, oh, I wanna be in a space
where there is no competition,
but the truth is having at least one direct competitor
is a good sign that you're in a good market
because human beings are smart
and no company is a unique snowflake.
If a bunch of people aren't going after a specific problem,
that means it may not be that lucrative of a problem
or that urgent of a problem
or that important of a problem.
So the first thing is, are there direct competitors?
The second thing I would look at is,
a lot of times also you you may say
like you know what we have a lot of competitors,
then it becomes a little bit more of a question
of, okay, maybe there's a better segment of the market.
So the second thing I would look at
to diagnose your market strategy
is, is there an underrepresented segment in the market?
So a lot of times it's not the case
that you don't have any competitors.
It just maybe like you are just too crowded.
You're in a very, very crowded market.
In that case,
what you really need to do is figure out
a segment of the market
that is actually underserved.
If you can find a segment of the market that's underserved
and you just focus on that
and craft your market strategy around that
and your strategic narrative around that
and your messaging and your targeting around that,
then you can actually rise above.
So in conclusion for principle, number one,
when you're looking at your market strategy,
find the competitors, figure out what they're doing.
Are they killing it?
If not, then you're in trouble.
If they are, then figuring out what they're doing right.
And number two,
is there an underrepresented segment of the market
that you can go focus on?
All right, so that's your market strategy.
Those are the two biggest things,
if you just focus on those two things,
I promise you,
you will actually start to unlock some growth.
If you actually look at it in an objective way.
Once you've done the market strategy piece and diagnose that
the second piece is your product strategy.
And the first thing that I always look at
when I'm working with a founder
is what is your core loop versus your NIT features.
And I fell into this trap.
I learned it the hard way with my team.
It's very easy to fall into the one more feature trap.
I've talked about this in the channel
a bunch of times before.
It's very easy to think
like, oh, we're just this one feature
we have this one feature then we'll win everything.
It's never the case.
Great products and great SAAS businesses
are actually not built on more and more and more features
they are built on great feature loops.
They're built on product loops.
The difference is that with the product loop,
you focus on what is the job that's actually getting done.
And what is the set of paths that you need to follow
to get that job done as fast as possible
and as effectively as possible.
That is more important than that one more feature
that your competitor may have launched,
and it feels like you gonna lose every single deal
if you don't have that feature.
But in reality that's not the case.
What people care about is the overall experience
and the overall loop.
And that's more important than anything else.
So go and look at, are you guys focus way too much
on just one more feature,
one more feature, one more feature,
or have you actually articulated,
what is your core product loop.
The path to an aha moment.
The paths are an actual result.
And have you optimize that as much as possible.
When you do that everything else becomes a lot easier
in terms of growth strategies,
your customers get a lot more value out of your product.
Churn goes lower and it becomes easier to demo
and it becomes easier to sell and growth takes off.
So for your product strategy,
figure out what your core product loop is
versus NIT features.
And the second thing to look at
is that ultimately people are hiring your piece of software
to do a job in their company.
That's kind of what it is.
It's like a robot employee in a way.
And what matters the most
is are they able to do the job?
Are they able to get the result faster, easier,
or in a more integrated way?
Those are some questions to ask about your product strategy,
to make sure that you are competitive in the market.
If you're the fastest in the market,
that's one would actually rise above.
If it's the easiest to use in the market
that's one way to rise above.
If you're the most deeply integrated in the market,
meaning like for example, with ToutApp,
we were integrated right into Gmail
and everyone else was,
but we also integrated right into Outlook
that opened up a whole new market segment
that our competitors couldn't get into
for a very long time.
So being much more deeply integrated
actually helped us a lot more.
Asking the question in your product strategy,
what is the core product loop versus the NIT features
and also are your faster, easier use
and more integrated, more deeply integrated.
Those are things that can unlock growth for you
in terms of your product strategy.
Okay, now we're going into principle number three,
that's your Go-To-Market pillar?
I have a bunch of stuff on that,
but before we do that,
let me just pause here for a second.
And if you are getting insights on the video,
getting some aha moments,
and you're like, okay, we can tweak this and market,
we can tweak this in product.
First of all, smashed up like button
for the YouTube algorithm
and also share in the comments below
on what you've come up with so far.
I'd love to hear from you.
I'd love to get your insights
so that we can have a real dialogue
on how to drive work growth for your SAAS business.
Also, if you're thinking deeply
about how to drive growth for your SAAS business
at the end of this video,
I'll tell you more
about my Five Point SAAS Growth Strategy Guide.
It's completely free.
I'll link to it below,
and I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video,
but let's go into principle number three now.
Once you've covered market and product,
then you get into Go-To-Market.
Your Go-To-Market Strategy Pillar.
And how do you diagnose that to unlock growth?
The first thing then I look at in the Go-To-Market
is are you in every deal your direct competitor is in?
Once you've identified that direct competitor
or sell direct competitors.
The question I would ask you
is, are you in every deal?
Like truly if you're creating a new category
and you really honed in on it,
like this is the career we are gonna own,
this is the nascent thing.
This is how we're gonna be a billion dollar company,
or are we going to have a significant slice of it?
The question to ask yourself
is, are you in every deal
that your competitor is in?
Your direct competitor is in.
Why do I ask this?
I don't expect you to be in every single deal,
nor is that totally possible.
