- If you're operating a B2B SaaS business
and you got to some revenues,
you're likely starting to wonder,
how do we get to that next stage of growth?
How do we actually build a more scalable
go-to-market strategy?
How do we execute on it?
The first thing I'll tell you is the machine,
the go-to-market machine that got you to this point
is not gonna be the machine
that scales to that next stage of growth.
So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through
the three principles you absolutely need to know
in order to actually build a scalable go-to-market strategy
to accelerate the path of your SaaS business.
Intro.
(upbeat ambient music)
What's up everybody?
Welcome to unstoppable, I'm TK,
and on this channel, I help SaaS founders like you
grow your size businesses faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
Now if you are new to this channel, welcome.
I drop an episode every single Sunday
with actionable strategies from the trenches
on how to scale your SaaS business faster.
If you are new, be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon, that way you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode
with the TK energy. (snaps fingers)
Now if you are 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 I remember when I first started this channel,
we had just sold Marketo to Adobe.
I was SVP of Strategy there.
And I started this channel almost as an outlet
to actually share some
of what I've learned about building SaaS companies,
scaling SaaS companies, exiting SaaS companies,
and most importantly, go-to-market.
Fast forward to today, after now, we're at 30,000,
over 30,000 subscribers in this channel,
in this amazing, unstoppable community.
Now that I've worked with over 250 SaaS founders
with their go-to market strategy
inside of my coaching programs,
I wanted to actually revisit this topic
and just go from the ground up
on exactly how I go about building a go-to-market strategy
for SaaS companies today.
And when you follow these three principles
that I'm gonna teach you,
you will be able to understand exactly
how to grow your SaaS business faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
Now if you're excited, dig in, go ahead
and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm,
it really likes it when you do that.
And let's get into principle number one.
The first principle
that anytime you're approaching revamping
a go-to-market strategy
and building out your go-to-market strategy
and figuring out how to scale your SaaS business
or B2B business, whichever you're in,
the first thing you really wanna start with is data.
Now here's the thing,
everyone thinks of go-to-market in itself.
They separate it out from product,
they separate it out from all these other dynamics.
But the thing is,
if you want to grow your SaaS company, your B2B company,
you have to think about this thing holistically.
And the way I always look at it is you have your market.
You have, that's one piece of the puzzle,
you have your product,
that's another piece of the puzzle,
and you have your go-to-market,
and that's another piece of the puzzle.
And when you optimize for all three of these things
with data, you actually get a proper understanding
of exactly how you're gonna grow.
If you just think about,
well, do we run this Facebook ad campaign?
And you don't think about the market you're in,
if you just think about your product
and you don't start on your go-to-market early enough
before a launch,
if you just think about go-to-market
but don't feed the insights back into product
to make it differentiated, none of this will work.
And the most important place to start
when you thinking about revamping your go-to-market strategy
is pulling in the right data around your business,
across these three key pillars.
'Cause when you do this and you lay it out
all out on the table
and you look at the right metrics around your SaaS business,
then you'll be able to understand exactly what's working,
what's not, where do you win?
Where do you don't?
What are the competitors doing?
And based on all of those things
and there are over 27 choke points that I work with
when I work with founders,
you're able to actually get a good understanding
of exactly where we sit in the business
and in the competitive dynamic space right now.
Now data on its own,
like you as a founder or you as a leader
might go into a corner somewhere
and look at a bunch of data.
And then you might pull your people together and might say,
here's like, what we're gonna do, that won't work.
And so in order to really create a proper strategy,
the second principle that you actually have to do is
you have to actually build alignment around the data.
Now, depending on what stage you're in, it might just be you
and your co-founder trying to figure this out.
You have some revenues you need to scale,
or you might have a full executive team
trying to figure this out.
Inside of my coaching programs,
I've worked with companies that are at 10K MRR,
all the way up to 75 million of ARR.
And so between that range, I've found that
depending on the number of stakeholders involved
you still need to figure out
how exactly you're gonna build alignment with your team,
because there's a lot of nuances
that come into building a go-to-market strategy.
For example, what are the most important market dynamics
that are coming into play?
Or what is the core product loop that's actually working?
Which features are being used, which ones aren't,
or what are the main channels that are driving
the most quality leads that are leading to actual revenue.
These are all questions that you wanna understand
and you actually wanna build alignment
with your leadership team around the data.
And most importantly,
there's three things you wanna look at
when you're bringing your leadership team together,
you wanna obviously look at the data,
you wanna look at choke points,
meaning what's working and what's not.
