- If you've got some revenues
but you are not scaling those revenues.
You're not growing at the rate
that you wanna be growing.
You're not figuring out how to get more customers
beyond maybe your existing network.
That's how you got those initial revenues,
whatever it may be.
Here's a big question.
What's broken?
What's broken in your go-to market strategy?
After having worked with over a hundred founders
with their go-to market strategy,
specifically in B2B SaaS.
After working in my own companies
on go-to market strategy.
In this episode,
I'm gonna walk you through the three principles
that you absolutely need to know
to diagnose your go-to-market strategy.
And figure out what area
you need to actually revamp,
so that you can kickstart growth
and accelerate growth.
And when you follow these three principles,
you too will be able to accelerate the growth
of your SaaS business.
Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody.
Welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK.
And on this channel, I hope SaaS founders like you
grow your SaaS businesses faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
Now, if you are 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.
Now, if you wanna be notified
every single time I drop an episode,
go and hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon.
So you'll get a notification,
every single time I drop an episode
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Now, if you're already part of this community
you're part of my go to market coaching programs.
My people.
Welcome back.
It's really awesome to see you over here.
So I remember I was on a call with a founder
and they were having trouble scaling.
They had saturated their existing network
so they couldn't get any new customers
through just favors and existing network and referrals.
And they were trying to actually run ads.
They were trying to do content marketing.
They were trying a bunch of different things
to figure out how to get more customers
and how to scale growth.
They knew they had a great product.
They had happy customers.
But they couldn't get more customers.
So that was a real problem.
And I remember we were talking through
and he's like, "I already know."
I'm like, "Okay, what do you know?"
He's like, "It's the channel.
We're using this specific channel
and that's just not the right channel.
We need to go to these three other channels.
And that's where we're gonna get to the promise land."
It was like the go to market version
of the one more feature trap,
which we talked about in this channel all the time.
That was a lot of channels,
but you know what I mean.
And I was like,
"I can almost certainly assure you
it is not the channel."
And so we disagreed.
And we're like, you know what,
that's totally fair.
Let's just follow our framework
and diagnose what's going on.
And then based on that,
we'll figure out what you need to revamp.
And my whole point was,
it's never just the channel.
It's other things that compounds
and you just see it in the channel.
And just moving to another channel
is not gonna help you solve those issues.
And you just waste more money in time burning runway,
trying to figure out growth on another channel.
So anyway, that was the impasse of the discussion.
And so we followed a very specific process
to actually diagnose the go-to market strategy
and figure out how to actually unlock growth.
And so in this episode,
I'm gonna walk you through
the exact process we went through, as an example.
And hopefully based on that,
you'll be able to understand
what area of your go-to market strategy is broken,
and what you need to do to actually fix it,
so you can kick start growth.
So if you started digging into principle number one,
go ahead and smash the like button
for the YouTube algorithm.
And let's go into principle number one.
So principle number one is gonna be outcomes.
Before we figure out what's broken,
and what the strategy is.
We actually have to understand
the outcomes we are getting.
And so in this specific go to market example,
there were three outcomes that stuck out to me
as we were talking through it.
This is why in my head,
I was already starting to diagnose
based on all the pattern recognition I now have,
having worked with over a hundred companies at this stage.
This is exactly-
Like I could pick up patterns pretty quickly.
And so the outcomes though were essentially,
there were ads they were running
and there was engagement.
Meaning people liked it.
People looked at it
and Facebook does a great job of highlighting
all the amazing things it's doing
as you're giving it money.
Even though there was very little
money/conversion coming through.
So lots of engagement,
but not a lot of conversion, right?
So they were already seeing that.
The second thing was they were doing
social content, right,
on the social channels,
which is organic and it's free.
Thank God.
But again, there was actually no engagement
and no conversion.
Not even leads.
So they were seeing that.
And they were seeing
a little bit of success on Outbound.
So they were doing Outbound.
But it was one to two for thousands of emails sent.
And that converted to revenues.
They were getting some success through this thing,
but it was not anything
compared to the number of emails
and the number of people
that they were reaching out to.
And so based on this they were like,
"It's the channels that we're focused on.
That's what's broken.
We need to go do activities in other channels."
Immediately I was like,
"It's not the channels, right."
You have enough of the channels.
And there's a little bit of a trap here
where as soon as you get this one to two deals,
depending on your deal sizes, you're like,
"Oh, it's not that bad."
