SaaS Marketing Guide: 5 Strategies for Business Growth
- Firstly happy new year. This is the first video of the year that I'm doing. And to kick things off, I wanted to make sure I bring you key strategies that you can use this year and beyond to accelerate the growth of your SaaS business. Now, here's the thing, these aren't flash in the pan hacks, they're not this one weird trick that one guy used years ago, and it kind of worked, and maybe it'll work for you. These are battle tested, these are time tested, these are five true strategies to actually accelerate the growth of your SaaS business. Regardless of when you're watching this, for all I know you're watching this like December of 2030, or you're actually watching this January 2nd, 2022 when I really published this.
Either way, I'm going to walk you through the five strategies that you can deploy into your SaaS business today and this year, so you can rise above the competition, 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. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies on how you can grow your SaaS business faster. So be sure to hit the 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 community, this fast growing community, which recently just hit 20,000 subscribers, if you're part of my coaching programs, which recently just hit over 200 founders in the programs, my people, welcome, it's really awesome to see you over here. I'm so incredibly honored and excited to serve you in the highest way possible this coming year. Now, what I want to do do on this episode today is make sure that you actually start to focus on the right key areas of your SaaS business and actually deploy some time tested, some battle tested growth strategies to accelerate your SaaS business.
Now, I remember when I was growing ToutApp, there were some years where we had like 300% growth, we were raising our rounds, and for me personally, it became really overwhelming. It became overwhelming because there were just so many directions you could go, there were so many different fires to put, there are so many different opportunities, and it got a little overwhelming on like, what do I focus on? How do I do this? What do I prioritize? Which fires are okay? And so it was a little overwhelming until I really discovered how to think about a SaaS business through a common framework. And once I did that, the strategies to drive growth, what to focus on, what to ignore became a lot easier. So I'm going to do two things for you in this episode. One, I'm going to walk you through this framework that I use to diagnose any SaaS business, to understand what's working and what's not in the go-to market. And then I'm going to walk you through five actionable strategies that you can deploy so that you can actually accelerate the growth of your SaaS business.
So if you're excited to dig in, go to smash our like button for the YouTube algorithm, it really likes it when you do that, and let's go into first the framework on how to think about a SaaS business. So every successful business, not just a SaaS business, is inherently a flywheel. It means that there's this thing that you go and you do a set of things to actually drive that business. And if you have a choke point in any one of these parts, then it kind of gets stuck, right? But a fly wheel is one of those things where when you optimize each of the points, it starts to go faster and faster, and faster, and faster, and faster, and exponentially grow.
And so what your job is, is to think about your SaaS business through the lens of a flywheel. And when you think about it that way, it gives you this common framework to think about what do I need to look at? What do I need to optimize? Where's the choke point? And everything becomes a lot easier. And for every SaaS business, this is how I visualize the actual flywheel of a successful SaaS business. So at the core of it, you have your ICP, this is your ideal customer profile or your target market. And what you're doing is you're running a series of sales, and marketing, and product led activities, regardless of what model you follow, to actually acquire people that are in your ICP into your world, into your product, into your company.
Once you acquire them, and this could be a trial user, or it could be a lead, depending on whether you're a sales driven or product driven, then you actually want to make sure that you activate them. And so then you actually do a set of things to activate them. This could be in the product, where they actually use the product, or it could be them saying, hey, I want to demo and I want to talk to sales, and actually activate into the process. Once they activate into the process, then you're doing a series of activities to actually convert them to revenue.
And this could be in the product where they swipe a credit card or it could be a sales process where they say, cool, I'm going to buy from you guys, let's go do a deal. Once you have the revenue, then a SaaS business wouldn't be a SaaS business if it didn't have recurring revenues. So you have revenue, and then the next thing you have is retention, which means that they buy, and then they keep buying, and keep buying, and keep buying. And the best part about all this, what really makes it into a real flywheel, like if you get stuck where people don't even activate, but you have a lot of leads or trial users, then you'll never get to revenue, nor will you get to retention. So as you start to unplug and optimize each of these parts, the latter parts starts to drive that flywheel.
