- Suppose you've raised a seed round
and now you're in this mad dash.
You need to get to your series A.
In order to get to a series A,
you need to actually build out quality revenues.
I covered this in a prior episode
and what exactly it takes to get to a series A.
I'll link to it below it. You don't have to go right now.
The real question is how do you actually get
to these quality revenues?
Well, the answer is you need to actually build out
a go-to-market strategy
and you actually need to make sure that you're building out
a go-to-market strategy that is scalable.
So you can get to that next stage of growth.
How do you do that?
Why do you need to do it?
Who's responsible for it?
I'm gonna walk you through all of that in this episode.
Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody!
Welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK.
And on this channel,
I help SAS founders like you,
grow your SAS businesses faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to this channel,
be sure to hit the subscribe button
and that bell icon
because I drop a video like this
with actionable strategies
on growing your SAS business,
two to three times a week
with the TK energy.
If you're already part of my coaching program,
if you are part of this community,
welcome back!
It's so awesome to see you over here.
Now, I've been through
an entire set of stages
especially when it comes to the early stages
of SAS business.
I've raised a seed round,
I've raised a seed plus round,
I've raised a series A,
I've raised a series B.
I know what it looks like
when you have a sound go-to-market strategy
and I know what it looks like when you don't.
There are lots of traps
that come into play when you're navigating this path
to that next stage of growth.
In fact, a ton of companies,
depending on which stats you look at anywhere from 4%
to 40% of companies,
never actually graduate
from a seed stage
and go onto a series A.
And when you look at why they fail,
some of the top reasons
for why they fail
are having to do with a go-to-market strategy.
It's their pricing,
it's identifying the right market,
it's the messaging.
All those pieces
don't come together and therefore seed companies fail.
So, having gone through that whole path,
I'm gonna walk you through exactly
what a go-to-market strategy is,
who needs to own it,
and how it all comes together.
The key components of it in this episode.
So if you're excited, dig in,
go on and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm
and let's dig right into it.
So the first question is...
What is a go-to-market strategy?
If you do the Wikipedia definition,
it sounds absolutely horrible
so I wasn't going to quote it,
but I did find a definition
that I actually really, really like.
A go-to-market strategy
is an action plan
that specifies how a company will reach
the target customers
and achieve competitive advantage.
It's pretty good.
It's got the right components in there.
They didn't mention world domination in there
but ultimately that's the goal.
A go-to-market strategy is essentially how you go after
your ideal customers
and position yourself in a differentiated way
so they buy from you instead of anyone else in the market.
That's what a go-to market strategy essentially is.
And the important question asked is what if you have
a go-to-market strategy.
We're gonna dig into what the key components of it is
but one question that often gets grazed over
is who's responsible for it?
Like seriously,
who in your company is responsible for actually creating
a go-to-market strategy?
There's an easy way to answer this.
You can say like, "Oh, it's the junior marketer we hired
or it's the marketing team
or the sales team."
But ultimately that's not enough
because there's a difference
between go-to-market strategy
and go-to-market execution.
Execution is running those ads.
Execution is sending those emails.
Execution is creating that landing page.
It's the activities.
And there's different people
that can be responsible for that.
But the strategy,
the strategy is a different thing.
If you're wondering about what the difference is
between a go-to-market strategy and execution,
I did an entire video on this.
You can check it out here.
I'll link to it below, you don't have to go right now.
But the question becomes,
well, who's responsible for the strategy?
Well, there's a few options.
Number one, it could be your VP of sales
and your VP of marketing.
Ultimately, as you start to scale out,
as you start to raise more money
and you can attract really high caliber talent,
your VP of marketing and your VP of sales
is gonna be collectively responsible
for the go-to market strategy,
and you as CEO and the founder will ultimately need
to sign off on it.
You may be a little bit earlier than that,
you may not be at a stage where you can really attract
that world-class VP of sales
and VP of marketing.
That's been there, done that
and can exactly tell you,
"Here's what the strategy should look like
'cause we've done this before."
In fact, a lot of times it's hard to get those people
'cause there aren't that many
of them out there.
So, when in the absence of that,
then it falls under the CEO
and ultimately the founders.
This is where I see
that a lot of companies go wrong.
Well, they ended up doing
is they can't quite afford a VP of marketing
and a VP of sales yet.
So they do go out there
and do is they hire a marketing person.
