- If you're a SaaS founder,
and you're in the early stages,
you've got some revenues,
but you don't quite know
how you're gonna accelerate that growth,
how you're gonna scale that growth,
how are you gonna actually build
a proper go-to-market machine,
in this episode,
I'm gonna walk you through the three principles
you absolutely need to know
to accelerate the growth of your SaaS business
by transforming your go-to-market strategy.
And my promise to you is that by the end of this episode,
you'll know exactly the three things
that matter the most
and the things that are just distractions,
and slowing you down,
and you just need to ignore.
Intro! (upbeat music)
What's up, everybody.
Welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK, and on this channel,
ooh, 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 with actionable strategies and tactics,
from the trenches, on how to scale SaaS businesses.
So, 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.
If you're already part of this channel,
if you're part of this community,
if you're part of my coaching program,
my people, welcome back.
It's really awesome to see you over here.
Now, over the last 15 years,
I've spent time building, scaling,
and exiting SaaS businesses.
And over the last 18 months to 20 months,
I've actually worked with over 200 SaaS founders
advising them on how to scale their SaaS companies.
Based on all of that experience,
based on being in the trenches
as a founder, as an advisor,
specializing in go-to-market,
in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through
the three principles that matter the most.
The simplest way to actually transform
your go-to-market strategy,
so you too can accelerate the growth of your SaaS business.
And more importantly, based on these three principles,
you'll know exactly what to avoid.
If you're excited to dig in,
go and smash out Like button for the YouTube algorithm,
and we're gonna switch it up this time around.
We're actually gonna start with principle number three
and work our way backwards in order of importance.
So, principle number three,
and this is essentially where most people start,
which is why I wanted to start over here,
are your activities.
In any sort of, tivities, there we go.
Activities for your GTM.
Principle number three are activities.
This is the activities you're doing
in your go-to market machine.
Whether it's part of marketing,
or part of sales,
or part of product.
This is where most founders
and most leaders start off
because it's the easiest thing to start to think about.
While this is the right principle,
this is not always where you should start.
But this is a natural place where people tend to start.
So thinking about sending emails, right?
Do you do maybe outbound emails.
You can think about ads.
You can think about content.
You can think about SEO.
You can think about product driving virality
if you're a product-led.
you can also think about social.
All of these things are essentially marketing
and sales activities that you could be doing
to actually generate demand,
generate pipeline for your SaaS business.
And that's principle number three,
and it's the right principle,
and you absolutely need to be doing this.
However, the reason this alone,
and just focusing on this alone,
and starting with activities alone,
is where most people go wrong and get distracted
is because when you are actually posting on social,
when you are sending that cold email,
when you are writing that ad,
when you are actually putting out content
and deciding on the topic you wanna put out,
when you are trying to target keywords for your SEO,
when you are building the product
and really trying to get people into that product
in the first place
so that they can actually invite others
and generate that virality
and that product led-growth,
when you are trying to do all those things,
there's one fundamental question that comes up.
And that fundamental question is,
what do we say to the person?
How do we position the product?
What is the value proposition we're delivering?
And how do we drive urgency in a deal
when, maybe they met with us,
they did a discovery call,
but they were like,
"Cool, just come back to us
when you have this one more feature."
And then you're like,
"Well, why won't they buy right now?"
Even when you're running an ad,
or you're trying to pick a keyword,
or you're doing a blog post,
you're fundamentally,
when you're trying to do these activities,
trying to answer one core question.
It's what do we say to these people?
What do we put in that LinkedIn box,
or what do we put in that ad,
or that landing page.
which brings us to principle number two.
And the reason I started with three
is because this is where most people start.
Perfectly normal, baby TK did this too.
Principle number two is what I call your manifesto.
And the manifesto essentially is your value proposition.
It is your messaging.
It is your positioning,
and it is your narrative.
Now, these are things that people often skip.
And that's the fundamental difference
between what is execution and what is strategy.
And a lot of times, what I've seen is,
I'll meet with founders or early stage leaders,
and they're like, "Look, we sent 1,000 emails
and no one responded,"
or "We ran a bunch of ads,
and people are clicking,
but they're not converting,"
or maybe, "They're downloading our PDF,
but no one cares and no one's responding to our emails,
they're not gonna get on calls,
they're not getting into the product."
Or, and you know, the list goes on.
And usually, when that is happening,
it's because they jumped to principle number three,
instead of first thinking about principle number two,
which is, what's our manifesto?
It is a noisy world out there.
And if you're gonna make a difference,
if you're gonna stand out,
if you're gonna differentiate yourself,
whether you're starting a new category
or getting into an existing category,
you have to differentiate.
You have to show what big transformation you're bringing.
And that's why I'm a big fan
of actually building a manifesto
that encompasses these core pieces
to really position your product
and message your product
so that when you get into the activities,
you know exactly what to say,
and it's set in a differentiated way,
it's set in a way that drives urgency,
and it's set in a way where it really speaks
to the person you wanna be selling to.
And so most people start with principle number three,
but really, in order to be effective
in principle number three,
which are just more execution pieces,
you wanna start thinking about what is it
that you're going to say and think about the strategy.
And that's this overarching theme over here.
This ends up being the actual strategy of your go-to-market.
And this ends up being the execution.
If you jump into execution
or you start with execution,
everything's gonna be 10 times harder.
If you start with strategy,
then, everything's gonna be 10 times easier
because you've actually made some of these hard choices.
So that when you get into execution,
maybe you hire an agency to do all this work,
or maybe you hire a couple of external people,
it's a lot easier to do
because you actually have a proper go-to market strategy.
