- When it comes to B2B SAAS businesses,
when it comes to growing them, there's the old way,
and the new way of driving growth.
The old way was to actually think about leads,
that's more of a defensive position
because you're trying to just get the leads to come in,
and then you're kind of defending which ones
are the right leads, and which one you focus on
which one you don't, and you hope that there are good leads
that are coming through.
The new way is to actually focus on accounts
instead of leads,
accounts are really more of an offensive play,
with the accounts, you're saying, here are the accounts
we really want, and you actually run an offensive play
to go after those accounts,
'cause you know, they're gonna be great customers.
This is where account-based marketing comes into play,
now, while this idea has existed for a while
only now B2B SAAS companies are really starting
to embrace account-based marketing,
and there's the right technology to support them
in actually deploying ABM campaigns.
In this episode, I'm gonna dig into exactly
how you can deploy an ABM strategy to drive growth
for your SAAS business in five easy steps, intro.
(high energy upbeat music)
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to Unstoppable, I'm TK.
And on this channel, I help SAAS founders like you
accelerate your path to the next stage of growth,
with an unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to the channel,
welcome, it's really great to have you here.
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because I drop an episode like this every Sunday,
Wednesday, and Friday, to help you grow your SAAS business
and you'll wanna be notified right?
So go ahead and hit that subscribe button and the bell icon,
and you'll get notified right away,
whenever I drop an episode with the TK energy.
Now, also if you are already part of the community,
if you're part of my SAAS, Go-To-Market coaching program,
welcome back, it's really great to see you here.
In this episode, I'm gonna dig into how you can deploy
an account-based marketing strategy
to accelerate the growth of your SAAS business.
I'm gonna walk you through the five steps
that applies to actually deploy this strategy,
and we're gonna talk a little bit around why
this is so much more powerful, than just waiting around
and looking at your leads and hoping they're great,
which is more of a defensive play.
Whereas running an ABM strategy
is more of an offensive play to drive growth.
I've used this strategy this ABM strategy over a ToutApp
to drive our growth.
We also use it in Marketo needless to say,
because Marketo really opened up this idea on ABM
and built a whole platform around it.
So based on all of my experience in building SAAS businesses
and operating revenue technology businesses I'm gonna dig
into the five principles that you need to know.
So if you're excited to dig in,
go to smash that light button for the YouTube algorithm,
and let's get right into it.
Okay, so I'm gonna walk you through the five key steps
that you need to follow for deploying an ABM strategy,
step-by-step, the first thing you really need
to look at to figure out your ABM strategy
is first looking at your customer base.
Within your customer base, even if it's small right now,
what you wanna do is find out the highest LTV customers.
Who are the customers that have the highest LTV,
they buy the most, they renew,
and they don't complain a lot,
and they're successful with your platform?
These are essentially your best customers.
And what you wanna do is identify a list of them, why?
The reason for that is it's gonna give you a clue
into what segment of the market, what part of the market,
what type of customers,
what types of accounts you're already starting
to see success with.
Because what, instead of just saying
here's all the people we want and hope meet us,
you're starting to say here's the people
who are already getting success with us,
let's figure out a way to go get more of them,
this is the best way to start
an account-based marketing strategy
because you're going off of data.
You are not just hoping and praying
that these people will buy,
you're seeing these people already buy,
let's go find more of them and then go to them.
This is principle number one
of every successful ABM strategy
figure out who are your best customers
so that then you can start to go find more of them.
You guys getting this?
Once you've done that, that's what you take,
you take all that data, and feed it into building
an ideal customer profile.
An ideal customer profile is essentially
a codified version of exactly who are the people
that are most likely to buy your software,
what are the characteristics that makes them successful
and makes them actually need your software right now,
and lastly who they are specifically,
so you can go after them, this is what an ICP codifies.
Now, by the way my next episode,
I'm actually gonna be walking you through
how to create an ICP,
so be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon
if you're not a subscriber already so you get notified
when I dropped that episode, we'll go a little bit more
in depth into how to create an ICP.
But anyway, once you've gotten the data
on who are your best customers you wanna codify
that into an ICP, so you start to understand
here the type of customers and accounts we really are gonna
be successful with, based on the data that we have,
even if it's small data in the early days.
Once you've done that, you wanna take that ICP
and start to build out a target account list,
the biggest thing here is what you're doing
is instead of just hoping these people come,
and staying in the abstract,
you wanna build out your dream 100 customers and do a list.
You wanna make a list of your dream 100 customers
that are gonna be wildly successful
if they were to find out about your platform and come on.
And this is all based on data, right?
You know these types of customers are gonna be successful
and therefore based on that, you're gonna build out a list
of your dream 100 customers.