And a marketing person essentially
is like a junior marketing person,
nothing wrong with that
but they've never done the strategy.
They know how to run a campaign.
They know how to run ads.
They know how to set up landing pages,
but they don't know how to think about the overall strategy.
And a lot of times it gets delegated to that junior person.
Junior person doesn't know,
they kind of flail
and then they get kicked out because they didn't execute
and even though it really wasn't their fault.
Ultimately, you'll notice,
the junior marketer is not listed over there.
Now, the junior marketing team,
the junior sales team,
individual rep that you hired,
they may be responsible for the execution of pieces,
but ultimately, it's the CEO
and the founders that are responsible
for the actual strategy of it.
And this is where a lot of founders go wrong
in the early stages.
I've made this mistake before.
I thought that the junior marketing person
could figure it out
'cause it's marketing and sales
but it's not true.
Strategic thinking in terms of...
What are the core components,
where do we position ourselves in the market?
That's hard for junior people to do.
They've never done it
and so it falls in the founder,
who really own it and define it,
otherwise, anyone you hire
in the marketing side or the sales side
will be set up for success
and it won't be their fault.
That'll be the founders fault, ultimately.
So, number one is what is a strategy?
And number two is who is responsible?
Now, before I dig into,
well, what are the core pieces of a go-to-market strategy?
You might be asking RTK and how do I craft this?
What goes into it?
How does this all come together?
Let me just pause here for a second.
These two alone
should wake you up.
It should make you realize that just hiring
a marketing person
isn't gonna solve your go-to-market problems.
It's not gonna help you escape those seed startups.
That statistic where most of them don't actually graduate
to a series A.
Hopefully, you're seeing the power
in thinking about, well, "There's a strategy pieces.
I need to lay out the strategy collectively with the team
and own it,
and then I need to give it to my more junior team
so they can execute on it."
Now, junior team may be in-house,
they may be an agency who hired,
they may be an...
A virtual assistant you hire, like, who knows?
But you'll still have to own the startup.
If you starting to see the power in just this piece alone,
you're more than halfway there
and really unlocking yourself.
Can I just get a yes in the comments below
if you are with me.
Also smash that like button,
I really likes it when you do that.
Now, if you are figuring out these pieces
and you want a framework to follow,
this exact scenario
that I just described,
I face it as a founder
and it is horrible because founders don't get
a lot of resources.
This is why I created my SAS go-to-market coaching program,
where I work with you
to actually flesh out the strategy
and actually have an execution plan.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video.
let's dig into
what exactly goes into a go-to-market strategy?
All the components inside of it.
So, this is a simple piece of paper.
I'm gonna walk you through all the components
that go into a go-to-market strategy.
The first piece you have to really think about
and this is obvious
because if you've been following me for a while,
you know about this.
Is your ideal customer profile.
You gotta know who your ideal customer profile is
or what your ideal customer is.
You have to define it.
You have to write it down.
The reason this is important is because...
If you are unspecific over here,
everything you do,
going downwards from here
will be unspecific
and therefore it will be all over the place
and it'll be spray and pray.
If you are specific over here,
then everything you do down below
is gonna be more specific
and you're gonna be more likely to succeed.
It's really as simple as that.
Now, once you do these pieces,
what people tend to do,
what founders tend to do
and junior teams tend to do
is they jump into all of these execution pieces.
Over here, It's your traditional funnel,
where it goes through certain pieces around marketing
and certain pieces around sales
or PLG, if you're more product driven
but you still need marketing.
And then it converts to revenue
and then you look since it's SAS,
you looked to grow that revenue.
What people do is they just kinda jump
into these execution pieces.
That's what we already explained,
what you shouldn't be doing.
And in fact it's your responsibility to make sure
you get some of the strategic pieces down.
What are some of those strategic pieces?
Well, they include your positioning.
Chances are that you are not
the only person in the market
and if you are,
there's still a competitor that's a spreadsheet,
or the status quo,
or doing nothing.
And so, positioning yourself in the market
and talking about, well, "Here's how we differentiate
from the rest of these people"
is super important.
Thinking about positioning is super important.
It's also important to think about segmentation, right?
You could be going
into the SMB market.
You could be going into the mid market,
the enterprise, the lower enterprise,
the big enterprise.
You could be going into an industry vertical.
So segmentation is also super important
for you to understand and define.
