- Where am I going to break?
And you're like, I've seen this 100 times.
- Most people that try to skip that step
and don't build the playbooks,
end up falling backwards on the weight of their growth.
(upbeat music)
What is that Marnie, how are you doing?
- I'm good, how are you?
- I'm doing incredible.
I...
Excited to chat.
Just so for everybody's context,
why don't you give us a 30 seconds company,
who you serve, what problem you solve and how you solve it?
- Absolutely.
I am Marnie Stockman, CEO of Lifecycle Insights.
So we help IT business owners sell to execs, not techs.
- Cool.
So IT business owners sell to execs, not techs.
Meaning C-level not the dev teams or engineering teams.
What...
Yeah, what problem do you solve for them?
- Yeah, so we...
They get into the tactics, the technology very easily,
not the sales piece, so the strategic conversation.
So we help automate reports.
So they get the reports that they need
and we help tie that to the business pains
in an assessment piece,
so they can connect for the business owner.
Business pain, how we're gonna solve it for you.
- Cool, so I kind of get the problem.
You help these IT consultancies manage the quarterly reviews
with their small business customers
so that they can not only keep the customer,
but get new business.
- [Marnie] Absolutely, yep.
- What can I help with today?
- So, I've got a few questions.
My favourite is, we do...
10% of what we do,
is what 80% of what there's a competitor of ours does.
And I am most interested in the best way
to market to them.
So we do all the education, the organic pieces.
And I'm curious if you have a good strategy around,
I've done Google ads, people do not search for these terms.
They find other vendors in the space
by asking people in their peer groups, right?
So they speak to others who they would go after.
So, targeting them in a traditional Facebook ad or Google ad
or whatever, doesn't seem to work as much.
So I'm curious if you have any--
- So, I'm trying to understand it.
So the problem you're trying to solve
is a potential customer of yours discovering you online?
- Yes.
Particularly targeted to our competitor.
- Okay, so you want to target
your competitor's customer base?
- [Marnie] Yes. - Okay.
Why do that versus not just speak to the market
and the problem they have?
- So we regularly do that
and when we get some good traction, for sure.
- Okay.
- This we are doing something unique
to combat this one particular competitor.
- Okay, so here's a question then,
'cause I've done this many times over the years.
One of the strategies I teach is core targeting,
which is asking the question of what other products
does my ideal customer purchase?
And through that process,
I call it the fund, the follow, the frequent model.
So on the fund side, where do they spend money on?
How do I attract or get in front of that customer?
Does your competitor run an event every year?
- [Marnie] They do not, they attend events.
- Okay.
They don't run an event, do they have a Facebook page?
- [Marnie] They do not.
- Okay.
Do they have a partnership with any other companies
that you're aware of?
- So they have...
They integrate with other companies as do we.
- Okay.
So, is there anything that tells you from a website
that accompany is using your competitor?
- Sometimes we can identify them on the client end.
Well, I can see for folks that we integrate with,
that they also integrate.
But I don't know the--
- But typically what you'll see sometimes
if the tool has like a scheduling component to it
or a contact form, you can scrape the HTML of a website
to see if they use HubSpot, Shopify, your competitor's name.
Does that make sense?
Does your competitor have a tool, a widget
that they ask their customers to instal on their website?
Do you have a tool that you ask your customers
to instal on their website?
- [Marnie] No. - Okay.
- So I'm always looking for artefacts.
I'm looking for-- - Oh, I'm with you,
I'm intrigued. - Yeah.
No, and this is where I think growth hacking
truly comes from.
It's not essentially marketing.
People are like, oh, growth hacking is this.
And I'm like, that sounds like marketing to me.
Growth hacking is asking yourself,
what data point, artefact, characteristic is true,
that if I uncovered and I found a creative way to build
some technology, a scraper, utility to pull that list,
that I would be able to create some kind of campaign, right?
So if I knew they had a private Facebook group
and I scan that group.
I'm not saying anybody should do this,
but people have done this.
Which is scrape all the Facebook IDs,
turned it into a remarketing list
and created ads against that.
You can imagine that would be something people do, right?
Or scrape using builtwith.com,
which is a great tool to find
companies that have used certain technologies
to build their website.
Or there's even companies out there
that I don't know the names of them,
but I know my team uses it to find...
My sales team does this to find companies that...
What they do is they search the job postings of companies
to see what technology they mention,
to figure out what companies are using what technology.
Isn't that cool?
So companies around the world publish their job postings.
And in the job posting say things like
must have 15 years experience in Siebel or BEA WebLogic
or Oracle data frames.
And then they'll scrape that and then sell that list
to people that are trying to sell the companies
that have these characteristics.
So, that's what I'm always thinking about.
Other strategies, again, I don't recommend these,
but I'm gonna share them anyways 'cause that's my job.
I work with hundreds of SAS founders
trying to build demand gen programmes.
Another strategy is to find out
who used to work at that organisation as a sales rep
and see if they might have potentially access to...
Other people have done this.
Not us, we would never do this.
But you can imagine somebody could do that.
And they would bring their book of business with them.
That's another way to do it, right?
But typically like I'm looking for partnership connections,
and then I'll see if I can build a relationship
with that partner that's more lucrative than my competitor.
I used...
Back in the day I used to use compete.com,
there's probably some other SEO tools
that will actually show me
who are the largest referrals for my competitor.
So I might be able to find out what traffic source
is generating the most traffic to them,
and then try to build a relationship
with that traffic source to send that traffic to me.
- That is super interesting.
The interesting part is, none of our competitors
actually do much marketing at all. (laughs)
So they tell us we are everywhere in the space
because they actually see us out there,
and we just want more of that space.
So-- - Yeah.
