- When you're first starting out
in building your SaaS business, there's not a lot of data.
However, once you start to generate some revenues,
once you're starting to get together with your team
or your co-founder and you're starting to say,
"Hey, let's go scale this SaaS business,"
it can be really daunting with the amount
of data you actually have.
In fact, I've been in your shoes
where we were scaling and I forgot how much data we had.
I got so used to making decisions just with intuition,
because there was no data.
I forgot to look at the actual data.
Here's a big question, though.
It can be really easy to get overwhelmed
with all the data once you start to look at it.
What data do you actually look at
from your Go-To-Market machine
to figure out how you can scale your SaaS business?
How do you make sure that you're hitting
the right benchmarks?
In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through
the three principles you absolutely need to know
on how to actually diagnose your Go-To-Market machine,
look at the right data and scale
your SaaS business effectively.
And when you follow these three principles,
you'll know exactly what you need to do
and what area of your Go-To-Market machine to focus on
so you can accelerate your growth to the next stage.
Intro.
(energetic music)
(digital beep) What's up, buddy?
Welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK and on this channel I help SaaS founders like you
grow your size businesses faster with unstoppable strategy.
Now, if you are new to this channel, welcome.
I drop an episode with actionable strategies and tactics
from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
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I drop an episode with the TK Energy.
Now, if you're already part of this community,
if you're part of my SaaS and Go-To-Market
coaching programs, my people, welcome back.
It's really awesome to see you over here.
So I remember when I was operating
my last SaaS business, ToutApp,
we pioneered the sales and engagement space
and then we sold it to Marketo,
we were going through different inflection points of growth
and as soon as we were at that inflection point
where we had some revenues and we were looking
to get to that next stage,
this happened when we were driving to a million,
it happened again when we were driving to 3 million,
again, when we were 6 million,
we would get together and we would look at,
"Hey, what do we need to do
to actually accelerate our growth?"
And every single time I had to remind myself
that there's actually not just an intuitive way to do this,
but there's also a data-driven way to do this.
And at the end, we found a way to actually do this
where we both looked at our intuition and also looked
at the data to make the best possible decision.
Sure enough, we were able to get to a million ERR,
then that following year, we actually did 300% growth
and got to 3 million ERR and the rest is history.
And so what I want to go through
is going through that actual stage,
what are the three principles that I learned?
What are the three principles that I apply now
with every single SaaS founder that I work with
as they're scaling their growth
to actually get through this stage of the process?
And when you follow these three principles,
you, too, will be be able to accelerate
your growth to that next stage.
So if you're excited to dig in to the first principle,
go ahead and smash out like button
for the YouTube algorithm
and let's dig into principle number zero,
there is principle number zero,
because I wanna lay the land out properly.
Principle number zero is for every Go-To-Market strategy,
there is essentially three components
and the three principles I'm gonna give you
are tethered to this.
And if you've been watching this channel for a while,
then you already know these three components.
The first one is your ideal customer profile.
That's how you actually figure out
what part of the market you're going after.
The second one is your manifesto.
This is your strategic message, your strategic narrative,
your positioning, your messaging.
And the third one is your Broadway show.
And your Broadway show is the consistent set of sales
and marketing activities that you run
to actually attract the right people
from your ideal customer profile, show them your manifesto
so that they get into your sales and marketing process,
whether it's product-led or sales-led, doesn't matter.
And so these are essentially the three components
that you have in every Go-To-Market strategy.
If you already know about these three components,
that means you've been part of this community for a while.
You're part of my coaching programs,
you know this very well.
If you're new to this, don't worry.
You can check out this video.
It's our best performing video on the six steps
to actually building out a Go-To-Market strategy
and the key principles you need to know.
you don't have to go right now, I'll put it in a link below,
you can watch it after this video
and it'll go in depth into these three components.
But notionally, what all you need to know
is these are the three components
that go into a proper Go-To-Market strategy.
And needless to say, the three principles
I'm gonna walk you through tie into a core metric,
a core piece of GTM data
that ties into these three components,
because everything connects together.
So principle number zero is just know
these are the three components
to your Go-To-Market strategy.
If you don't have all three of these,
then chances are you don't quite
have a Go-To-Market strategy
and so that's something you'll have to work on.
If you already have them, you'll know exactly
what part you need to fix or you need to focus on.
