Go-To-Market Strategy for 2022
- At the center of the growth of your SaaS business is your go-to-market strategy. Your go-to-market strategy is just as important if not more than your product and pretty much anything else that you're gonna be working on this year. In fact, it's so important, the leading cause of death for SaaS companies today is the lack of a proper and scalable go-to-market strategy. And so, in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the three principles that you absolutely need to know to make sure you've got the right strategy to actually drive that growth you want for your SaaS business in 2022. The big questions we're gonna be digging into is, what are the key components of a go-to-market strategy? Which part of it do you focus on and how do you decide what to focus on and what to double down on so you can actually kickstart that growth? And when you follow these three key principles, you will be able to accelerate the growth of 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 because I drop an episode like this every single Sunday with actionable strategies on how to grow your SaaS business faster. So just go ahead and 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.
Now, if you're already part of this channel, if you're part of my coaching programs, my people, welcome back. We are larger than ever, and I'm so happy to see you over here. In case you don't know, why am I talking about go-to-market, why am I talking about SaaS? I have nearly 15 years of experience. I was a founder of Tower app, it was backed by Andreessen Horowitz.
We started and pioneered the sales engagement space, and then we sold that to Marquetto. I was SVP of strategy at Marquetto. We did a two year transformation of Marquetto and sold that to Adobe for $4.75 billion. And over the last year alone, I helped over 200 founders through my coaching programs to accelerate the growth of their SaaS companies. In addition to all the people that watch this channel, we're bigger than ever. So based on all of that experience, which I know makes me sound really old, but I'm not that old.
I'm 38, so I don't know. I guess that's old. Anyway, based on all of that experience, I'm gonna break this down to the three core principles that you absolutely need to know so that you can kickstart the growth of your SaaS business and avoid any of the mistakes that I made and others have made, so you can make new mistakes and grow faster and reduce execution risks.
If you're excited to begin, go ahead and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It really likes it when you do that. Let's go to principle number one.
So principle number one is, what are the components of a great go-to-market strategy? It's so funny because when I started this channel, go-to-market was this OG old school word, but over the last couple of years, go-to-market is the word now. Like, everyone uses it, it's awesome. And the reason for it is because that's so essential for the success of your SaaS business. So go-to-market strategy is it is a combination of all the things that you do under sales, under marketing, under product to essentially drive revenues.
And the three key components that I found that you absolutely need to have in your go-to-market strategy are the following. Number one, you need to have a clear ICP. I'm gonna walk through each of these, but let me list them out first. Number two is you need clear messaging, positioning, and you kind of need a strategic narrative, basically.
I call this your manifesto. And I'll go more into that. The third thing you need absolutely is your consistent set of sales and marketing activities. And you can either be super scattered on this or you can be very concerted on specific channels.
And so I call this your Broadway show. The thing that you run, let me not talk and write and say Broadway show. Okay, so let's talk through each of these.
Your ideal customer profile is essentially the definition of specific profile of customers that you're going after. And what I've found is every single person thinks they have an ICP, an ideal customer profile, but really they don't. And the reason for this is, the more specific you are over here, the more likely you are to succeed in your go-to-market activities and your strategy. The more broad you are, the more watered down your messaging is gonna be, the more watered down who you target is gonna be, and therefore, your revenues aren't gonna be as strong. Your metrics aren't gonna be as strong.
And so it all starts with the ideal customer profile of the people that you really wanna be going after and getting very specific about it. Once you have that, the second component comes into play, which is what is our messaging? What is our value proposition? How do we position this in the market compared to all the other competitors or default players that may exist? And it doesn't matter what market you're in. There's always a competitor, even if it's Microsoft Word or Excel or Google Sheets or whatever you may call it. So there's always competition, so how do you position yourself, how do you message that, how do you communicate the value, what's the big story you're telling? That's what I call your manifesto, and you need to have that component as well. Now, once you have these two things, this essentially makes for your strategy.
And then it becomes a question of execution. And the execution part is how you essentially take your messaging, your positioning, your strategic narrative, your value proposition, and you drive it to the ICP so that they are aware of you and they buy. And that essentially are the sales and marketing activities that you're gonna do. Regardless of whether you're a sales-driven, marketing-driven, product-led, you're still gonna have to do marketing so that more people find out about you every single day, and then come into your product or come into your sales process.
And so, that's what this is. This is your activities that you're running to to get more people to discover you every single day, or get more people to refer you, or get the word of mouth going, whatever it may be. And a lot of times, in the early stages, a few things happen. This is why I break it down into these three parts. What happens a lot of times is founders and early stage teams will skip the ICP work, skip the messaging work, and just start doing a bunch of activities.
