- When you're building out a go to market strategy
for your SaaS business, for your software product
it can be really daunting because
of all the different ways you can get attention online.
Well, turns out if you really look at it
there's essentially six key ways that you can drive growth
for your SaaS business.
Here's the problem, though, when you're starting out
you kinda do a little bit of everything
cause you don't know what to focus on.
That's the lack of a strategy.
You kinda hope that something works.
Now, this is where you get overwhelmed
and you end up neither here nor there.
I'm gonna walk you through these six key ways,
that you can actually drive growth
as part of your go-to market strategy.
And I'm gonna teach you how to prioritize them
in the right way, depending on what stage you're in.
This way, you can actually focus
on each of them and actually drive growth
and then figure out which one to double down on.
And when you do this
you'll 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 help SaaS founders
like you grow your SaaS businesses faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to this channel, welcome
be sure to hit the subscribe button and that
bell icon that way you'll get notified every single time
I drop an episode with the TK energy.
All right, now, if you're already part
of my SaaS go-to-market coaching program, if you're part
of this community already, we just had 8,000 subscribers.
Thank you for doing this with me.
Thank you for allowing me to serve you so
excited to see you over here.
All right.
Now I remember when I was first starting out tout app.
That was my last SaaS business.
I was kinda new as, as an engineering founder
I was new to sales and marketing
and it got really overwhelming on what do you focus on?
What do you not focus on?
I try to do a little bit of everything.
And this is what I see a lot of founders that come to me
to join my go to market coaching program be doing,
they're like, we're doing all the things
and nothing's working and I'm like, okay, cool.
Let's just actually slow it down.
Let's focus on the core components.
Take it a step at a time.
It turns out having done this for 15 years,
there's really six key ways you can get attention online.
The six key ways that you need to focus on,
especially for a B2B SaaS business.
And having done this for so long,
I finally started to see the forest for the trees
and I kind of know which one I prioritize first.
So in this episode
I'm gonna walk you through what those six are,
which ones to prioritize and why.
And as you actually understand this
you'll be able to best prioritize your time
so that you actually have a proper go-to-market strategy,
to actually drive growth.
If you're excited to dig in,
go to smash a like button for the YouTube algorithm
and let me show you how this all comes together.
Okay, so first of all, all the six ways, right?
There are six essential ways.
I wanna map them out in, in a, in a
in a conceptual way that you can understand.
Because it can get overwhelming
if you start to think about all six of them, right?
So the way I think about it is,
first there's a skill required, right?
Out of the six ways to generate growth
and drive growth and get attention online,
there's, it can either be easy for anyone
or it can be really hard.
There's a certain amount of skill required, right?
At the same time, there's also something around, well
do you get quick feedback or is it slow?
So when it comes to the early days of growing your go
to market machine and growing your SaaS business
you wanna get quick feedback.
If it takes forever to get feedback
then you don't know if your messaging is hitting.
If your ICP is right,
if you're positioning it the right way, you won't know any
of those things, you can waste months thinking like, okay
like give Mark Zuckerberg another a hundred dollars
and we're like one click away, right?
So you wanna actually go for a quick feedback speed
and you wanna make sure you start
with the easy stuff first and then start to scale out.
That's essential to the general principle around this.
You wanna start with a quick and easy, quick feedback
easy to get started.
And then you wanna start to work outwards.
And I'm gonna map out the six different ways
of getting attention and driving growth across this vector.
What I've learned is when he actually explained it this way
to founders and to marketers, they're like, okay
this makes a ton of sense.
Now, I know how to focus, how to validate
and I can take it a step at a time
versus being ad hoc and neither here nor there, right?
So let's talk about the first one.
The quickest and easiest way, that you can actually,
so the first one is the quickest and easiest, right?
And the quickest and easiest way that you can actually
generate demand and get attention,
is existing customers.
A lot of founders forget this.
So if you are zero customers, then I would say
find your friends and family
find your first degree network.
People that you already know,
that's in your ideal customer profile and engage with them.
What you wanna be able to do is go
to your existing customers and your existing network, right?
And you wanna say, hey can you refer me to more people
that will use the product?
So many founders don't do this.
Either because they don't have enough trust in the product,
or they're shy, or they're hoping that Mark Zuckerberg
will give them a whole bunch of customers like,
but this is the easiest and it's often forgotten.
The power in this is
when you actually start with the existing people,
there's a lot more trust built.
And when it's a warm introduction, just like an investor
People are gonna trust you even more when
you get introduced to them.
And they're more likely to give you real feedback.
