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Third and final part
Selling
I'm keeping this simple and to the basics. If you want to dive deeper, go research more on Value Selling and MEDDICC.
• Current State
◦ Your customers are buying your product because they exist in a current state they would like to change. If they like their current state, or at least their current state relative to what your SaaS solves, they aren't buying. In other words, they have a pain point that they are willing to pay to fix. You need to figure out what they are experiencing here. What in their day to day is going off the rails. This is a great time to talk to customers and ask them why they bought. Make sure you dig though. Don't settle for "you handle invoices" get to "I was spending half my day handling invoices and it was taking away from time spent on product development" even better is "I was spending half my day handling invoices and it was taking away from product development which meant bugs were piling up which was making my customers unhappy but I can't not get paid otherwise I can't cover overhead" <- if you can get the metrics that go with those problems, even better. The more you can uncover their world and the richness of it the better. Simple rule of thumb, try to drive to 5 Whys deep.
◦ These current state pain points and stories are great content thought starters. If you can tell someone's story in your messaging then you can capture their attention. Remember when I said I would flag content ideas below, here ya go.
• Desired Future State
◦ This is what your customer wants and it's not your solution. Using the previous example, the customer doesn't want a SaaS that handles invoices, they want a world where they spend more time on product dev. More time on product dev isn't the end all be all though, figure out the benefits that come out of it. How much better would it be if you could not only free up their time from invoices so they can fix bugs, but what if you could free up time so they could add new feature requests that clients had been requesting. The key here is that you want to figure out the biggest gap between their current state and their desired future state. The bigger the change you can help them realize the better.
◦ Flagging again for content ideas.
• How you get them from Current to Desired
◦ Here's where your solution comes in. This is your chance to talk about how you are going to bridge the gap between their current state and their desired future state. Don't talk about features unless it's necessary. Back to the previous example don't lead with "our proprietary AI blah blah blah" start with "we can free you up to work on those feature requests by handling those unpaid invoices with our solution" if they prod as to how you are able to do that, then feel free to peel back layers but don't rush to technical details.
◦ Once again, content ideas.
• Practical Application
◦ Great, this all sounds wonderful but how do I do it? Start with questions. You need to ask questions that help you discover what their current state is and what their desired future state is so you can properly talk about how you bridge that gap for them. If you come out the gates with a solution then you are hoping you guessed correctly and are connecting dots they care about. Let them give you the dots by answering your questions and then you connect them.
◦ Making the questions. Before your calls, write down questions that when answered will help you uncover the before and after. Trying to figure out their current state "tell me more about how you are handling invoicing currently" then "what effects is that having on your business?" then "what would you do with that time back?". Test the questions, if they work great, if not, try new ones (you could do some A/B testing here too). LLMs are great for brainstorming these questions. Throw a prompt in asking for questions that would help you perform discovery.
▪ Flagging again, these questions are great thought starters for content
◦ During the call ask the questions and once you have adequate clarity on the dots then move into talking about yourself and your solution. If you can spend 80% of the time listening and 20% talking, you are doing the right amount of question asking. If you don't, shrug it off and try again. Not every call goes as planned.
◦ Note: for longer sales cycles and enterprise deals you are going to have more complexity around navigating political landscapes, getting to economic buyers, working with champions, etc etc. There is a ton of great content out there and I would be happy to have some convos around it and point you in the right direction. This post is already way too long.
• Informing the Foundation
◦ Multiple times I have referred to talking to your customers and getting their input and then said if you can't then do your best but make adjustments once you can talk to them. This right here is a great solution for if you had problems connecting with customers. These conversations are technically with prospects but they will get you inputs and these inputs should be compared against the assumptions you made in your foundation. This is a great opp to go improve your foundation.
◦ Prospect perspective vs customer perspective. One thing to keep in mind is paying attention to what you are selling a prospect on vs what a customer provides feedback on as valuable. You might hit a situation where when you ask your customers what the true value add is and they might surprise you with their answer. This should be a huge flag (red or green) to spur action. They might be giving you feedback on a way to clarify your messaging but they also might be giving you a game changing pivot. What gets them in the door and what makes them super happy might not always be the same thing, keep your eyes out and learn.
Alright, that concludes part 3. Hopefully it helps and feel free to reach out with questions.