So principle number zero is essentially
just know the three components.
That's zero.
Now, principle number one is the first piece of data
that you want to look at is your ICP.
And the biggest piece of data
that I've found to be eyeopening,
I work with founders all the time
when they're revamping their Go-To-Market strategy
and we do an ICP exercise
and one thinks they have an ideal customer profile
until they go through my process,
one of the pieces of data that we look at for companies
that already have revenues, already have data,
is their win percentage by segment.
And this is the first piece of data
that I found to be eyeopening every single time.
I personally have gone through an inflection point
in a SaaS business and I've operated SaaS business
all the way from pre-revenue all the way up
to 450 million ERR in revenue.
And I've found that if you actually look at your win rate
by segment, whether it's SMB, mid-market,
enterprise or certain vertical, it becomes eye opening
on where are you winning and where are you losing.
And that insight can help you reinforce
what your ideal customer profile should be based on data.
And so if you have some data, what I encourage you to do
is look at win percentage by segment
and actually start to do a proper ICP exercise
based on that data, so you can actually revamp
your Go-To-Market strategy.
And what I've found is when companies start to focus in more
on specific ICPs, they're able to grow faster.
I've seen this at a million, 3 million, 10 million,
40 million, 450 million in all these companies
that I've either been part of or coached,
they have been able to grow faster,
because they used this metric
to go through a proper ICP exercise
and that actually unlocked growth for them,
because it focused on where they had
their greatest strengths.
That's principle number one.
Principle number two is having to do it with your manifesto.
When I work with founders around their manifesto,
it's a core piece of centralized asset that we create
that incorporates your strategic message,
it incorporates your core messaging and your positioning.
Once you have a manifesto,
we then turn it into a lead magnet.
We turn it into your sales deck if you're sales-driven
or we turn it into an educational piece
if you're product-led.
The biggest thing to understand
on whether you have an effective lead magnet
or you have an effective sales deck
is to look at this one metric
and that one metric is your lead to opportunity percentage.
So if you're generating a hundred leads,
and 10 of them are becoming opportunities,
then you have a lead to opportunity conversion of 10%.
What that means as 10% of leads become opportunities.
That actually happens to be a healthy benchmark.
If you're below 10%, then chances are the way
you are attracting the people from your ICP is bad
or it's not converting well
or it's not educating them properly,
it's not creating that demand.
Or it could be that the ICP you're targeting
is just not the right fit for your product or your message.
What this does is looking at this metric opens up
the conversation on is our ICP right
and are we educating them in the right way?
Are we messaging to them the right way?
Are we positioning ourselves the right way?
Because if we are, then a lot of them
will turn into real opportunities.
If we aren't, then they'll just look at the manifesto
or the lead magnet and say, "Hey,
this is not for me. I'm gonna move on."
Or even, they might even aren't getting in the manifesto.
They might not be clicking on your ads
or responding to your cold emails
where you can also use the manifesto messaging.
And so what I've found over and over
is looking at this metric of lead to opportunity conversion
gives you a really great benchmark on,
"Hey, is our messaging actually resonating?"
Once someone comes in, they've gone through
all these steps to maybe click on an ad
or click on a LinkedIn post, an organic post,
and then they say, "Hey, I want this lead magnet."
And then they get in and they're like,
"No, I'm not interested."
And so it gives you a really good view
into whether your messaging is working
or being effective or not.
Just between these two things, you can start to understand
what part of your Go-To-Market strategy is working
versus not working and how you can improve it
so you can scale faster.
And the biggest thing to know
is there are real benchmarks around this.
Win rate should be around 20%.
It's classic Pareto's Principle.
20% of whatever you've got is gonna be of value.
And so out of your opportunity to pipeline,
benchmark is about 20%.
If you have 20% win rate, you're doing pretty well.
If you go above 20%, then you're doing really well.
And same thing with lead to opportunity,
this one is actually 10%, meaning if 10% of your leads
are turning into real quality opportunities
and then you're winning 20% of them,
then you have a really great Go-To-Market funnel
and what you can do is now start
to scale that in meaningful ways.
You can put more money into that,
because you know it's converting in the right way.
Now, there's a third metric that I want to go into
and I wanna show you the benchmark for it.
