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- We now operated inside of SaaS companies that are scaling in full tilt mode. We've used eight different lead generation tactics to actually generate quality pipeline. Here's the thing though, if you're in the earlier stages, doing all eight makes no sense. You have to have focus. But here's the big question, which one do you focus on? In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the eight best lead generation tactics that you can use for your SaaS business. And at the end of it, I'm gonna show you the prioritization framework that I use to actually pick the right tactic and then scale up over time. And when you watch this episode, by the end of it, you too will be able to apply one or more of these SaaS lead generation tactics so you can accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. Intro. (upbeat music) What's everybody? Welcome to "Unstoppable". I'm TK and on this channel helps SaaS founders like you grow your SaaS businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now if you're new to this channel, welcome, I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster. So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bail 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, if you're part of my SAS go-to-market coaching programs, my people, welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here. So when we were scaling ToutApp, we were using two to three key lead generation tactics that was actually generating quality pipeline for us. One of the years we grew 300%, which led us to raising our Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz. We ended up selling ToutApp to Marketo. When I joined Marketo as executive team member that was scaling at about 450 million ARR going after half a billion in ARR. And it was mind blowing to see all the different lead generation tactics they were using to actually generate quality pipeline. So based on all of my experience, I'm gonna show you the eight best SaaS lead generation tactics that you can deploy. And if you watch till the end of this episode, I'm gonna show you the little framework that I use to figure out which one you should pick and how to scale each of them over time so you don't end up neither here nor there. You're excited to dig into principle number one, lead generation tactic number one, go ahead and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that and let's dig right into it. Okay, so the first lead generation tactic that still works today and works really well and worked back then for me and every SaaS company that I've been part of is content on social plus inbound leads. This is very similar to the strategy that even I use over here. I publish a YouTube episode over here and that generates a number of founders who wanna work with me. I post on LinkedIn, I post on Twitter, I deliver valuable content, and out of that content people end up becoming leads. And over time we work together. And this is something that's worked with every single SaaS business I operate today. Every single founder I coach and every single SaaS business I've operated in the past, this essentially is all time. It's not a lot of money, meaning to post on LinkedIn, to post on YouTube, to post on Twitter, to post anywhere. You don't have to give them any money. You just have to put in time to creating valuable content for your ideal customers. And if your ideal customers discover your content, they spend time with you, they can start to understand if you are full of crap or you are actually very legit if you're solving a real problem. And if you are, then over time the trust builds and they become customers. So this still continues to be the number one tactic that I use across every SaaS company that I'm either coaching, operating, or have operated in the past to generate quality pipeline to actually serve our customers. And the second one that works really well, which kind of connects to this is content plus ads. This is the scenario where instead of posting manually every single day, you actually go to LinkedIn or you go to Facebook or you go to Twitter or any other platform where your ideal customers hang out and you say, Hey, here's a bunch of money, please promote my content. And that will in turn, turn into leads and pipeline. One of the common mistakes that I see very often in both of these tactics is people confuse likes for leads. There are a lot of founders that say, yeah, we're gonna be doing content. I'm really gonna up my content game, I wanna do YouTube. But they don't realize that there's a huge difference between posting content that just gets a bunch of likes versus posting content that persuades your ideal customers to understand the problem that you are solving, the solution that you have and why they should go with you. Very big difference. So when you're doing either of these, you wanna actually make sure you're optimizing for leads and not likes because likes don't actually turn to revenue. The number three way that you can actually generate quality pipeline and leads for your SaaS business is content plus SEO. This is where instead of posting or instead of running ads, you're publishing blog posts and you're optimizing these blog posts for specific keywords that you know people are searching for. Specifically people in your ideal customer profile that are searching for a certain keywords that relate to the problem you're solving and the solution that you are offering. And so this is a great way to tap into the monthly