Ultimately, when you think about positioning
and segmentation,
and what your product really does,
and the transformation it does,
there's essentially messaging
that needs to come into play.
And once you actually think about messaging,
you also need to think about your narrative.
And the strategic narrative is essentially
that summarizes your positioning,
your segmentation, your messaging,
into this one compelling proposition
to the ICP on like, "Hey, you should do business with us
and if you don't, here's what's gonna happen," right?
You're gonna make them an offer you can't refuse.
These are essentially strategy pieces
that often gets overlooked
and they jump into the execution.
If you don't do these pieces, again,
it's just like the ICP.
If you're not specific on ICP,
this is gonna be unspecific.
If you don't define these things,
a lot of your activities are gonna be undefined
and it's gonna be spray and pray.
And when you are talking to your junior marketing,
you're like, "Why isn't this working,
I thought you were good at marketing?"
It's not their fault
because it's no one that did the strategy work.
And generally junior people,
the difference between the junior person
and the senior person
and an ace person is that they know strategy
and they've actually done that.
Been there, done that, right?
This is super important
in actually flushing out
how all these pieces come together
and from a strategy side.
Then it starts getting into more of the marketing pieces
and one of the things around go-to-market,
the reason I use the word go-to-market
instead of saying SAS sales
or SAS marketing
is because it's all encompassing.
As the founder, you need to make sure
both are being covered.
If you're not doing that,
then you're not gonna have a full customer experience,
customer journey defined.
You're not gonna be able to convert to revenue.
What do I mean by that?
Well, first of all,
you need to think about equally marketing and sales.
The marketing pieces is essentially figuring out
how to drive awareness, right?
How do you get this ICP?
How do you engage with these people
with this messaging and get them to realize
that you exist?
One of the best definitions
of marketing I ever found was...
Great marketing is when more people know about you today
than they did yesterday.
That's what great marketing is.
And essentially what you're looking to do
is drive awareness.
And from awareness,
you're looking to actually generate leads
and this could be through the form of a manifesto.
If you have been following me for a while
or old-school lead magnet,
all those things, right?
You're essentially generating leads
and then from the leads,
you essentially have to figure out,
"Oh, do we go into sales
or do we go into free trial?"
And is the product gonna do the selling for us?
They're gonna go through a trial experience,
they're gonna activate,
and it's gonna convert to revenue on its own,
or do we have to go through a sales process?
You have to kind of figure out that piece,
that as you get into the sales side.
You'll also have to ask yourself, well,
"Is it gonna be inside sales or outside sales?"
Meaning, are you gonna do it only over the phone?
Or are you also gonna go to the customer's offices
to get a deal done?
Or maybe, you never actually talked to anyone
and they just do a free trial and they convert.
These are all questions that are strategic questions
that you have to answer.
Couple of things, come into play for this as well.
So for marketing,
you really have to figure out what is gonna be
your lead magnet.
What is the thing that you're gonna use
to attract people?
You also have to figure out,
what are the channels
you're going to go after, right?
Is it social?
Is it ads?
Is it outbound?
So on and so forth.
Are you gonna do cold calling?
Is that even possible
with social networks?
These are all conscious strategic decisions
you're gonna have to make
so that you can actually make the execution very focused.
And then as you start to figure this out,
you'll also have to figure out, well,
"What is our pricing strategy?"
How much should we charge for the product?
If you are charging $99 a month,
then you literally cannot afford to have a sales team
so you must actually go
the product like growth route,
the self-service route.
If you are charging $10,000 a month,
then no one's gonna sign up for your product
until they see you in their office
or through multiple Zoom conversations.
So in that case, you're gonna have to do an outside team.
So this is why figuring out your pricing strategy
is super important.
Figuring out your sales methodology
is also super important.
How do you actually navigate the sales process?
Meaning, once someone says,
"Hey, I'm interested.
Do you do a discovery call?
Do you do a demo?
How do you do a demo?"
So part of this
is what your demo looks like.
Part of this is what your deck looks like,
your sales deck.
Part of this looks like,
what are the touches that you need to do?
Part of this looks like, how do you manage all these deals?
So there's a sales methodology in here as well.
Now, if you're saying, "You know what,
we're not gonna do sales driven.
We're gonna do product driven."
Then you have to figure out what's your new user experience.
When someone signs up,
how do you actually navigate them through the process?