But you also have to look at it like,
"This is no way that we're gonna scale
and hit our 12 month revenue numbers
if we keep doing this.
And we're burning cash on ads,
we're spending time and money on social content,
we're doing Outbound and burning our brand.
And all these people are not responding.
There's something broken over here."
Whenever I have outcomes like this specific example,
instead of jumping to,
"We should change the strategy
or throw everything out."
I always look at well,
let's diagnose this first.
And so if principle number one
is to really get clear on what your outcomes are,
what you're seeing.
The principle number two is you should diagnose that.
And almost always would go to market.
It breaks down-
This is principle number two,
it breaks down into three key areas
that you want to diagnose and understand.
Let's use a different pen for this.
There's almost always three areas
that you can dig into.
The first is activity.
And I'll explain what each of these are.
The second is the message.
And the third is the targeting.
Two Ts.
So let's break these down one at a time.
The activity.
Activity is how many reps
you're doing on a weekly basis.
If you're doing Outbound,
how many Outbound emails are you sending?
If you're doing social posts,
how many social posts are you doing on a weekly basis?
If you are running ads,
it's how many impressions
are you driving on a daily basis
based on your budget?
So activity is essentially
the first thing I wanna diagnose
because if you don't have sufficient activity,
then you don't stand a chance.
It's a noisy world out there.
It's kind of like,
if someone's out there like,
"Oh, I did one social post and nothing happened.
And I did it once a month."
It's like you did one social post.
It means nothing.
But if they're like,
"Look, I posted every single day
and it's been eight weeks.
And here's the results that I got,"
Then okay, we can start to say,
maybe activity is not the problem.
But if you are not driving enough activity,
oftentimes it means that you don't have enough data
to really know whether everything else is working or not.
So that's the first thing I look at.
Are you driving sufficient activity?
In their case,
they were spending thousands of dollars on ads.
that are driving sufficient activity.
They were sending tons of Outbound emails.
They were driving sufficient activity.
They had social content.
they were driving sufficient activity.
So I'm like, okay, it's not the activity.
Got it.
Again, you can't just jump to the channel
or whatever this is broken.
It's like, if you wanna break through these things.
That's the power in this.
So once you have figured out
whether it's the activity or not,
then you say, "Cool, there's enough at bats going on."
Meaning we are getting the message out there.
Maybe the problem is the message.
And that's the second thing I look at.
I try to understand
what is the value proposition you are bringing?
What is the manifesto,
like the big transformation
you're bringing into the market?
Does it make sense?
Is it tied to a clear result
that this person is going to get
or this business is going to get?
So when activities checked off,
when you have enough activity,
then I look at, what's the message.
And what's working with the message,
what principles are being followed with the message,
and what's not.
That's the second thing I look at.
Looking at the message on its own is really hard.
I can't just look at your value prompt and say,
"Yeah, this is good.
Or this is bad."
Because it really, really depends on this third piece.
So in a way, I first look at the message
to see if it's just terrible.
If the message is okay and plausible,
I'm like, "Okay, that's a reasonable message.
I can see someone allocating budget for that
or clicking on that."
Then I look at the targeting also.
Meaning who is the specific group of people
that this is for.
And the better the targeting,
the better the message.
The worse the targeting,
the worse and more diluted the message.
The more it worsen and diluted the message.
Doesn't matter how much activity you drive,
the worse it's going to be.
But if you have great targeting
and you have a great message,
and you have even moderate amounts of activity,
it'll still hit really well.
That's the power in this.
And so in a way,
this influences how good this is gonna be.
And this influences how good this is gonna be.
The worse this is,
the worse this is gonna be,
and the worse this is gonna be.
No matter how many activities you pull.
Which is why as principle number two,
before jumping to conclusions
on what the strategy is and how it should change,
or whether it's good or bad.
I always look at it first on,
what are the outcomes?
And then I look at what's the activity level?
What is the message and what is the targeting?
And based on those three tiers,
it helps me understand where the problem might be.
Helps me diagnose exactly what's going on
with a founder when we're working together.
So let me just pause here for a second
before we go into how this impacted the strategy
and the results that they saw.
So let me just pause here for a second.
I started to say the power of this.
If you're at that stage
where you have some revenues
and you're doing a bunch of marketing activities
or you're starting to do a bunch of marketing activities.
And you're trying to figure out,
"Why are we not converting as much?