They'll hire a content person, they'll blog, they'll do SEO, and then nothing works. On other times, they're so broad on their ICP, they'll do the messaging work, but it's so broad, it's so undifferentiated, it's so bad that when you start doing the activities, no one cares. This is the case where you can send out a thousand cold emails and then no one responds. And so this is why I always say, first, let's just make sure you have the right components to your go-to-market strategy.
Do you actually have an actual strategy or did you jump to the execution? Did you actually flush out your ICP, your messaging, or are you just doing a bunch of activities, untethered to an actual strategy? And then if you have a strategy, is it any good, right? If you're doing a bunch of activities and no one's responding, then chances are, you have to go back to the strategy. So this is why I always say you gotta get your three components right. And that's principle number one, do you have the right three components, and did you put enough work into them? Because here's the thing, you're gonna spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars into developing a product. But if you don't do the work on go-to-market to really make sure that there's a market for it, there's demand for it, you can be wasting all that money.
And so it's important that you put in the time and money to flesh out your go-to-market strategy and your execution. Now, a lot of times, I'll meet founders that actually wanna work with me. And they're like, hey, we went through three agencies, didn't work.
And I'm like, I'm not surprised. There's nothing wrong with agencies, but agencies tend to specialize in execution. There are amazing agencies that can really do well on running Facebook ads.
There are amazing agencies that can do really well on SEO. There are amazing agencies that can do Google ads, whatever it may be, but they're not purpose-built for figuring out the strategy, your ICP, your positioning, your messaging. That's the kind of stuff that, in the early stages, it's gotta be founder-led. And if it's not founder-led, companies will fail. Unless you have a rockstar VP of marketing that you're able to recruit as a founder into the team, right? That's kind of how it works.
And so, you wanna figure out, do you have the right components? Once you have the right components, the second question is, let's just say you are just starting out. You have a little bit of revenue and you're looking to build for scale. Well, in this case, you know, you just need to get going.
You need to implement these things and start collecting data. But if you already have some revenues, you're doing a bunch of activities. You did some of this work, and you're like, it's not quite working, the second principle is know the metrics that matter. So what are the metrics that matter? Well, let's actually list them out. I'm gonna get another color here. I have so many, let's do black.
Out of all the colors I have. So the metrics that matter essentially break down into how many activities are you running? And I'll explain each of these, What's your lead slash trial percentage? What's your win percentage or convert? Depending on how you look at it. And how much revenue? Super simple.
Look, are there other metrics to this? Yeah, but this is kind of what you need to know, right? This is like, the four that lean to look at, especially in terms of new business and driving growth. I just wanna understand, like, what do you have moving? And that's what you should look at also. So let me explain each of these. The first one is how many activities are you running? How many LinkedIn posts did you do? How many blog posts did you do? How many Facebook ads did you run? Essentially, what you're trying to do is start to understand the number of impressions that you actually exposed your messaging to. How many people in your ICP, or at least what you think is your ICP, actually looked at your messaging, your positioning, your offer, your lead magnet, whatever it may be, your manifesto, right? That's the first thing you wanna look at.
How many activities did you run? How many impressions did you get? The second thing you wanna understand is, out of that, what percentage of people actually raised their hand and said, hey, I want this piece of thing that you're offering. I wanna download your manifesto, or I wanna start a trial, or I actually wanna book an appointment or a sales call or a discovery call, whatever you may call it. So you wanna look at what your lead slash trial percentage is. Out of all the impressions, what percentage actually said, hey, I'm interested in this? And so you'll have a number there, a percentage number there. Now, typically, we wanna see 20% plus on this out of impressions.
Out if the impressions, you wanna see about a 20% that actually say, hey, I want some of this. And they fill out their information and get into it. Whether it's the product or the lead or the manifesto, whatever it may be. Once you have that, then you wanna start to understand, out of these people that raised their hand and got into the process, whether if it's product-led, they went through your onboarding process and started to use the product, or if it's sales-driven and they actually got on a discovery call, you wanna figure out what percentage of them actually converted to revenue.
And generally, we wanna see a 20% win rate. If it's sales-driven, and I've seen downwards of 10% conversion rates if it's product-led because the numbers are so huge, it's totally fine, right? So 10% slash 20%. And then you wanna figure out, well, how much money did you make? And let's just say you made a million, right? And so, this is the four key things you wanna look at. And when you list these out, it'll help you understand where the choke point might be and what's working and what's not. And that's where we get into principle number three, it's like once you have these four metrics and you have these three components, then you can start to dig into it and say, okay, cool. For 2022 or beyond or whenever you're watching this.
This could be the year 2030 you're watching this, who knows? What do we need to do? These are timeless principles. You'll be needing this in 2030 also, I guarantee it. And so the question is, what do we do? Like, what do we do with this? And that's principle number three. But before I go to principle number three, now that we've outlined the three components and the key metrics that help you identify, well, do we have a strategy, are we driving execution, and what are those metrics? Then you can start to make decisions.
