How To Build a Scalable Go-to-Market Machine with TK Kader

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When you're crafting your value proposition, your messaging when you're saying, hey, we do xyz, it needs to be tying to a really urgent and important problem. If you're not, then it's going to be much harder to sell down the line. And also, you need to have a clear ROI model because no one just wants to give you money for your software. They want to know, am I going to get more growth? Am I going to have cost savings and reduction or am I going to reduce risk? And that's the order and priority where people make decisions. People will always spend more money for growth. People will then spend a little money for cost and reduction and they will spend the least amount of money reducing a risk. But they still will. I need some traction. You need some traction.

Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more.

You need some traction.

Hey everyone, Lloyd Lobo here, co founder at Boast AI. Today's Traction webinar is brought to you by Boast AI and Launch Academy. Great topic today. How to build a scalable go to market machine for your SaaS business to 3x growth. Couldn't find a better speaker on the topic. Who's done it before? TK, founder of ToutApp, a pioneer in the massive multi billion dollar sales engagement space that was funded by Andreessen Horowitz and then acquired by Marketo. And then as a part of Marketo, TK was the head of strategy and part of the exec team that led a 2 year GTM transformation which was then acquired by Adobe for 4.75 billion. TK Lots of zeros man. Tres comas my friend.

Not all of it came into my bank Account, but still proud for the experience.

As long as have those comas, you can retire. But thanks for joining us. How are you?

I'm doing fantastic. Thank you for having me.

What got you into entrepreneurship? Building tout. How did you get into all of this?

Yeah, yeah. My dad was an entrepreneur. I was originally born in Bangladesh, my dad was an entrepreneur there and then we moved to New York when I was 10. We grew up in, I grew up in Queens and entrepreneurship. I was always around it. So naturally I got pulled into it at a very early age. I did my first startup even though we didn't know to call it a startup. Cause I went to school in upstate New York, so I did it in college. We built this thing called My Pimp. It was like an online calendaring company. And then we got bought as we were graduating. That's when we discovered Silicon Valley. And then through the twists and turns I did Toutapp and then Marketo. And so over the last 15 years I've just been in SaaS and that's how I got my start all the way from college. I'm an engineer by trade. I have a computer science degree. I wrote the code for Toutapp like the first version of it. But in my journey I learned that in order to win in startups you have to embrace sales and marketing. Which is why I became really passionate about taking kind of an engineering approach to go to market and sales and marketing so that founders, more founders can embrace it and be successful with their startups. And that's what I do now.

Fantastic story man. You and me, both engineers turn go to market people.

Awesome. I've been following traction so it's really an honor to be here with you. I'm going to be focusing. My promise to you is I'm going to teach you how to build a scalable go to market machine to drive 3x growth year over year growth and accelerate your path to at least 3 million. ARR. The reason I'm really focusing on this topic is I've actually done it. I've been in the trenches, I've been a founder and then I was ahead of strategy and so I know this part of the journey and so that's what we're going to be focusing on. Quick background on me. I know we gave the origin story so I want to spend too much time here. My first startup was in college. It was a company called Hipcal, which is originally called My Pimp. Long story. We sold it to a company called Plaxo. Then I worked at Bridgewater one of the largest hedge funds in the world. After that I started a company called Toutapp. We pioneered the sales engagement space. We're backed by Horowitz, sold Toutapp to Marketo, it was backed by Vista. Then I helped sell Marketo to Adobe for 4.75 billion. Today I work with SaaS founders purely I'm on a mission to help SaaS founders become unstoppable through an advisory practice that I run. It's very boutique. So everything I'm going to be talking about here today I've actually done. I've actually used over the last 15 years as a founder, a venture backed CEO and a senior executive across multiple companies. Also, if you love what you see here, be sure to check out my YouTube channel. Today we are actually the fastest growing YouTube channel focused on B2B SaaS. We have a new episode every single week. We cover topics across from product, go to market, enterprise, sales, marketing, pricing, everything it says here too. We actually switched to one because we just needed to go deeper. So now we go deeper videos and start two smaller videos. So you can go to tkkader.com YouTube to subscribe to all of that if you don't get enough of the TK energy on this webinar. And lastly, I've taken all of this and I actually coach VC backed and bootstrap SaaS founders. It runs three coaching programs. One is my launch program to get you to initial revenues. Another is my go to market program to get you to 3 million ARR. And then my other is my scale program. I have people in there upwards of 100 million ARR that need to unlock growth. Okay, so that's like the background on why you should pay attention. Now let's get into why we actually need to build a scalable go to market machine. And this is a statistic that I came across a couple of years ago and it gave me pause because at SARA Founders we know that we're playing the impossible game. We know that there's a 1% chance of us actually succeeding. And so when this is the case we're like cool. Like this is an impossible task. 1% chance, let's go at it. That's how like we're entrepreneurs, we're used to that. But when I saw the 4% stat it gave me pause. They said only 4% of stars graduate from the seed stage. And granted the markets are crazy right now. So the seed is really the pre seed and the series A is now the seed plus. And but aside from all of that it just gave me pause because it made me realize that money and being able to raise money is never the barrier to success in startups. Which made me wonder, what is the thing that actually breaks through? What is the thing that really gets founders to succeed? Because all of a sudden if it's 4% that's succeeding and 96% isn't, makes you wonder what is that 4% doing? I dug into the data a little bit more. This is a combination of data from Wing VC and also PitchBook. PitchBook is very well known. And again, this goes to 2017 and these numbers may shift based on what you call a Series A, because those things are moving targets. But it still gives you a glimpse into what the statistics are today. In order to raise A Series A, 70% plus of companies that are raising Series A's or even C pluses have revenues. You have to have revenues. The days where you're raising the Series A without any sort of revenue or traction or go to market machine that's repeatable is over. It doesn't exist. And on top of that, if you look at what percentage seed startups are raising that Series A, it goes all the way down to 4%. I was being a little generous. It's actually 3.8% or something like that, but still. And so this begs the question of what the hell is going on. And so the next thing I looked at was this thing from CB Insights. CB Insights has incredible research on all things startups and they analyzed 101 startup post mortems. And when they looked at those 101 startup post mortems, there was a certain pattern. If you look at the top 10 things that came up, especially the ones as you see are highlighted in yellow, they had more to do with go to market than anything else that had to do with the startup. It wasn't really about the team, although that is mentioned over here. Not the right team. It wasn't about them running out of cash, although that is true. But they may have raised the cash and just extended their inevitable death. But really, when you look at the rest of the things, poor marketing, didn't quite have a business model, pricing wasn't right, got out, competed, or there was literally no market need. And when you look at that, it makes you realize that we as founders and Lloyd is an engineer, I'm an engineer, we obsess about product, but we don't think about go to market, we don't think about market, we don't think about distribution nearly as much as we should. And even when we don't take it as seriously. Countless founders in my advisory practice where they're like, hey, we raised the seed round, we have this amazing product, we just need to hire a marketing person and we just need to hire a salesperson and then boom, revenues are going to come. And that is never ever true. Because that magical unicorn salesperson, A will not work for you because it's too much of a risk and they can make a million dollars plus working for a SaaS unicorn and B, does not have the skills