searches that are happening on Google, the billions and trillions of them and say, Hey, I have some valuable contents, if they're searching for, I don't know, SAS lead generation, then I want them to see my blog post. And then when they get into the blog post, I can then educate them and build their trust and maybe they'll use my product. And that's the power of this specific tactic. Now if you look at these, these all three of these are generally inbound. What that means is someone has to kind of go out there and search on Google or someone has to go on Twitter or LinkedIn and they're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and they end up in your piece of content and then they engage with you in a deeper way over time. Now, what if your people, your ideal customers aren't really looking for what you're solving, at least you don't think they are. In that case, this next tactic comes in really handy. It's essentially outbound. Outbound can come in two ways. You can either email them or you can call them. Either way, outbound is great if you are solving a problem that your customers aren't fully aware of yet. They're not out there searching for this, but you know they have the problem and if you can just get it in front of them they'll say, oh my god, this is totally something we actually have. I didn't really think there was a solution for this. I wanna talk. So outbound as a tactic for generating leads and generating pipeline is brilliant. When you know exactly who your ideal customer is, you know your messages will resonate if you get it in front of them and they're kind of in hard to reach places. So you can actually go into outbound with a proper message and get in front of them and say, Hey, would you like to get on a call or would you like to get on a webinar? Would you like to get on a demo? And you can take them down the process. Now those are the first four tactics that I have for you and they're some of the best. Now remember, if you stay till the end, I'm gonna tell you how to prioritize these because if you try to do all of these, you're gonna end up neither here nor there. Trust me, I've done this, it was just horrible. What works best is if you pick the best one for your specific company and at the end of this I'm gonna show you the framework I use to figure out which one you should go with first and then second and then third. But before we do all of that, I'm gonna show you the next four. I have four more tactics for you before I get into that, lemme just pause here for a second. If you're starting to see the power in this, if you're starting to see, oh my god, there's so many different ways to generate leads and quality pipeline and not just do it in a cheesy way where you're in front of people's faces, but really serve them and offer them value and actually solve some of their problems early on and then get them into your product. If you're starting to see the power of all of this, can I just get a yes in the comments below and also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm? It just loves it when you do that. Also, if you're in this stage where you're trying to figure these pieces out, how do I generate leads? What's my go-to market strategy? How do I take it to market? How do I scale? This is exactly how I help in my SaaS go-to-market coaching program. I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode. You don't have to go anywhere right now. Let's dig into tactic number five. Tactic number five is one of my favorites and it's one of those black arts. I didn't know how to do this back in the ToutApp days, but in Marketo I really learned the power of this. And if you can crack the code on this, it could be a completely unfair way to rise above your competition. Number five is partners. So there are already companies that are selling to your ideal customers. So for example, in case of ToutApp, there were a lot of companies that were already selling to sales teams. We sold to sales team and the biggest one we found was Salesforce. So we figured out how to partner with them, how to actually show up at their events, how to actually run air cover on top of whatever marketing they were doing so that we could actually partner with them and sell to their customers. A big part of this was actually integrating with them. So partners are a really great way if you can identify two to five companies that are in your space selling to the same type of customers that are bigger than you or similar size to you and they're not competitive to you, and you can actually go to them and say, Hey look, we're selling to the same customers. If your ideal customers also buy my product and are on your product, they're gonna stick with you longer. Then you can actually create a true partnership and you can actually mobilize an entire marketing and sales motion that generates quality pipeline. One of the great things about partners is if they're coming referred through a partner, then they trust that partner so they'll trust you more. So everything moves a lot faster. I learned about partners in a really big way when I ran the alliances and partnerships organization in my time at Marketo, I had a 60 million number that I needed to hit both in terms of source and influence revenue. And in order to do that, we were able to galvanize key partners of already selling to our ideal customers and together we were able to generate that level of pipeline, which was incredible. And so partnerships, when done right, you can actually generate a ton of leads. We have to actually