Now, before I go to number three, let me just pause here. Or you starting to see the power in this? Are you starting to see the power where go-to-market doesn't have to be a mythical thing? It doesn't have to be something you ignore because you don't understand it. It doesn't mean you have to be something where you go hire the next pizza boy running an agency to figure this out for you 'cause they can't 'cause they've never built a company before, but they can do the execution. If you're starting 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. Now also, if you're in this stage where you are looking to build a scalable go-to-market strategy and machine, and you wanna work with me as part of my go-to-market program, I run a coaching program to help you flesh all these pieces out.
Check out my SaaS go-to-market coaching program. You don't have to go right now. I'll link to it below. I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video, but let's go into principle number three now.
Principle number three is what do you do with this? Now, there's essentially an order of operations here. Let me explain. Let's just say your win rate and your revenue is low.
But if it's low, let's just see your win rate sucks. You're like at 1% or something like that. Do you focus on that? Well, this is where it depends. Meaning if you're activities are low and your win rate is low, activities matter more than win rate.
Meaning if you're not getting enough people looking at your message, and then working them through the funnel and really getting enough people down to where they're having a real sales call or an activated product experience, then your win rate almost doesn't matter. And so, the first thing that you wanna look at is are there enough activities? Why? Well, what we don't know is whether you actually have the right ICP and the right message. And until you run enough activities with at least your version one of this, you're never really gonna know if you're onto something. If there's real market demand for this or maybe your sales person is really bad.
Or your product experience is really bad, right? Or maybe you're really bad at converting, right? Whatever it may be. And so, activities is what I look at first, because if you're not driving enough activities in the right channel in the right way with the right message, then you're never really gonna know, you won't know like, hey, is this actually resonating with people? And so, this is essentially the first thing to look at over here. Are we driving enough activities, and are we generating enough impressions, and are we actually getting enough people to say, yeah, you know what? I'm interested in this.
Because if you're not, your win rate doesn't matter. Your revenue doesn't matter because you may not even have the right messaging and the positioning. And in this case, your strategy is the problem. If you're running enough activities and people are just not actually doing the lead to trial conversion, meaning you're like, TK, I ran enough on Facebook ads. I did a whole bunch of LinkedIn posts. We sent a thousand cold emails.
We did the activities. Then what you wanna look at is, well, what's our messaging and what's our ICP? Because there's something wrong here. So this is why it's so powerful because it helps you make some decisions on what do we need to focus on and fix versus being overwhelmed on what do we do next? It's not working, right? And so, number one is, if you're not doing enough activities, you need to amp that up so that you get enough impressions to test out this messaging. If you're getting a bunch of activities in, but no one's engaging, no one's responding, no one's raising their hand, it's not quality people, then you need to go in and you need to revisit, what is your ICP? What is your manifesto? What is your messaging? What is your positioning? You need to revisit the strategy. Now let's just say your activity is pretty good. You're hitting all the channels and you are getting a lot of people to raise their hand, but they're going through it and it's just not converting, right? They're not converting.
They're like, this is cool, but I'm not gonna pay you money. And this is what you call a classic vitamin, not painkiller problem where they're like, this is a nice to have, but this is not a must have. And one of the big things we work with when I'm working with founders in the program is like, is this an urgent and important problem? How do we drive urgency in the sales and decision making process or the product process? How do we position this where this is a must have? These are the big things that you wanna figure out.
So if your win rate is suffering, but all of these are fine, then almost always it ends up being a strategy problem, again, because chances are, either you're not messaging this in a way where it's urgent and important, where your value prop and your messaging and your manifesto is off, or you're simply targeting the wrong people. Where the messaging is fine, but you're bringing in a group of people that are broke or don't have that urgent important problem, but it needs to be a different group of people. And so this is where we can actually work with this and say, cool, well, what do we know, what does the data say, and how do we tweak this? Maybe it's in the targeting, maybe it's an ICP, or maybe it's in the messaging.
How do we tweak this? Or maybe it's an experience in the product or in the sales process. And maybe it's a sales methodology. So you have some levers you can look at to figure out what you need to tweak because now you know, you know what? Enough people are engaging. We kind of know if it's the right people or not, but they're not winning.
So you can actually start to make some decisions here. And so, A is activities. B is essentially your messaging, which is this guy right here. And then C becomes, maybe it's the ICP and how do we revamp that? Now, the last piece I always look at over here also is revenue, right? Like if you're getting win rates and if you're getting revenue, but the revenue is not enough.
One of the things I see very often is founders will come to me. They're like, hey, look, I got enough revenue, but I can't see this going to like 10 million or 100 million, wherever we're trying to scale to next. And they'll join the program because what ends up happening is, they kind of are working, like they're generating revenues, but the problem is, it's not a consistent use case. Meaning the ICP is all over the place. The value prop is different for each customer.
