- When it comes to growing your SaaS business,
you need a go-to-market machine.
Now, there's two things
that goes into a go-to-market machine.
There's the go-to-market strategy
and there's the go-to-market execution.
Now, most founders tend to over-focus on the execution,
they'll load up the emails, they'll pay the ads,
but they won't spend enough time on the strategy.
Now why not? It's because it's kinda difficult.
It's much easier to just
give the money to Facebook and hope it works.
It's a lot easier to send 1000 emails.
'cause it's in a sales engagement platform.
But when you get the strategy right,
the strategy being your ideal customer profile,
the strategy being your messaging, your positioning,
the strategy meaning your pricing, everything changes.
In this video, I'm gonna dig into exactly
the most important part of your go-to-market strategy.
That's your strategic message.
I'm gonna explain to you what it is
and the three principles you absolutely need to know
to actually build out your strategic message.
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're 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 actionable strategies and tips,
that'll help you grow your SaaS business faster.
If you're already part of this community,
if you're part of my SaaS go-to-market coaching program,
welcome back. It is so awesome
to see you guys all over here.
All right. So I remember in the early days of ToutApp,
that was my last SaaS business that I founded.
It was backed by Andreessen Horowitz. We scaled it, sold it.
We were the pioneers in sales engagement software,
but back then no one called it sales engagement. In fact,
most people didn't even believe
that there was budget to be had by selling to sales teams.
It was that crazy.
And so we were going around trying to teach people
that, hey, it takes eight touches
to convert a lead to an opportunity.
When an inbound lead comes in,
you need to follow up with them. You need tools.
You need to make sure that you have consistent messaging.
You need to have productivity.
Over time, as multiple competitors entered the space,
it coalesce into this category called sales engagement,
but make no mistake, back then no one knew what it was
and selling something was really difficult.
And on top of that, the worst part of it was
there was no assumption
that you absolutely need a sales engagement platform
on top of your sales stack or martech stack.
That's how crazy it was.
Now, how did sales engagement come to be?
It was because enough companies
delivered a consistent strategic message
about building pipeline,
about having a productivity solution,
about having multiple touches to generate pipeline
on the sales side, because we did that,
because we crafted that message
and kept delivering it, sales engagement became a thing.
And today, you have billion dollar companies
in the sales engagement space,
and you have caught a long tail of companies
that are serving in the sales engaged space. In fact,
I meet a founder every other week
that's starting a company in the sales engagement space.
That's how incredible it is.
But none of this would have happened
if enough people didn't come together
and craft their strategic message.
As soon as we crafted a strategic message,
we were able to actually articulate
exactly why someone needed to use our software.
And it became a thing.
It became such a thing that it became a required thing.
It became something that budget was allocated for.
It became a thing where companies of all sizes said,
"In addition to CRM, we also need sales engagement."
Same story plays out with sales enablement,
marketing automation, you name the category,
the same story has played out.
It exists because they got together
and actually created a strategic message
that really made it clear that this is very much needed.
So if you're in a SaaS space
and you're starting to figure out your category
and you start to figure how to differentiate yourself
from the competition, you need a strategic message.
That strategic message, when you actually craft it,
will make everything easier.
Your website will become easier.
Your ads will become easier.
Your pitch deck will become easier.
Your sales deck will become easier.
All of these things will come together
very, very effectively.
If you skip this part
and you just start sending out outbound emails,
start paying for ads, you'll lose money real fast
and your conversion rates aren't gonna be very good.
And you're also not gonna win the game, the category game,
which is what pays premiums in the SaaS space.
Now that you know why you need a strategic message,
you might be wondering, "Well, how do I build one?"
How do I actually create and craft the strategic message
so that I can actually have the right go-to-market strategy.
And then I can focus on the execution,
which is actually, believe it or not, the easier part.
There's three principles that I wanna teach you
based on everything that I've learned,
both in the ToutApp journey,
where we crafted a strategic message
and the Marketo journey,
where we had to revamp our strategic message
to actually do a two-year transformation
and sell the company to Adobe for $4.75 billion.
Strategic messages win deals.
And I'm gonna give you the three principles
that you absolutely need.
So if you're excited to get the three principles,
if you haven't already, go and smash that like button
and let's dig right into it.
The first thing you need to answer
in a great strategic message.
The first principle you need to embrace
is you need to answer "Why you?"
Not you, but you, the customer.
As the customer is scrolling, scrolling, scrolling,
scrolling, and scrolling,
or looking through their inbox on LinkedIn or on Facebook.
When they look at your strategic message,
you'll immediately identify them specifically
and answer why they should pay attention.
It will specifically call them out.
The more specific you get,
the more likely it is that you'll get their attention.
So you could say, "We target salespeople."
Well, that's pretty broad now.
That won't work if you're in the sales engagements space,
maybe back then you could save a piece of sales.
