- 2023, the year 2023 is amongst us.
So on one hand, depending
on when you're watching this video,
you're likely looking to finish this current year strong.
On another hand, you're trying to figure out, well
what do we do to actually continue to drive growth,
to accelerate growth for our SaaS business
in the new year over the next 12 months?
Here's the big question though.
How do you actually get your co-founder
and you and your team together
and really figure out what's worked, what hasn't worked
and how do we actually revamp our go-to-market strategy
our SaaS business
and create this plan to go crush it in the next 12 months?
In this episode, I'm gonna walk you
through the three principles that I follow
that I have followed over the last 10 years of
operating SaaS companies to actually plan for the new year.
And when you follow these three principles,
you two will be accelerate your growth
to that next stage.
Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody?
Welcome to Unstoppable, I'm TK
and on this channel I help 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
from actually been a founder just like you
from working with founders just like you
on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
So if you're new
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 channel, if you're part
of this community, if you're part of my SaaS go
to market coaching programs, my people, welcome back.
It's really awesome to see you over here.
Now, I remember there was this one year where
in my last company, ToutApp, we had hit product market fit.
We were generating revenues
and all of a sudden we had a team and we were going
into the new year, in years prior as I was figuring
out what my right product is, what the right market is
it was just me in a room during December break
or going into January trying to figure out like, okay
what's the new plan?
What do we do next?
But all of a sudden we had a team, and it wasn't just enough
for me to be in a corner to just make a bunch
of decisions, I needed to actually align the team.
And also there was power here.
There were other perspectives,
other opinions that we could tap
into to really understand how we could drive growth.
And so that's when I started to really think critically
about how do we actually come together to
forge an unstoppable plan for the new year?
And that's how I got into these three principles.
Having worked at ToutApp, having grown it,
having sold it to Marketo,
having been SVP of strategy at Marketo
having worked with over 250 founders over the last two
and a half years of running this channel and this program
here are the three principles that I now teach
that I have followed to actually plan for the new year.
And when you follow these three principles
all you need to do is just sit down
and kind of answer these three key questions.
You too will be able to plot your unstoppable plan
for the new year.
Most importantly, you will not be doing it
in just a vacuum vacuum.
You'll actually be aligning the key stakeholders to
make sure everyone's on the same page.
So if you're excited to dig into principle number one,
go ahead and smash that
like button for the YouTube algorithm.
It really likes it when you do that.
Let's jump right into it.
So the first question that you want to answer is
the last 12 months versus the next 12 months.
And I'll explain this in a second on what this means.
It can be very easy to have recency bias.
Recency bias is where the things that happen
in the last seven days or last 30 days taint your view
into what you're gonna do for the next 12 months.
And the worst thing to do is make decisions
on just a slice of that data.
So to begin any sort of planning exercise
for your SaaS business to truly do a SaaS business plan
what you really wanna do is ask yourself like, Hey
how did the last 12 months go?
And you wanna take a 12 month view into this.
You can slice this up into month over month,
quarter over quarter, the last 24 months
if you have that data.
But pausing and reflecting
and understanding exactly what the last 12 months have been
like is super important to get everyone grounded
into reality and also to escape recency bias.
Now, you might be asking like all right TK,
what do I actually look at?
Here are a few things that I always looked at myself
and then when I started to formalize it
into a process I looked at together as a team.
What I would do is do the data analysis
and put together two to three slides that really
outline the business from a data perspective.
What this allowed us to do was forget the recency bias,
forget the opinions and ground ourselves
into the reality of the business.
A few things that I like to look at is, well
what was our revenue in terms of the last 12 months?
And I'd like to look at this over a month over month basis
and also a quarter over quarter basis, right?
'Cause nothing else matters aside from revenue.
If you're pre-revenue
then the next thing that matters is what was our pipeline?
And this matters just as much if you are post revenue also,
meaning if you close a certain amount of revenue,
how much pipeline did we actually generate?
How many opportunities do we have?
How many trial users do we have?
How many leads did we have?
This allows us to understand
are we actually talking to a big enough pool
of people to have yielded the right amount of revenue?
Then I get into, well, what was our win percentage?
How much did we win?
How much did we lose?
We get into what was our churn?
Did we lose customers
and they didn't renew or do we actually renew them?
These are some basic things that I start to look
at and put into a couple of slides to really
understand here is what the last 12 months looks like.
The real important part about this is it gets you
out of just the last recent memory that you have
and helps you zoom out and look
at here's what the business has done
over the last 12 months.
Because while 12 months has not a long time,
it's still a good amount of time and a lot
of data that you have collected, and I don't know about you,
but whenever I zoom out and look at things
on a 12 month perspective, I always walk away with, oh
like that's a different perspective
that I wasn't thinking about.
And that's basically recency bias getting crushed.
Once you have a few set of slides
on here's what the last 12 months looks like,
here's how the business has done, here's where we are,
then you can start to think
about what are the next 12 months looks like?