You can also make sure you don't just think
about it as an account, you wanna think about these
are the core accounts, and here are the core people,
maybe it's the CEO or the CIO or the VP sales,
whoever you're selling to,
you wanna actually flesh this out into a list
of concrete people and a list of target accounts,
that you believe should be a dream 100
and these are gonna be your next 100 customers.
All right, so let me pause here for a second
before I go into four and five,
which is really more about your go-to-market machine,
these three steps, let me just pause here,
these three steps are super powerful.
If you do this, you'll switch
from a defensive go-to-market machine
to an authentic go-to-market machine.
'Cause you're gonna be very much purposeful,
about who you are going after, who you want as customers,
and how to go after them.
You start to see the power in this,
go and smash up like button for the YouTube algorithm,
and also let me just get a, "Yes," in the comments below,
I wanna hear from you, on what you're seeing so far,
what insights you're getting,
if you're excited about digging in
and applying this account-based marketing principle
and strategy to your SAAS business to drive growth.
Also, if you wanna dig more into this,
building on an account-based marketing strategy,
it's just one of the critical growth levers
in growing your SAAS business.
I outlined five critical SAAS growth levers,
I'll help you kickstart the growth of your SAAS business,
insight of my SAAS Growth Playbook, it's completely free,
I'll link to it below and also tell you more
about it at the end of the day video,
but let's go back to principle number four and five,
so we can round out your steps for building an ABM strategy.
Once you have these three things,
couple of things will happen.
You'll have a list of 100 customers
that you really wanna go after.
You'll start to understand some key people
you really wanna target,
you'll start to get a lot more focus on the type of customer
the type of ideal customer that you wanna go after.
Based on this, based on these market insights
what you really want do is build out your manifesto.
Now, I teach you how to build a manifesto
inside of my Go-To-Market SAAS program
and inside of that program I actually walk you through
what are the key things you need
to incorporate a manifesto and make it persuasive, effective
so you can attract these people.
So what you'll wanna do is craft a manifesto.
This is about an eight slide document, a PDF,
that you can use as part of your Go-To-Market strategy
to attract these people.
Now, I talk a lot more about how a manifesto works
and how would we incorporate it
inside of my Go-To-Market program.
So I'll link to that below and you can check that out
if you wanna learn more about how to craft I manifesto.
But the key thing here, is you need something
that uniquely speaks to them this group of 100 people
that you've outlined that gets their attention,
that communicates the value and the change you're trying
to bring to their lives, and gets them to take action
on actually saying you know what?
We need a platform like that,
so we can take advantage of this new opportunity.
That's really what a manifesto is.
And you wanna actually do that work
to create that and craft that message.
When you have a great manifesto
your value proposition becomes easier,
your messaging becomes easier,
and you have a much clearer strategic narrative.
So that's what the manifesto step is.
You wanna get all that messaging right?
Once you've done that, then you wanna take that manifesto
and mobilize it through a Broadway show.
A Broadway show is essentially the marketing
and sales actions, and activities
and motions you do on a weekly basis.
Now there's two ways to do this, you could just come up
with a random set of things to do every day and every week,
or you run a very conservative effort
to promote your manifesto every week.
That's one Broadway show that you promote every week
and that's the final part
about mobilizing your ABM strategy.
So what ends up happening is by the time
you have your dream 100, you will have a set of accounts.
And what you're gonna do every week is go target
and reach out to these target accounts,
and that's your Broadway show.
How does a Broadway show come together?
There's a few things you can be doing.
First of all, you can actually connect via social, right?
You can actually connect with the people in your dream 100.
The other thing you can do is every week
you can actually share a post,
on this social network so that they see
your content specifically tying to your manifesto.
So they can start to interact with you as a brand
and learn more about what you're doing.
What you can also do is do outbound DM or email,
and you can engage with these accounts in a strategic way
using the messaging you define in your manifesto
to actually connect with these accounts.
The other thing you can do is as they are interacting
with your manifesto, and your posts
and going to your website, the other thing you can do
is you can retarget them, this is what we call all bound.
When you retarget them, what ends up happening
is they're gonna see you everywhere,
and you'll be able to retarget them
because they were on your website
they looked at your manifesto
and it'll seem like you're on their social feeds,
you're emailing them,
and every website they go to has your ad,
it's gonna feel like your everywhere,
and the universe is just telling these people
that they need to buy this thing,
and the messaging in the manifesto will help them understand
why it's an important urgent, frequent problem
that need to solve now and they can
if they just invest in your platform.
Now the beauty of ABM is it doesn't just stick to digital,
there's other things you can do, because you know
these are high value accounts or you probably dream 100,
you can also send them a FedEx envelope.
(pen squeaking)
I have some friends at PFL, they specialize in sending mail
to your target accounts as part of a B2B strategy,
they call it tactile marketing.
And one of the things they always say is,
there's a 98% open rate on a FedEx envelopes.