So the first, the quickest and easiest way
it requires the least amount of scale
as a quickest way is to just go after existing customers
in your existing network and just email them or call them
or text them or message them, whatever it takes to say,
hey we want, this is what we're building,
we wanna actually like, get more customers,
what do you know?
And actually working through it that way.
The second way,
it requires a medium amount of skill, right?
But it's still relatively quick is to actually go into
a social and on LinkedIn, especially you're B2B, SaaS right?
Social,
LinkedIn,
and in some cases, Twitter works as well.
And I'm gonna, I'm gonna carry out this is like,
I focus on B2B SaaS.
So that's essentially all these six ways work best
for B2B SaaS.
So the second way is just as relatively quick
in terms of feedback, like if you post something
on LinkedIn, with your current connections
you will see if it resonates or not.
If you DM someone that's in your ICP,
you'll see pretty quickly if it'll resonate or not,
you'll get quick feedback on this,
and it's like, and it requires a little bit more skill
on how to message this properly
but you can still get to it fairly quickly.
And best of all, it's also cheap, right?
These don't cost anything.
So once you have these two down
this is number one, this is number two.
The third one that comes into play,
is actually a little bit slower,
but it doesn't require as much skill even as social, right?
Cause there's enough stuff out there on how to do this.
The third one is outbound.
And this could be email,
or it could be calling, whatever works for your ICP.
The third way that you can actually generate demand
and drive growth is essentially do outbound calling
or emailing or ideally both.
And basically these all compound on each other.
You start with referrals, then you go into social
and then you go into outbound.
And when you go into these three, you have three
of the biggest ways that you can drive demand
get attention for your SaaS business
and actually drive growth.
You can actually do these three things.
And they're all relatively easy to do in terms of skill,
like in terms of the activities that you need to do.
And the feedback speed.
These two are very quick
and this one is a little bit slower
but still worth it because it's free.
And you can actually build on these three things.
Now I have three more that are that round
out the six, right?
Now before I go into those three,
let me just pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the clarity in this?
The clarity in this is,
you wanna start with the quick and easy.
What gives you the quickest feedback?
What is easy to do?
And then you wanna start working outward, right?
A lot of times people try to do this whole map.
They do all the hard things that they have
no business doing.
They're doing some of the easy things
and they're here and they're here, here
and then they don't know what's working and what's not
and they're all over the place, right?
When you do it in a structural way,
when you say let's do it quick and easy
and then go to social and then go outbound.
What you're essentially doing is little by little expanding.
And you can actually measure what's working
and keep iterating, right?
Measuring and iterating is the power of,
is the real thing that makes a difference
between the people that make it
and the people that don't make it.
And that's the power in this.
So if you're starting to see the value in this,
can I just get a yes in the comments below?
Seriously hit me with a yes.
I love hearing from you guys, ask any questions you have,
also smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm.
It just likes it.
We like it.
We put a lot of love into these videos,
so that means the world to us if you do that.
Also, if you are trying to figure
out how to actually implement all this,
you're trying to figure how to get the messaging, right,
what your ICP is?
If you want the step-by-step framework on how to
implement all this stuff, I invite you to check out my SaaS,
go to market coaching program,
I'll tell you more about it,
and then this video let's go to the other three ways.
The next one is a little bit more in the difficulty side.
But as you start to conquer these three, and you know
you've gotten some level of product market fit.
You're starting to see the demand.
You didn't know how to position it, and you know how
to message it.
The fourth one is over here
and this can vary in terms of feedback speed.
It can be pretty quick depending
on what platform you're going into,
but this is the fourth one.
This is platforms
and marketplaces.
Platforms and marketplaces are a great way
to generate demand, get awareness in the market.
Examples of this is the Shopify marketplace.
I have a lot of founders in my program,
that are building in the Shopify ecosystem.
Another great example is the Salesforce ecosystem.
Another great example is the HubSpot ecosystem.
All these ecosystems have apps that are integrating
to that core platform.
They get listed in the marketplace
and people that are looking for solutions to their problems,
they're able to search, find it, see the reviews
and sign up right away, which is half the power.
So you can actually, once you have your messaging right,
you know how to position it,
you get the right page, a page set up over here
and you can start to generate a lot of demand
through number four, platforms and marketplaces.
And there's a whole art
to how you position this in the right way.
There's a reason why this comes after these three,
because you can waste a lot of time trying to set this up
and not know what's working and not because you don't
know how to message this properly
and position this properly.
But by the time you've done these three,
then you can start to get into this.
It's a little bit harder to do it.
You can do it because these have made it a lot easier
for you to message it.
And then you can start to get feedback pretty quickly
because these platforms promote you pretty quickly as well
once you have the listing set up properly.