And it's very easy to overcomplicate this at this stage
but in this question
what you really wanna say is like, okay, cool.
How much do we want to grow over the next 12 months?
This could be as simple as, Hey, we want to grow 300%
over the next 12 months and just leave it at that.
Not alone grounds everyone, cool, here's where we are
here's where we want to get to.
Let's talk, instead of getting
into the nitty gritty details of all these specific pieces
you'll get to that towards the end.
So that's principle number one where it's very
easy to have knee-jerk reactions
and just do things that feel right based on recent data.
Forcing yourself to think about the last 12 months
and then the thinking about the goal
and the target for the next 12 months
is a great way to structure any sort
of short discussion you want to have
with your team or even with yourself on, Hey
what's our plan to grow in the new year in 2023 and beyond?
Once you have that down,
it can be very easy to jump into, oh
we gotta do this and we gotta do this
and we gotta do this and don't do that.
This is what we call jumping to solutions
and I'll come in step number three.
What you wanna do as principle number two
and this is something I learned the hard way
was you actually want to ask yourself what's broken?
And another way, depending on whether you want to be
this can come off sometimes negative
or sometimes as a very realistic question.
Another way to think
about this is what were the lessons learned?
So depending on your team culture
if you guys are all about like hardcore reality
then what's broken is a great question to frame
and really solicit the team or
if it's a little bit more culturally incorrect to do that
you can just say, Hey, what were some lessons learned
based-on things that went wrong, but maybe we turned
around or we never wanna make a mistake around that again.
What this allows you to do is look
at the last 12 months and the next 12 months
in the context of how the business is working and
what the opportunities are to actually improve the business.
If you just walk away, we're like, let's just go 300%.
Everyone says yes, and everyone goes back to their jobs.
They do the same things as they did over the last 12 months.
Chances are what got you here
to this point isn't going to be the thing that what gets you
to that next point.
You may have to tweak some things,
you may have to subtract some things,
you may have to add some things.
And so thinking about what's broken
and what were some lessons learned actually
helps you start to think about, okay, here are the areas
of the business that we actually need to fix
or there are opportunities to grow.
If you've been watching this channel for a while
you know that there's three key components
of every SaaS business, okay?
So there's market, this is the market
that you're selling into, there's product.
This is essentially what you're bringing into the market
and there's go to market.
Go to market is essentially how you are
bringing your product to the market, educating them
and getting them into the product to create revenues.
So when you're thinking in terms
of what's broken and what are some lessons learned,
it always helps to structure the discussion based on
your market and then your product
and then you go to market in three separate pillars
because then it tethers a discussion
to what's most relevant instead of being all over the place.
So for example, if you're a pre-revenue company
and you're coming up
on 12 months of not generating any revenues
then chances are it's not the go-to market to focus on.
Chances are you really want to stress test
whether you're in the right market.
But if you've got some revenues, but you've had a lot
of churn, then you may want to look at, well
what is our churn management process?
And is the product broken?
But if you've got some revenues,
you've had healthy growth and the market's ripe
and the product's good, you've got healthy competition
but you're just not growing as fast as you want
or this year didn't quite hit the target number,
then you wanna look at, well, what's our go-to market?
How do we actually fix our go-to market?
Chances are there are things broken
in all three of these pillars
but there may be one pillar that really needs your attention
in the new year, and that's something that this
discussion can actually drive.
Once you have the last 12 months
you start to set a target for the next 12 months.
Then you start to look at, well, what's broken?
What are some lessons learned?
You'll identify some opportunities.
This is what leads into principle number three.
Now, before I go into principle number three,
let me just pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
The power in this is it can be so overly complicated
to do strategy offsites or to do actual diagnostics
like people overcomplicate these things
and because people overcomplicate these things,
they do none of it.
And you can start to see where on one hand you do nothing
and you just expect different returns
and that never is true.
On the other hand, you can overcomplicate
and get lost in the details
and therefore you don't come out with a plan or a strategy.
But if you just ask these two questions,
it really tethers you to like, okay, what really matters?
What you're really doing here is for you and your co-founder
and maybe your team, you're trying to get
into the essentials of what really, really matters.
What are gonna be needle movers in the next 12 months?
If you're starting to see the power in this
can I just get a yes in the comments below
and also smash out light button for the YouTube algorithm?
It really likes it when you do that.
Also, if you're in this stage where you have some revenues
and you're looking to grow your SaaS business,
you're looking to accelerate your path
to that next stage of growth,
and you know there's some go-to market pieces
that you need to revamp,
you need to focus on the right market.
You need to make sure that you're communicating
the value of your product in the right way.
And I encourage you to check out
my SaaS go-to market coaching program.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video.
You don't have to go anywhere right now.
Let's go into principle number three
because this is where it all comes together.
So principle number three is really where
you start to build this plan.
And the simple question that you really want to ask here is
how do we revamp our go-to market and strategy?
Now, you've watched this channel for some time.