So the last piece of this flywheel is referral. And referral is idea that they love your product so much, they love your business so much, they tell all their peers about it. So if you sell a product to VPs of sales, like we did a ToutApp, they're going to love it so much they told other VPs of sales, like, you got to get on ToutApp, and that's essentially what happened to drive that flywheel. And so as you do the referral, then these people are actually referred into the backend of the ICP and that then drives back into the acquisition, and then they activate, and then they converter revenue, and then you retain them, and then they themselves drive more referrals. And this is where it becomes a flywheel. And so the reason I wanted to start with a framework and then get into the five growth strategies, because if I just gave you five growth strategies, it'd be five more things that you have to think about to drive growth and you'd get even more overwhelmed, which is perfectly normal.
But if you think about it in the terms of this framework, everything becomes a lot easier because you start to think about what is the most important area of my business that I need to focus on. Let me explain, if you actually have an acquisition problem where you're not getting enough trials, you're not getting enough leads, then it's not worth it to think about referral or retention because you literally don't have anything to retain and no happy customers to drive referrals. And so there's a natural pecking order of what's the most important area to focus on, meaning if you're acquiring people and it's pretty okay, but they're not activating, they're not converting to revenue, then acquisition is fine, you can focus on activation revenue. However, if your conversion is fine, and your activation is fine, but literally not enough people converting, you're not getting that growth, you're not getting enough people into the funnel, then you need to focus on acquisition. You don't have to think about retention, you don't have to think about referral until you solve for these things. So there's a natural order because if, for example, there's a choke point here, nothing over here will matter as much because you don't have enough of an optimization here.
And that's why I love this framework because it forces you to think about which area of your flywheel is problematic, and it naturally tells you which area to focus on. So don't focus on this side, unless you optimize for this side, depending on the stage of the business you're in. So that's the framework. Now, let's dig into the five growth strategies that you can deploy this year and beyond to actually accelerate the growth and rise above the competition.
The first one I want to tell you about is referrals. Now, a lot of these strategies are going to sound kind of obvious, but at this point I work with over 200 founders inside of my coaching program, I have over 20,000 subscribers on this YouTube channel, so I talked to a lot of founders. And what you'll find is a lot of obvious strategies are not used, except for by the best SaaS founders out there. Why? Because the ones that aren't quite doing it are looking for this one weird trick, one weird hack, and they discount this tried and true systems that have made successful SaaS companies, and that's the trap. And so what I want to get you to unlock is look, there's proven strategies to accelerate the growth of your SaaS business, just embrace them, you don't need to reinvent the wheel.
In this case, you can use your creativity to reinvent your product, which is what the unique differentiator is going to be in the market. This stuff can be easy and simple, just take it. And so the first thing that I want you to think about, the first growth strategy is essentially instituting a referral marketing program. We did a bunch of research into this and when a person refers a certain product to a peer, they are more likely to buy from you, and they're more likely to buy more, and they're more likely to refer other people themselves.
This is just like backed by data, and because of that, it's makes a ton of sense to actually go into your existing happy customers and say, hey, if you love the product, can you please refer us to one person? You would be shocked how few SaaS companies out there do this and do this effectively. And sometimes, even if they do it, they'll do it once, and then they won't follow up, and won't be programmatic, and essentially it leads to a dead end. And so the first growth strategy, if you are healthy on all these areas, and it's okay if you're not 10% healthy, if you're relatively healthy, then you want to think about how do I drive a referral marketing program? How do I go to my existing customers, the happiest ones, and say, hey, you seem to like our product, you're renewing, you're paying us, you've been with us for a while, can you please refer us to one more person? It would mean the world to us. And you can say, here's our ICP, the type of people that love our product, can you refer to us? And you know, we'll give you a discount, or we'll give you our t-shirt, we'll give you a strategy session, whatever it may be, but you actually mobilize your existing customers to actually drive referrals for you. So few companies do this, I have no idea why, it's not that complicated to do, but when you actually put in a programmatic system to do this effectively, it's massive, massive growth driver for your SaaS business.