Continuing from Pt.1 that covered building a foundation
Outreach
This is often times where people think marketing starts and this is often why their marketing fails. This is also where templates often times come into place and fair warning, I'm not going to give you one. I'll give you a process you can follow based on effectuation. I'm also assuming you don't have gobs of money to spend on meticulous research and test campaigns because if you do you probably already have a consultant. Are starting point is limited time and money. This is hard work and there is no silver bullet. Ready?
• What do I say?
◦ You just built your unique value prop, you talk about it.
◦ Need some inspiration for content. Check below on the selling part, I'll call out where this overlaps. Told you this ain't linear.
• Where do I go?
◦ I don't know, you have to find out. It's fine to take inspiration from others as a starting point or an experiment. Just don't put all your eggs in the basket of an out of the box solution. Again feel free to buy the basket and build from there but please use it as a starting point. Your optimal channel might be social media, it might be cold calling, it might be networking, it might be playing dodgeball with nuns in Siberia.
◦ Where do I recommend you start? You have an ideal customer that you identified during your foundation building. The best resource to figure this out is your customers. Ask them. Be curious and make sure you listen. Find out where they spend their time while also having buying intent. If you are trying to sell to me and your channel is TikTok, you are 1) never going to get my attention because I don't spend time there and 2) if you somehow get me on there, I will not buy anything off TikTok.
◦ If for any reason you can't get this insight from your customer or you want to experiment on new channels that you haven't acquired any customers through, go for it. Here's my strong recommendation, use affordable loss to guide you. In other words, don't put any time or resources into anything that you aren't fine with getting no return on. This number is different for everyone. Some people will spend $1k some will spend $10k and some will do grunt work and just lose time invested. If you look at an experiment and the investment is going to crush you (financially or emotionally) if it doesn't work, don't do it. Or do, I'm not your boss. It's just way easier to stay alive and keep moving if your losses are all affordable.
• How do I know it's working?
◦ Design of experiment (DOE). I'm going to keep this very high level because it could be a post in itself and there is great content out there if you want to get deeper. At this stage there are a lot of factors at play. Did you get your unique value prop right? Are you talking about it clearly? Did you get your customer right? Are you talking in the right places? Without putting some controls in place it's going to be really hard to understand what's happening when the data comes back. The simplest approach here is A/B test. That can be two different messages in the same channel or it could be one message in two different channels. Now you can layer this as much as you want but know it's going to require more effort on tracking.
◦ Working in a non-ideal world. Ideally you have the resources to run campaigns that are statistically significant. As mentioned above, I'm assuming you don't have those resources. You need to figure out what is attainable within your time constraints. Do you need to figure out your funnel in a couple months? Great, you probably need some answers in a couple weeks so you can make adjustments in case this isn't the right channel. How many people can you reach with your time and affordable loss budget? That's your population and it's probably not statistically significant but welcome to being an entreprenuer.
• What's next?
◦ Review the trends. If you set up your DOE correctly then it should be easy - did A do better, did B do better, or did nothing work? So what does drawing a conclusion look like
▪ I tried message A and message B in one channel
▪ If you layered, you can repeat this process across the two layers. Keep in mind though that it might get complicated. You could end with something clean like message A works better in both channels or you could end up with Message A works better in Channel B but message b works better in channel A.
▪ If you layered even more, then it's going to get even more complicated
▪ I will say this, if you are comfortable managing this complexity and confident in your ability to navigate confounding factors this is a great way to learn a ton fast. I'm happy to dive in further below on this but this post is already a novella.
◦ This is a critical time to be thinking about your foundation. What is the A/B testing telling you about what you put together? If you didn't have a lot of customer input at the beginning and your assumptions were wrong, it'll start getting pretty clear pretty fast. Listen to your customers, look at your data, and adjust based on what you are seeing.
◦ Optimizing using A/B. Once you start honing in on a message and a channel, start performing A/B tests to see if you an figure out the most optimized channel and most optimized message. How? You just keep doing A/B testing and picking the one that does better. More ideas on this below.
Now that you have a process for your outreach, we need to get people over the finish line and close some deals. If the deals you are closing aren't above $1k, a full sales cycle isn't a sustainable approach. That being said, you can learn a ton of great insights because you are going to approach because I am going to give you a discovery mindset to follow and as you talk to prospects it's going to validate or invalidate what you have in your foundation. I'll also call out where you can get some content ideas.
I think we can all agree building the product is the best part, but at the end of the day we have to sell and market it. So I decided to write up a guide based on my co-founders expertise in marketing and my time as a sales consultant.