do one thing. The biggest thing I learned about Partners is it's one thing to say, Hey, we shake hands, we're gonna be partners. It's a great partnership, we're integrated, but it's a completely different thing to actually mobilize that partnership. And the way that came was you actually had to do co-marketing. You had to go to the marketing team of that partner and say, okay, what are we gonna do together to reach your customers and our customers? So our customers buy your product and your customers buy our product. And then that dovetails into one of these other tactics that you're gonna do together using your collective forces. If you don't do that, partners won't work. It'll just be a really cool agreement and integration, but it won't generate pipeline. So that's kind of like the other stuff where it's one thing to do it and it's another thing to do it effectively. So in content, you can generate a ton of likes, but that doesn't mean you'll generate pipeline. You need to generate pipeline. Same with partnerships, you can generate a partnership, but if it's not generating pipeline, it doesn't matter. So you actually have to do that co-marketing, and that's something I learned while I was doing that. Number six is so powerful, I put it in a separate one. Technically it could go under outbound, but I put it separately because it's kind of an OG thing. But the people that do it do it in with an unfair advantage. And five through eight are really unfair advantages. This is direct mail. Someone said something to me one time and it really stuck with me. They said, "TK a FedEx envelope has a 99% open rate." Compare that to email, which basically has maybe a 20% open rate if you're successful and very effective or a phone call, which I don't even know what the connect rate is these days because people basically just don't answer their calls. Although it does work. Like I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, there is a certain percent, but it's not 99%. It's not a 99% open rate. If you send your ideal customers one FedEx envelope, they are going to open it 99% of the time. Now it is expensive, but it may be worth it if your average deal size is $1,000,000 and you only sell to 500 customers, that would pay $1,000,000 each. It may be worth it to spend up to $100 mailing someone a FedEx envelope with a very compelling message inside. And so I include this here because sometimes people say, oh my god, that's so old school. I'm like, well, is it though? It's effective. You could send it and will have a 99% open rate. And when they do, if the messaging inside is super compelling, it could be very effective, especially if your deal sizes support that kind of customer acquisition cost. So I put that as number six because I still think it's super effective and I'm excited to actually do this. We did this at ToutApp. I'm excited to do this again for one of my companies that I own now. We're gonna be doing a direct mail exercise. I'm like super pumped to see the results. And if you want to hear about how that goes, you want me to share the results, put it in the comment below and there's enough people will add that to the cube. Okay, number seven is events. And I clued you into this a little bit. Remember when I said Salesforce had all of our customers, like if they were a Salesforce customer, they should be a ToutApp customer. Well, that was the same for Marketo also, but Marketo got banned from Salesforce's events because the founders had a fight, that's for a different episode. But more importantly, those events that Salesforce held were super powerful. We knew that if we showed up to a Salesforce event, their customers would be there and out of their customers, 99% of them should be on our platform because they're using ACRM and their sales teams need a sales engagement platform. That was the logic. And so events were super powerful when done right. Now, there's a whole art to generating quality leads from events. If you just go up to an event and you just sponsor it and you just sit in the back of the room, nothing will happen. But if you go to an event and you speak on stage and you actually give your narrative, your manifesto, your strategic message, you're able to share that with the audience and then you can say, Hey, we'll be hanging out in our booth, come hang out, then it's gonna work really well. Now let's just say the people that are running the event won't let you get on stage because maybe you don't have a track record in speaking, you might have to just pay them more. Just like, look, I'll go to the gold sponsorship but I'm not coming unless I go on stage. You could do that. The other thing you can do is have a really compelling booth with some sort of activity. So we sold the salespeople and at events we always had a little booth. And then at the booth we had this giant question printed out. It said, "What's the first thing you ever sold?" And every salesperson would be able to come and write down on a little post-it note, what's the first thing they ever sold? It could have been a CD, a bicycle, some weird thing, drugs. We had that. And one of the things that was kind of weird, and they would put it as a post-it on top of the booth and over the course of the few days that we were at the event, the entire booth would just be covered with little post-its of what's the first thing you ever sold? And of course these are all salespeople. So they're coming, they're talking to us, they're putting the post-it, and they're like, what do you guys do? Like, oh, we're