- There's this Catch-22 I encountered
back when I first raised my Seed Round,
we raised a million dollars,
back then that was, you know, sizeable Seed Round,
in today's dollars it's probably
about a three to $4 million Seed Round,
same spending power.
And there's this Catch-22 that I encountered where,
we had a bunch of money in the bank,
we wanted to go out and recruit some great marketing people,
but you literally, like it wasn't enough money
to recruit great marketing strategy people.
I could spend that money to hire an agency,
but a lot of those agencies were started by ex pizza boys
that never really done this before
or I could hire a number of junior marketing people,
great people,
but all of these people that were available
within that budget of a million dollars,
or even today at $3 million, were more execution people.
They weren't the marketing strategy people.
And what I learned the hard way was, you needed both.
You actually had to find a way to define the strategy
so that you can hand it over to these execution folks
that they can go run those ads, create those blog posts,
put out that content,
that execution stuff would actually work.
Without the strategy, it would be unfounded
and you would spend a bunch of dollars,
do a bunch of things, but nothing would actually click.
And even today, when I talk to founders who are Seed backed,
they complained about the same thing.
They're like, look, we did a bunch of this stuff,
but it's just not resonating.
It's like, yeah, like you hired a number of execution people
and it's not your fault,
that's literally all you can afford, given a Seed Round.
The really talented strategy people
are the VPs of marketing,
VPs of DemandGen the CMOs of much larger companies
and there's just not a lot of them.
And so what happens?
Ultimately, you are sitting in a room as the founder
trying to define the marketing strategy.
I've been there.
And this is why I created my go-to market program.
In today's episode,
I wanna walk you through the three critical components
that you absolutely need to understand as a founder,
when it comes to your marketing strategy
and you need to get good at understanding
why these three components are important
and why they're critical to whatever dollars you spend,
whether it's with an agency, a junior marketing team,
or just doing it yourself,
no matter what you do,
you need to actually get these three principles down
for your strategy in order to drive growth
for 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 SaaS businesses faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
Now, if you are new to this channel, welcome,
be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon,
where you get notified every single time
I drop an episode with actionable strategies
on how to grow your SaaS business faster with the TK energy.
That subscribe button and that bell icon,
make sure you hit that.
If you're already part of this channel,
if you're part of my SaaS coaching programs, my people,
welcome back.
It's so awesome to see you over here.
Now I'm gonna warn you guys,
if you are an avid viewer of this channel,
this week, I'm actually loaded up on steroids,
thanks to my doctor.
She prescribed me some steroids for this thing
that I'm dealing with.
And so my energy might be a little bit different,
hopefully it'll be just fine and we'll roll with it.
So with that said,
I'm gonna walk you through the three marketing principles
that you absolutely need to understand, internalize
and start to really get your head around as a founder,
a Seed stage founder,
to be effective in sales and marketing
and go-to market for your SaaS business.
And this is regardless of whether you've already hired
a marketing team, an agency,
ultimately this piece of marketing strategy
falls on the founder
or a really high caliber VP of marketing,
which oftentimes the Catch-22 is,
you can't afford even with a three to $6 million Seed Round
because there aren't enough of them.
So this is what I'm gonna be digging into today.
And I'm gonna really break it down for you.
It really breaks down into your actual segmentation.
It breaks down into your targeting
and it breaks out into positioning.
I'm gonna break it down into three principles
and take you step by step like I always do.
So if you're excited to dig in,
go ahead and smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm.
Let's first talk about segmentation.
So the first piece of marketing strategy
that you really need to nail,
and this is something that you can't outsource
to the agency, you can't leave to the junior marketing team
is what segment of the market you're gonna be going after.
Now, when it comes to B2B SaaS,
that's what we really specialize in over here,
there's some very well-defined markets
that you could be going after.
And in the early stages, the more specific you are,
the more successful you're going to be
and then you can earn the right to expand from there.
So you could go after just solo users,
you could also go after prosumers.
You can go after small, medium sized businesses,
you can go after mid-market businesses
and then you can go all the way up to enterprise.
And there's also room for a little enterprise business
over here.
These are the different segments
that you can be going after.
And each of these segments, depending on you know,
who these people are, where they live
and what problem you're solving and what their role is,
and how much money they can spend,
how much disposable income they have,
how much budget they have,
how successful they are,
they're gonna be able to buy from you in different ways.
And it's super important for your specific problem
that you're solving and the product that you're building,
you start to figure out which segment of the market
is most ripe for disruption.
Now, when you're thinking about segmentation,
the other thing that you also wanna see is,
generally speaking, there's this rule over here where,
if you go like this,
the more you go into the enterprise segment,
the more you go deeper into these larger
and larger businesses,
the more money you're going to need
as your cost of acquiring a customer.