or capabilities to actually find your product market fit. And so it begs the question, if the stats are so bad, how do you break through? How do you become part of that 4%? What do you need to do? What is that 4% doing? Seriously, that actually allows them to succeed. And when you look at these stats, it means that you can get a cool name, you can get a logo, you can get a slick website, you can get a blog, you can create your social profiles, you can run some ads, you can build an MVP or even a full product, you can do SEO, you can do a press, you can raise $3 million, you can do all these things and still end up with not enough traction, no clear product market fit, no insights. And in the dead zone, which is the 96% of startups. And so I made the same mistakes. By the way, I'm not here preaching from the choir. I'm like, hey, by the way, don't make these mistakes. I made the same mistakes. This is totally normal because we as founders are product people and we understand sales and marketing even when we are, we do have a co founder or we are the co founder at sales and marketing. We don't know what it takes to do early stage sales and marketing. So in my own personal journey, you saw the earlier slide where it's neat and clean work for the best hedge fund in the world, the best raised from the best VC fund in the world, worked with the best PE firm in the world. But what we don't talk about are all my startup ideas that never went anywhere. And I had plenty of those. I had plenty of those, but they're just not on that slide because they didn't go anywhere. And the reason they didn't go anywhere, because I over indexed on product and kept thinking I was that one more feature away from product market fit. I also meet countless founders, they're like, look, we just need to build this one feature because all these customers we talked to didn't want to buy, but they said if I had this one feature they'll totally buy. And we built that one feature and we went to them and they didn't buy. They kept thinking they were that one more feature away from product market fit and from getting revenues. By the way, if you've ever been in the one more feature trap, I know I have just put a one in the chat. That way we can all see that we're not doing this alone and put it to everyone so that everyone can see. I also failed to embrace sales and marketing and thought if the product was good enough, then the market will speak for itself, which is also not true because the product can be amazing. But SaaS is so competitive that you will not even be discovered. Awareness is the biggest thing that kills. And by the way, the ones are flying. You guys are awesome. So we're not alone on this. If you failed to embrace sales and marketing, mainly because it just, you don't know sales and marketing. If you, if you think like sales and marketing is icky and you're like, look, the product should win in itself. If you're like, no product led growth, we don't need any marketing and sales, which is a lie, just put another one in the chat because I have failed with that too. I also interviewed users, interviewed users even in the early stages, even at 500k when we were trying to break into new segments, but didn't know they would actually buy if we did what they asked. Meaning a lot of times a polite way to say, no, I don't want your crappy software. So if you just had this feature that took me to the moon, then I would totally buy. And you're like, oh, we can build that in three months. They're like, cool, come back. Which is so much easier than saying, no, your thing sucks. So what I learned when I really analyzed my own journey of 15 years of building companies and exiting them and also looking at the data and the research and talking to. At this point, I have over 150 founders that I've worked with in my coaching programs. To increase the chances of getting to the next stage of growth, you need to have a clear strategy across three core pillars. Every startup is built across three key pillars. You have to have a great product. That's a given, right? But on top of that, you also need to have a right market, your market strategy. And you have to have a scalable go to market. And the majority of this webinar we're going to be talking about, how do you have a scalable go to market. But what I'm going to Break down are the three key secrets you need to know on what makes for a great and ripe market, because that's important and what makes for a great product and what makes for a go to market. Because here's the thing, you could have the best product, you could have the best go to market people working for you. But if the market demand, the market macro trends, if the market need is not there, if it's not an urgent, important problem, none of it will matter. None of it will matter. This is why you see so many teams that are incredibly talented. They kept working on an idea, nothing worked. And then one day they pivoted to this other thing named Slack and boom, it took off and IPO and got sold for $28 billion. It was the market, it wasn't the product. The product was still high quality. It wasn't the go to market they saw distribution, it was the market. I'm going to break down these three things and we're going to go much deeper into go to market. But first we're talking about market, then we're talking about product and we're talking about go to market on exactly what you need to craft that strategy so that you can get that 3x growth, so you can get to that 3.5 million error, which is actually a very good inflection point. And I'm going to walk you through the market strategy, product strategy, and the go to markets. If you're ready to get started, you're excited, put excited in the chat and let's jump into market strategy. Let's talk about market. Here's the thing, there's only three reasons people buy anything. And a lot of times what we do is we skip the market strategy, we go right into product and then we say let's go higher sales and marketing and give all our money to Mark Zuckerberg and nothing works. And when you think about the biggest reason that startups fail, they ignore the market need. And when you ignore the market need, that's a critical part of your go to market strategy that you are skipping over. And the reason for that is people don't realize there's only three reasons people buy. All right? People buy for one of three reasons. If you spend your own personal you don't want to get paid, you want to get made or you want to get laid, you will pay. If you're single, you will pay money to buy drinks or buy Tinder. You so that you get like it is true and maybe a little crass. And I'm sorry if you get Offended. If you're offended, put offended in the chat. I'm offended that you're offended, but that's okay. But it's the best way to communicate it. But here's the thing. When it comes to business software and most of my expertise is B2B SaaS, right? That's what I've done for 15 years. I only coach on things that I've actually done. And so when it comes to B2B software, you have to get businesses paid. People will buy business software because they're getting paid more. And that breaks down into three key categories. You either have to deliver cost savings, you have to promise growth, or you have to promise lower risk. If it's not one of these three things that's tied into the market you're going after, if they're not going to see significant cost savings, if they're not going to see significant growth, if they're not going to see significant reduction of risk, then it won't work. Your product could be amazing, your go to market could be amazing, you could do all those things, but none of it will matter because it is not getting them paid. And so many startups, if you remember that those 101 postmortems, number two or number three was like no market need, no shit because they skipped the market thing. And you got to ask yourself, are we number. If you're in B2B SaaS at least, or for your startup, are we either getting them paid made or laid? And if it's getting paid, is it savings, is it growth or lower risk? I want to ask, I want to ask the audience a question. Which one do you think trumps everything by an order of magnitude? Which one sells like crazy? Growth, lower risk or savings? So if you think it's growth, put growth in the chat. If you think it's savings but savings in the chat, you think it's lower risk. I'm seeing more of one. And you guys are right, you would think it's lower risk, but human beings inherently want to die and so it's never lower risk unless you really show it. You would think it's cost savings, but unless you're selling something like Lloyd, which is like a no brainer cost savings, look, it's guaranteed. It's actually hard to promise the cost. And the one thing that businesses will always pay you more for is growth. If you can show how your do Hickey product thing can actually drive more growth in a differentiated way, they will pay you all day long. And so there's a pecking order to this, there's a pecking order to the market you're going after. Because what is the urgent and important thing every single company needs in the world? Sorry, they want to grow. Oh, so he's interrupting. Sorry. They want to grow. That's what