If you mail someone a FedEx envelope
and they're a highly valued account,
and you send them a copy of your manifesto,
and then some other swag with your logo on it,
they're gonna open it 98% of the time
because it's a FedEx envelope it's really usually important,
so you can actually do physical mail and email them,
and actually mail them the manifesto and other goodies
to get more awareness around your brand.
And the last thing you can do is you can invite them
to a webinar, or an event, or a dinner,
to also further engage them.
And so when you actually follow these five steps
and you figure out who your best customers are,
you figure out your ICP,
and you figure out your target accounts, your dream 100,
and then you build out your manifesto,
and then you run this Broadway show
which surrounds this account wherever they go,
everything starts to come together.
And what you end up with is instead of just defending
on the leads that are coming in, figuring out what's good
and trying to score them, you're saying,
forget that we're gonna go on the offense,
we're gonna go after a dream 100 clients in multiple ways
using the very strategic messaging
that we develop in our manifesto.
And we do all these things everything comes together
and actually drives to more growth, more customers,
more revenues and everything starts
to come together on our terms.
This is something that every SAAS business
that's looking to grow more aggressively must adopt.
A lot of these things are core marketing principles,
they're not specific to ABM,
all ABM has done is just pull together the right things
to say, this is what you need to be doing,
and this is essentially how the whole thing comes together.
When you do this, you will actually be able to drive growth
on your terms and accelerate your path
to that next stage of the growth.
So that's what an ABM strategy is,
that's how you do account-based marketing,
those are the five steps.
Now there are a lot of insider things that I mentioned here
like manifestos and Broadway shows.
So if you're in that stage where
you're building out your SAAS business,
and you really wanna take it to the next stage
I have two resources for you.
The first resource is my SaaS Growth Playbook,
it's completely free, it's a PDF,
so all you need to do is go to tkkader.com/playbook,
or just follow the link below.
It's a free download, you can download it
and it'll give you the five critical growth levels.
So one of them being account-based marketing,
and actually drive the growth of your SAAS business.
So you can start to learn
about these concepts a little bit more.
The other resource I'll give you
is my SAAS Growth Market coaching program.
So I have a lot of videos on YouTube that tell you
about these different concepts that you can start
to adopt to run your SAAS business,
and I tell you what they are, I tell you why they exist.
Over here I gave you the steps that you will have to follow
to build on ABM engine, so you can accelerate your growth.
But a lot of times founders like,
"Hey, like what is the framework to follow?
Where are the steps?
And how do I do this faster?
And how do I incorporate all of this?"
One of the things I didn't want people to be
is get overwhelmed with all the different things,
this is why I created my SAAS Go-To-Market coaching program.
Inside of the program you're gonna get a streamlined way
to actually build out your ICP, your dream 100,
to actually create your manifesto
which is a strategic narrative,
and then run it through your Broadway show.
You get the blueprint, you get the framework
you get the training, and then you get to work with me
to actually make sure you're doing each step right,
so that you can accelerate your path and next stage grow.
So if you're in that stage, where you with some revenues
and you really wanna scale your revenues
you wanted to point ABM strategy
and you really wanna accelerate your growth,
I invite you to go apply to join
my SAAS Go-To-Market program, but here's how it works.
You follow the link and go to tkkader.com/gtm.
And in there, you'll learn everything about the program,
and there's a little apply button, follow the apply button,
answer a couple of questions, that'll help me validate
that I can actually help you if I can,
then we'll get on a strategy call,
instead of a strategy call, it's completely free,
no strings attached, no pressure,
we'll talk through where you are in your SAAS business,
where you wanna go, and if the Go-To-Market program
can actually help you, once we determine that you can decide
if you wanna join or not, and we take it from there.
So I invite you to go check out my Go-To-Market program
and apply to get on a strategy call with me,
and then we can figure out if we can work together
to accelerate your path and put all this stuff into play.
But here's thing, you gonna have to do this anyway,
you're gonna have to figure out what your messaging is,
you're gonna have to figure out
what your marketing activities are,
why not follow a framework,
and that's really what I teach you inside of the program.
So go ahead and go to tkkader.com/gtm,
and you can apply to join the program.
And also you can get a copy copy of my SAAS Growth Playbook
which will give you some more of these concepts,
and then you can start to drive the growth
of your SAAS business.
If you got value from this video, be sure to smash
that like button for that YouTube algorithm,
and also share this video with other co-founders, founders
the SAAS founders that might get value from it.
And lastly, remember I drop an episode every Sunday
Wednesday, and Friday, so be sure to subscribe,
under the bell icon if you haven't already,
so you get notified when I drop an episode
on how to grow SAAS businesses.
Lastly, remember this one thing,
everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business.
When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable,
I'm TK, see you the next episode,
or really more on a strategy call
for joining in my Go-To-Market program, take care.
(high energy upbeat music)