And at the same time,
the more money you can actually charge these customers.
Intuitively it makes a ton of sense,
but we tend to not think about this all the time.
Let me explain.
If you're in the enterprise,
chances are the enterprise is gonna wanna do
a really big deal with you.
Otherwise, they're not gonna give you the time of day,
not at the enterprise level.
Maybe you'll get one person in a large enterprise,
which is really a solo user.
But if there's surely an enterprise purchase,
then they're gonna say,
look, this is a big transformation.
This is a big problem.
So we're gonna buy, we might do a three-year deal.
We'll pay a lot of money,
but in order to get here,
you'll also have to send in your salespeople
to meet with them.
You'll have to go through a security review.
You'll have to go through a SOC review, you name it, NSAs,
you'll have to get lawyers involved.
The higher you go, the more money you can make,
but the more money it costs.
The lower you go, the less money you can make.
But at the same time, it doesn't cost a lot.
You could have a completely product led growth model,
a self service model, a bottoms up model.
And this solo person can just sign up for the product
and pay and you wouldn't have to put any salespeople,
no legal reviews or any of that.
And they're not gonna ask you for your security footprint.
They're just gonna use the product.
You can actually get customers that are very low clip.
So this is a strategic decision
because the way you talk to the enterprise
is gonna be wildly different than the way you talk
to the solo person.
Similarly you could actually try to sell into the mid-market
thinking that you know what,
the mid-market is kind of like in the middle here
so, you know, it should be easier than the enterprise,
but you'll be shocked to find that the amount of stuff
that the mid-market company is asking you for,
is oftentimes not that different
than what the enterprise company is asking you for.
They'll have just as high lofty expectations
in terms of security footprint, and legal reviews and MSAs.
And so you'll start to realize that there are trade-offs
on what segment of the market you can go into.
And that's super, super important.
So really, the first thing you wanna think about,
as part, the first principle here is really digging into,
what segment of the market do we really wanna be serving.
Now, as you're deciding on this, couple of things as well,
how well capitalized are we?
What can our cost of sale be?
Do we have enough funding in place to go after
these big deals and to really fund
that kind of 12 months sales cycle?
Or do we need to go earlier?
The other thing is, your competitive dynamics,
like who else is already playing in these different places
and are we gonna be able to compete or not?
And when you start to think about these things,
you realize, this is not the job of your marketing team,
it's the job of the founder to really start to hone in on
what are the market dynamics and where can we best compete?
And that's really what you're looking to do first
with segmentation.
Where's the heat in the market?
The most opportunity for you to really serve
the group of people that are underserved
based on what your product can do.
Once you've done that, the second piece is targeting.
So this is segmentation.
That's number one.
The second is targeting.
Now it's one thing to say,
all right, we wanna sell to prosumers.
These are people that are creators.
They have a YouTube channel.
We wanna target them.
We wanna charge say 30 bucks a month
and we wanna help them make more money, great.
Now it's one thing to just say that,
it's another thing to make a list of a thousand people
that fit that exact criteria,
that's targeting.
It's one thing to say,
we're gonna go after the enterprise
and we're gonna sell at the highest level
and we're gonna do top down
and we're gonna have a strategic narrative
to really show them how this is gonna work
and the big transformation we're gonna bring.
That's one thing.
It's another thing to say,
here are the hundred companies
we're gonna run an account-based marketing plan into.
That's targeting.
And a lot of times,
because the segmentation work doesn't get done,
the targeting work never gets done.
So you don't really create that list.
And so we call this in my go-to market program,
we call this the Dream 100.
What is literally the list of the hundred customers
that you're gonna go after,
depending on the segment that you're actually choosing
and how do we really hone in on that?
So being able to say, you know what,
we really wanna focus on mid-market companies,
and we wanna actually do a bottoms up sale
in this mid-market companies
and so we wanna figure out how to keep our costs
to the lower end.
And so let's go in and make a list of the companies,
our Dream 100 list
that would be willing to try out software,
be an early adopter and give us a shot,
not have as crazy expectations as the enterprise,
be friendlies.
Let's make a list of those companies.
That's targeting.
That's making it very concrete on,
here's who we really, really want.
Now there's a third principle here,
but let me pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
Are you starting to see the power in the difference
between execution and strategy
and why so many Seed stage companies
fall into a trap where they say,
I hear this all the time,
before they joined the program, like,
we bought outreach, we've sent out a thousand emails,
I got one response back,
or we spend $10,000 a month in ads
and it just didn't work, right?
It's because you skip over these core principles.
These are core marketing principles
that a lot of junior folks don't know how to do effectively.
It's not their fault.