they want to do. So when you're thinking about the market strategy, you want to think about what is the core need we're solving and. And is it important, urgent in the pecking order? Okay, so how does that break down? There are a few things you have to distill into your market strategy, and we can't go into all the details of it because then I can't talk about go to market. But let's dig into some of the key things. Number one needs to have an appropriate tam. The reason I put appropriate is people get obsessed about what the. How big the TAM is. Look, you can build a bootstrap company that has free cash flows and is wildly profitable and get it to 100 million. I know founders, I hang out with founders that have $100 million companies and they're doing really well. TechCrunch will never write about them. They don't need a massive TAM. They have an appropriate TAM. I know founders that have raised 30 million, 50 million, a hundred million, and they have to have a bigger tam, otherwise they're never going to be rich. And so you need to have an appropriate TAM for your market strategy. That's something that everyone does. Here's the thing that people don't do, what they don't look at. Is there a macro trend driving urgency? And that's a really packed thing. And you can watch my YouTube channel where I talk about this more. But is there a macro trend happening that is driving the urgency for your software? I'll tell you, one of my good friends, Daniel Barber, he started a company called Data Grail. Data Grail goes all over to companies that are actually that have email data, they have digital data, and they're saying, hey, listen, GDPR will fine you up to $20 million. $20 million if you actually validate GDPR provisions. Our software ensures that you are compliant, that we are transparent, that you can build the trust in terms of the data you're hosting. Do you want to buy? That's what you call a macro trend driving urgency. Because every company is like, we don't want to get sued for $20 million. We don't want to get fined. And they're like, by the way, it's not just Europe. California, Mexico, New York are all going to have privacy Regulations, so you better get compliant. That is a macro trend driving urgency. It's an external thing, in this case government regulations. That's driving urgency for every company. And a lot of companies build the product, hire the salespeople, give money to Mark Zuckerberg, but they don't think about what is the macro trend driving urgency. Why do people need this now or do we have to really convince them really hard? That's something you want to think about. And yeah, TAM is total addressable market. Sorry, I should clarify in that vein. You need to be solving an urgent and important problem. When you're crafting your value proposition, your messaging, when you're saying, hey, we do xyz, it needs to be tying to a really urgent and important problem. If you're not, then it's going to be much harder to sell down the line. And also you need to have a clear ROI model because no one just wants to give you money for your software. They want to know, am I going to get more growth, am I going to have cost savings and reduction or am I going to reduce risk? And that's the order and priority where people make decisions. People will always spend more money for growth. People will then spend a little bit of money for cost and reduction and they will spend the least amount of money for reducing a risk, but they still will anything beyond that, they just won't. And you want to actually think about what is your market strategy. Now here's the thing. All this stuff, pretty obvious, pretty straightforward, but truth be told, and I'll be honest, and you can be honest with yourself, you don't have to admit to everyone else how many of you do the real diligence work on each of these items. A lot of the startups that don't make it skip over this part and they start doing all of the execution items on let's go build a product, let's go out the features, let's add one more trick, one more feature and let's go hire the go go to market people. Let's run the money on ads, but they forget, hey, what's our model? Is this an urgent important, Is there a market there? Because market trumps everything else. You can have a mediocre team, you can have a mediocre go to market, but if the market demands are incredibly strong, that mediocre team will still win. On the other hand, you can have pretty great team, tier one team and everything, but the market's not there, they still won't get there. And even if they get a little bit Ahead, there's still gonna be this drag that pushes them back. Are you guys starting to see why market is so important and why that is the first thing you have to solve for before you get a product and go to market? If you are, hit me with a yes in the chat. How do you actually solve for a market strategy? You create an ideal customer profile and everyone says they have an ideal customer profile, but then I look at it and they don't. You have to get specific. You wanna get into firmographic and demographic. Pharmagraphic is, hey, what type of company, what type of market segment, what type of employees, what globally, where they live. That's pharma, graphic and demographic. Like the actual characteristics of who would buy. You also want to get specific on who are the 100 companies that should buy this. This is super important because if you can't find 100 companies that should buy this and there's something wrong, that means that your market's not big enough, right? And by the way, any one of these things, if you are curious, all you need to do is go to my channel. I probably have a 14 to 30 minute video specifically on the topic, meaning I have three videos on ideal customer profile, just on how to think about that stuff. Here's the most important one. In your ideal customer profile. As you're defining a market strategy, you really want to think about what is the intent, why would someone want to do this now? What are the triggers, what's going on in their world that really necessitates the need for them to do this now? And also what other platforms or software are they using that make them more likely to use us? I'll give you an example. ToutApp. We knew that if they were using Salesforce, they needed ToutApp and so we targeted all of Salesforce customers. We knew that if they were using our shittier CRM then that means they don't have a sophisticated enough team. So they probably don't need us right now, nor do they have the budget. That's an example of an ideal customer profile because you're going off of their decisions, their world and things that are happening. And based on that, you're targeting them. And that's a really powerful thing around the market strategy. And the best way to think about market is you want to hone in on a group of people that has money to spend, don't sell to broke people. You want to make sure they have an urgent and important problem and you want to make sure that they are early adopters. Because in this early stages, even as you're going to 3 million, 5 million, 7 million, you're still selling to early adopters, you just are. And then little by little, you start gaining the capabilities to actually go up market. And that's how you think about your core market strategy. You do these things, then you take the number two reason off the table, right, of why startups fail and immediately increase the percentage of success because you're like, cool. I really thought about the market because remember, if the market is great, even a mediocre team and a mediocre GTM and a mediocre product will still win because the market is so strong. The stronger your market, the easier everything else becomes. The harder your market is, the more of an uphill battle you have to do with the product and the features and the go to market. So if you want cheat codes in Startup Live, get the market right. If you get the market right, a lot of other things follow. So that's market strategy. Who is now ready for product strategy? If you want, if you're ready for product strategy, hit product in the chat while I take a sip. And then we're going to dig into that and then we're going to get into how you use the market strategy and the product strategies to really flesh out your go to market product strategy. Now, the reason I go with market and then product is you could have the best go to market. It won't matter if you don't have market and product. Do you agree? If you don't have a great product and a great market, you can be the most skilled marketer and salesperson in the world where you know how to sell ice to Eskimos. You will not be you. You won't even know how to make the ice. You won't even know where the Eskimos are. It doesn't matter, right? And so you need to have the market and product strategy. So let's talk about product. Product is important, but we often forget what makes for a great product. Okay. I just posted a video in my YouTube channel this past Sunday, how to create. One of the things that happened with Toutapp and I experienced this with Marketo also was whenever we talk to customers, they would use the word love. That's a real. Let's just be honest. Like, I know we're in tech, we're not changing the world, we're not solving cancer. But they were using the word love to describe the software they were using. They're like, I love Toutapp or I love Marketo. When I was in Marketing Nation. This is Marketo's user count. 