So you might say, "Well, we focus on sales teams
"that are in early-stage, fast-scaling, hyper-growth mode."
Right? That gets specific.
So the first thing you need to actually pick
and defined for your strategic message,
by the way, strategic message is what I call a manifesto.
I refer to a manifesto all the time.
I'll tell you more about that later.
You need to actually define "Why you,"
and you need to actually clearly articulate it.
How do you go about doing this?
Well, one of the first steps in this
is to actually create an ideal customer profile.
Everyone thinks they have an ideal customer profile.
They don't. Check out this video where I go into details
on exactly how to create one,
three things you bet you didn't know.
I bet you didn't know about building
an ideal customer profile.
You don't have to go now I'll link to it below.
The second principle that you need to employ
after you've answered the "why you"
specifically you, the customer
is "what is the big opportunity or the big risk."
Companies and categories highlight a big opportunity
to be had, or a big risk to be had.
For ToutApp, we said, "Look, it takes 8 to 10 touches
"to actually convert a lead to an opportunity.
"You're probably not doing it.
"You're not gonna do it manually.
"Not at scale, not for every lead."
That's both a risk and an opportunity.
That's what makes sales engagements so damn good.
So you gotta figure out what is the big opportunity
or risk that's happening for this group of people.
This very specific group of people.
That's the second part
that goes into your strategic message.
Now, before I go into principle number three,
let me just pause here for a second.
If you're starting to see the power of a strategic message,
you can start to see how answering
some of these simple questions,
crafting a strategic narrative can make your website easier.
Your ads easier, your outbound emails easier.
Your pitch deck easy, if you're starting to see how powerful
and important this strategy piece is,
before you start exiting, can I just get
a yes in the comments below
that way I know you're getting value.
My team loves seeing these. I love seeing this.
It just means a lot to us. And if you haven't already,
go and smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm as well.
Lastly, if you wanna develop a strategic message,
you wanna apply these principles
and you want step-by-step framework to follow,
this is why I have my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of the video,
I'll link to it below as well.
Let's go to principle number three.
Principle number three,
you have to answer, for your strategic message is "Why now?"
So it may be that you have called me out specifically.
It may be that you highlighted a big risk
or big opportunity.
I'm still not gonna do anything until you answer "why now,"
what happens if I don't take action now?
What happens if I don't take advantage
of this opportunity now?
What happens if I don't actually do anything?
What is the risk? What am I gonna lose?
That's the third piece
that you have to have in your strategic message.
Now a strategic message comes together into a pitch deck.
I call it a manifesto.
A manifesto could be about a six to nine slide deck.
You can use it as a lead magnet,
it'll guide you in your internal company messaging.
Goes into your pitch deck. It helps with your website
and your ads, outbound, I mean,
it's core to everything that you do.
Strategic message will also translate
into a one-sentence value prop as well,
which will be super important when you meet people
or you're going to Thanksgiving
and explain to grandma exactly what you do.
Thanksgiving was last week, but that's so good.
I don't know why I included that joke.
We're gonna keep it in there.
Anyway, so those are the three principles.
To recap number one, "why you,"
number two, "what is the big opportunity or risk?"
And number three, "why now?"
You put these three things together,
you start to get the right ingredients
for your strategic message.
You get a great strategic message,
you'll be able to differentiate from your competitors.
You'll be able to execute better
for your go-to-market machine
and you'll be able to close deals faster
because people will understand
the urgency around taking action.
If you got value from this video, if you're excited
of building out a strategic message,
go and smash that like button, if you haven't already.
Also, if you are building out a go-to-market machine,
that means the strategy part and the execution part,
if you wanna get distribution
and if you wanna grow your SaaS business faster,
I invite you to apply to join
my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
This program gives you a step-by-step framework
to follow along with my coaching,
to help you build a scalable go-to-market machine.
Based on my experience at ToutApp and Marketo,
all both rev tech companies
based on helping other early stage companies grow.
All of that is backed into this program.
I'm super excited about it.
It's been an amazing ride with the founders
that we do have in there seeing the success
that they're seeing already.
And I wanna help you as well.
Now, the program is not for everyone.
The better the fit, the better the results.
So what we ask you to do is check out the details,
just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
I'll give you details about the program.
If you feel like this is a fit for you,
and you're ready to commit to joining a program like this,
you can apply to join.
We'll ask you a set of simple questions,
I get on a call with you, we have a discussion about it,
and if I think I can help, then you're in.
We'll get you into the program.
More details at tkkader.com/gtm,
if you want a step-by-step framework to follow.
If you got value from this video,
please smash that like button.
Now don't forget, I do three videos like this,
where I go into actionable strategy
on how to drive growth for your SaaS business.
So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon,
if you haven't already.
And also remember,
everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business,
but when you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, and I'll see you in the next episode.
(gentle music)