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- As a startup founder, you're constantly cranking two levers to grow your startup. (gentle music) You're either shipping code or closing deals. Shipping code, closing deals, shipping code, closing deals. When you operate these two levers the right way, it'll accelerate your path to traction, to product market fit, to larger rounds of fund raising or more revenues, ideally both. In this episode, I'm gonna walk you though how creating an unstoppable sales funnel can actually help you close more deals, have more customer conversations, and most importantly build and ship the right features, the right code, so that you actually accomplish product market fit. Intro. (funky music) (beeping) What's up everybody, welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK, author of the book (gentle music) "How to Punch the Sunday Jitters in the Face", entrepreneur, and angel investor. On this channel I help startup founders, business owners, and entrepreneurs build and execute on an unstoppable strategy for their life, and their business. I drop an episode like this every single Sunday, so be sure to hit the subscribe button, and the bell icon, so that you get notified when I drop an episode. When you're starting out as a startup founder, in the early stages of building a company, it can be so daunting to actually figure out how to get demand, how to get attention for your startup. On one hand, you're trying to build the right product, and get to a product market fit. On the other hand, you're also trying to close deals, so that you can accelerate your path to the next round, or more revenues or profitability, whichever your goal is. And there's so much advice out there on how to build out a sales funnel. Do you do webinars, do you do blogs, do you go on LinkedIn, do you do cold outreach emails, do you run ads? There's stats that say 40 cents of every venture dollar raised goes through Facebook or Google on ads. How can you do that when you're trying to get the right unit economics to actually go raise a series A or series B. I struggled with this when I was building out ToutApp myself. I took that company from zero to seven million ARR, and then went on to sell it to a market leader called Marketo. Over there I served as VP of strategy and sat at the forefront of how other companies, like ToutApp actually generated demand. I know you could've been anywhere in the world this morning, but you're here to talk about the future of marketing, our craft, and how Marketo can help you. And I'm really honored to be here, thank you so much for having me here, it's really an honor. I joined Marketo about six months ago, when they acquired my company Tout. I have one of the coolest jobs in the world. I get to travel the world, spend time with marketers like you, and compare notes on what are the big trends happening in marketing. (beeping) After doing it myself, after leading strategy, after doing countless keynotes, talking about how to get attention, how to generate demand, I came across this core formula that every successful company uses. And I call it the unstoppable sales funnel. In this video, I'm gonna break it down to five simple steps that you can follow to build out your unstoppable sales funnel, so that you can ship the right code, the right features, close deals, and get traction and product market fit. If you're excited to dig into this, go on and hit the like button, and let's get started. All right, so step number zero, it's so important that I had to put it up front, is you are the brand. So often when you are building an early stage company, no one knows your company, no one knows your brand. You may have invested money in building out the brand, getting a cool logo, coming up with the right name, getting the right domain, but in reality, no one really knows it, and no one really trusts it. You, on the other hand, you already have social media followers, you already know people hopefully in the same space that you're serving, that actually trust you. So you've gotta orient yourself as the brand. Because people trust people, and you have followers, and that's the best way to establish your authority. The key to this unstoppable sales funnel is to lead with you and your personal brand as the founder, so that you can establish yourself as an authority in the space that you're serving. So in my case, I was getting into the sales space, and I had no background in sales, but I put in the effort to build my own brand, and actually establish myself as someone that knows things about sales, and as someone that has access to people that knows things about sales. And I built that brand to then build out the ToutApp brand. Once you've done that, step number one is you need to get clarity into who you're serving, your ideal customer profile. In the early stages, this only works if you are hyper specific. You have to be hyper specific in the beginning. And I get it, as startup founders, we always have to deal with dualities. On one hand, you have to do incredibly scalable things to build a successful company, but in the early days, you have to do un-scalable things that turn into scalable things. In the same way, you have to go after a huge TAM, a huge toll addressable market, you have to go after a huge problem, but at the same time, in the early days, you have to solve a very specific problem for a very specific niche, and as you do that, you earn the right to go bigger. This was the perfect case when I was building out ToutApp. We originally started as just business email. We're like we wanna solve email for everyone. Email sucks in business and we wanna solve it. And guess what, it didn't work. It was the moment, the moment we started to focus on sales emails, email for sales people, everything blew up. And here's the thing, it may seem small at first, when you're picking a niche, when you're forcing yourself to go small, it may feel a little scary. You may have a hard time convincing your co-founder to do it. But remember it's not the end all be all. You earn the right to actually go bigger, so you start in this very, very specific niche, and then you go outward, into these outward cycles, as your company grows, and you earn the right to go solve bigger problems, and serve a larger audience. Amazon is the perfect example of this. They started with selling books online. Selling books online, and that may seem like a big niche, but in the grand scheme of what Amazon is today, it's not, it's so small. But they solved that problem, and then earned the right, year after year, to go sell everything online. So step number one is who are you serving, get super specific about the niche that you're serving. Step number two is to identify the big macro trend, and change that is happening for these people that is your ideal customer profile. In order to build out this unstoppable sales funnel, you have to get super specific about who you're serving, and then