5,000 people. They're wearing purple, the company colors. It's insane. It's a cult gathering. They loved Marketo. That was insane because I was like, I don't like. How do you get love out of a product? And the thing that we don't realize is these people, these humans. When your product is great and helps them do their jobs and get a particular result, they need to do in their jobs, they do well in their jobs. When they do well in their jobs, they get promoted. And when they get promoted, they make more money. When they make more money, they can provide for their families. And because they're able to do all that using your product, they love your product. And so often we forget what the purpose of the product is. We get so enamored in the technology and the APIs and the capabilities and AI and what it can do. And you're like, oh, my God. But you forget no one cares about software, but they care about the outcome. And the biggest thing you want to think about is what is the problem you're solving that comes from your market strategy? And then what is the result you're delivering? What is the result that you're going to get that these people care about and how many clicks it takes for them to get there? That's it. That is the one guiding thing you need to understand about your product strategy. Nothing else matters. You need to figure out what is the problem. That's from your market strategy. You need to figure out what is the result we're giving them, how do we solve it and how many clicks does it take? And the greatest product people known to history, they know how to consistently add features or remove features or reorganize features to reduce the number of clicks it takes to get to an aha moment where they're like, hey, this product might be something, than to a result where they're like, I love this product. That's it. And so many people forget that. And the reason this is important is because the more complex your product is, or at least the core product loop is, the harder it is to sell. I know you're at a go to market webinar. You're like, why is TK talking about product? Here's why I'm talking about products. If you don't have a compelling product strategy, it's really hard to sell. If it's really hard to demo, it's really hard to sell. So the clearer your product strategy is, the simpler your product is. At least in the surface level, it can go deeper and the easier it is to sell. And you have to clear think clearly about how your market strategy gets them, the result. And when you reduce the number of clicks, everyone's oh my God on a demo because they're like, you did that in three clicks, and that takes me an hour. And that's super important. Here's the thing. That's a litmus test, right? No one cares about software. I use the thing. Your software is the thing. Fill in the blank for your startup and feel free to share it in the chat if you'd like to. You don't have to, but you can. I use the thing. That's your thing, that's your software, so that I can blank. Ultimately, great product, great go to market. Great market, great. Marketing and sales is about articulating the thing about the thing. What do they really care about? Because they don't care about the software, right? So the thing about the thing. I'll give you an example. With ToutApp, we had email templates, we had tracking, we had analytics, we had sequences, you name it. But none of that mattered. I used ToutApp or Outreach or Salesloft or HubSpot or 172 other companies that are now sales engagement platforms so that I can create pipeline. That's it. Create pipeline. That's all that entire category was about. Build your product so it is easy to buy. Meaning the more complicated you make your product and your product strategy, the harder it is to actually sell it. So you need to actually figure out what the surface level looks like and how to make it. And this thing around. How many clicks does it take to get to that initial aha moment? And the result will define how easy it is to buy and easy to sell. There are three golden types of SaaS. And I don't know if everyone's in SaaS here. A lot of you may be there's three golden types. That's it. And depending on what category you're going into now we have clients that are creating SaaS software for all kinds of niche verticals. We have clients that are going really horizontal. So it varies. But ultimately every SaaS business falls into one of the three things. Number one, it's a system of record. It's where you write stuff down. Number two, it's a system of engagement where you do the work. And number three, it's a system of decision where you analyze all the data. Now, the biggest SaaS companies do all three. Salesforce does all three. HubSpot does all three, the medium sized companies does one of them and the tiniest ones, the earliest stage startups, try to chip away at one of these and grow into one of the three. One of the three and then all three if you're successful. And so you want to think about which one are we. The reason I highlight this is there's a pecking order over here also. Systems of record, where all the data is stored is worth way more than a system of engagement. And. And a system of engagement is worth way more than a system of decision. Why? Because it's hard to become a system of record. It just is. And that's something you want to think about. Also, this is something for the PLG fans over here. I'm a fan of PLG. I just think it's overhyped. PLG has existed for 15 years, but some people want to make money off of it. That's totally fine. What we used to call it, and you can call me the old grandpa talking about it is you need to have a single player mode, meaning someone should be able to get in your product and get value from your product without having to invite another person. That's what you call a single player mode. If you think about your product as a video game, which my friend Rahul Vora talks about a lot, Founder of Superhuman and I love Superhuman and what he's doing, single player mode means that you don't have to invite another friend to enjoy your product or play the game. You should be able to play the game yourself and get some value and then you can invite other people for virality and that's super important in the go to market process. And the last thing is quickest path to aha. We talked about this a little bit. You want to figure out what is the first aha moment you can deliver in your product when someone's in it or. Or you're giving a demo, right? For us in the early days of tout, we needed to show how once you sent an email, you would be able to see when someone views it and clicks on it. That was our core aha. And what we were able to do was fake it. We were like, hey, send this test email to this test address, hit send, boom. And here's what it looks like when they view it. And we would trigger it in the back end. That was super powerful because people are like, oh my God, that's cool. I want to send more emails. So you want to think about how to get someone and get to an aha moment as early as possible. The Last thing is avoid the one more feature trap which we talked about. And given the amount of time we have, we want to now get into go to market strategy. This is why product strategy is important. Now remember, great SaaS businesses are built on market, product and go to market. Are you guys starting to see why market and product is so important to enable sales and marketing? Are you guys starting to see this? You start to see the power in making sure your product is easy to buy and easy to sell and you're going after a market that's worth going after and that sets you up for success. Even before you've written one email or paid for an ad or built any sort of go to market capabilities, are you starting to see the power and why this is so important? Hit me with a yes in the chat. That way I know you're with me. And then we're going to get into go to market strategy. Who's now ready for go to market? And I recognize you guys are like, it's 30 minutes in and you're finally talking about go to market. But you start to see where go to market is not just go to market. All these other things feed into go to market because if you don't have those things, it won't matter how good you go to market is. Let's talk about go to market traps. So this diagram right here is one of the core pieces of our coaching program, our go to market coaching program. There's only so many ways to get attention out on the Internet. Let's just say you pick the right market, you have your icp, you have a great product, and now you're like, cool, how do we take this to the market and so that more people know about us and then they buy from us, Right? Simple. So the question is, how do we do that? Now there's only so many ways you can do it. You can go direct or through channel. Direct means you are creating your own capabilities to reach your ideal customers. Okay, you can run inbound, you can do SEO, you can do social, go on LinkedIn and post. You can run ads, give