Now, there is another principle
that you absolutely need to nail
and part of your go-to-market strategy.
But before I go into that,
let just pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
Are you starting to see the power?
And it's easy to start with execution and the activities,
however, the fundamental question
you're asking is like,
"Well, what do I say?
How do I differentiate?"
But if you start with the strategy
on really defining just your messaging,
or your value prop, or your narrative,
and then you feed that into your execution,
everything becomes 10 times easier
and you're more likely to succeed.
And if this is all you focus on,
all the other distractions go away.
It's not about these little tactics,
it's about really the message.
If you're starting to see the power in this
can I just get a yes in the comments below,
and also, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
It really likes it when you do that,
and so do we.
Also, if you're in the stage
where you're building a much more scalable
go-to-market strategy and machine,
and you want my help,
checkout my SaaS Go-To-Market Coaching Program.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video,
I'll also link to it below,
but you don't have to go anywhere right now.
Let's talk about principle number one
because this is what really brings it together.
Now. you might be asking,
"All right, TK.
It's a noisy world out there, got it.
How do I craft that value prop?
How do I really hone in on that messaging?"
And the biggest thing that I try to teach people
in this channel and anyone I work with
is the more specific you are,
the more successful you're going to be.
That's the best way to be successful
in a very noisy world.
The more specific you are,
the more your message is going to stand out,
the more your activities are gonna stand out.
The more you're gonna be able to focus on the right people
and close deals and convert users.
That's what where most people go wrong.
When you're building your value prop,
when you're building your messaging,
and you're positioning,
the more specific you are
in exactly who you're gonna be targeting,
the easier it's gonna be to actually build this stuff
and execute on it.
And so principle number one
is basically, you should have an ideal customer profile.
An ideal customer profile or ICP
is where you get very specific
about who are the specific group of people
you're going to be selling to or marketing to
that needs your product,
that have the urgent important problem,
to help you get to this next stage of growth.
Not to get to $100 million, or 1 billion dollars,
or to put a total addressable market slide
for your fundraising deck,
just to get to your next stage.
Because the more specific you are
in defining your ICP,
the more specific your manifesto is gonna be.
The more specific your manifesto is,
the more it's gonna stand out
during go-to market activities,
and the more success you are going to get
out of your go-to market machine.
Now, there's a lot of detail
that goes into building an ICP, right?
You wanna think about specific attributes.
You wanna think about specific trends.
And honestly, there's a very deep process
around ICP work.
Just any one of these things are not gonna be enough.
These three things together is the simple way
to actually build and scale your go-to-market machine.
If you just do an ICP,
but you don't do the manifesto,
it won't work.
If you just stay at activities,
but you don't do the strategy pieces, it won't work.
But if you do these three things
and ignore everything else,
you can be wildly successful.
And that's the power in this framework.
So principle number one is build your ICP,
your ideal customer profile.
Not your TAM, but a very specific ideal customer profile.
Principle number two is build your manifesto
on top of the ICP for that specific ICP.
And that's your value prop,
your messaging, your positioning, your narrative.
Once you have these two pieces,
then, you wanna actually kick off the activities.
And instead of just random activities,
what I make sure that founders
and early stage teams do
is they run a Broadway show.
And a Broadway show is a consistent set of activities
that you run on specific channels
to bring your manifesto to your ICP every single week,
and you keep iterating on it.
When you do these three things,
that's the simple and easy way to transform
your go-to-market strategy,
to differentiate yourself in the market,
and to actually build a scalable go-to-market machine.
That's what's worked for me and my prior companies,
that's what's worked for all the founders that I advised,
and this is a proven blueprint
that helps you actually execute on this
while ignoring all the other distractions.
That's what I wanted to share with you today.
It's the simple framework
that has just worked so well for me and others.
Okay, so those are the three things
that you need to know.
ICP, manifesto, Broadway show.
And now you know those three principles
are what matters the most
to build your go-to market strategy
and to scale your SaaS business.
What you may not know is exactly how to build an ICP.
What you may not know is how to actually build a manifesto.
There's a lot of deep work that goes into this.
What you may not know is what channels do we do?
How do we get channel mastery?
Do we do email or social, and what sequence,
what data do we track?
You may not know all these things.
This is exactly why I created
my SaaS Go-To-Market Coaching Program.
Inside of this program,
we work together to make sure
that you are set up for success,
you actually build out these pieces,
you're able to execute on it,
you're able to scale your SaaS business.
You go from a relatively undefined go-to-market strategy
to a well-defined one
that you can execute on and scale.
So, if you'd like to work together,
just go to tkkader.com/gtm, tkkader.com/gtm.
When you go over there,
you'll get all the details around the program.
There's a little link where you can apply to join.
We'll then get on a call to make sure
that you are in the right stage
where we can actually help you.
And if you are, then we're off to the races.
We'll start working together.
It's an incredible program.
It's been (indistinct) with working
with so many SaaS founders
to help them scale their companies.
If you are in this phase where you've got some revenues
and you're looking to scale,
and you wanna differentiate yourself in the market,
you wanna do it effectively,
you wanna reduce execution risk,
this is the program for you.
So just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
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.
Also, I drop an episode with actionable strategies
on how to grow your SaaS business faster,
so if you haven't already,
be sure hit that Subscribe button and that bell icon
that you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode.
If you have a fellow founder,
a team member that will get value
from this channel, in these videos,
please share it with them.
We wanna help as many SaaS founders as possible.
We wanna actually help all of you
build incredible SaaS companies,
that's why I do this.
And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business.
When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, and I'll see you in the next episode
or inside of the GTM Program.
(uplifting music)