So that's number one, putting in a referral program and actually mobilize your customer base to drive referrals and new leads and opportunities for you. And what this'll do is it'll push this flywheel into the ICP with your customers and automatically start to drive more leads and more opportunities for you. So that's principle number one. Principle number two is around retention. And in case you haven't noticed, I'm basically going to give you a one growth strategy tied to each of these key inflection points in the flywheel.
And that's why these are so powerful, and battle-tested, and time-tested, you do them, your entire flywheel will start to move a lot faster. So number two is retention. And one of the things that SaaS companies get really stuck on is that they sell this one product at this one price point, and they have these customers and they're happy, but they're not doing anything more with them.
And they're constantly looking for new customers to bring into their world. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but one of the easiest ways, one of the easiest ways to grow any business, including SaaS businesses, is to go to your existing customers and figure out what's one more thing you can sell them. And so one thing that you should look into is for your product, is there some aspect of the product, is there a new feature that's coming out? Is there some feature that's already there and you give for free, but you can carve out for customers and charge more? That's the big question. And so what you want to figure out is, is there a defined upsell program? And I call this the one more thing, so sell them one more or the next thing. And this is super powerful because if your customers are truly happy with you and the product, they want more. Naturally, they are just going to want more.
And so it is music to their ears when you go in and say, hey, listen, I know that you've been really happy, here's all the value we've delivered through the platform, but you're in stage one of the platform, in order to get to stage two, where you take more advantage and actually get even more value, you should buy this new tier. It could be an analytics tier, it could be some new feature, could be some AI enhancements, whatever it may be, find out what is the next thing your existing happy customers want and upsell it to them and sell it to them. A couple of things happen when you do this, one, your existing customer base is who you're selling to. So the cost to acquire that revenue is much lower than trying to acquire new customers, the same as doing a referral program there, your CAC actually goes down, customer acquisition costs. The second thing is you're actually increasing your dollar retention rate or net dollar retention, which means that if customer spent a dollar last year, and this year they spent $2 because you have a consistent upsell program, in your financials, not only is your CAC going to look great, but also your DRR is going to look great, which is one of the leading indicators of successful SaaS companies. So if you're profitable, that means you would just make more money, if you are venture backed, that means that investors will love you because they love seeing a net dollar retention rate.
And the only real way to really drive that up is to actually think about what you can upsell them and what you can actually give to them to make things work a lot better. Now I'll put a little bit of a caveat here. There are some cases where you're like, TK, there's nothing else I can sell them, okay? I don't have an extra feature, I don't have an additional layer, I don't have any of those things. And if I was coaching you, I kind of challenge you a little bit, and I'm like, let's think about that, and let's think if that's truly true.
Let's just say we get to a point where you're like, there's really nothing else you can sell them, there's no additional feature, there's nothing you can carve out. Then one way to get around this is to revamp your pricing. And there are different ways, a lot of times, you know, and I've done videos on this before, we tend to undercharge for our product. And so there's people in my coaching program, my go-to-market program, as they're scaling, we've actually doubled their pricing. And after doubling their pricing, they actually sold more and made more money. Customers were happier, they got better quality customers.
And so revamping your pricing, if you can't find out what the one more thing is, you can actually carve out and reorient your existing pricing strategy. That's another way to actually drive up revenues with your existing customer base. So that's something you can think about as well.
So that's principle number two, first one was referral marketing. Again, low CAC to get more customers. The second one is upsell programs and revamping your pricing, and that way with your existing customer base, you can make more money. And again, low CAC, because it's existing customers, that revenue comes a lot cheaper than brand new revenue, but still drives your growth. So once you have those two, the third one is around your actual revenue conversion process. And I am working backwards here, so that by the time we get here, this is probably going to be the most impactful, and I'll have a bonus one for you over here, but these are all like you can put into play to actually drive your growth.
So the third thing that you can think about is tied to revenue, and this is essentially around your win rate. And firstly, the big thing you want to figure out is is this a choke point or not? Now in B2B SaaS , a 20% win rate in the sales process is pretty much benchmark, like that's pretty good. I've seen high upwards of 50% and 60%, especially when it comes to inbound leads. But on average, if you think about advertising opportunities, lead opportunities, if it's not always inbound blended, you get about a 20% win rate.
