Stand out as a Sophisticated Marketer — Tactics for Growth

The aim of this articles is to summarises some of the key challenges that many growing software and SaaS companies face as they scale growth and offer some tactics and strategies for bridging the growth chasm. This knowledge is based on my personal experiences working in outbound demand generation and performance marketing for more than a decade along with my research and experience on overcoming growth challenges across SaaS and early to mid-stage startups.

Inbound Content Marketing — Strategy over Obsession

Letting go of the obsession with creating countless high-level thought leadership inbound marketing content will help you step back and identify the strategic areas of focus for growth.

The biggest problem with inbound content marketing is the time taken for it to become ROI positive. Content marketing works well for established companies that have been around for many years, however, for highly ambitious, exponential growth, you need to be generating quantifiable results that builds the sales pipeline and grow revenue.

High-level though leadership inbound marketing is a nice to have for most companies unless you are in the business of journalism. Better to narrow the focus to key content that can easily segue to the problem that your product solves. From here, partner with influencers, publishers, and PR agencies, that has already built up the following that you can leverage for distribution, rather than trying to build an audience and a following from the ground up.

Growing Through Partnerships

Most marketers define their target customer as the target market. However, part of your target market should also be your partners. Consider creating as much value for your partners as well as the customer. In fact, your target market needs to extend to include all the 5C’s including competitors, company, context, collaborators as well as customers.

Key influencers as well as other companies can be considered as partners. The benefit of having key influencers as partners is that they already have credibility and hold a huge influence over your target customers.

On the other hand, when it comes to partnering with other companies, select the partners that already have a trusted relationships with the companies that fits you target customer profile. Examples of these type of partnership opportunities could include businesses that are of similar size or smaller, web developers, designers, dentists, accountants. Trigger event partnerships within key businesses such as bankruptcy law or CRM solutions can generated demand for your products, if those specific trigger events relate to the products you offer.

Before researching partnership opportunities, product positioning should be clearly defined and quantified through a data centric approach.

Use Data to Quantify Positioning

The goal of sales enablement is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales process, allowing sales to close more deals and drive revenue. By quantifying your positioning, the messaging strategy and value proposition for sales enablement becomes clear, allowing sales to sell and close effectively.

Rather than looking at benefits, features and product category and guessing at product positioning, as what many marketers do; breaking down the value positions into their respective benefits and use-cases allow you to quantify and focus on the components that generate the most value. This makes it easier to quantify the exact value (i.e., time/cost savings) each component generates. Taking a data centric approach to inform your positioning in this way makes the value proposition tangible and optimizable.

Fill the Chasm Between Marketing and Sales

Many times, marketing teams obsess over lead generation (free trials, demo request, etc.), optimising for the lowest cost per lead. This way of marketing often creates big drop-offs in MQL to SQL handoff from marketing to sales.

In most situations, focusing on the handoff from marketing to sales will generate a lift in performance, for example, bringing up a calendar link to immediately book a time for a demo, and schedule it in their calendar. However, merely getting the customer to book a meeting is not enough and this needs to be followed up repeatedly with reminder emails that continually sell the value proposition of the demo itself. It is essential to continue to advertise (through retargeting) to these people after they become an MQL with messaging that support sales enablement.

All your marketing activity needs to focus on generating sales where your goal is to lower the acquisition cost. Therefore, rather than optimising budgets to lower cost per lead, focus instead on measuring Pipeline Revenue, SQLs and SQOs that lowers the cost of acquisition. The goal here is to lower the overall acquisition cost, while this may mean that top-of-funnel cost per lead may in fact increase.

To bridge this chasm, marketers need to have enough product knowledge to understand the technical aspects of how the product creates value for the customer; and articulate the information that addresses major obstacles (such as integration issues and other technical requirements) in a meaningful way.

Short witty, one- or two-word sentences, that talk high-level benefits do not give enough information for customers to decide. Therefore, do not assume that pithy writing is better writing. Rather, provide context that leads the customer to the final purchase.

Many marketers avoid the nitty gritty and skim over high-level benefits as a value proposition, hoping that a demo of the product will convert prospects to customers. This approach fails because often the demo request leads to a conversation with a sales team member that lacks the technical knowledge to fill the customer’s value gap. At this stage, the MQL often gets disqualified by sales for not having the product knowledge to close the deal. The customer usually then moves into nurturing which could have been avoided by delivering the nurturing content at top-of-funnel.

Define Goals First then Strategy

Setting goals first help to define a customer segment that is big enough as a group to reach your goal. Setting goals first sets time constraints on the type of tactics to use which informs strategy.

Putting the goal first may sometimes mean not going after customers that are the best fit for the product, because you have that high-level perspective of the segments. For example, if your goal is to land enterprise level deals, you need to focus on getting to those key decision makers, even if most of your revenue is currently coming from your $29 to $49 MRR from B2C and small business customers.

Many marketers jump straight to the execution stage without a clear goal definition. Deeply understanding the product offering is what helps define goals for strategy execution.

Strategic Vs Non-Strategic Product Offerings

A strategic product offering is a key driver of a company’s revenue and profitability, and it is often the primary focus of the company’s marketing and sales efforts. A strategic product offering is central to a company’s strategy for attracting and retaining their customers. Strategic products are what you offer to your customers to differentiate your customers products from their competitors and help your customers build a strong market position.

However, the type of products most companies provide are non-strategic offerings such as bookkeeping SaaS or live chat plugins that fundamentally do not influence the end customer’s choice preference towards your business over your competitors. Therefore, do not make the mistake of assuming that you are selling a strategic purchase when you are not.

Marketing strategic and non-strategic purchases require fundamentally diverging tactics. A strategic purchase competes on differentiation and quantifying how much the customer will save or make from using the product. Whereas non-strategic products need to be offered at a fair price with a focus on reducing friction through the sales process.

Avoid high level benefits and claims of revolutionising profit when the product is non-strategic.

Final Thoughts

Often the use case for your company’s product is technical and functional-centric, that deliver functionality and low-level outcomes at a fair price. For these companies (i.e., software and SaaS products), the messaging should focus on the specifics — what the product does, the product category, how the product saves money or time for the customer through features and use-cases over high-level benefits like saving money or save time without a clear explanation of the HOW?