Why are we not getting as much engagement?"
It's very, very easy
to jump into another shiny channel and say,
"Well, that channel sucks, right?
Or that messaging sucks."
But it's a lot more nuanced than that.
It's a lot harder to do,
but if you do it
you actually save yourself more time
to actually diagnose it in the sequence of events.
Activity, message, targeting.
If you start to see the power in this,
can't I just get a yes in the comments below.
And also smash our like button
for the YouTube algorithm.
It really, really likes it when you do that.
It's really awesome.
Also, if you're in this stage
where you have some revenues
and need a much more scalable go to market strategy.
And you want the step by step actions
to follow and my coaching,
this is exactly why I created
my SaaS go to market coaching program.
The link for more details for that is below.
I'll tell you more about it
at the end of this video.
But right now,
let's go to principle number three.
Which brings this all together.
Okay, so principle number three
is the actual strategy, right?
This is where it all comes together.
And based on the outcomes
and what you are seeing.
And based on the activity level, the message, the targeting,
you now will start to understand,
"Is it an activity problem?
Is it a messaging problem?
Is it a targeting problem.
Is the target too broad.
Is it message too weak?"
And that's when the strategy really comes into play.
When we were able to diagnose it,
we were first able to understand like,
"Look, this is not just the channel problem.
There is a deeper problem here
around your messaging and your targeting.
If you don't solve these,
you can still spend money on ads.
You can still spend thousands of dollars on ads
and you can spend thousands of emails
and burn your brand.
But it won't work and you'll hurt yourself.
You're better off revamping the strategy
based on what we've learned."
So based on that conversation,
we were then able to shift
into much more proactive discussion about,
"Cool, how do we actually revamp the strategy."
And beautifully,
this all lines up with the exact framework
that I always teach in this channel.
The first thing that we did,
and this is actually in reverse order.
The first thing that we did
is we actually revamped their ICP.
Here's the thing.
You can do all the activities
and then move on to another channel
and do more activities.
But the ICP is the first piece
that helps us understand
which channel do we go after.
And what is the differentiated message
we bring to them?
A lot of times, people just skip this part
and just go straight into the activity,
and pick a bunch of channels
with a pretty okay message.
And it never works and they waste months doing this.
So when we revamp the strategy,
we went back to,
"Well, let's actually figure out what your ICP is.
Your ideal customer profile."
Because I know the better the ICP is-
Remember this compounds, right?
The better the targeting is,
which is your ICP.
The better the message is gonna be.
The better the message is gonna be,
the better the activities are gonna be.
The more effective they will be.
If the targeting is terrible,
then you are basically taking a left
when you should have taken a right,
and you just waste months doing the wrong thing.
So the first thing that we did
was we revamped their ICP.
And when you revamp-
Everyone thinks they have an ICP
until they do it with me.
When you revamp the ICP, we got really detailed
on exactly what makes that buyer move,
and what is going on in their world.
Based on that, then we revamped their messaging
and their value proposition.
And this is what I call their manifesto.
And the manifesto essentially is six to eight slides.
And every manifesto is different,
but has core principles on how to build them.
It actually revamps your messaging on,
"Why they should buy now.
What's different about you.
What happens if they don't do this?"
And a bunch of other things
that really drives that message home
on exactly why you and why now,
for whoever you're putting this in front of.
When we did these two things,
we then had a much more revamped strategy.
And also because we understood the ICP better.
And because we understood our message better,
we were then able to choose
what channels we were gonna go after.
So that's what the front third piece is,
which is a Broadway Show.
And a Broadway Show is instead of just saying,
"We're gonna do this channel
and we're gonna do this channel.
We're gonna do this channel and that didn't work.
Let's do this."
You get all scattered.
Broadway Show is a consistent set
of sales and marketing activities
that you run every single week
to bring your manifesto to your ICP.
That's what you do.
And that makes sure that you don't get scatter brained.
That makes sure that you have the right messaging,
the right targeting.
And also part of this,
is you're picking the right channel.
And turns out the channel was just fine.
The messaging was the problem.
People looked at it,
but it didn't compel them to take action.
That's why they were getting engagement
but there was no conversion.
People were looking at it and they're like,
"Oh, that's cool."
But they were like, "Cool, I'm gonna keep moving.
I'm gonna keep scrolling."
This is why they were doing Outbound.
And people may have looked at it,
just like in social but they were like,
"I'm not gonna take any action on this."