That's kind of how it shakes out. But if you're anywhere lower than 20% win rate or let's just say a 10% product led conversion rate, if you're more product led and they're in the product, they're swiping a credit card, then there's something wrong. And what you want to figure out is do we have an appropriate win rate? Because here's the thing, you're spending all this effort over here to actually acquire leads or trials, and then you're putting in all this effort to activate them, get them into a sales call, or get them to use the product, and if they're not converting, all of this work is pretty much going to waste. And the last thing you want to do is spend more money acquiring more users with a very low win rate.
And so what you want to think about is can we actually revamp our process for converting to revenue? And there's a couple of nuances here, but the key things that you can start to think about is can we actually revamp our sales process? What is our sales process? What is our sales methodology? Now, let me break this down here. If you are product led, then you want to think about what are we doing to actually activate our customers and then show them the value of converting and staying, right? And you want to think about what are we doing in the product and are there things we would want to do outside of the product? Even if you're product led, I've seen companies actually put in an onboarding call to activate customers and increase their conversion rates. Sometimes I've seen companies put in education marketing to educate them on how to use the product, when to use it, and that impacts conversions. Now, there are a lot of cases where you may be selling into an industry or a market where they're not used to buying software just on their own.
They're not going to swipe the credit card, they're just not going to do it, and so you may need to actually think about what kind of a sales process and sales person do we put in, so that we run a proper software sales process, versus just being product led. And this is the kind of stuff you want to think about on increasing win rates. And the growth strategy here is you want to think about implementing a proper methodology. A lot of times people just keep it as an afterthought, like, oh, ask for their credit card, or just do a demo call.
But the question is, well, how do we actually do our sales process? Like, how many calls is it? Is there a salesperson involved? Is there an onboarding person involved? Is there a sales methodology that we are adopting? And sales methodology includes what you're doing inside of the product, what you're doing with your support people, what you're doing with your salespeople, and your marketing people, all of these teams, and all these people, and if it's a super early stages, it's just you, then you're doing, wearing all these hats, you're thinking about what do we do? What are the steps we take someone through to help them realize the aha moment, which is activation, and we'll talk about that in a second. And then say, you know what, I want to buy this, I want to pay for this. And are we matching it to what the market expects and what our competitors deliver? And so what you want to think about is how do you revamp your sales process? That's literally what you're thinking about.
And my big growth hack here, or a growth lever here is for you to think purposefully about what is your sales methodology. If it's product led, that's one form of a sales methodology, you want to talk about what are we doing in the product to ensure that the conversions are high and what can we tweak? If you're a sales driven, then you want to think about what are the five touches that our sales process involves? How does our sales person run it? Is it inside sales? Is it field sales? And again, like, does this all match up with what customers expect when they're buying software, our specific customers? And so, for example, in my go-to-market program, I have a whole set of things around our sales methodology. Like how do you establish the sales methodology? What are the steps? If you have a product lead, what do you want to think about? If it's sales led, what do you wanna think about? And so, you know, you can do the go-to-market program and I can help you do it, or you can go read 10 books, like whatever it is, right, you want to figure out what is your sales methodology that's increasing your win rates. And the thing I'll say is if you're a sales driven, if it's less than 20%, then there's something wrong here.
If you are product driven, if it's less than 10%, then there's something wrong here. And so you want to figure out if there's a real choke point here and really implement and revamp your sales methodology, and that's the third growth strategy that you want to actually deploy, and you want to actually focus on if these numbers are not quite hitting it. Okay, so those are the first three.
Now I have two more and a bonus one, so I want to make sure that before I jump into the next one, let me just pause here for a second. Are you starting to see the power in this? First of all, are you starting to see the power of having a framework to visualize your SaaS business, so you can figure out what to focus on and which ones take more priority than others? Are you also starting to see how some of these growth levers, these growth strategies, you can put into play and almost immediately you can start to see improvement in your revenue without spending a lot of money? 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, and so do we. Now also, if you're in this stage where you're figuring out, well, how do we grow our SaaS business? How do we revamp our go to market machine and our strategy? How do we put these growth strategies into play? And you want a framework to follow and you want my help, you want to work with me to actually do this effectively. Then I invite you to check out my go-to-market coaching program. You don't have to go right now, I'll put all the details below, I'll put a link in, you can also go to tkkader.com/gtm to learn more after this video.