a bunch of money to Mark Zuckerberg. You can also do outbound. Outbound is my jam. We started this whole space. You can send out emails saying, hey, here's what we do. Do you want to chat and get on a call? You can cold call them. Cold calling still works in 2021. And if your deal sizes are big enough, you can send them a FedEx envelope with something special and say, hey, let's chat. And that's worth it too. We have customers that do that because their deal size is 150k, like literally. So like we'll send a $20 FedEx envelope to our 100 customers that can afford 150k. That so that's direct. Now you can also go through channels. What's channel is when you borrow someone else's sales and marketing engine so that they sell your product. One way to do that is the easiest way is to get on marketplaces so you can go on the Chrome web store, you can list yourself in the Salesforce app Exchange, the Shopify marketplace, and that way people looking for your type of solution can find them through Shopify's channel or, or a Salesforce's channel and then they'll sign up for you. That's super powerful. You can also go to these people that have armies of salespeople and marketing people and say, hey, why don't you resell our product? You can go to these people and say, you can white label our product. This is where they put their logo on your product and sell it as their own. And you can also ask to co sell where you say, hey, your customer, when they're buying your platform, they should buy ours too. So bring us in on deals and we'll give you a cut. So that's co selling. And regardless of whether you're enterprise or mid market or SMB or you're going to use one or more of these channels to get demand. So your go to market strategy is going to be about which channels do we use, when do we use it, what, how do we build our capability in that channel so we can actually have a go to market machine. You guys with me so far? Now here's the thing. When it comes to going to market and picking these channels, there's one laws of physics type of thing. In the early stages, companies tend to be good at one. You would think, oh, let's do inbound and outbound and social marketplace. Let's do all the things. You can only be good at one in the initial stage. You can build your capabilities from there. Why? Because it's hard enough to do it in one. That's why. And so there's some traps that exist. So when founders get in, we try to avoid, we try to avoid certain traps. Let me walk you through some of these traps. The first trap is channels. Channels are the most attractive thing. You're like, oh, I know it can get that other company's people to sell our stuff. I don't have to hire sales. I Don't have to hire marketing. You can make a product led growth and it's free. That's one of the biggest traps. Because here's the thing, I ran the alliances organization in Marketo under SVP of Strategy. That was one of the, one of many things that I owned. We had a $60 million number that we had to hit in terms of source and influence revenue. And what I had was an army of people that were paid to have coffee with people like you. And we would have coffee with people like you and we would say, hey, like when you guys get to a certain, like, we should totally figure out how to get this to Marketo customers. And all these Martech companies are like, oh my God, we are totally integrated. Marketo, we would love for your sales team to sell our stuff. But here's the thing, until you've proven yourself in the market, we're not going to give you the light of day and tons of people will still have coffee with you. So it's super enticing, like, oh, they're talking to us, but they're not going to give you the light of day. We're trying to just map the field. We're trying to look at what companies we may potentially want to buy. We want to know what, what's taking traction. I also owned M and A at Marketo, so that's how we got our data on who we should potentially buy or what our roadmap should look like. It's a trap. It's a trap because these people will take you out to coffee or get on zoom calls, but will never co sell, resell white label until you're at 10 million, 20 million, 50 million ARR. It's a trap. It can take up a lot of your time, but it's not going to go anywhere. Now, could you win with marketplaces? Maybe you could, but not before. You at least get to a million ARR. Because marketplaces are driven by volume. The more reviews you have, the more attention you're going to get. The more attention you get, the more customers you're going to get. So if you're trying to kickstart the growth in the early stages with marketplaces, you're just not going to get there. You're going to give up, you're not going to get good at it and you only have time for one channel, right? So that's one of the biggest traps. You guys start to see this. The second biggest trap I see is we're going to do SEO. We're going to hire a content person, they're going to blog every week and we're going to optimize our SEO and then we're going to get customers. And I'm like, cool, sounds great. See you in 18 months. Hope you have Runway. Here's another problem with SEO. Yes, it's great, but one, it's very saturated. Two, it could be payoff, could be 12 months away. Because that's how competitive SEO is. So in the early stages, I'm not saying you shouldn't do SEO. I'm just saying it's a trap. Because when you start with SEO, there's such a long payback period. You just don't know when it's going to pay off. And you don't know if you pick the wrong market or the product slots or you just are waiting for the SEO gods to grant you traffic. And so that's a trap. And the last one I see all the time, they say something like 70% of every venture dollar goes to Facebook, Google and Amazon for advertising. And I believe it. You can spin up ads. You can buy a sales engagement tool like Outreach or Sales Loft. You can blast emails, you can FedEx your dream customers. You can do all those things. But you may end up firing blanks. You can. So here's the thing. When it comes to sales, I always built companies that, that sold picks and shovels. Why? Because I'm like, people are looking for the gold rush. I don't want to find the gold. I want to sell the pigs and shovels. So we became arms dealers. So sales engagement tool, arms dealer adds arms deal. We'll sell you the ammo, we'll sell you the guns. But if you don't know who the enemy is, if you don't know where you're firing, if you don't know what the messaging is, if you don't know who your ICP is, if you don't know where your market is, you will end up firing blanks. And I see this a lot. People don't do the work around what is our market, what is our value proposition, what is our messaging. But instead they jump to, let's send a thousand emails, let's spin up the ads. And when none of it works, they're like, I don't get it. Fire that person. This is why CMOs are 18 months stints. Fire that person. Let's get another one. And then you're stuck in the beginning again. So you may end up firing blanks. So what's the thing to learn here? Don't jump to execution. If there's one thing you want to learn about go to market and I think you know the traps and I'm going to tell you what channels to focus on. Don't jump to execution. How do you know if you're jumping to execution? Easy. Fill out this index card for me and you can do this right now and you can share it if you'd like to. But one sentence value prop is an exercise. I get anyone that's even looking at my channel or thinking about working with me to do my company blank. This one's easy. That's the name of your company. So put that in. Create software for who's it for? Blank. What's the ICP that helps them blank get the result? I'll give you my my answer. My company Unstoppable creates software for SaaS founders that helps them build a scalable go to market machine. And we don't really create software, we have a coaching program, but we treat it like software with that type of thing. I'll give you an easier one. Tout app. My company ToutApp creates software for salespeople that helps them generate more pipeline. When you have more pipeline, you actually hit your number easy. And the question is, can you answer it for you yourself? And by the way, I'll raise my hand right now if you were to ask me, say six months into ToutApp when things weren't quite working, I wouldn't be able to answer it. I'd be like, I don't know. We do email tracking. So to increase productivity. It was terrible. It takes time and the actual strategy work to flesh this out. And so I want you to ask yourself this if you can answer this and if you feel good about it, if it feels right or if you're forcing it. Because out of the go to market strategy work comes out these clear answers. If you don't have this, then how can you possibly be effective in writing an ad or writing a cold email or doing any of those things? It will never work. So there's a difference between strategy and execution. Strategy is fleshing out some of these core pieces that goes into a go to market machine. Execution is sending the thousand emails, running the ads, doing the blog posts. That stuff is a lot easier. If you have the right strategy, you if you don't have the