Like for example, HubSpot is not in every deal
that Salesforce is in, I get that.
But I think it's a good litmus test to understand
are you at par in terms of you Go-To-Market strategy
in terms of Go-To-Market prowess,
in terms of Go-To-Market reach
with your competitors or are you well behind?
The question to ask for yourself
is for every deal that your part of
is it a competitive deal?
Is your competitor already in it, right?
And then the question
is, well, are they in all of our deals?
And we're in all of their deals
or are they in way more deals than we're in
and we need to catch up,
'cause that will help you understand
if you're getting enough market coverage.
If you feel like you guys are all in the same deals
and there's pretty good coverage,
then it's a different playbook to actually tweak
what you need to do
versus if you don't have enough coverage as your competitor,
there's two different levers to think about there.
Okay, so once you figured out
what the competitive dynamics are
like, who's winning, who's not,
are you in every deal that they're in?
One thing I like to look at
is look at all the logos in the competitors page
and see if you were in those deals or not.
That's a good way to understand,
like if you have pretty good coverage or not.
If you don't have a good coverage,
if you're not in all the deals
your competitors seem to be in
that means that you don't have
a solid enough Go-To-Market Machine.
And we'll talk about how to fix that.
The other thing you wanna get a good idea around
is to identify if you've got a market problem
or a sales process problem.
Do you have like a market awareness problem
or a sales process problem?
A lot of times companies that I work with
their marketing is fine.
They have enough awareness in the market.
People are looking at them,
but they just lose the deals.
In that kind of scenario,
it's more of a sales process problem
or a sales enablement problem,
or could just be like a differentiation problem.
Other times you have companies
that just haven't invested enough in marketing, right?
Forget the salespeople,
forget them as you're getting into deals.
They're not investing enough in marketing
to build that awareness,
to get into those deals,
to have a differentiated enough message.
So they have more of a market awareness problem.
And so this is one of those things
where don't try to over engineer the sales process problem
until you solve the market awareness problem.
So figure out which one you have first,
which one is the bigger problem.
So this one,
I honestly, I could do do an entire episode on this.
And if you want me to go deeper
into the Go-To-Market Machine and how to diagnose them,
put it in the comments below,
and I'll prioritize that video.
I will leave you with two things,
number one, you should figure out
what your CAC to LTV ratio is also
when you're digging more
into this Go-To-Market pillar, right?
I did an entire video on this you can check it out here.
I'll also link to it below you don't have to go right now,
actually calculate CAC to LTV ratio
that will tell you if you are under investing
on sales and marketing
or over-investing on sales and marketing.
When you start to look at the competitors in the space
and figuring out if you're in there competitive deals,
that will also tell you how much coverage and awareness
you have in the market.
And once you start to look at your sales process
and your win rates,
you'll start to understand
if you have a sales process problem
or more of a market awareness problem, right?
And when you look at CAC to LTV ratio
it will tell you if you're not investing enough.
Those are the things that I would look at to really diagnose
how to actually get your Go-To-Market Machine
to be humming.
Now here's the thing I covered your market strategy
and how to diagnose it.
I covered how your product strategy and how to diagnose it.
And I honestly, I think I covered about 10%
of everything that you can do
to diagnose your Go-To-Market strategy.
And I don't wanna do it disservice
because this is little complicated.
Like you Go-To-Market Machine,
building and differentiate Go-To-Marketing machine
there's a lot to it.
And these are just some initial tips
to start getting you thinking about it.
If you are thinking deeply
about how to build a Go-To-Market Machine,
how to build a differential Go-To-Market Machine,
then I encourage you to check out
my SAAS Go-To-Market Coaching Program.
Inside of that,
we help you build a differentiated Go-To-Market Machine.
So you can go head to head against your competitors
so that you can drive up the market awareness.
You can try it out the thought leadership
and you have an amazing sales process.
There's three parts of the program.
We help you craft your Ideal Customer Profile.
We help you craft your Manifesto,
which is a Strategic Narrative,
and we help you run a Broadway show,
which drives market awareness,
and then lead some more sales conversations.
You can check out more details about that at TKKADER.COM/GTM
You can apply to join the program.
Also, I have one more thing for you,
you can go check that out
there's some resources in there.
If you are building out the growth strategy
for your SAAS business,
you're diagnosing what's working and what's not
I invite you to download
my 5-Point SAAS Growth Strategy Guide it's completely free.
And in it, I go into more questions
that you can ask across these key pillars
on how to drive growth and how to craft a one page strategy.
So just go to GETUNSTOPPABLE.COM/STRATEGY
or just follow the link below.
And you can go download that guide as well.
You can go check out more details
about my SAAS Go-To-Market Program
if you'd like to work with me,
to build out a differential to Go-To-Market Machine.
And also I'll link to the video that I did
on how to actually create a growth strategy.
This video was around how to diagnose your growth strategy.
So tons of resources there for you.
If you got value from this video,
you should have smashed up like button
it'll mean the world to me and my team.
Also, if you have a friend, a team member
that would get value from this,
please share this video with them.
Use the click to tweet link below
if you want to share it on Twitter.
I'm really active on Twitter
so be sure to add me on Twitter as well,
and we can chat over there.
And lastly remember everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business,
but when you are with us,
yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, I'll see you in the next episode.