But right now, smash that like button, and then let's go into principle number four, growth strategy number four. Okay, so growth strategy number four is activation, okay, and first of all, let's talk about what activation is, right? Activation is essentially when someone learns about you guys and then takes action, that's activation. Now this can happen in different ways, the easiest, simplest way is they become a lead, you acquire lead, or they learn about you guys through an ad, and then they download your manifesto, whatever it may be.
It's not enough, that's just like a lead, and it doesn't mean they're going to do anything. Activation is when they say, oh my God, I need this. And this could happen in a traditional sales and marketing model in SaaS , which by the way is still the best way, even though product lead is all the hype, I believe in product led. But I'm just saying like, it depends on your market, right, and your business.
So in a traditional model, that means that whoever became the lead is like, oh my God, I want to talk to a salesperson. And they request a demo, or a discovery call, whatever it may be. In the product led world, where you dump them into the product, activation is where they take some meaningful action inside of the product. More often, you'd be shocked, and you should look at the rate on this, how many of your trial users are actually taking meaningful action in the product? That's a fundamental question that you'll want to ask yourself. And so if most of the people are signing up and you spend all this money to get them to realize that, hey, you know, you should check us out, and they get into the product, and they just leave, that means they're not activating.
If they become a lead, but then they don't engage with the emails, you don't follow up, you don't get them on a discovery call, then they're not activating. Regardless of whether you're product led or sales led, sales and marketing, you want to figure out, out of the people that are getting to know about you, what percentage of them are actually activating and actually saying, hey, I want a discovery call or they're taking meaningful action in the product, where it shows like, okay, they're starting to use the product. Now the question here is, are you doing enough to drive this activation? And the growth strategy here? The thing that you want to focus on here is if this number is low, and this does vary from business to business, like on a sales and marketing, like if you're lead driven, you want to see at least a 10% conversion of lead to real opportunity. On the product side, it really varies, right, depending on how many people you're bringing in and what percentage you need to convert, if your freemium or not. But again, 10% is a pretty good benchmark.
If at least 10% of the people are not taking meaningful action in the product, go to get to an aha moment, there's something wrong with your product led strategy. If at least 10% of leads, aren't saying, hey, I want to get our discovery call or I want to actually talk, or I want to get a demo, then there's something wrong with your sales and marketing strategy. Either way, this is just something to know, and you can identify that choke point on whether you have a choke point on the activation side. And if you do, then the gross charge you actually want to put into play is to revamp your activation strategy. And so the way this manifests itself, the easiest way that I see, regardless if whether you're sales driven or product driven, is to revamp your demo.
The way you are demoing your product is not working. So even before they use the product, right, you'll want to like teach them like, hey, here's what you really get out of the product, if you're a product lead. If you're a sales lead, before they even book a demo, they're going to want to understand, like, what is the highlight, what is a key thing that I'm going to get out of this product? No one wants to use more software, what they want is a transformation and an actual result. And so this is usually a hint that the way you are communicating what your product does, and how you demo it, and how you show the result, there's something wrong. And so the biggest growth strategy you have here is to revamp your demo. And there are different ways to do this, there are different ways to think about this.
The first thing is to really be aware, like, do we have an activation problem or not? If you have an activation problem, then you have to like own it and prioritize it. Remember, if you have an activation problem, none of this stuff matters, because until you solve this activation problem, that's a choke point with the rest of the parts of your flywheel. And so if you have enough people coming in, but none of them are activating, then there's something wrong about how you're communicating the value proposition of your product, how you're demonstrating your product. Do you have a video? How are you educating people on how to use the product and why they need to use it? That's the area that you want to focus on, and that's the area that you really want to flesh out. And the art of a demo, what typically happens, and we'll talk more about this on the acquisition side is if people are coming in, then there's clearly something you're doing, right? We're like, oh, they're interested, but then they're getting turned off.