It's such a broad product, they're like, look, this group of people uses it for this. This group of people use it for this. This group who use this for this. So we're neither here nor there, we're scattered all over, so I don't know what to double down on. And it shows in the revenue and the makeup of the customers.
All of this stuff looks okay, but you can tell where it's so varied, if you put more impressions, if you put more dollars in activities, it's not gonna hold. It's gonna be all over the place. You don't know where to target. And that becomes a really interesting exercise for, well, how do we revamp our ICP? Is there a more valuable set of customers? Can we message it to them in a more compelling way? Therefore we double down on that or do we go broader and position in a certain way where it's a subset of groups, and that's where it becomes an interesting problem as well.
So those are my three principles. So let me just recap 'cause I know I just covered a lot. Number one, you wanna make sure you have these three components for your go-to-market.
Number one is your ICP. Number two is your positioning and messaging and value prop and strategic narrative. I call that the manifesto. And number three is your activities.
What channels you're going after, what's a consistent Broadway show you're running? Once you have these three, then you wanna measure them. You wanna look at how many activities are you driving? What's the conversion rate onto a lead or a trial? Out of that, how many of them convert or become real opportunities and actually convert your real revenue? And how much revenue did you generate? And based on that, you wanna go through the order of operations. First, you'll look at what are the activities. Are we doing enough activities to really know if we are testing this messaging properly? The activities are good, then great. Let's look at if it's converting.
If people are saying, yeah, I'm interested in this. If that's great, then look at win rate, and then look at revenue. But if the activities aren't there, you're not running enough activities, you don't know how to run a certain channel or get channel mastery so you can actually run enough activities, then you wanna focus on that first. Once you have that, then you wanna look at, well, if they're not engaging, but lots of people are looking at it, then you wanna revamp your ICP or manifesto. If that's working, but you're still not winning deals, then you wanna go back and say, well, maybe the ICP is wrong. We're attracting the wrong group of people.
And if the ICP is right, maybe we need to reframe the messaging, and you can look at that order of operation. If all of this is working, but the is kind of like spread out and you're not getting a consistent use case, then you wanna look at, can we actually pivot in, this is a zoom in pivot, we do this all the time, into a certain ICP to really get things moving? When do you do that, if you follow these three principles, you will be able to revamp your go-to-market strategy and drive growth for your SaaS business. And now you know exactly how to do it. Now, what you may not know is, well, what does a great ICP look like? Or how do I craft my messaging and positioning? How do I revamp that? Or what does channel mastery look like? So let's just say I wanna use LinkedIn. How do I get good at LinkedIn? Or how do I get good at Outbound? Or how do I get good at Facebook ads, and what do we do in that? What you may not know is what are benchmarks for these metrics, what are all the metrics, and how do I make these decisions, and how do I navigate this process? What you may not also know is, well, how does all this come together and how do I know I'm reducing my execution risk so that I can actually drive growth? I have big growth plans, and I don't wanna make any mistakes. This is exactly why I created my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
Inside of this program, I work with you to actually revamp your go-to-market strategy. I help you flesh out your ICP, your manifesto, and your Broadway show, and I help you scale your SaaS business with a scalable go to market strategy. And I work with you step by step to make sure that you are successful in scaling your SaaS business.
So if you're interested in that, I have had over a hundred founders in the program so far. Countless founders have actually reached profitability because they're bootstrap, countless founders have raised their subsequent rounds because they're venture backed. We've had enormous success stories from the program, which I've featured in this channel before, so you can check those out as well. So if you're interested in working together, I encourage you to go to tkkader.com/gtm/ tkkader.com/gtm. When you go there, you'll see all the details around the program.
You can apply to join. We wanna make sure you're the right fit and we can actually help you. When it's the right fit, we know we can actually help, and therefore, we're more likely to succeed on both sides. So I wanna make sure it's win-win, so you'll get all the details. You can fill out a short application form, and then we're off to the races to figure out if we can work together and serve you. So just go to tkkader.com/gtm for all of the details,
and I look forward to seeing you in the program. And lastly, if you got value from this video, please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. I also drop an episode like this every single Sunday to make sure that you get actionable strategies from the front lines of me, coaching founders from my own 15 years of experience in building SaaS companies so you can actually reduce your execution risk and grow your SaaS business faster. So be sure to hit subscribe button and that bell icon that way you'll get notified every single time at drop an episode. Also, if you have a friend, if you a fellow founder or a team member, if you're part of a Slack group, a WhatsApp group, please share this video with fellow founders, fellow members of the SaaS community.
It would just mean the world to me and my team who put a lot of love into these videos, and we wanna help as many people as possible. 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 in the next episode or inside of the go-to-market program.
(soft music)
2022-01-13 03:24