So try to figure out traffic,
try to figure out who has the list of their customers,
figure out who's the partners with them.
Like that is competing in the space.
There's grey hat techniques, there's black hat stuff.
I'm super ethical,
I don't do anything I wouldn't feel comfortable
having published on the homepage of the Wall Street Journal.
But at the same time,
I'm aware of every strategy out there for demand gen.
So, A, I can protect myself against it.
That's also another reason to be aware of them,
and not just stick your head in the sand.
But that's the way I think about it.
And I guess like there's some more digging for you to do
to figure out where that might lie.
But now you understand the principles
and the framework behind it.
Does that make sense?
- Oh, completely.
And frankly, when I wrote that question for myself,
I finished it without being gross.
Like we just refuse to be gross,
it's one of our core values, so I'm not gonna do any of--
- You have a core value called don't be gross?
- It actually is to be transparent.
But we might change it to don't be gross 'cause--
- Don't be gross is a little bit more specific.
It's like don't be evil, but a little bit broader meaning.
What did you like best about what I just shared Marnie?
What resonated the most with you?
- Well, for sure the referral piece,
because I think I actually know how I'd go about doing that.
So to find what is a good referral source for them,
can become a good referral source to us.
'Cause we'll be scrapping and go do that.
- Cool.
What else can I help with?
- So, if we are at 500,000 MRR
and aim to be at 1 million MRR in six months--
- I'm assuming that you mean AR,
annual recurring, not monthly. - [Marnie] Oh, I do mean AR,
wouldn't that be something? - Yeah.
'Cause you...
I mean, if you're at that level, then we should talk about
a little bit more fun, yeah. - You're McLaren.
So, okay yes, ARR.
What am I not gonna see coming?
We're like scrapping like champs
to get all of the processes in place.
Where am I gonna break?
And you're like, I've seen this 100 times or 1000 times.
- Yeah, I mean, in the early days,
there's this level of scale.
At the bottom, it's always product.
You can't out grow yourself from a bad product.
So we always start with product.
The next level is promotion.
So if I ask you on a product level,
it sounds like you feel pretty comfortable
you have a great product based on the fact that you do
80% of or 10% of 80% of what somebody else does, right?
So you have a great product.
So then I go to promotion, which is,
how do I build a demand gen engine where I can...
And I'm always looking for CAC payback,
that is my core metric.
So, where can I invest money to generate sales
and do that in a period that's quick enough
to cover my costs?
So CAC includes marketing and sales expenses.
Okay?
So your marketing team, budgets, sales team, commissions
and truly what's called fully loaded CAC includes tooling,
office space.
And if you want to get even nerdier,
just gross margin, not revenue, right?
So, you can play around with what feels good
but typically I wanna get for bootstrap founder,
CAC payback period.
For all my coaching clients,
I wanna give them below 90 days.
Because if I can get them below 90 days,
then if you grow really quick
and you don't have a below 90 days,
that's where you're forced
almost to go raise external capital
just to fund your growth.
Right?
But if you can get really creative on implementation fees
or what's called setup fees,
which I teach in my SAS academy programme,
like I have this whole framework
called the setup fee implementation,
which I think if you do it right,
for the right type of mid market demo-led sales process,
you should be able to be cashflow,
CAC payback period within 30 to 60 days, right?
By deferring your sales commission to an agent,
collecting the cash upfront.
'Cause really that's the game we're playing.
So that's on the promotion side, right?
So, and now I'll give you the third level out of the five,
'cause that's probably where you're gonna run into issues
after that, is the process side.
It's if I've got the product
and I've got a demand generation
and a sales process working,
then it's documenting the process from a marketing, sales
and onboarding customer success point of view,
to then unlock the next level of growth.
Most people that try to skip that step
and don't build the playbooks,
end up falling backwards on the weight of their growth,
right?
And that's where they fire people, customers fire them,
they have buggy code because they haven't taken the time
to say, hey, what are our best practises
when it comes to marketing?
What's our best practises when it comes to sales?
What's our best practises for handoffs
in between departments and onboarding customers?
What's our best practises for monitoring our customers
and making sure that they're happy with our product, right?
And then operationally speaking,
I had a client the other day that ran a report,
'cause I do this with all new coaching clients.
And they found out they had a customer
that hadn't paid an invoice in 17 months.
But I mean, this is like, that's just a thing
that they didn't have any accounts receivable process.
The person that was doing the bookkeeping
was so busy with just trying to do the bookkeeping
they weren't even thinking about accounts receivable.
And they found out that they had dozens of customers
that hadn't paid invoices a while.
But the one that was the worst was 17 months.
And like try to go back to a customer and say,
oh, sorry, you owe us $20,000
'cause we were not on top of it.
They're just going to be like, I'll give you three
and you should start invoicing me next month.
- [Marnie] Put your act together.
- Yeah.
So I mean, these are the things that
to me process is the next stage
once you can get the promotion side figured out.
Does that make sense, Marnie?
- It does, and the plus side, it is what we're working on,
like around the clock.
So then--
- What do you like best about that strategy?
Like what resonated the most with you?
- Well, I think it mainly just confirms
that that is what we're spending the right time doing.
It feels like you have to slow down a bit
to document every single piece.
But if we don't do it, we break in the future.
And I come from a background of customer success.
As a matter of fact,
I wrote a book on it for managed service providers.
So I truly believe in the pieces you were talking about,
about figuring out when they're happy, healthy, et cetera.
- Awesome.
Cool Marnie.
With that, I just wanna tell how much I appreciate the time,
the opportunity to help you out a little bit.
And I'm just grateful to have you in the programme
and support you on your journey.
- Well, I appreciate the call, I'm very excited.
- All right, have an amazing rest of the day.
- You too, bye-bye. - Cheers.
(upbeat music)