identify what's the big macro trend happening with them. For me, when we were at ToutApp, the big macro trend that was happening was 80% of the sales person's time was spent on data entry. And so when we went in and said hey, there's a better way to actually streamline your tasks, automate a whole bunch of things, you can be a lot more successful. That immediately helped us get attention with people. Eventually it got to an even bigger problem, a bigger macro trend, is was that it took seven touches to turn a lead into an opportunity. And most sales people didn't do the work. And so our software streamlined that for them, and said hey look, it takes seven touches, that's a big macro thing that's happening for you, and most sales people don't do those seven touches. We can streamline that for you. And as soon as we said that, people started paying attention to us. So for you, you have to figure out what is the big macro trend or the big change that's happening. There's a few different tricks to this, and the first one is to identify the old way verses the new way. Andy Raskin talks about this, he's a genius when it comes to strategic messaging. And he always says, "What is the old way of doing things, "and what is the new way of doing things, "and how do you put yourself "in the middle of that conversation?" The other way to think about is is there an impending doom? I'm an investor in a company called DataGrail. DataGrail focuses on GDPR compliance. That is an impending doom for a lot of companies. You have to be GDPR compliant, you have to be CCPA compliant, and if you're not compliant, then you're going to get fined. That is an impending doom for every C level person that operates a business that has customer data. That's a big macro change. And guess what, when you're talking about that to your customers, regardless of what your product actually does, when you have that conversation with them, it gets their attention. Which brings me to step number three. Step number three is enter the conversation. That's already happening in your ideal customer profiles of mind. This is the trick to enter the conversation when you figure out the big macro trend, you're able to actually enter the conversation. The biggest thing that I've learned in sales, in marketing, is that there's little convincing that happens in the beginning. People either believe what you're saying or they don't. You're not gonna change their mind, until you earn their trust, until you have a relationship, until they go down the path of actually building that. So in the beginning, when you are trying to get attention, as part of unstoppable sales funnel, you have to enter the conversation they are already having in their mind, which is why I always get you to say who's the specific person, what is the big macro trend, and then can you go in and enter the conversation. Now in order to build out this unstoppable sales funnel, and there's a very specific way to enter the conversation. You have to first write your manifesto. What is your manifesto? It could be a blog post that's relatively large, it could be an ebook, it could be a book that you write, whatever it is. So for example, I believe more people should become startup founders. This is why I wrote the book "How to Punch the Sunday Jitters in the Face". That's my manifesto. I believe that in order to get to a series A, and subsequent rounds, you need to ship codes and close deals, ship code, close deals, that's my hashtag for my manifesto. Your manifesto is your point of view in this conversation that your ideal customer's already having. It's your point of view, in that look, we're building this product, but the reason we're building this product is to get you this result. And that result is something you need because we believe this. This is a new way of doing something, or this is a new way of thinking about this problem. This is my addition to the conversation. So you have to write out your manifesto. Other ways you can enter the conversations, you can collect stats and dangers, and opportunities that are happening. So for us at ToutApp, seven touches to turn a lead into an opportunity, that's a stat. And that's a stat that will get the attention of every sales leader, 'cause they'll wonder, wait, are my sales people really doing seven touches of every lead? I don't know, we should have that conversation. So stats are also a really powerful way, and you wanna arm yourself with as many of these stats, so that you can have a quality conversation with your ideal customer. And the last piece, you wanna enter the conversation with your journey. This is the most underrated form, but the most valuable form. When you're building a company, you may have good days, and you may have bad days. You may be hiring new employees, you may be shipping a new feature. You're super excited about it, right? Or you may be really afraid of something, right, or maybe having some insight from some customer conversation you have. You wanna identify and write out your journey. And share your journey. You wanna enter the conversation by sharing your journey as an authority that's building in the same space, as someone that's thinking about these macro trends for your ideal customers, you'll share your journey, and what you're learning, the challenges you're facing, and the things that you're getting stuck on, and the a-ha moments you're having. You wanna share your journey. It's the most underappreciated form, but it's the type of thing that builds the most relationships when you're going after your target customers. Once you've entered the conversation, you wanna drive to as many one-on-one conversations as possible. This is how that comes together, the first part is this five steps to blank. Five steps to blank is your manifesto, or some sort of lead magnet, some sort of thing that encapsulates your thinking. These are all the things that you've been sharing on social media, or in conversations, or on stage, or on blog posts, or on Twitter. Whatever it is, you wanna encapsulate that into some sort of a five step guide other people can go check out. So as many conversations you're having, you can always say hey, if you care more about this, go check out my five steps to blank. So for example, for ToutApp we had how to write a kick ass sales team message. It takes seven touches to turn a lead into an opportunity, here's how you write and do those seven touches, here's how to write really great sales emails and get the tension. So every conversation I had, and every time I entered that conversation, I was always able to say be sure to check out our guide. I didn't call it the manifesto, you shouldn't either, so you can out the book, check out the guide, whatever works for you. As you drive more attention to that five step guide, you also run a webinar every week. I ran a webinar every single week, and literally, our original employees will tell you, we were in a tiny We Work office at the time, and we