And the biggest thing that usually kills this is if you are giving too much detail, too soon, getting too much into the weeds. And that's usually where our demos go to die, and discovery calls go to die, and product lead trials go to die. You're giving them too much, too soon, instead of guiding them on like, here's the two or three things that matter the most. Now there's a lot more principles on how to really craft a real demo, it's part of this whole sales process and methodology that you're developing.
There's a lot more to be done on how you think about onboarding on a self-service product, on a trial based product that's beyond the scope of this video. But if you're interested in that and you want to learn more about that, put it in the comments, and I'll share some resources for you guys. This is also something I cover in depth in my SAS go-to-market program where we really dig into like, well, how do we craft your demo? How do we flesh out the sales methodology? And how does this all work? That's one of the key pieces of it and that's super important to unlocking growth. But recognizing that there's something wrong here is one of the first things you want to think about. Okay, so we have referral marketing, we had an upsell program, we had a sales process methodology to increase your win rates.
Then you want to revamp the demo and your onboarding, and we'll put onboarding here, just so it's clear, depending on what model you're following to make sure your activation is not a choke point. Once you have those pieces, like, you know, like were working backwards, right? Like all the key pieces you can put into play, we get into principle number five. And principle number five is probably like the thing that is on top of mind for every single founder. And the reason I wanted to put this in the end is because I didn't want to start with this because it's a top of mind, and I know like, this is top of mind for you, but I wanted you to see all how you have all these other levers.
This one is important, but these other levers, if you put into play, it compounds and accelerates your growth and gets this flywheel moving faster and faster. So what is number five? Number five literally is we want more leads, trials, and opportunities, right? Like how do you get more people in your ICP to actually raise their hand and say, I know about you guys, and I want to do something together? And so ultimately the question becomes, well, how do you actually get more pipeline? And how do you get more trials? And there's two things I want to mention here. Even if you are product led, you still need people to discover your product, and that's marketing. Even if you are sales led, you still need people to discover your product, and that's essentially sales development, SDRs, if you will, if you're doing outbound.
And so there's no way out, right? And you want to think about if that is your choke point, meaning if you are not doing enough in terms of marketing and sales development to get more people to discover you every single day and enter into this world and this flywheel, then none of this will matter, right? If you don't have enough of that going on, even if your product led, there's not going to be enough people to come into here. And these are percentages, right, to actually activate, and then convert to revenue, stay, and then drive referrals to be product led. If you're a sales led, where you have to talk to a sales person, you're not going to have enough opportunities with a 20% win rate, you need enough leads and you need enough opportunities to be able to drive growth.
So ultimately it comes down to how do you get more leads, trials, and opportunities. How do you get more people to discover you? And this is essentially one of these things. Like I have probably done a hundred videos on go-to-market strategy and how to generate more pipeline, but it all boils down to, like the growth strategy here is you need a proper go-to-market strategy. What I wanted to give you here, I wanted to front load the value on this video. These are all things you can do to optimize your current go-to-market machine that you have, whatever you're getting, you can optimize them and get more out of it, that's why I wanted to give you like these pieces first.
But ultimately, all of this is dependent on how much you're acquiring, how aggressive you are being on your ICP recognizing who you are and identifying the value. And for that, you need a proper go-to-market strategy. And in order to do that, there are certain key things that you need. You need to actually have a well-defined ICP, ideal customer profile. You also need to have proper messaging and you need to have positioning. And I call this, you need to have a manifesto.
So between these two, that really defines your go-to-market strategy. And a proper ICP, and a lot of people think they have an ICP, but they're not specific enough about, if we're at a million where we are no or we're going to a million, and we want to get to, say, 3 million, who are the people that are going to buy from us at what price point and what stage that's going to help us drive that growth? That's getting very specific on an ICP. A lot of companies skip over the positioning and the messaging, they just drive into ads and content marketing, they higher content person and they do it. And it doesn't work because they haven't thought about what's our messaging? What's our strategic narrative? What's our positioning in the market? Why do they have to do this now? What happens if they don't do it? What's our manifesto where we can communicate this at scale? You need a proper go-to-market strategy for that.