a sales engagement platform. You ever wonder what happens when you send an email or do you wanna follow up with emails? That's what we help you do. And we'd get a user and a lead right there. Events work incredibly well when you really understand your ideal customer and what your message is. So when you know that if you can get on stage and speak to the audience and direct them to your booth, you can have something fun in your booth that really speaks your message, then you're gonna be golden. You're gonna come away with quality leads. And much like a lot of these other tactics that I shared over here, there's a difference between just doing them versus doing them effectively. So in content, there's a difference between likes versus actual leads. In the terms of outbound, there's a difference between connect rates and open rates versus just sending out a thousand emails that no one responded to or worse put you in the spam folder. In terms of partnerships, there's a difference between signing a partnership and doing an integration versus saying, Hey, we're gonna go co-market together and actually create pipeline. So you wanna make sure that in each of these tactics you differentiate between doing the activities versus getting the results. The results are what matters. And that's usually leads and pipeline and quality leads. So you wanna measure for that. And guys ready for number eight? After number eight, I'm gonna show you the framework on how to prioritize these because if you try all eight of these, you will fail. But if you prioritize the right ones, and it depends on what kind of company you have and what stage you're in. So I'm gonna show you how to prioritize it super easy, then you'll be able to pick which ones to focus on. So number eight, drum roll. Number eight is one of my favorites and it's one of the ones that again is OG, but people that use it get huge advantages out of it. It's referrals. And this is super easy. What I recommend is you set up an referral automation platform and the referral automation platform monitors your customers and when they're happy, you hit 'em up and say, Hey, do you have another person that would get value from our product? If you do, we'll give you x and x could be a bottle of champagne, it could be a free month, it could be a free renewal. Like whatever you can do, you might be spending money on all this anyway, whatever your customer acquisition costs is, just give it to the customer if they refer you to a successful customer. Referrals are amazing because when someone gets referred in, the win rates are higher, they tend to buy more and they tend to refer more people. So it becomes inherently viral. And that's one of the best lead generation tactics that you can do. Super powerful. Those are the eight best SaaS lead generation tactics that I have personally used. I tried to add as much color as possible to each of these just so you get some pro tips. Having done all of these. You do any one of these that can be incredibly powerful, you start to compound them, they can be even more powerful. There's a catch though. You wanna make sure you don't try to do all of these because you'll be neither here nor there. You when you think about when I was at Marketo, there were entire armies of people that were dedicated to just one of these things. So if you are a smaller team, trying to do all of these doesn't make any sense. So you wanna figure out which one is the best one to actually go with. Now I promised you something. What I promised you was if you stayed till the end and you did, I would show you how to prioritize the one for your company. So this is the little framework that I use to actually choose which one to focus on when you are getting things going and when you're scaling your go-to market strategy. Are you excited for this? Okay, I'm gonna show it to you, smash our like button if you haven't already and you're getting value, if you're watching this far, you probably are. So smash our like button. It just means the world to us and my team, we put a lot of love into these videos and then let's get into the framework. The way I think about any one of these tactics is I think about difficulty versus speed. So difficulty, it could be hard or it could be easy. Speed, it could be slow or it could be fast. So this is kind of the two by two that I always look at. If something is fast in terms of speed, it means that you'll quickly get results. You'll quickly see did it work or did it not work? Some of these tactics, you're not really gonna know if it works until a while, but there are other tactics where you are gonna know really quickly if the messaging you're using, if the go-to-market strategy you're using or the people you're targeting, whether the message resonates with them or not. So you kind of wanna pick which ones you wanna start with and you wanna scale out over time. Now, if you were to take any one of these tactics, here's how I would map them out and that's gonna tell you which ones to start with and how to scale over time. So I always wanna start with fast and easy. I want something that's easy to do, meaning it doesn't take a lot of skill in terms of marketing and sales. And it will give me fast feedback 'cause that way if I have a certain message, if I have a certain go-to-market strategy, if I have a certain manifesto, I can test this really quickly and see if it's working or not. And so the easiest thing that I've found is referrals. I can just go to my existing customers and say, Hey, are you getting value from the