- If you're the SaaS founder
or the CEO of a successful SaaS business,
scaling your SaaS business is likely top of mind.
Having worked with over 250 SaaS founders and CEOs
there are three common mistakes that I see all the time
when you are actively looking to scale your SaaS business.
So in this episode,
I'm gonna walk you through the three exact mistakes to avoid
and when you do the opposite of these
you will 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 size business faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
Now if you new to this channel, welcome,
I drop an episode every single Sunday
with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches
on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon where you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode with the TK energy.
Now, if you're already 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 over here.
So in my experience in the SaaS industry,
I took ToutApp from zero to one million
and then one to three million and then three to six million.
We then sold ToutApp and I joined Marketo
as a member of their executive team,
as their SVP of strategy
and that was driving towards half a billion in ARR.
And then since then we sold Marketo to Adobe.
Since then, I've worked with over 250 SaaS founders
and CEOs anywhere from pre-revenue
upwards of a hundred million in revenue
in growing their SaaS businesses.
As I've gone through the twists and turns of this road
I've seen some patterns on exactly where SaaS founders
and leadership teams go wrong,
the mistakes they made
as they are looking to get to that next stage of growth.
And depending on when you're watching this video
it could be growth at all costs
or it could be predictable growth and profitable growth.
Either way, these three mistakes have come up all the time.
So in this episode,
I'm gonna walk you through those three mistakes
and if you do the opposite of these
then you will be able to accelerate your path
to that next stage of growth.
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
and let's dig right into it.
Okay, so the first thing that I work on with founders
and leadership teams when I work with them
and even when I think about my own SaaS businesses
is the flywheel.
This is a SaaS business flywheel,
and every successful SaaS business,
heck, every single business ever
has mastered their flywheel.
When you're just starting out,
when you're just starting to get
to that first stage of growth
all you're trying to do is get those customers.
But once you have customers and you have revenues
it's all about the flywheel.
And the way the flywheel breaks down
is this is your ideal customer profile,
this is your target market.
And what you are doing is essentially doing a bunch of sales
and marketing motions to actually get this flywheel going.
So the first piece that you are doing,
I'm gonna put these in blue because these are the stages,
is acquisition.
This is where you're generating leads,
you're generating pipelines, you're generating free trials,
you're getting attention of your ideal customers.
Then you are focusing on activation.
Now, depending on whether you are sales led or product led,
if you are sales led
you're trying to turn these into real opportunities,
if you're product led
you're trying to get them into active trials.
Once you have that, then you are driving towards revenue.
If you are sales led, then this is opportunities one,
if you are product led,
then this is someone swiping the credit card
or maybe a salesperson coming in because it's a hybrid setup
and helping them convert to real paid customers.
And then it doesn't stop there
because we are SaaS businesses,
we are recurring revenue businesses.
And so the next piece you're working on is retention
meaning you want happy customers continuing to pay,
continuing to renew, continuing to upsell,
and then finally they're so happy
they're actually driving referrals
back into your target market
which is driving even more acquisition.
Once you have all of these pieces going
then you have a flywheel.
Now, the mistakes that I see when scaling a SaaS business
tend to come at each of the inflection points
of this flywheel.
So the first mistake that I see all the time
is founders and leaders that have gotten
to the current stage of growth.
Let's just say you got to a million era,
or 3 million era, or 10 million era,
or 20 million era, or a hundred million era,
in each of those stages
what got you to that point
isn't necessarily going to get you
to that next stage of growth.
For example, I work with a lot of early stage founders
and in the early stages
they go after their target market,
they work on their existing network,
their existing contacts,
and they get that initial revenue going
but very quickly they run out of that network,
they have no more friends to sell it to
and they still don't have a scalable way to drive growth.
Similarly, let's just say you got to a million
or three million.
Well, once you got to that point,
maybe you got there through two SDRs
or you just called emailing and cold calling,
but to get to the 10 million
you need to actually get more marketing going.
'Cause if you don't have marketing
you can only hire so many SDRs so quickly
and send so many cold emails profitably.
And so it ends up being a blocker.