And the last piece you need is a Broadway show. And a Broadway show is a consistent set of marketing and sales activities that you run so that more people in your ICP that you well-defined actually discover you and get into this flywheel. And if you don't do that, if you're not consistent about it, and you're being intentional about what channels you do it in, is it social? Is it SEO? Is it ads? Then you actually are going to be all scatterbrained, you're going to give up, and nothing will work. But if you run a Broadway show, this is one of the things I teach in my program, we get very intentional about exactly how we're going to go into key channels and mobilize our messaging and positioning and attract the people in our ICP.
And you run it every single week, and when you are able to do that, typically you start doing it by yourself, and then you hire people to scale that out across different channels, and you scale the messaging you write on it. If you have solved for these, and these are no longer the choke points, and you're like, this is pretty good, but really the only thing holding us back now is how do we just get more leads, more trials, more opportunities? Then it's time to actually revamp your go-to-market strategy and machine, and actually I'll call this a machine too, because it's not just about the strategy, it's about execution as well. And so, and you want it to look at your ICP, your messaging, positioning, and manifesto, and you want to think about the Broadway show.
Like what's the consistent set of activities that you run? And the reason I put this in the end is because I first wanted you to realize how many levers you have just within your existing, like if you generate a no more leads, how you can extract more revenue out of it? And then once you optimize these pieces, then you can say, cool, how do we just get more? Because I know if I put in more over here, then all of these things will continue to convert, because we've actually optimized them, and then you're able to actually compound the growth and scale a lot faster. And so that's the fifth strategy, more leads, more trials, you actually want to make sure that you have proper ICP, proper messaging and positioning in a manifesto, and you actually running a Broadway show. Now I did promise you a bonus and you're all the way over here, so I want to make sure I deliver on that, oops, before my marker flies away. So the bonus I'm going to give you is as you're thinking about this piece on how do we acquire more? There's a bonus here of the idea of channel mastery. And one thing you can look at to accelerate your growth here is typically when it comes to SaaS companies, and I don't know why this exists, but it's true, it has to do with the DNA of the founders, and the team, and the company, and the market.
But there's this idea that one channel outperforms everything else. Now what are our channels? Channels are, let's just say LinkedIn is a channel, or Facebook is channel, or SEO is a channel, or blogging is a channel, or YouTube is a channel, whatever it may be. And so what you may want to look at in your acquisition piece, as you're fleshing out your proper go-to-market strategy. And when you were in the go-to-market program with me, I actually tell you what data to look at to actually identify this. You're going to be a master in at least one channel, there's going to be one channel where everything just works better. And so one bonus strategy you can do is identify, which is the one channel that you may already be doing as part of your early Broadway show, where you're getting out-sized results.
If 50% of your revenue or 80% of your revenue is coming from this one channel and the rest of them kind of make us small numbers, one growth strategy you can put in is to say, let's just double down on that. Forget the rest, because sometimes focus actually drives better results instead of spreading it out. And so what you want to think about it as a bonus is there a channel that we're starting to master that we're getting better at? Because each channel that you use to drive demand requires a certain level of mastery. Also, each channel tends to work better for a certain type of company targeting a certain type of market.
And so you want to look at the data and see, is there one channel where you're doing better? And if you got better at it, and if you knew exactly how to master that channel, and you focused on it, can you actually move faster? And that's one bonus thing that you can look at. Okay, now this video has gone on for long enough, but I wanted to give you as much value as possible. So let's recap, when you are thinking about growing your SaaS business, you first want to establish this framework, this framework where you look, the ICP is in the middle, and you look at acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral. And the way you actually accelerate the growth of your SaaS business is you get rid of all the choke points that exist. And in that framework, there is a natural priority. If you don't have enough leads, none of this matters.
If you're getting leads, but they're not activating, then none of this matters. If you're getting leads and they're activating, but they're not converting to revenue, then none of this matters. And so you can start to think about which area you want to focus on using this framework. Once you've done that, there are five growth strategies that we covered that you can put into play to actually accelerate the growth of your SaaS business.