product? Can you introduce me to five more people that would get it? And I'll, I'll make it worth your while. That is the easiest thing you can do and you really can't screw it up. And even if you have five customers, hit up all five of them. If you have a thousand customers, it's a little bit harder. You wanna automate it with the proper platform. But this is the fastest and easiest because either customers will say, "Yeah, totally, here we go." Or they'll say, "No, you are terrible. I want nothing to do with this." Either way it's good because then you can fix it and prevent the churn if they're unhappy. But if they're happy, they're referring. So that's the fast and easy that I always start with, right? So you can start there. The second one that I think is about medium difficulty. And by medium difficulty, I mean it's not the hardest thing in the world. It can be taught, I teach this to founders all the time and gives you relatively fast speed in terms of results, in terms of like, Hey, is this working or not and how do we tweak? Is content. So content on social, which is this first one, giving you inbound is medium difficulty. You gotta get it right. You wanna make sure you're not doing stuff that just generates likes and not leads. You wanna make sure you're positioning it the right way. You wanna make sure you have the right message. But if you do that, you can get pretty quick feedback from the market on is this a thing or not? Is it resonating with people or not? And how do I fix it? So that's number two. Then what's a little bit harder is content plus ads. So that's a little bit harder. Ads do require skills and you can lose real money real fast and a lot if you're not careful. And so I always say this is medium essentially. And so you can start with content on social and then you can go to ads and you can go in that way and you can hire the right people once you get some momentum going. So that covers that one. Now a lot of people say we're gonna do content marketing and then they hire this ghost writer that says I'm gonna do a bunch of SEO stuff for you and I'm gonna do all these blog posts and they do content marketing. And that usually is a trap for a lot of founders. So I always put content plus SEO pretty much over here. It's hard to do, but that's not the reason not to do it. SEO is very powerful, but it's very slow, meaning it could take months to actually get results in terms of placing first page for Google search results, placing first page for any search results in any search engine, and then people that are in your ideal customer profile to find that content, to click on it, to go through the blog post and then actually become elite. So while this is very powerful, it is not the first thing you should do. You should do this later on because it's hard to do. You gotta have quality content and it's slow and you wanna do the slow stuff later. So the next one that we had over here was outbound email and calling. And I put that in terms of medium difficulty but also medium in terms of speed. And the reason for this is, one of the things I learned while I was running ToutApp and I was selling ToutApp sales engagement, was that it takes about seven touches for someone to actually engage with your outbound email sequence. You just have to follow up with them. They don't see it seven times. And this is not made up in terms of sales outbound. This is just the law of marketing and how the human brain works. You gotta see something seven times to trust it. Could you get responses on the first one? Yes, but not the bulk of it. Not enough to make a material difference. So I put that as medium speed, meaning you're gonna have to touch people every three days or every seven days across multiple channels to do outbound and call calling and to actually get real leads, real pipeline, real appointments and real engagement. It does work, but it's just medium speed. It also requires a certain level of skill. You actually need to know what your message is, what your value prop is, and you need to position that in the right way. So outbound, I always put in sort of the medium speed, medium difficulty. And then there's partners, I put partners. It's hard to do and it's also medium speed. One of the things that I realized is when I ran alliances and partnerships and Marketo, I had an army of people that their job was to meet with potential partners, but we didn't partner with everybody, unless that other company also had a humming go to market machine and some brand recognition. Unless they were sponsoring our stuff, we would not really let 'em in 'cause we don't trust them yet. And so I put that as it's a little bit medium speed and it's hard to do. It's hard to mobilize a partnership and to do that co-marketing that I talked about, it's also hard to gain the trust of a potential partner because they're extending their brand credibility with your brand. So you have to show that you can do some of this other stuff on your own. You have some credibility, otherwise they're not gonna just extend you an olive brunch. They're just not. And so I put that as a little bit harder to do and medium speed, it takes time. And so you can kind of think about it in that way. And then you have direct mail and events. Those are the last two that are left. Direct mail essentially is slow obviously 'cause it takes time to get it mobilized. You also have some difficulty on like, okay, 99% opener on the FedEx envelope. They open it, what do they take out? What is the messaging? What's the manifesto? How