And you also wanna look at threats and opportunities.
Threats, meaning competitors
and opportunities, meaning changing market dynamics.
And you'll start to understand when you think about
market product and go-to-market, all of these things
can actually foster a really robust discussion
about exactly how you're gonna scale
to that next stage of growth
versus just running Facebook ads or doing SEO,
which is a bunch of activities
but has nothing to do with the actual go-to-market strategy.
Now, once you have this data
and you start to get some alignment
and you start to have some of these discussions,
then you'll actually want to get into this third principle.
And that's where you actually flesh out
your go-to market strategy,
that's where you can actually point to it and say,
here's our go-to market strategy.
And before I actually flesh out
exactly where that third principle is,
let me just pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
Are you starting to see the power in how,
if you start with data around your business,
around your market,
around your product or on your current go-to market
and then you actually build alignment
around what is this data telling us?
What are the choke points that exist?
What are the threats and opportunities?
Once you have that,
then you can actually have a constructive discussion
around how do we actually scale growth.
If you skip these pieces and just focus on the tactics,
then what you're essentially doing
is just doing a bunch of random marketing
and sales activities.
Not exactly revamping your go-to-market strategy
or your machine.
Are you start to see the power in this?
If you can start to see the powers,
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.
Also, if you're in the stage where you are looking
to revamp your go-to market strategy
or maybe build one out to scale to that next stage
and you start to wonder, well, what data do we pull?
How do we build alignment?
What does a go-to market strategy look like?
This is exactly why
I created my SaaS go-to market coaching program.
I have over 250 founders
that have gone through this program across different stages.
And so if you wanna work together
to actually implement a go-to-market strategy and scale it,
you should definitely check that out.
You don't have to go anywhere right now,
I'll link to it below,
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode.
First, let me explain to you what this third principle is
and how all this comes together.
And if you haven't smashed the lock button,
make sure you do that, 'cause the YouTube algorithm
really does like it when you do that.
And so do we.
Okay,
so the third principle is you want to take this data,
you wanna bring this or take this alignment
together with your leadership team,
really flesh out your go-to market strategy.
And these are essentially all inputs.
The discussions, this is gonna be all quantitative
and this is all gonna be qualitative.
And they all go in
as input to a proper go-to-market strategy.
I forgot the y there.
And you might be wondering, well, what does that look like?
How does the go-to-market strategy come together
based on these inputs now that we have this alignment,
these discussions happening, is grounded in data.
Well, that's a great question,
and if you've been a long time viewer of this channel,
you've probably heard me talk about this
but it's never enough
'cause you really wanna think about this in a holistic way.
The first piece of your go-to-market strategy
that you're gonna build is your ICP.
Your ideal customer profile.
Your ideal customer profile is a very, very deep exercise
in exactly understanding based on the data,
based on the qualitative information
your leadership team has on exactly who you're gonna target
to get to that next stage of growth.
The second piece that you want is a manifesto.
A manifesto is essentially what I call
this piece of document that really codifies
your positioning, your messaging, your value proposition,
how you differentiate, how you drive urgency in deals.
It's not a big document
but it's the core asset that you use
to tell the strategic narrative of your company.
And when you do the manifesto right,
it's very easy to check the box on a manifesto,
just like an ICP, but that doesn't mean it'll work.
If you wanna understand
if your manifestor or ICP is working,
you'll wanna look at the right metrics.
I covered that in a prior video,
you can check that out here.
You don't have to go right now, I'll link to it below,
you can check it out after this
but that way you'll understand
if you actually built yours right.
But what you wanna be doing
is you want to build out your ICP
and based on that, you wanna build out your manifesto
so it's actually effective in this market
given everything that you know.
Once you have your ICP and your manifesto,
you essentially have your differentiated
go-to-market strategy based on data,
based on the qualitative information,
based on alignment across the team.
And some magic happens with this,
you actually get a lot more focus,
you know exactly what part of the market to go after.
You also know how to tell your story
when you do generate leads,
you learn how to drive urgency on deals,
and also what I've seen really powerful
is when you build a manifesto in an ICP,
this actually feeds back into product.
Your product roadmap becomes clearer.
So many founders and leadership teams I've worked with,
once they've gone through this exercise,
actually we went back to product,
the head of product and the head of technology,
the CTO was like,
oh my God, we have a much better understanding
of exactly how to take the product forward.
So that's really powerful also.