strategy, then it's just rocks because you're firing blanks. You don't know what the target is, you don't know if the bullets are any good. None of it works. So you may be asking, so what goes into a go to market strategy right now. I tricked you. I know. I was talking about marketing, I was talking about product. But you already have half the things. If you actually follow this presentation. First thing is you want to think about your positioning and messaging. And by the way, one thing I'll remind you, all of this stuff sounds simple, but simple is not easy. Simple is hard. And a lot of this stuff, it's, I meet a lot of skeptical people like, oh yeah, we have positioning. I'm like, do you even know how to define positioning? Do you know what great positioning looks like? And I channel the founder that I was before Toutapp became successful because I was that arrogant engineer. I'm like, we already got the positioning down, but I didn't know enough. I didn't embrace sales and marketing. So we all fall in this trap. So these things may sound simple, but simple is hard. And that's one of the things to remember. So positioning is one thing. Positioning could be. What segment of the market are you going to start with? A lot of times they're like, oh, any company could use us. I'm like, that's not an icp. Amazon started by selling books online at a time when people didn't even buy online. Now they sell everything everywhere. So just because you're positioning yourself into a very specific category now doesn't mean you can't expand to world domination. But in order to win, you got to sell the books online. You got to start somewhere. Messaging. How do you. What's your one sentence value prop? This is one example of that. But also, what's your strategic narrative? Why should someone buy now versus later? This all goes into your messaging work. Value proposition. What is the value proposition that you would put in your cold emails or your ads? The one sentence value proposition that's super powerful as well, the strategic narrative. A lot of times I'll meet founders who are like, yeah, we're getting a lot of attention. But once they get in the sales call, they see the demo, they're just not buying. They're just like, oh yeah, we'll look into it. And immediately I go into, you need to think about your strategic narrative. Because your sales deck, your presentation is essentially asking, why do I need to do something now versus later? Because my default is, I don't need to do anything right now. I'm gonna do it later. If I can do it later, I'd rather do it later. And strategic narratives are the things that really craft. Here's the big change that's happening in your market here's what happens if you don't do anything about it. Here's what what's at stake, here's what you get if you do something and here's how we help. That's your strategic narrative and that's super powerful. And now you'll see how if you don't do the market strategy work, your go to market won't work because you won't know how to craft your strategic narrative. And when you do these simple things, which is hard to do, but they're simple and it complements things like your market segmentation. Meaning, are we a mid market target company? Are we a SMB type of play? Are we an enterprise type of play? Do we sell to the government? We just had a company that's in the program. They just graduated. So we have about 80 companies in the program. I've been running it for 18 months. And they sell purely to the U.S. government. And then we help them start selling to the enterprise. And that was a market segmentation, that was a strategic narrative thing. There's a value prop thing. And they just raised their $10 million Series A, which is incredible. So when you do these things, it really helps you unlock growth. So then you start thinking about what's our market segmentation, what is our ideal customer profile and what is our dream 100. How do we write down the hundred companies that should be buying from? This is what a go to market strategy looks like. And you can make a take a screenshot of this and you could pretty much pick any of these words and go to YouTube and search for Positioning Unstoppable TK and you'll get a video for it. You can do value proposition unstoppable TK and you'll get a video for it. You can do a strategic narrative unstable TK you'll get a video for it. Market segment icp, any one of these. You can learn more about it because that's what we do. We just put out content like crazy. ICP is ideal customer profile. That's your ideal. You want to create an ideal customer profile as a go to market strategy. So what are the three critical components to a go to market machine and a go to market strategy? First one, your ideal customer profile. This is what goes into detail. This is from the work that you would do from your market strategy, the work that you would do to say, hey, what segment of the market are we in? What is the big macro trend happening to them? What are the triggers? What are the things that are happening in their world that would make it More likely that they would use us. What are the systems they're already using that we integrate with that makes them a perfect fit, and they have a more urgent, important problem. Who are these people? Where do they live? What's the title? That's your ideal customer profile, and you really want to flesh that out. The second thing you want to flesh out as part of your go to market strategy is your strategic messaging. I call this a manifesto. I like calling it a manifesto because every company should have a manifesto, and that is your strategic message. And when you have that, everything else becomes a lot easier in terms of your messaging. Messaging is. And positioning is a very deep subject and most of us can't learn all of it. But I've learned that if you actually create a manifesto, then you can actually flesh out a lot of these key pieces that you're trying to communicate your value proposition, the macro trends. What happens if they don't buy? Now all these things go into your strategic message. And again, this comes out of the macro trends that you're finding from your market. This also helps you strengthen your positioning, your value proposition, your sales deck, the emails that you ride, the ads that you run all the way down to your website copy. One of my favorite things is when people apply to join our go to market program. I sometimes I get on a call, other times my team gets on a call and we'll always like, hey, I was looking through your website. They're like, oh, yeah, we're changing the website. And one thing I know when they're a good fit is like when companies are constantly changing their website and they don't quite know what to put on it. That means they don't have a go to market strategy. They don't have a market strategy. And that's super important to have. That's super powerful. The third piece is the Broadway show. So here's the biggest problem I see. The first big problem that I see with Go to market is that people will jump to the execution without doing the strategy work and building your ideal customer profile. And your strategic messaging is the strategy piece. Then it gets into the execution. And the biggest problem, the second biggest problem. You guys want to know what the second biggest problem I see with this is? People will jump to execution and then they'll be ad hoc about it. Every week they're like, oh, we should do a blog post. Oh, let's post on LinkedIn. No, let's do YouTube. YouTube is cool. And they're all over the place. And what we get you to do is Say, hey, let's run a consistent set of marketing and sales activities. Choose the channel that you want to get good, get great at, and then mobilize the messaging that you've crafted. Or number two, and be consistent about it. Everyone knows this, but they don't want to think about it, is you don't take action or anything until you've seen it eight to 14 times. It used to be eight, 10 years ago, now it's 14. Meaning if someone sees a LinkedIn post by you, until they see it the 14th time, they probably won't book a meeting with you or book a demo with you or try your product. That's just the truth. So what you need to do is run one consistent set of marketing activities in the channel of your choice with the messaging that you have, targeting the ICP that you have. And when you do that, over time, it compounds and you start to build pipeline demos, users, trials, whatever you're optimizing for. And so what I recommend is you think of it as a Broadway show, is one show, perfected it, and you run it every week on the channels that you want to be participating in every week to new people in your icp. And that could be through ads and that could be through social, like LinkedIn, that could be through blogging or YouTube. Pick the right one and then be consistent about it. A lot of people don't do that. And this is how. This is why these three components build on each other. When you have your ideal customer profile, your messaging gets a lot more specific. And you can build your messaging. When you have your messaging, then you run a consistent set of activities with that same messaging every week. And you test the data and