But before I do that, before I go to principle number three,
let me just pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
Are you starting to see the power of instead
of getting overwhelmed with all of the data
and all the metrics that can exist
or just continuing to do intuition-based decisions,
which worked in the early stages,
but doesn't work when you're scaling,
I've learned this the hard way.
Instead of that, if you could just start to think about,
"Okay, here are my three components
of my go-to-market strategy, my ICP
who are we going after, what's the market
what's my manifesto, what's my messaging
that I'm gonna go to attract these people
and what's my Broadway show?
How am I gonna consistently bring my manifesto to my ICP?
If you start to do that and then you start
to look at these two, just these two metrics,
you start to have some constructive discussions
about how do we scale our Go-To-Market machine.
You start to see the power on 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.
Also, if you're in this stage where you're like,
"You know what? I need a proper Go-To-Market strategy.
I need to revamp my Go-To-Market strategy.
I don't think my ICP is right, we kind of winged it.
We don't quite have the right messaging,
it's not quite resonating.
I bet I'm not hitting these benchmarks,"
then I encourage you to check out
my SaaS Go-To-Market coaching program.
This is where we work together to actually revamp
your go-to market strategy and accelerate your growth.
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 video,
but right now, let's go to principle number three
and metric number three that's gonna help you scale.
Also, if you haven't already,
go ahead and smash that like button.
My team loves it when you do that.
YouTube loves it when you do that.
I love it when you do that.
We all love it and it just means a lot to us.
So principle number three. Principle number three.
Now with the Broadway show, just to reiterate this,
a Broadway show is the consistent set of sales
and marketing activities that you're running
to actually bring your manifesto, your message to your ICP
and this could be on LinkedIn, this could be on Twitter,
this could be on Facebook ads, this could be on Google,
there's so many different channels.
But it's a consistent set of activities
and you're doing it in a consistent way.
That's why we call it a Broadway show.
You don't wanna be doing is a scattered-brain set of like,
"Oh, we're gonna do this this week.
And I hear TikTok is great
and I hear we should do a webinar,"
and you're just all over the place.
There's nothing consistent, so nothing compounds
and you don't iterate.
This is the idea of building one master Broadway show
that you run every single week
and it gets better and better
to bring your manifesto to your ICP.
The metric that I like to look at to really understand
that this is working or you need to revamp something
or how you can scale it, is your pipeline coverage.
And this is something that often gets forgotten.
Every single founder that I've talk to,
every single leadership team that I work with,
they all have goals.
They're like, "Look, we wanna actually do
10 million of new business this year,"
or, "We wanna do a million this year,
million of net new revenue that we want to do this year."
And what founders and teams often forget is the math behind.
You need to generate a certain number of leads,
certain percentage of those leads will become opportunities
and you're gonna win a certain percentage
of those opportunities.
And in order to close, in order to win
a million dollars of opportunities,
you need to generate that much more
in terms of pipeline, in terms of opportunities.
you need to generate a lot more opportunities
in dollar value than you're actually planning on closing,
'cause you're only gonna close 20%.
Out of the 20% of opportunities that you win,
only a certain percentage of leads
become opportunities, only 10%.
So that means that you need to create a lot more leads
that's gonna create a lot more opportunities,
out of that you're gonna close 20% of that.
Are you starting to get this?
And so these two connect.
The idea of that and embracing that
is called pipeline coverage.
And generally speaking, the benchmark for this
is 3x to 5x, 3x to 5x, what does that mean?
It means that if you are planning on closing,
this is broad rule of thumb that every VP of sales,
VP of marketing will follow
and founders need to learn it, too.
I learned this the hard way, Baby TK.
If you're looking to close a million dollars
of net new business, that means you need
3 to $5 million of pipeline,
depending on how healthy your win rates are
and how healthy your funnel is.
And so if you're below benchmark on lead to opportunity,
meaning, let's just say 1% of your leads turn
into opportunities, then you wanna err towards 5x,
because you need a lot more leads.
If your win rate is suffering or it's a competitive dynamic
and you haven't figured out your manifesto yet
or you're all over the place in your ICP
and the win rates are all over the place,
then you need to go towards 5x.
If these are pretty healthy, you're hitting benchmarks,
then you can go towards 3x,
you can be a little bit more conservative.
But the idea is knowing your pipeline coverage,
meaning, if you need to generate
a million dollars of new revenue
for whatever period of time you're looking at,
you need $3 million of opportunities.