Number one, you can put in a referral marketing program. Number two, you can actually put it in an upsell program or revamp your pricing strategy, depending on what you have to work with. Number three, you can actually revamp your sales methodology and how you sell, maybe product led is not the right one for you, or maybe it is, and you want to think about which one works better. Number four, you want to revamp your demo and onboarding process, and that will actually get more people to convert because you actually make that easier for them to understand what the value is. And number five, you want to think about how do we get more leads, opportunities, and trials. And the way to do that is to revamp your go-to-market strategy overall, using these three components we talked about, your ICP, your messaging, positioning, manifesto, and also, how do you run a consistent Broadway show? And lastly, you had this bonus where there's this idea of channel mastery.
So you want to figure out, is there one channel that just works better for you guys? Can you double down on that? You couple these things together, you identify the right channel, you flesh out your ICP, your messaging, you revamp your Broadway show, and then you start to actually optimize on how you activate these people that are coming in, and you actually optimize your sales process, you convert more, and you start to actually upsell them on more as they renew, and then you start to get those happy customers who refer you more people, and you know they're going to convert in a really high clip. Then this flywheel starts to turn and you can actually accelerate the growth of your SaaS business and rise above the competition. And you know now exactly the key pieces to look at without getting overwhelmed.
But what you may not know is how do I do each of these pieces? How do I actually flesh out my go-to-market strategy? What does an ICP look like? How do I think about my messaging and my positioning? How do I think about what a good Broadway show looks like and what channel mastery is on each of these channels? How do I think about what my onboarding or demo should look like? How do I actually flesh out my sales methodology? Or what should my pricing strategy be like? How do I actually figure that out? Or what is a good referral marketing program look like? What tools do I use? Now, you know you need to do these things, you know how to prioritize, but you may not know exactly how to implement these pieces. This is exactly why I created my SaaS go-to-market coaching program. Inside of this program I actually give you the step-by-step framework to follow along with my coaching to help you put these key pieces in, prioritize the right things, and as you're putting into play, I'll actually coach you on exactly what's working, what's not, and how to navigate this process. The main reason I created this program is to reduce execution risk for early stage founders. And the reason I did it is because I was in your shoes where I had to figure out these pieces, and we may have had advisors, but no one had a framework, they were just kinda giving me opinions. We tried hiring agencies, but they were created by ex pizza boys, and we just churned through them.
And we had millions in the bank, but we didn't quite have enough to go recruit a best of breed VP of marketing that really knew this stuff and did this before. So it was this catch 22. And that's why I created this program because early stage founders need someone on their side and a frameworks to reduce execution risk, and that's what we do inside of the go-to-market program. And I give you the step-by-step training to actually figure out these pieces, I give you the coaching, we meet weekly, the most fun call ever, only with SaaS founders, to actually make sure that you're on the right track and I can coach you. And we have strategy calls where we dig into the data, I teach you what data to collect so we can course-correct, all of it. And it's been incredible to see the success that this program has brought to the founders that are in it.
If you're interested, you can learn more about the program, you can look at success stories of other founders inside of the program, and you can apply to join the program and work with me. All you need to do is just go to tkkader.com/gtm. And when you go there, you'll get all the details, and you'll have a little form that you can fill out to actual apply to join, and you'll get all the details on how it works and how the process works to get you in as quickly as possible, and we'll also answer any questions that you have. Just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
Also, if you got value from this video, please smash that like button, the YouTube algorithm really likes it when you do that. Also, I drop a video like this with actionable strategies, how to grow your SaaS business faster every single Sunday, and give you as much value as possible so you can actually understand what these core things are, based on my 15 years of growing, scaling, and exiting SaaS companies. So be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon, that way you will get notified every single time I drop an episode. If you have a fellow founder, a team member, anyone that you know that would get value from this episode and the other videos we have on this channel, please share this video with them, it just means the world to us putting your Slack group, or WhatsApp group, or mailing this wherever you are connecting with other founders and SaaS leaders, it would just mean the world to us, we put a lot of love into these videos.
And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours is going to be unstoppable. I'm TK, and I'll see you the next episode, or inside of the go-to-market program where I'm going to help you actually flesh out your go-to-market strategy and help you execute and scale your SaaS business. I'll see you in there.
Take care and bye. (upbeat music)
2022-01-08 22:19