But when you actually revamp the ICP,
you come up with a better message.
When you come up with a better message
then you can pick the right channels
to go after in a consistent basis
without second guessing yourself.
And consistently you're bringing your manifesto
to your ICP on a weekly basis.
And the best part about this was we put that into play
and they immediately start to see
more traction in the market.
One of the best ways
that I know that we've hit right
on the messaging and the manifesto and ICP
is when the founder comes back and says,
"You know what?
We were running through the deck."
We have some founders that are product led.
Some founders that are sales led.
These guys were sales led like,
"We're running through the deck.
And there were a lot more head nods.
People were getting it.
People were really interested in."
I'm like, "Yeah, that's when you know,
you hit the messaging."
And because we actually established
some key metrics that they could measure.
Based on these metrics,
they were then able to iterate.
Whereas before,
when we first started with these outcomes
they were like,
"We're just gonna move to this other channel
because we lost a whole bunch of money here."
They were being all scatterbrained.
Instead, they were able
to look at these specific metrics and say,
"Cool, here's what's working.
Here's what's not.
Here's how we diagnose.
Here's how we iterate."
And they were able to get better
and better and better and better and better.
And that is the power of revamping
a go-to market strategy in a much more systematic way.
Especially when you've got some revenues,
but it's not quite converting.
And the sooner you do this,
the less time you're gonna waste on ad dollars.
On burning your brand by sending
a whole bunch of Outbound emails
to people that are like,
"Oh my God, these guys are terrible.
I never wanna hear from them again."
Right, because the messaging didn't hit.
And also just wasting time on social contents,
wasting money on doing all these things.
And then wasting even more time
moving onto something new
without having learned from it.
But if you actually look at your outcomes
and then you figure out,
"Is it my activity?
Is it my messaging?
Is it my targeting?
Which one do I need to fix?"
And based on those insights, you then say,
"Cool, let me revamp my ICP and my manifesto.
And then I'll run my Broadway Show
and track the right metrics and iterate."
Then you will have a much more scalable
go-to market strategy so you can drive growth.
And this is the framework
that I've used in my own SaaS businesses.
This is the framework I use now
in any company that I run.
And this is the framework that I use
with any founder that I work with,
inside of my go-to market program.
So now, you know the three principles
that will help you understand
what is wrong with your go to market strategy.
What you may not know is how to fix it.
You may not know, "What is my ICP,
and how should it look,
and how do I do a proper ICP process?"
What you may not know is,
"What should my messaging be?
What's my value prop?
What's my manifesto?
Or how do I drive urgency and deals
so I have higher conversion rates
and shorten my deal cycles."
What you may not know is,
"What channels do I pick?
How do I measure whether they're working
and how do I iterate?"
This is exactly why I created
my SaaS go-to market coaching program.
Inside this program, we work together
to ensure that you are able
to revamp your go-to market strategy,
and execute on it so that you can scale your growth.
Instead of just guessing,
we'd hit a very systematic approach
to make sure that you're doing the right steps
and not wasting time in the wrong areas.
So if you wanna learn more about the program,
just go to tkkader.com/gtm
tkkader.com/gtm
It's an incredible program.
You'll get all the details over there.
You'll get exactly how it works
and what you need to actually be eligible for it.
And then you'll fill a little form
to get on a phone call.
Program like this,
we wanna make sure we can actually help you.
So on the phone call,
we'll dig into exactly where you are in the business,
what you're struggling with.
And if it sounds like we can help you,
we are off to the races.
We'll help you revamp your go to market strategy,
and get to work on scaling your growth right away.
Super simple.
Just go to tkkader.com/gtm
And in there, you'll get all of the details.
If you got value from this video,
please smash the like button
for the YouTube algorithm.
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Also, if you have a fellow founder,
if you have a fellow team member,
if you're part of a SLACK community
or WhatsApp group with other founders
that would get value from this video,
please share this with them.
We put a lot of love into these videos.
And it would just mean the world to me and my team
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We wanna help as many people as possible.
Also I drop an episode like this every single Sunday,
with actionable strategies
and tactics from the trenches.
With working with actual founders
and actually having been in your shoes as a founder.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon,
that where you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode.
And lastly, remember,
everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business.
When you are with us, yours,
it's gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK.
And I'll see you in the next episode
or inside of the go to market program,
where we get to work together
to scale your go to market machine
and scale your SaaS business.