And so the number one mistake that I see founders
and leaders make when they're looking to scale
is not switching from their unscalable strategy,
their unscalable go-to-market to a scalable go-to-market.
And this essentially focuses right over here.
How do you actually get their attention of people?
How do you generate demand?
How do you capture demand?
This needs to turn into a proper go-to-market machine
that you're actually executing on.
And a lot of times I find
people kind of conceptually know like,
yeah, we should be doing a lead magnet,
we should be doing ads, we should be doing content,
we should be doing SEO.
They may have the strategy
but they don't quite know
how to actually turn it into action
at the scale they need to be
to get to that next stage of growth.
So mistake number one that I see all the time
is sticking to the go-to-market machine or lack thereof
instead of saying,
"You know what?
That got us here,
in order to get to this next stage of growth,
how do we revamp that go-to-market strategy
and the execution so that we can scale our reach
and do it more profitably
based on everything we have right now?"
So that's kind of where the first part gets stuck.
The second biggest mistake that I see
happens all the way over here, the retention.
So kind of like how you have to turn this
into a real scalable go-to-market machine,
a lot of founders and a lot of SaaS leaders
as they are scaling,
they get so fixated on this point of acquisition,
they don't think about what their retention machine
looks like.
And what ends up happening is
they put so much attention over here,
they keep getting customers, but they keep losing customers
so they never hit escape velocity
on how to drive growth for their SaaS business.
Remember, SaaS businesses are recurring revenue businesses.
And so in order for things to compound,
you actually need to make sure
you're retaining your customers.
So the biggest mistake I see over here
is basically a lack of a success machine.
Now, there are a couple different things
that come into play to do the opposite of this.
You wanna start thinking
about having proper customer success people.
You wanna make sure you have a customer marketing machine
where you're actually enabling them and educating them
to take advantage of your product.
You wanna make sure that you prevent a churn
by detecting when someone's not actually activating
in your product or using your product on a consistent basis.
You actually wanna make sure
that just like how you are building a machine
to generate demand and capture demand,
you are also generating a machine
to keep the demand you already have captured,
to keep the customers and the revenue that you already have.
Few things that come into this
when you actually have a proper success machine,
you have actual reduction in churn.
So that's obvious, right?
That's really good.
When you actually have a proper customer success machine
your roadmap actually becomes clearer,
because your successful customers tell you
what you should be building next.
And also when you have a successful machine
you actually have success stories
which you can then take back
into your acquisition machine and say,
"Hey, look, here are all our successful customers,"
which then gets this flywheel going even faster.
So not only is retaining the revenue important
for the flywheel of the business,
retaining the customers and capturing the success stories
of the customers and having a proper machine
to manage the customer success actually helps you be better
in your go-to-market as well,
which is really powerful.
Now there's a third one which ties this whole thing together
but before I go into the third mistake that people make
and it's often missed, let me just pause here for a second.
And you're starting to see the power in this.
Are you starting to see the power
in how actually building a proper go-to-market strategy
that's scalable and executing on it
through a go-to-market machine can be the difference maker
in actually driving scale?
And you're starting to see where instead
of just thinking about,
well, how do I get new customers
thinking about your business as a full flywheel
can actually unlock true scalable growth
for your SaaS business.
You start to see the power in this,
can I just get a yes in the comments below?
And also smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm,
it really likes it when you do that.
And by the way, if you're operating a SaaS business
and you are wondering,
well, how do I get this full flywheel going?
How do I build a proper go-to-market strategy
and execute on it?
How do I have a proper customer success discipline?
How do I make sure that I'm measuring the right things?
This is exactly what I do
inside of my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode.
I'll also link to it below.
Don't go anywhere yet.
Let's go into the third big mistake
that founders and leaders make.
Okay, the third big mistake that founders make
and leaders make is lack of compounding.
And this is true for the overall flywheel analogy
to begin with.
When you get all these pieces going,
you start to get this flywheel turning
and it turns faster and faster and faster,
meaning the more leads and pipeline and demand
that you capture and generate, the more that they activate,
the more revenue you make,
the more you retain,
the more you can get customer success stories
and the more people will buy from you
because you start to elevate your brand,
the trust starts to go up.