were just five to six people, and when I ran our Thursday webinar, the entire office was required to be quiet. Because we were running a webinar, I was live, I literally ran a webinar every week so I could have a deeper conversation with the people in our ideal customer profile, about these macro trends. I think you're starting to get the pattern here, right? You're the brand, then you go niche into the specific ideal customer profile, figure out the macro trends, enter the conversation, and then do a webinar every week, post every week, and you start to have more and more one-on-one conversations. How do you ask for the one-on-one conversation? Offer a strategy call, super easy. So okay, we'd love to do a strategy call on how you're turning leads into opportunities. Boom, that's what we did for ToutApp. For Unstoppable, we have a life accelerator product. We talk to startup founders, we help them lead better lives, we say hey, are you experiencing burnout or imposter syndrome, here's our life strategy guide. And the life strategy guide, we post a webinar every Sunday, and from the Sunday, we say hey, do you wanna do a strategy call on how you can run your personal life better. Same exact unstoppable sales funnel. In case you haven't notice already, the marketing principles and the sales principles have been the same since day one. But so often I see startup founders get lost and a little confused and a little overwhelmed with all the different strategies that are out there. You can start to see how this strategy really hones in on what is most important for an early stage startup. Just do ship code and close deals, so we're having as many customer conversations as possible. You can start to see that. Before I go to the rest of the steps, can you just put a yes in the comments below? Can you just put a yes in the comments below? Because when you do that, it lets YouTube and everyone else know that you're getting value from this. Just put a yes down, and let's keep going onto the next step. Step number four is you drive to one-on-one conversation. Now here's why this is very powerful, okay, especially this part. You wanna have as many one-on-one conversations, and you don't have to close anything in the beginning. In fact, you don't even need to have a product ready in the beginning. Because what you're getting out of this is you're getting tapped into what your ideal customers care about, you're entering the conversation, you're establishing yourself, your credibility, your brand, you're establishing your authority, and on top of that, you're getting insights on what they really care about. This was super valuable for me, because the questions that my customers asked me on those webinars went straight into our marketing material. Went straight into our sales net, because we were using our customers words to describe to them exactly the way they think about it in their heads. And that allowed us to actually ship code and close deals. So let me just kinda wrap all these up for you, and I know there's a few steps here. Number zero, you're the brand, and you establish yourself as an authority. Number two gets super specific in niche about who you're serving, your ideal customer profile. You identify the big macro trend that's happening for them, and you actually start to enter the conversation. And the way you enter the conversation is you constantly share your journey, share the stats, share your thoughts, your point of view, and you'll always link to your manifesto or your five step guide. As more people get into the five step guide, you host a weekly webinar, you talk deeper about that conversation, and you slowly start to tie in the products that you're selling. And more importantly, as you start to have more of these one-on-one conversations, as more people start to become aware of you, you start to craft which features are the most important, how to actually solve the key and most strategic problem, for your ideal customer profile, so you ship code the right way, and then as you do that, as you ship the code, you close more deals. That is my five step formula to building an unstoppable sales funnel. I've used this method, this tactic, this strategy countless times with multiple companies that I advise. I've used this in my own companies, and I've seen it work well as I was VP of strategy at Marketo, and I actually worked with other companies that adopted this methodology. So this is an incredibly powerful way to not do a billion different things to get as much attention as possible, and go as big as possible, but instead build one golden unstoppable funnel, so that you can ship the right code, and close the right deals, and actually get to traction and product market fit. Now you know how this unstoppable sales funnel actually works, and how you can build out a sales funnel for your startup, for your SAS startup. But you might not know how to actually identify your right ideal customer profile. You might not know how to actually figure out the right macro trends. You might not know how to enter the conversation in the right way, or how to operate this machine. I've got two things for you. If you hit the subscribe button and the bell icon, in the next episode that I'm gonna draw up next Sunday, I'm gonna go into actually how to build out and operate this unstoppable sales funnel. Or the key steps that goes into actually operating this machine. If you actually wanna dig in, and you really wanna understand how to define your ICP, how to define your marketing strategy, and you go to market strategy and your product strategy, and ship code and close deals in the right way, if you really wanna dig into that, I have a completely free unstoppable startup strategy guide. And the unstoppable startup strategy guide will actually go into detail on how to answer these questions, and I'll also give you a one page strategy challenge that'll help you get started on building out your unstoppable sales funnel. If you like this video and got value from it, please hit the like button. I drop a video like this on how you can become unstoppable in your personal life, and in your startup, every single Sunday. So be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. More importantly, (bell dinging) we put a lotta effort in these videos, so if you got value from it, you're part of a slack group with other start up founders, or you're part of a mailing list, please share this video with them. It would mean the world to us. And more importantly, be sure to comment below and with a yes if you got value from it, 'cause it tells YouTube that you got value, and then it spreads the word, and it helps us out, and it makes us feel good. If you wanna get in touch with me, just DM me on Instagram, I'm TK Kader, I'm also on Twitter. And remember, most importantly, everyone needs a strategy for their life, and when you're with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK, and I'll see you next Sunday. (funky music)