So that's number four platforms and marketplaces.
The fifth one that you can now go into.
This is one of the hardest,
and I'm gonna talk about why this is the hardest
and why it's number five versus number one.
Number five is ads.
Now, I can go in
and give Mark Zuckerberg, a thousand dollars
and he will take my money really quickly and I'll run ads.
But this is really hard to do a writing ad copy
setting up the targeting, figuring out how to follow
up with those ads and how to warm the traffic.
These are, there's art to this.
The problem is that you can actually go
and set up an ad yourself, if you know what you're doing.
If you don't know what you're doing,
this will take a lot of your money.
All the dashboards will look like things are happening,
people are clicking, but you have no revenue coming out.
Which is why I put this as number five.
A lot of people start with ads
before they've figured out their ICP,
before they figured out their strategic message,
before they figured out any of these things.
And they just jump right into ads and lose a lot of money.
On top of that,
they don't have the right partner
to actually set up these ads and run these ads.
There are people that run billions of dollars of ads
or people that run hundreds of dollars of ads.
You wanna have the right people on your team,
that are running the ads for you,
versus you just kind of messing around on your own,
losing all your money.
So once you have these things in place
whichever one of these applied.
These two should apply to any SaaS business,
this is kind of optional.
Then you can run ads because you have a lot of
core ingredients and proof points on what's working
and what's not, that you can feed into these ads
because it's been proven by the market.
And then you can actually get the ROI on these ad dollars
which is why I always say number five should be ads.
And then finally I put over here, number six.
If you can guess what number six is by now,
number six is SEO right?
A lot of times I see founders start over here.
They're like, we're going to do content marketing.
We're gonna blog.
I'm like, cool, how are they going to find you?
So what we're gonna tweet about it.
It's like, how they, why would they click?
Like no one wants to click on a blog post anymore.
They just don't.
No one cares.
So when an SEO takes 18 months,
the feedback speed is very slow.
So you can do a lot of content,
but you won't really know if it's hitting the market or not,
which is why I put this step last.
By the time you get to the SEO, you will have proven
out your messaging, your strategic narrative,
your manifesto, your product market fit.
A lot of things get proven out.
Then you can invest in ads
for the long run for, for the next 18 months.
And you start to get the ROI on that.
And that's how I lay out how to actually, step-by-step go
through the six ways you can generate demand,
before you go to market strategy,
for your SaaS business and your software product.
And when you follow it in these steps, these stages.
you're able to do it in a structured way,
you're able to can gather data,
you're able to get quick feedback,
you're able to do it with less skill
and little by little, you build up, build up, build up,
your messaging gets, gets strengthened,
your, your manifesto gets strengthened,
your ICP gets strengthened
and then you can spend money on ads and SEO
and platforms that you can start to scale that way as well.
So to recap, start with quick and easy
and then go all the way out in terms of slow feedback
speed and hard.
A little by little,
you can start to scale your go to market machine.
So that's what I had for you today,
if you're building how your go to market strategy,
then these are the six ways,
that you can actually generate demand.
Don't try to do all of them all at once.
Do it a step at a time.
Now, if you are doing this, there are some things
that you're gonna have to figure out.
The first thing you're gonna have to figure out is,
what is your ICP?
The second thing you're gonna have to figure out,
is what is your messaging?
You need a strategic messaging, you need a manifesto.
The third thing you're gonna have to figure out is,
what is the sequence?
What is the, what I call the Broadway show,
that you're gonna run,
across each of these different ways of getting demand.
So if you're looking to figure out these three things
and you want a step-by-step framework to follow
then I invite you to check out
my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
Just go to TK, kader.com/gtm, or follow the link below.
When you go to that link
you'll get all the details around the program.
You'll have a little application link.
You just fill out a couple of questions
and then we'll get on a call.
Once we're on the call
we'll figure out where you are, where you're looking to go.
And if we can help, feel like we can help
we'll get you into the program.
It's an incredible program.
It's one of, the it's, it's so cool.
And it's so fun to work with all these founders
to help build out this scale we're go to market and machines
and it helps you get the strategy right
and then the execution right
and all these things come together.
So go to TK care.com/gtm, and we'll get on a call
and we'll figure out if we can help you.
Lastly, if you got value from this video, please smash
that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
I drop an episode like this three times a week,
so be sure hit the subscribe button
and that bell icon where you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode.
If you have a fellow co-founder
if you're part of a Slack group or WhatsApp group
of fellow SaaS founders, please share this video,
it would means the world to me and my team.
And lastly remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business
but when you are with us, yours is going to be unstoppable.
I'm TK.
I'll see you in the next episode.
(dramatic music)