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- When it comes to driving the growth of your SaaS business, there's a go-to-market strategy, and then there's go-to-market execution. When you start executing, without getting the strategy right, everything is harder, way harder. But when you get the strategy right, some critical components that matter, then execution actually becomes 10 times easier to achieve growth. So on this episode, I'm gonna dig into the critical components that go into a go-to-market machine, by walking you through my unstoppable go-to-market blueprint. Intro. (upbeat music) What's up everybody. Welcome to unstoppable I'm TK. And on this channel, I help SaaS founders. Like you accelerate the path to the next stage of growth with an unstoppable strategy. If you are new to this channel, welcome, I drop a video like this with actionable strategies to grow your SaaS business every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday. 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. If you're already part of my SaaS and go-to-market coaching program, you're part of this community, welcome back it's really great to see you here. Okay, so there was this one year at ToutApp my prior SaaS business, which I sold to Marketo and then I helped sell Marketo, but with ToutApp, there was this one year where we grew 300%. We got to a million ARR and within one year we went from a million ARR to three million ARR and it was incredible. And as I reflect on that one year where we had that amazing growth I kind of asked myself, well, what worked well? What was the one thing that really made a difference? And the truth is there wasn't a single thing that made the whole thing work. It was a whole bunch of little things that really came together to building a really scalable go-to-market machine. And when we actually doubled down on that and executed on that, that's when we had that 300% growth. So based on everything that I've learned at ToutApp and growing ToutApp and exiting ToutApp then working in Marketo helping exit Marketo to Adobe for $4.75 billion based on everything that I know I'm gonna walk you through my unstoppable go-to-market blueprint. And in this blueprint I'm gonna walk you through the critical components that you need to actually address so that you have a scalable go-to-market machine that helps you grow your SaaS business faster. If you're excited, dig in, go ahead and smash that light button, let's dig right into it. The first thing that you really need to understand in this is the difference between strategy and execution. A lot of times when I start talking to SaaS, businesses and founders when they're looking at joining my go-to-market program they're like, "Hey, we wanna grow faster. "We're not quite sure what's happening. "We're doing all these things." And I'm like, "Well, I know you're doing all these things "but did you do these things?" And the difference is there's the execution part and there's the strategy part. If you get the strategy right, If you get these components right then all of this becomes easier. Execution is actually just a matter of discipline and consistency. It's not that hard, but it becomes 10 times harder if you don't have the strategy right. That's the kind of the trick in go-to-market and in terms of sales and marketing that I've learned. So the first thing you gotta realize and ask yourself is are we just executing or do we actually have a go-to-market strategy? Because if you have a go-to-market strategy then this becomes easier. The second thing you wanna start looking at is when you start digging into your go-to-market strategy there's some key things you need to address. The first thing you need to look into is your ICP. If you are a regular member of the channel I apologize because I know I bring this up all the time but that's just how important it is. It's so important that I need to remind myself of it, which is why my company name is actually called Ideal Customer Profile, LLC. I'm not joking, go look it up. So the most important thing here is you need to actually think about your ICP. When you think about executing, when you think about going into all these things... And I'll go into this a little bit later. All of this becomes easier if you start to get a lot more focus on who your ideal customers are gonna be but more importantly let's just say, you're in a million ARR right now and you're looking to get to 3 million ARR, thinking about who are these customers that are most likely to buy from you to help you get to 3 million ARR versus the entire world. Does that make sense? So this is why it's super important to actually flesh out your ideal customer profile. The next thing you wanna do is think about your messaging and positioning. I call this a manifesto. A manifesto is about a six to eight slide deck. It's essentially a lead magnet, It's a PDF, but it's a lot more than that. What it is, is it's a very persuasive way to get your ideal customer to see it, and then say, "You know what? "This is super important. "We need to at least have a conversation." And then enter the sales process or the self service process. That's what a manifesto is. And that incorporates your messaging your positioning, your competitive differentiation your unique selling proposition even your pricing all of these core things that I just mentioned your messaging, your positioning your pricing needs to actually be fleshed out on its own. Before you start writing a cold email or cold calling someone or running an ad. Now, let me pause here for a second. Are you starting to get how it can be a common trap to just start going on the execution side and doing all these things? But you're going to be doing all these things the wrong way if you don't get your strategy right. If you're starting to see the power in this thinking let me just get a yes in the comments below and also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just helps me out and the team in helping more SaaS founders actually understand these principles. You mean the world to us. Also, if you are building out a go-to-market strategy, if you think about driving growth for your SaaS business, I invite you to check out my five point startup growth strategy guide. I'll link to it below, I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video, but