How do you educate them?
And how do you make sure they're set up for success?
These are all components
that is strategy.
When you actually define these strategic questions
then the execution becomes more focused
and is more likely to succeed.
If you ignore
some of these strategic questions
then what ends up happening
is you run a bunch of ads,
you kinda see what sticks,
you hand over a bunch of money to Mark Zuckerberg
and you keep trying
to actually make something work
but you don't even know what you're tethered to.
And therefore you fire your marketing person
or you fire agency, yet again,
and then you're back to square one.
This is why go-to-market strategy is super important.
And I learned,
almost the hard way that if you're gonna go
from the seed stage to the series A stage,
you have to get really serious
about your go-to-market strategy.
And if you wanna start doing that,
you have to own it.
And before you can hire that VP of marketing
and that VP of sales to own it,
you're gonna have to own it, you're gonna have to define it.
You have to get dangerous enough about it.
It's what I had to do
because that's just what it takes to succeed
in the early stages.
And when you're digging into that,
you wanna think about what is your ICP?
What is your positioning?
Your segmentation, your messaging,
your strategic narrative.
What is gonna be the lead magnet?
What are the channels you wanna go after?
Which ones make sense?
In what order?
What is your pricing strategy?
What are your sales methodology?
And what is in user experience look like?
You need to figure out all these pieces.
When you do that,
then the execution side
which is all this stuff
and all this stuff becomes a lot easier
because you're tethered to a strategy.
So, that's what I had for you today.
That's exactly the components that go
into a go-to-market strategy.
It goes into what is a go-to-market strategy?
Who should own it?
And what are the key components inside of it?
If you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button, if you haven't already.
But also have one more thing for you.
If you're starting to wonder like, well,
"How do I put all these pieces together?"
I've literally been in your shoes and I was scaling ToutApp.
I was sitting there.
We couldn't quite hire all the VPs yet.
We were in that stage where we had some seed money.
We didn't have the series A money.
But we still needed to grow
and we needed to get quality revenues
and therefore we would then be able to raise.
And I actually embraced a sales and marketing
and I started to understand some of these strategic pieces.
I was lucky
because I sold to salespeople
and I sold to marketing teams
so I was in front of really great world-class leaders
where I'm like, "Wow, that's what good looks like.
I better get good at this
'cause we need to figure this out."
So this is why I created
my SAS go-to-market coaching program.
If you are in that stage where you have some revenues
and you're looking to scale your revenues,
you need to build out this go-to-market strategy
and then drive the execution.
You don't wanna be out there
just looking at a 50 million YouTube videos,
trying to piece all the pieces together.
You can't rely on your junior marketing team.
You can't rely on a junior sales student
and it's kinda falls on you.
This is why I created my SAS go-to-market coaching program.
Inside of the program,
we actually give you the step-by-step process
on how to flesh out these key pieces.
I have exclusive step-by-step training on this.
I meet with all the founders in the program
every Wednesday to actually answer your questions,
and do hot seats, and to review your strategy,
and your metrics.
And we teach you how to actually execute on your strategy.
It's not just strategy.
It's also execution.
How to actually run a core Broadway show as I call it
every week to actually drive growth.
And when you do that,
you actually can accelerate the growth of your SAS business
and increase the likelihood of getting to that next stage
of growth, the next stage of fundraising.
So if you're interested in that,
if you're interested in working together,
all you need to do is just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
Inside of that page, you'll get all the details
on my SAS go-to-market coaching program
and over there, you can actually apply to join.
You just have to fill out your email,
and you answer a couple of questions,
and then we'll set up a call.
We wanna make sure that we can actually help you.
That's why we have the application process.
It just ensures that the right people are getting on calls.
We're not wasting your time.
You're not wasting our time.
We can actually help
and that's why we have the simple questionnaire.
And once you did that, we're on a call together,
we'll walk through where you are in your SAS business,
what your goals are, what the choke points are
and based on that,
we'll start working together if it makes sense
for both of us.
So that's the go-to-market program.
Be sure to go to tkkader.com/gtm
and set up a call.
Also, if you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button if you haven't already.
Also, I drop actionable videos like this,
two to three times a week, every week.
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.
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 on the next episode.
(upbeat music)
The strategic narrative is essentially...
Don't include it in the bloopers either.
(laughs loudly)
Okay, let's cut into this. Sorry.