If you need to generate $3 million of opportunities,
then you have to divide that by basically 10%
to get to how many leads you need
based on your average deal size.
This is where marketing math comes in really handy.
And when I worked with founders,
I always give them a little spreadsheet to say,
"Cool, let's actually map out what your target is
and let's map out what your metrics are
and so that way we know exactly
how much we need to generate."
And this number is always eye-opening,
because it tells you, "Look, whatever you're doing,
you probably need to 10x that in terms of activities
and make sure that you're amping up on the amount
of eyeballs and traffic you're getting in front of,
because you have to hit a very high pipeline coverage number
in order to hit your revenue goals."
And a lot of times people don't look at this data
and don't do the math, and they're like,
"We didn't quite grow."
It's like you didn't even stand a chance,
because your benchmarks were off
and the traffic level wasn't high enough.
And this opens the eyes to exactly what matters.
Now, to recap, here are the three principles
that you need to follow to use data
to revamp your Go-To-Market strategy and to scale.
Principle number zero is you need to make sure
you have a proper Go-To-Market strategy.
You need to have an ideal customer profile,
not just wing it, a proper one.
You need to have a manifesto.
That's your strategic narrative, your messaging,
which will turn in your lead magnet, your sales deck,
your educational contract if your product-led
and also you need to have a Broadway show
where you're consistently bringing
your manifesto to your ICP.
So that's principle number zero.
You need a proper Go-To-Market strategy.
Once you have that, then you actually need
to look at your data.
You need to look at is what's my win rate
by win percentage by segment.
You need to make sure you're hitting
a benchmark of 20% and choose the segments
where you're doing really well and revamp your ICP.
Number two, you need to make sure you're converting
your leads to real opportunities.
Benchmark is 10% for that.
And number three, you need to make sure
you're doing enough in your Broadway show
so you're able to hit a pipeline coverage
of 3x to 5x, which is your target number.
You do these three things, you look at these data,
it'll give you an actual plan to say,
"Cool, what do we need to do?
Which area do we need to focus on?"
Maybe it's all three. Maybe it's one of them.
Maybe you're hitting benchmark on some or not,
or maybe it's all messed up
and you just need to revamp your Go-To-Market strategy.
You'll know based on looking at these three numbers.
You'll be able to have a constructive conversation
and say, "Cool, what do we need to do
to grow based on this data?"
It'll open your eyes, it'll make this a lot more manageable
on how to scale your SaaS business.
Now you know exactly the data to look at
and the principles to follow to actually revamp
your Go-To-Market strategy.
What you may not know is,
how do I calculate each of this data?
How do I know I'm making the right decisions?
How do I feed this into a proper ideal customer profile,
a proper manifesto, a proper Broadway show?
This is why I run my SaaS Go-To-Market coaching program.
Inside of my SaaS Go-To-Market coaching program,
I walk you through how to build
a proper ideal customer profile.
I walk you through how to actually build a manifesto
and then I walk you through how to run
a Broadway show consistently
so you can bring your manifesto to your ICP.
I also walk you through exactly what data to capture
and how to iterate on it and how to diagnose it
so you can scale more effectively.
It's an incredible program.
I've worked with so many amazing SaaS companies.
We've shared so many case studies,
we've had so many success stories.
We actually switched to two episodes a week
where every Thursday, we're launching
a new case study right now, so it's been incredible.
If you are at the stage where you need to revamp
your Go-To-Market strategy, you'd like to work together
to actually scale your SaaS business,
just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
tkkader.com/gtm and inside of there,
you'll see all the details on my program.
You'll fill out a little form,
so we can actually get on a call
and figure out if we're the right fit
and if we are, we're off to the races.
Generally, within three weeks of joining,
you're able to launch your revamped Go-To-Market strategy
and then we work together to scale from there.
It's an incredible program, so just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
If you've got a value from this video,
please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
It really loves it when you do that and so do we.
We put a lot of love into these videos.
If you have a fellow founder,
if you have a fellow team member,
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that would get value from this, please share this with them.
It would just mean the world to us.
If you're part of a Slack group, a WhatsApp group,
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We put out these videos completely for free
to help as many SaaS companies and teams as possible.
Also, 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 inside the Go-To-Market program,
hopefully, or at least, the next episode.
Take care, everybody.
(inspiring music)
In this episode...
Oh, how did I screw that up? (chuckles)