you iterate from there. And that's the power of a scalable go to market machine. Do this over and over, you start to scale. This is something we did when we had 300% growth. How does this all come together? I consider that this is what I call the unstoppable sales funnel. And these are the three components that come together. You define your icp, you build your manifesto, and you run your Broadway show. And money appears. And when you do this clarifies everything. Your strategic narrative becomes clearer. When you have that, you can explain better to yourself, your team, your board, what you're doing. And that's super powerful. You can actually explain your website message. You won't change your homepage every week because you don't know what the hell you're doing. Your pitch deck becomes a lot clearer. This is why out of the 80 plus companies in the last 18 months, we've had three Series A raises, 3C raises, countless bootstrap companies that have Kickstarter growth because everything just becomes a lot clearer. And you can also mobilize your Broadway show because you're like, cool, let's take this manifesto to our icp, to the channels we care about, over, over and over and over. And we can scale that over time with more people, more, more dollars. And that's the power of this. Well, how do you focus? I would focus on direct. Don't waste as much time on channel unless you can really get a great co sell relationship if it's a partner. And we've seen this for some people in our program where they get this incredible partner and they're like, you guys are so differentiated in technology. We'll bring you in even though you're a startup. So we've seen that. But mostly you want to own direct and you want to actually think about inbound and outbound both. But you want to scale it over time. So you want to think about inbound social, that's easy and cheap. Then you want to think about ads when you're starting to see signals on social, you want to do outbound emails and if your deal size can afford it, you want to do FedEx. That's how you want. Those are the channels you want to focus on. And then over time, as you get better and better and build more traction, then you can start to think about SEO. You can start thinking about marketplaces and all these other things. And so here's literally the step by step of what I would do if I were you, right? Write a manifesto about the big change our software is going to bring to the world. Literally. Write the manifesto. Hone in on the messaging and the positioning to the most ripe segment of the market. Figure out what your ICP looks like, write the manifesto for that ICP and really get specific. Run a consistent Broadway show every week, every for every week. First to drive inbound through social, right? Start with social. LinkedIn is the best, especially if you're doing business software. Then once your messaging is working and it's actually like hitting people, then say, cool, let's take the best performing social posts and turn it into ads, spin it into outbound, and then spin it into partnerships to see what we can get. That's literally the playbook that I run with anyone that's part of my program, except we take it step by step. Are you guys getting this? And by the way, the two big things you want to Take away is number one. Market is everything. The product's gotta be easy to sell, right? That's the first thing. And then when you get into go to market, you gotta think about the strategy before you do the execution. Don't blindly go take a machine gun, fill blank bullets, not know where you're targeting, start firing away and then complain that no one responded to your emails. Won't work at the strategy down. That's your messaging, your positioning, your icp. Then you got to do the execution and do it in a consistent way in the right channel. When you're in my program, this is literally, and you should, you guys should take a, take a screenshot of. This is literally what we do in the program. Step one, we, we flush out your icp. How? Let's, let's go really detailed on it and we push you to get specific so you can be more successful. Here's a pro tip. The more specific your icp, the better your messaging. You don't have to be a world class marketer. As soon as you're starting a hedge on two, three different ICPs, your messaging gets watered down and sucks. So for step one is icp. Step two, we flesh out our manifesto and messaging. Let's actually what's our value prop? What's the manifesto? What are the slides? Let's flesh those out. Then we start to spin up your Broadway show using these two strategy pieces. We start with existing customers and get referrals. Then we spin up LinkedIn and figure out what's really resonating. Then we spin up outbound and then we spin up ads. And as you're doing all of this, we teach you exactly what data to collect, how to draw insights, and you can iterate over and over. So you can do this on your own. This is not rocket science or you can do it with me, whatever works for you. But this is literally the framework that I follow for building scalable go to market machines. This is it. This brings together everything down, everything that we've talked about in a step by step basis so you don't get overwhelmed. So there's one more thing I would put extra attention to as part of my go to market strategy. Now I know we're running a little bit over on time. We'll make time for Q A. Do you guys want the one extra thing? If you want the one extra thing, put extra in the chat. Otherwise we'll skip over it. Let's talk about the one extra thing. I would put extra attention to pricing. I remember this one. Time tout was in trouble. And it's no secret, ToutApp went through its ups and downs. And then we sold. And I, I Toutapp was in trouble. And so I called up my investors. I called up Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and I'm like, we gotta meet. And it was like, somewhere, 9am at their offices. We sat down. Mark's sitting across from me. Ben's over here. There's one other guy here, and there's another guy dialed in on a robot through the iPad. It was like one of those, like, weird meetings. So anyway, Mark's. All right, just tk Just walk us through where you're at or what's going on with the company, and let's just talk through it, and then we'll figure it out from there. And Mark talks really fast. You think I talk fast as you mean Mark? I explained, like, all the things that we've got going on. We were having some troubles with really figuring out how to profitably grow. And this is one of the things I tell people. Like, I. I haven't had the rosiest picture in my startup journey, but I've had successes, but I've had enough things go wrong where I actually learned. And, but. And that's where you learn the most, when things go wrong. So things are going wrong, and these guys are world class for a reason, because you think day and night about everything you're doing about your company, and you try to articulate to them, and within seconds, they're able to calculate all the permutations and say, okay, here's what we think you should do, which is incredible. And if they don't know, they're like, I don't know. It depends. And they're honest. And Ben Horowitz, I'll never forget this, because this advice has paid dividends for me and for other companies that I coach now. They were like, I just wish everyone in our portfolio would just raise prices. And one of the things I learned is we as startup founders have the same problem that artists do. And in a way, we're artists. We're creators of our products and our work, right? Artists tend to grossly undervalue their products. They don't charge enough. That's why you have starving artists, and sometimes you have starving bounders and starving companies because you are not charging enough. And your pricing strategy, this is something that it became so important. We built out an entire piece inside, inside of the inside of the Go to Market program is crafting your pricing strategy to make sure that you're optimizing for the right things because we tend to not charge enough. With ToutApp, we started charging $30 a month, then went to 49, then to 79. And now we sell at. At the time we sold, we were selling at like 1:15 per seat per month. And so we were undercharging, clearly. And you are probably undercharging. And so what you want to do is you want to be intentional about your pricing strategy. And the biggest thing you want to optimize for is net dollar retention. Net dollar retention is something that every SaaS company is gauged on. And the best companies that have IPO'd had greater than 100%. What that means is if they spent a dollar when they first got in, then by the time in year two or year three, they were spending A$50 or $40 or A$10. And that's how you want to create your pricing strategy. There's a few things and there's a lot you can do around pricing strategy. You can search on my YouTube channel again, you can do pricing strategy on stable TK and we'll link to the video below for a link to it. I have a lot on pricing strategy, but what you want to do is you want to make sure you're aiming for a net dollar retention of greater than 100%. It means that you consistently see an increase in revenues