do you convince them to take the next step? Or did you just burn $50 on a FedEx thing that they're not gonna take action on? So it takes some work to actually get to a point where, okay, we know what to say inside of that FedEx envelope, we know what our messaging is so we can compel action. And it takes some time to actually get results 'cause it's like literally getting sent to them and you could do FedEx next day air, but then they gotta open it, they gotta take action. They have to type in a URL or call like whatever the call to action is, it takes some time, it's a little bit slower and take some difficulty there. And then events. Events, I actually put right over here, right above referrals. It's really easy to show up to an event. It is a little bit harder to show up to an event and actually get leads, but it's not like the craziest thing in the world. If you show up to events and you actually put in effort to get your message out there and you try to meet with as many potential customers as possible, you will learn a lot and that will tell you a lot. And so I think you can do a lot there. So I have that over here. Okay, so this is how I map out these eight tactics and the way you should think about it. I always think in terms of this line, I always like to go from easy to hard and then fast to slow. That's how I prioritize. So whenever I'm working with the founder, whenever I'm looking at the go-to market strategy of a company that I own in the past, I always looked at it this way, what's fast and easy that we can do? Let's knock those out. Then let's turn up the dial on the hard, meaning over here we can hone in on our messaging. If the messaging's working, let's do content. We'll get some quick results, let's iterate on our messaging, and then let's go to more content and ads. And if that's working, let's move to the slower pieces because we're moving with the go-to-market strategy that is working. We're moving with an ICP that's working, a messaging that's working. And then we can actually turn on all of these pieces. So I always say start from the easy and the fast and then move towards hard. That's number one. And then move upwards towards slow, because now you have the luxury of time, in the beginning you're really trying to get momentum going. So you wanna stick with the fast stuff and go from easy to hard. And then once you've gone from easy to hard, then you can go from fast to slow, meaning the slower channels. But all these are working. So this compounds over time. Okay, so I know that was a lot. So to recap, here are the eight key SaaS lead gen tactics. Number one, content inbound. Number two, content and ads. Number three, content SEO and then outbound email and outbound calling, partners, direct mail, events, referrals. If you're wondering which one to do, don't do all of them at once. Figure out which one's easy and fast. Start there, then move to the hard and then move to the slow and compound it over time. And now you know, based on my 15 years of experience in SaaS, the eight best SaaS lead gen tactics that you can use to generate quality pipeline. Now what you may not know is TK, how do I build a proper go-to-market strategy so I can mobilize these tactics? What should my message be? What should my ideal customer be? How do I speak to them? What do I put in the content? How do I actually craft an outbound email? What should I tell these partners so they they trust me? And how do we do this co-marketing thing and hold them accountable? Or what should I do in the events so that I have a booth that's buzzing just like you did at Dreamforce? Or maybe how do I get referrals going because I have a good number of customers that are really happy and how do we move from there? This is exactly why I created my SAS go-to-market coaching program. Inside of this go-to-market coaching program, I work with you to build out a go-to-market strategy and then execute on each of these tactics one by one. I teach you exactly how to do each of these so you can scale your go-to-market machine and accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. It's an incredible program. If you wanna learn more on how it works, just go to tkkader.com/gtm, tkkader.com/gtm. All the details will be there. If it looks like you wanna work together, just fill out the little form, we'll get on a call. The better the fit, the better the results. And we've had incredible results from companies that are going through the program. And so the better the fit, the better the results, which is why we do a call. Soon as we do the call, if it sounds like it's a fit, we're off to the races, we'll start working together to build your go-to market strategy and then accelerate your path and executing on it and accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. Lastly, if you got values from this video, please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. Just loves it when you do that. I also drop a video like this with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches every single Sunday so be sure hit the subscribe button and that bell icon and you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode. If you have a fellow founder, a team member, whoever part a WhatsApp group, a Slack group, and other founders who will get value from this video, please share this with them. We put these videos out so we can help as many SaaS founders 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 the SaaS go-to-market coaching. Take care everybody. (upbeat music) It's really hot in here.