let's go onto the next principle. Okay, once you have at least these strategic pieces right, then the execution becomes a lot easier but you also have to make some choices in terms of your execution. When you think about sales and marketing particularly in SaaS, there are a lot of choices. If you try to do all of them, you're going to be neither here nor there. Yes you should experiment, but you should also do a limited set of experiments because you have small resources. You wanna make sure you get a really good piece of data to understand which one's working, which one's not and you wanted to run a very tight set of experiments. So the first thing I want you to understand is there are lots of different ways of going to market. Your ultimate goal is that someone buys. Now they're gonna buy in one of two ways. They're either gonna buy by talking to a sales team, or they're gonna do self service. Now, how do you actually get people to this point where they're either doing one of these two things and buying? This is where all of this stuff comes in and I call this your Broadway show. Your Broadway show is the consistent set of activities you do every week to promote your SaaS business, to your ICP to make more people in your ICP, realize and discover you and say, "Oh my God, there's a solution to this. "And this is a problem. "And I need to go solve it. "Let me at least engage with them." That's your Broadway show. And there's a lot of different ways you can take this. This is why I baked it all into my go-to-market blueprint. By the way, I'll include a copy of this blueprint inside of my five point growth strategy guide, so be sure to download into the end of this episode. So couple of different ways you can either actually go to market using a direct channel or someone else's channel right? You can own the channel or you can go off of someone else's channel. Let's get channel out of the way, real quick. Channels, you can go into a marketplace and get listed there and people will discover you there. You can get someone else to resell you can get someone to white label your thing, you can get someone to co-sell your thing, they'll bring you in on their deals. And there's a lot of ways to do this and honestly, there's a little bit of a dark art to this. There's really fast ways to grow but it's actually really hard to do until you get a validated product. You have a product market fit, essentially. So while channel seems like a very exciting way to go at your market, it's not the best way in the early stages. If you were already past product market fit you're already at a million ARR then thinking about channels is a really good thing to do. Anything before then, not a good idea at waste of time. People really won't pay attention to you, these guys won't give you the light of day. Okay, so then you get into direct. Direct is like the real way to, you wanna go after it. If you wanna get into direct, there's really two ways. One is inbound, the other is outbound. When you go into inbound, there's SEO, which takes 18 months so don't start with that. There's social, LinkedIn is great for SaaS businesses so is Facebook and then there's ads. And then when you start to do outbound you have email, you have phone and you have direct mail like a FedEx envelope, FedEx envelopes have a 98% open rate. So those are all the different ways you can get attention and get people into your direct sales team or some sort of a self service thing. Now, look, if you're selling a $9 product it's a self service business chances are, you can't use direct mail it's just not gonna be cost effective. You'll have to go for a cheaper way but if you're selling a hundred thousand dollar product and it's an enterprise sale then you can absolutely FedEx something to the CEO and get their attention. So there are trade offs here. And so once you get focused on the ICP then you'll be able to make trade offs on which channel to use whether to do direct or go through on someone else's channel whether you do inbound or outbound well here's what I recommend for people that work with me inside of my SaaS go-to-market coaching program, where we have a very specific step by step process on actually building out our go-to-market machine faster without falling for the common pitfalls and actually accelerate their growth. What we always say is start with inbound, then outbound then ads and then channels. So there's a certain progression to this. Let me pause here for a moment now, that's my go-to-market blueprint. You have to first think about the strategy think about your ICP, then your messaging and positioning. Then you go into execution and figure out what the right approach is and what the right sales model is, all right? Now, if you wanna dig more into this... Now you know what the blueprint is if you want access to this blueprint this template, if you wanna dig a little bit more into how to grow your SaaS business I invite you to download my five-point startup growth strategy guide. It's completely free. You can go to getunstoppable.com/strategy to download it or you can follow the link below, I'll link to it below as well. In it I'll actually walk you through the critical strategy you need to put in place to actually grow your SaaS business. You'll have a copy of this blueprint and it'll also give you more details about my SaaS go-to-market coaching program all the way at the end after all the value in case you want a faster way to execute on all of this by working with me. All right, so I think that covers it. I wanted to give you my SaaS unstoppable go-to-market blueprint, there you are. If you got value from this video, be sure to smash that like button if you haven't already. If you haven't subscribed yet, I drop a video like this with actionable strategies like this from actual experience in growing SaaS businesses every Sunday Wednesday, and Friday, so be sure to subscribe button and that bell icon. If you have a co-founder, if you have a fellow SaaS founder they'll get value from this video, please share it. It will mean the world to me and my team. And also lastly, remember everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business but when you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK, I'll see you in the next episode. (orchestra music)