They've always had that VP on top of them
that did it for them.
And if the VP wasn't there,
there was an actual owner that really thought
through the strategic pieces.
And without that, you're just firing a bunch of blanks.
But when you actually think about these strategic pieces
and define them,
then the execution becomes tethered to that strategy.
If you start to see the power in this,
can I just get a yes in the comments below,
also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm,
it really likes it when you do that.
Also, if you're a founder, a Seed stage founder,
and you're looking to grow faster
and you need your marketing strategy defined,
and you don't wanna do it alone,
this is exactly why I created my SaaS go-to market
coaching program.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode,
I'm gonna tell you about principle number three,
but I'll also link to it below
if you wanna go learn more about it.
Okay, so once you have the segmentation
and you have the targeting,
then you get into where the rubber hits the road.
This is positioning.
And so often people skip over the positioning
and just jump right to execution.
What is positioning?
Positioning is what you actually say to this Dream 100.
If you were to sit across from them,
how do you position yourself against everything else
that's going on in their world?
Now, positioning typically breaks down into a few things.
The most important thing that it breaks down into,
is your value proposition.
If you're starting to sell more into this higher end
of the market, it also breaks into your strategic narrative.
What is the big change you're bringing to the world?
It can't just be about software.
It has to be some external change.
These two things defines your positioning
and in the absence of spending time to think about,
well, what are our competitive dynamics?
What are the big macro trends in the market?
What's going on in their world?
How do we craft our messaging and our value prop
and our narrative so that when we say it,
they're like, oh my God, these guys get me.
If you don't do that part,
every ad that you're running,
every outbound email that you're sending,
every content that you're writing,
the homepage copy, none of that will actually line up
because it will be untethered
from an actual marketing strategy.
And that's why this third principle of positioning
builds on top of the segmentation, the targeting,
and actually brings it right home.
Now there's a certain power in this.
The reason it goes in this order and it's so powerful
is that it forces you to really narrow down.
You are narrowing down to a specific group of people
and then creating the messaging, speaking directly to them.
And that forces you to be specific.
And because you're specific,
it'll resonate more versus trying to hedge your bets
across five different constituents.
And then it kinda doesn't hit anywhere.
So let me recap over here.
If you're a Seed stage founder,
before you spend money on your marketing team
or an agency that was started by an ex pizza boy
to run a bunch of execution plays,
you gotta get into a room and figure out,
what is my core marketing strategy?
The three big things that you really have to flush out
is what's my segmentation,
what market segment do I wanna go into?
What is my specific targeting
and what is gonna be my positioning?
What's my true value prop and my strategic narrative?
You gotta flesh these pieces out,
at least as an opening bid,
and then tether yourself to that and start executing.
And as you collect the data,
then you can iterate on this to make it better and better
and better,
and figure out where there is the right product market fit.
When you do it this way,
you will save hours of time on just sending out thousands
of emails or running ads.
You will save dollars,
you will save wasted effort.
And most importantly, you will preserve your runway.
And that's the power of this process.
Now, if you're in this stage where you're like,
Hey, how do I actually build out my marketing strategy?
How do I build out my go-to market strategy
so we can actually scale faster?
And how do we avoid common pitfalls
and how do I get the strategy right
so that the folks that I am hiring
can actually execute effectively.
This is exactly why over 75 founders
have joined my SaaS go-to market coaching program.
It's an incredible program.
It is literally the best thing I've ever done in my career.
And we've seen so much success out of the companies
in there.
I invite you to apply to join if you're in the stage.
Inside of the program,
we actually help you flesh out your ideal customer.
We help you flesh out your messaging,
your positioning, your narrative,
then we help you execute.
Step by step, nothing is skipped
and you get my full coaching.
It's an incredible program.
So if you're interested in making sure
that you do this the right way
and to reduce execution risks,
then go to tkkader.com/gtm
tkkader.com/gtm
Over there, you'll get all the details around the program
and then you'll have a little application link in the bottom
to apply to join.
Once you fill out the questions, we get on a call,
my team members are specifically trained
to help understand where you are in your SaaS business
and figure out if I can actually help you
through my SaaS go-to market program.
If we can help you,
we'll tell you all about the program
and then you can make a decision
on whether you'd like to be part of it.
And if you would, then awesome, we're off to the races
and you and I start working together right away.
That's the power of the program.
So go to tkkader.com/gtm
If you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
It really likes it when you do that.
I also drop in video like this two to three times a week
with actionable strategies
on how to grow your SaaS business,
coming from the trenches of actually building a company.
So, be sure to hit the subscribe button
and that bell icon where you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode.
And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business,
but when you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK.
And I'll see you in the next episode.
(soft music)