So that already gets this flywheel going.
Well, if you actually get your best customers
to start referring you to your ideal customer profile
that starts moving the flywheel even faster
because referral pipeline actually converts way faster
at a higher price and the win rate is higher.
So it's better quality pipeline
because your successful customers
are already telling their peers like,
"Hey, this is really great.
You gotta get in on it."
And that makes a world of difference in your sales process.
And when you start doing that, I'm gonna do this in green,
all these pieces start to feed off of each other.
The more pipeline you generate, the more they activate,
the more they convert your revenue, the more you retain,
the more referrals you get,
the more referrals you get, the more people know about you,
the more success that you get,
the more you feed it in your go-to-market machine.
And all these pieces start to fly that flywheel.
So all of these pieces actually get your flywheel
to move faster and accelerate your growth.
This is what true scaling looks like.
Everyone thinks that scaling is just like,
let's just do more of everything and just spend the money.
We all know that doesn't work
and that doesn't get rewarded anymore.
But if you can meticulously instrument this flywheel
you can build your scalable go-to-market machine.
And when you start to actually make people activate
and convert your revenue,
and you have a proper customer success discipline,
and then you're driving referrals,
and the success stories back into your go-to-market machine
then your business truly starts to scale.
So to recap, mistake number one,
you don't build a scalable go-to-market machine,
what got you here isn't gonna get you to that next stage,
so revamp your go-to-market strategy
and execute on that machine truly.
Mistake number two, lack of a success machine.
Make sure you have a proper customer success machine.
And as you get that going, drive up your retention
but also capture those success stories
and feed it back into your go-to-market machine
so you can actually accelerate your growth.
And as you get your successful customers to be successful
and staying and happy, ask them for referrals
and on top of that will further fuel
your go-to-market machine.
You'll avoid these three mistakes;
the lack of a skill of go-to-market,
the lack of a success machine, the lack of compounding.
You do the opposite of these.
You actually build a skill of a go-to-market machine,
you build a success machine, you turn on compounding,
then you'll be able to accelerate the growth
of your SaaS business, and that's all you have to do.
Now, what you may not know is how do I actually
build a scalable go-to-market machine?
How do I actually build a proper success machine?
How do I build a proper compounding machine,
a referral machine?
How do I do these three pieces?
This is exactly what I do
inside of my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
Inside this program, I work with you one-on-one
to actually help drive growth for your SaaS business
using these exact principles that I just gave you.
How do we do it?
Well, there's three core components to the program.
First, we flesh out your ideal customer profile.
That's a big part
of really building a scalable go-to-market strategy.
We really identify how we're gonna expand
in the market you're already winning at.
Number two, we build out a manifesto.
A manifesto is your positioning, your messing.
It's how you compete against the competitors in a market.
If you're scaling, chances are there is competition
and you have to differentiate yourself
with a strategic message that really resonates
with your customers and attracts their attention.
And then lastly, we teach you how to run a broadway show.
A broadway show is a consistent set of sales
and marketing activities,
the actual execution of your go-to-market strategy
that creates demand and generates demand
and captures demand.
And when you do these three things
you get this full flywheel going.
It's an incredible program.
We've shared incredible success stories
about the program just on this channel.
So if you wanna work together
just go to tkk.com/gtm,
tkk.com/gtm.
And on that page you'll get all the details
about the program and what it's like to work with me.
If you wanna work together,
just fill out that little form and we'll get on a call.
We'll make sure that we're the right fit,
the better the fit, the better the results
and that we're off to the races.
We'll work together inside
of the SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
Just go to tkk.com/gtm.
Also link to it below.
Also, if you got value from this video
please smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm.
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We do a video like this.
The reason we do these is we wanna help
as many SaaS companies and leadership teams and founders
as possible.
Also, I drop an episode every single Sunday
with actual strategy and tactics like this.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon where you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode,
you guessed it, with the TK energy.
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 in the next episode
or inside the SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
Take care, everybody.
(upbeat music)
You five with starts to fly
which is I think I made up, but is it a real thing?
Did I do TK energy?
I think I did.
Hopefully I did.