Now obviously just the strategy is not enough.
This is the strategy.
Then you wanna jump into execution.
And the last piece that you have
is probably go-to market strategy
and execution is your Broadway show.
And your Broadway show is your consistent set of sales
and marketing activities
that you're gonna run every single week
to take your manifesto to your ICP.
What I see so often is you have sales teams over here,
marketing teams over there,
no one's talking to each other,
and they're all doing a whole new thing every single week
to figure out how to generate demand.
That's broken and they're always trying new channels
and aren't achieving channel mastery.
What a much more effective way to do it is,
is to run one consistent Broadway show
that you run every week on key channels
that you have mastery in
to take your manifesto and bring it to your ICP
so you're consistently and in a compounded way
building pipeline, building demand
and building attention out there
that will lead to revenues and convert to revenues.
So that's the process that I followed.
And you know, if you go back to some of my earliest videos
when I had like two subscribers,
the principles were the same,
and the principles came from actually doing it
across ToutApp,
my last SaaS company at Marketo, which bought ToutApp
and then helping sell Marketo to Adobe.
So that's where the principles came,
that's where I learned it.
But over the last couple years
as I've worked with so many SaaS founders,
I've actually battle tested it and refined this framework
and it's gotten better and better.
And so this is like the most clarified version of it
where you first pull in the data,
then you pull in the qualitative data
with the team and build alignment,
and you actually codified with your ICP,
you manifest on your Broadway show,
and then you start to execute
and then you keep looking at the data.
You keep building alignment, you keep iterating
and you keep doing this cycle essentially.
And when you do this,
you're able to scale your go-to-market strategy
and you're able to scale your SaaS business.
Now you know the three principles that are battle tested
and the most important for you to know and follow
to actually build a SaaS go-to-market strategy
and actually scale your SaaS business.
What you may not know is,
how do we actually pull the right data?
What are the most common choke points?
How do we think think about the market,
the product and the go-to-market?
How do we actually build alignment, maybe with my co-founder
or with your entire leadership team?
How do we actually codify this
into an actual go-to-market strategy
where you have your ICP, you build your manifesto
and then you run your Broadway show.
And what do we measure after we do this
so that we can actually continue to iterate
and get better and better and better,
and just dominate the competition.
This is exactly why
I created my SaaS go-to market coaching program.
Inside of this program, you work directly with me
to actually revamp your go-to-market strategy.
I'll give you the step by step training
on exactly how to follow these steps.
And then I'll work with you as you start to execute on this,
and as you start to think through this
and as you start to build the strategy around this
to make sure you reduce execution risk,
you don't make the common mistakes
and you're able to actually accelerate the growth
of your SaaS business.
Now, this program is not for everybody,
it's only for founders
and leadership teams that already have some revenues.
If you are pre-revenue, if you're pre-product market fit,
it's too early for something like this.
But if you already have some revenues and you're like,
look, we need to revamp our go-to-market strategy
because it's not gonna get us to the next stage,
we need to actually scale our growth,
we need to drive alignment,
we need to understand our business,
we need to build on our go-to-market strategy,
then this program is perfect for you.
So all you need to do
is just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
tkkader.com/gtm.
When you go over there,
you'll get all the details around the program
and you'll fill a little form to apply, to join.
Once your application comes in,
if we feel like it's a fit, we'll get on a call,
we'll review all your details, we'll answer any questions,
and if it sounds like, hey,
we can actually help you with your go-to-market strategy,
we can help you scale,
then you're in and we're off to the races
and we'll build out your go-to-market strategy.
This program has been one of the best things
I've ever done in my career,
it's the most rewarding thing
'cause I get to work with so many amazing founders
and SaaS companies and there's been so much success.
We've done case studies and success stories in this channel,
we have an entire playlist for it,
which we'll link to it below
that actually highlights all the success from the program.
And so now we're adding more people to the program
to make sure that we can have as much impact as possible.
So just go to tkkader.com/gtm for all the details.
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.
I also drop an episode every single Sunday
with actionable strategies
and how to grow your SaaS business faster.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon that you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode.
And lastly, if you've got a fellow founder,
a fellow team member that will get value from this video
if you're trying to get them onboarded
on just doing this program with us,
you wanna make sure that they're just as excited,
please share this video with them.
It just means the world to us
we wanna help as many SaaS leaders
and operators and founders as possible.
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 more importantly, inside of the go-to-market program
so we can help you scale faster.
Take care.