This is not a silver bullet and will require work. It's also not a linear one and done process. It's a circle that is constantly informed by other parts of the process and should be done iteratively.
Ready to dive in?
Building a Foundation
• Start with you! You have to be able to clearly articulate who you are as a company so that when we get to how you connect to your customer you have a starting point. Once you know how you connect with your customer, it becomes all about them. Here's an exercise on how to uncover this:
◦ Assemble your team members for a brainstorming session.
◦ Write "Who, What, Why, How, When, Where" on a whiteboard.
◦ List everything about your business identity (e.g., founders, team, origin, culture) under "Who".
◦ List all the products/services you offer as well as important product features and benefits under "What".
◦ List the core purpose and reasons for your business existence under "Why".
◦ List the processes, methods, and unique approaches you use under "How".
◦ List important timelines, milestones, and operational hours under "When".
◦ List locations, markets, and areas where your business operates under "Where".
◦ Review each list and identify the three most important elements for each category.
◦ Highlight recurring themes or elements across multiple categories.
◦ Determine the single most important element for each list.
• Now you need to understand your competitor, so that you can figure out how you are different. Important note, be honest here. If you boil everything about your competitor down to "they suck" then you are doing yourself a disservice.
◦ Conduct the "Who, What, Why, How, When, Where" exercise for your main competitors.
◦ Identify and rank the key elements for each competitor like you did for yourself.
• Now it's time to bring the Customer into the mix. If you can sit down with some customers and do this part, do it! If you can't, ask them questions. Don't have customers or can't get them to respond? Do your best to put yourself in their shoes but the second you can get their input update this part accordingly.
◦ Conduct the "Who, What, Why, How, When, Where" exercise for your target customers.
◦ Identify and rank the key elements for your customers.
• Time to understand how personalities play into the equation. Study the 12 classical archetypes (e.g., Hero, Creator, Jester). A great book for this is the Hero and the Outlaw. It's a bit of a read so if you don't have time then you can do some googling or ask an LLM for some help. The most important part here is that you create a standard, you need to be able to match like for likes.
◦ Determine which archetype best fits your brand.
◦ Create a persona statement that embodies your brand's character and tone.
◦ Determine which archetype best fits your main competitors and create persona statements for each.
◦ Determine which archetype best fits your target customers and create persona statements for each segment.
• Time to understand the benefits of your product. I say this as someone who will geek out all day about your features or how brilliantly your backend is constructed - no one buying cares. They want the benefits created by you SaaS. The most powerful benefit is the emotional, followed by the functional. There's a lot of good content out there on this, you can google it or LLM it. The key here is to again create a standard. Pick one set of emotional benefits and one set of functional benefits and that becomes your standard.
◦ Write down all the key features of your product/service.
◦ List the functional benefits for each feature.
◦ Identify the emotional benefits for each functional benefit.
◦ Review the emotional benefits and identify what the customer desires the most.
◦ Conduct the Benefit Ladder exercise for your main competitors.
▪ NOTE: when doing the benefit ladder exercise, bringing your customer in is huge. If you can get their input that is way more powerful than doing it in a vacuum. If you can't get their input, do your best to put yourself in their shoes but be steadfast in validating or changing these answers based on what they say.
• Time to find your sweet spot that will be your unique value prop and what you talk about all the time when marketing your SaaS.
◦ Draw a Venn diagram with circles labeled "Yourself," "Customer," and "Competition."
◦ Populate the diagram with the features, functional and emotional benefits, and personas identified earlier.
◦ Place values in the appropriate sections of the Venn diagram based on matches with client and competition.
◦ Identify the components in the overlap of "Yourself" and "Customer." - that's the Sweet Spot and the place to be
▪ If you have nothing in here you need to rework some of the previous steps. You need to find something unique.
◦ Create a clear positioning statement highlighting your unique value proposition in the Sweet Spot.
• How to apply this unique value prop
◦ Focus efforts in the Sweet Spot to stand out and win customers.
◦ Avoid spending resources in the center of the Venn diagram where competition is highest.
◦ Ensure all communication and efforts are focused on the Sweet Spot to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.
Couple things to keep in mind now that you have this foundation. The first is that it should not be stagnant. Especially if you had minimal to no input from your customers. Always listen to your customers and always be researching your competitors. The market will shift, a new insight will pop-up, a new ICP might reveal itself. Evolving your foundation as you learn. As you step into Outreach, I will call out times where you should examine your foundation.
Pt2 will cover Outreach.
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