You know that a lot of this is just simple math.
If you have a certain growth number, let's just
say you want to generate a million dollars of new business
then you need a certain amount
of pipeline and a certain win rate, simple math.
And so you can start to already see like, okay
we have some things to fix in our go-to market
in our product or or our market
but we really need to generate this much pipeline
in order to generate this much revenue.
In order to generate this much pipeline,
we need to generate this many leads.
So there's some obvious things that will come
out for this plan right away that will clarify
here's exactly where we're going.
You'll also likely get a list
of things you need to fix from number two, which is, Hey
maybe we need to fix our messaging or our positioning
or we need to actually focus
on a certain segment of the market where we did better.
Out of this list, you'll actually want to
create an action plan that everyone signs
up with and has one person responsible
for each of those items that says
here's how we're gonna revamp our strategy.
And that list of things you're going to do to fix
and move the needle and the metrics you're gonna
use to measure it essentially becomes your plan for 2022.
And this was kind of my point in the beginning.
It seems obvious, and this seems pretty simple
and really it is.
It doesn't need to be overly complicated.
The devil's in the details
on how you actually tweak each of these things.
But just having this conversation aligns your team
on how did we do?
Where are we going over the next 12 months?
What were some of the things that we learned
and was holding us back?
And based on all these things,
what do we need to do to actually drive this growth?
And out of this can come an actual plan
that you can start to work
on to grow your SaaS business.
If you're in this stage where you're looking to build
out your go-to-market strategy
and really grow your business,
what I've found is there are three critical components
to your plan.
And this is exactly what I do
in my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
The first component
to your go-to-market strategy is your ICP.
This is your ideal customer profile.
A lot of times you may be generating revenues
from all different parts of the market.
Some are good customers, some are bad customers,
some have higher win rates, some have lower win rates
some have really high churn, some have really good churn
and that's your essentially your market.
And so building out a proper ICP
can actually revamp your focus area
of which market you're gonna go and win in and compete in.
The second part of your go-to-market strategy that will come
out of this plan is your manifesto.
If you are having trouble competing in the market,
if you're having trouble getting the attention
of your market, if you're having trouble generating leads
or pipeline, then likely you have to actually
fix your strategic narrative,
your messaging and your positioning.
This essentially is encompassed by your manifesto.
A manifesto encompasses your positioning, your messaging,
how you actually differentiate from the competition
and how you educate the market
so you can generate leads and pipeline.
And the third piece
to a go-to-market strategy is your Broadway show.
You can look at your data and see that maybe
you did a little bit of LinkedIn, maybe you ran some ads,
maybe you worked on some SEO, but it never paid off.
What ends up happening is a lot
of times when you lack a go-to-market strategy
and a proper plan to grow, you actually don't
know which channels you're gonna double down on.
Running a Broadway show essentially focuses you
on specific channels consistently where you're
bringing your manifesto to your ICP.
These three components are critical components
for your growth in the new year.
And so when you follow these principles,
on how did we do last year?
What do we want to do in the next year?
How much growth do we wanna drive?
What held does back?
What's broken?
What are the competitive dynamics like?
What's churn like?
What's win rate like?
And based on that,
you actually focus it into these three components.
You'll essentially have a go-to-market plan
and a plan to grow your SaaS business in the new year.
And out of this can also come insights
on your product roadmap on who you need to hire,
and what areas of the business you need to invest more into.
All these things comes into focus.
Now you know the three critical components
in the principles you can follow.
Literally, this can take an hour and a half with your team.
It shouldn't be that complicated to actually ask
and answer these questions
and start to formulate a plan for your SaaS business.
Now, what you may not know is well, how do we actually think
about the market and the ideal customer profile?
How do we actually reframe our messaging
so we can compete better
and get the attention of the market?
How do we actually run a consistent Broadway show
so we can get the tension of our target market?
This is exactly why I created my SaaS go-to-market
coaching program.
Inside of this program, we work together to
actually revamp your go-to-market strategy
and flesh out these three components.
And when you flush out these three components,
you are able to actually generate more pipeline
and close more deals
and accelerate your path to that next stage of growth.
If you wanna learn more about this program,
just go to tkkader.com/gtm, tkkader.com/gtm.
All the details will be there
on how you and I can work together.
And also, if you got value from this video,
please smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm.
It really likes it when you do that.
And if you have a fellow founder,
if you have a team member
that would also get value from this video.
In fact, if you're hosting this one and a half hour session
share this video
with them so that they all know what framework
we're all gonna be using to create this plan for 2023.
If you're part of a WhatsApp group, a Slack group
with other founders, it would mean the world to us.
If you share this video as well
we wanna help as many SaaS founders as possible.
And lastly, I drop an episode every single Sunday
with actionable strategies and tactics
on how to grow your SaaS business from the trenches.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that be icon if you haven't already.
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 inside the go-to-market program
or at least in the next episode.
Take care.
(upbeat music)