from existing customers. Right. And so often we forget that few things you want to think about when you're thinking about your pricing strategy. Number one, you're either the cheapest or the most expensive pick. If you're somewhere in the middle, then people get confused. This is a positioning thing, so you can be the cheapest. Look, we're cheaper than anyone else in the market. You'll get a certain number of customers or you can say, look, we cost more than anyone else, but we're worth it. If you're somewhere in the middle, then maybe you're not competing in the right way in terms of price. We were always more expensive than our competitors. We're like, we're the most expensive in the market. And the competitors that beat us eventually, they were even more expensive. So that's super important. You also want to add denominators to your price. And this is obvious because you're like, oh, obviously, like obvious for SaaS is per user. But one of the things I learned at marketo was you could actually add other denominators. You could add per instance, meaning we figured out marketing. Actually, we didn't figure this out. The Founders of Marketo figured this out and that's what makes them really brilliant, is they were like marketing teams are small, so if we charge per user, we're never going to make enough money. So let's charge per instance and per record. So what goes up when they use our product, the more successful they are, the more records they're going to have, the more successful they're going to roll it out to new regions. So we charge per instance and per record. And that made it where the more successful they were with our product, the more they paid month over month after month. And that's how you actually want to set it up. You also want to make sure that you do it based on per usage. Right? You can do it per instance, per record, you could do it per usage. The whole point of this is don't just think one dimensionally about how you're pricing, think about how you can set it up so that the more success they get from the platform, the more money they're going to spend with you. Because the best customers, they're going to be happily spending more money because they're more successful. They're like, yes, please take our money, we're making more money. And that's why it's super powerful. You also want to add ons. A lot of people don't think about add ons and you should add ons to your pricing strategy. You can add insights and analytics and charge extra for that. People are more than willing to do that. You can add control and auditing and people are more than willing to do that. You can add training and education. For some reason, services is a dirty word in SaaS. It's not. Services are phenomenal. You can scale them as long as you're consistent about it. Training and education is super powerful. People want to pay you to make sure they get the ROI on the investment they're making. So charge them for it. Create an academy. Create. We had Marketo University, we had tout University. Teach people how to use your platform and charge for it. And that's incredibly powerful as well. And lastly, this one is super powerful. Raise prices. Consistently raise prices. We consistently added, raised our prices and that worked really well because people were more than happy to do it. And lastly, you want to figure out how to tie the price, the business impact. It should not just be like, you're paying $79 a month, it's look, you're paying us 79amonth, but it's generating this much more pipeline, right? Like one of the things we say with our go to market program based on how it's priced is look honestly it's priced in a way where if you did one extra deal you'd make your money back and then somebody obviously you're going to do a lot more and you have a scalable go to market machine. You want to make it a no brainer type of thing by tying it to a business impact. One person asked why not in the middle? Because people don't know how to evaluate something in the middle. Right. They either know this is the cheapest, I get the most value or this is the boutique. This is the boutique and expensive one. If you're in the middle you can say we'll be in the middle but you're not competing on price. If you're in a category where pricing everyone is like beating you down on price, you got to pick one of the two and that's most SaaS categories right now. People will compare prices. The other thing was how to raise without making customers angry. Super easy grandfather, all the old customers and, and all new customers go on the new pricing. That no brainer do it that way. We've done it a bunch of times. Okay, so that's pricing strategy. So let's circle back. My promise to you was I'm going to teach you how to build a scalable go to market machine so you can 3x grow. And the way we started was talking about the really crazy stat of how few customer, few companies get to a series A and why you start to see no market need was number one. And we talked about why market strategy is so super important. You're getting out, competed, pricing is an issue. You don't have a clear business model, you don't have the right marketing, you're ignoring your customers. We've talked about how to make sure that you have the right product strategy and you also have the right go to market strategy. So these three things come together so you can overcome these top reasons why startups die. And it all comes down to this three things. Market, product and go to market. As we talked about, you want to flesh out these three things in a clear way. You want to flesh out the market strategy, you want to flash out your icp, the macro trends. The problem do you want to flush out your product strategy and you want to flush out your go to market strategy in distinct ways. And one of the things that I remind all the founders like in a way like I'm giving, I'm like their framework dealer, like the founders that I work with and the founders in my channel in my community, right? The thing I remind people is it's super depressing if you go on LinkedIn or TechCrunch or Twitter because everyone's just, there's a thousand unicorns a year right now and everyone's raising a $50 million round. What you gotta remind yourself is what stage of the journey you are in. This is hard work. This stuff is simple, but it's hard work. I'm not, I never lie to anyone. I'm like, this is not easy, but if you do it, then you can be successful. And that's why startups are so lucrative. But one thing I remind all the founders that I serve that are in my community, my unstoppable community, is you wanna rep. You don't wanna replicate the people when they're taking the victory lap. You wanna replicate what they did before, before they became the best. And this is a picture that I actually have as a downloadable in my program and I get founders to download it. This is Jeff Bezos in the early days of Amazon just cranking it out. This is Bill Gates in the early days of Microsoft cranking out. This is Elon Musk in his first company, just cranking it out. Go find a picture of your heroes. Not what they're doing right now, but when they were in the same stage that you're in, when they hunkered down and said, I'm going to figure this shit out, right? And we all know that there's no shortcut to success. But I find this to be a beautiful reminder of what the art of the start look like. And I think one of the tough things is there are so many people that share advice, but they look at it through the rosy colored glasses. They don't remember how much of a grind it is and how you truly feel. And so that's super important to embrace and remember and understand that this is part of a longer journey. And if you do the work like these guys did, then you can take your own victory lap. And that could be incredibly powerful. Powerful. And ultimately there's only two levers you have as a startup founder, either shipping code or closing deals. Ship code, close deals. It can get really overwhelming. But ultimately these are the two things that matter. You ship more code, then you see if you can close those deals, if you can close those deals and take the money and ship more code. If you can't, then figure out why not and go ship more code to fix that. And in a way I look at, as an engineer, I look at, go to market when I Take everything in a scientific approach, even marketing and sales is like shipping code. You may not be checking into GitHub, but you're checking into your marketing automation system. You're checking into your email marketing system, you're checking into the ad system. It's still code in a way. You're programming how your machine is going to work. And that's why I like to think of it as a go to market machine. It's still shipping code and then ultimately you're closing deals. And it all comes down to these three things. Market strategy, product strategy, go to market strategy. You want to flash those out. You guys all stayed. We're running over an hour and we want to do Q and A. But I do have a gift for you guys. But I have a five point SaaS growth strategy guide. And inside of it, I walk through each of these key components. I link to specific videos you can watch to flesh out your market strategy, your product strategy, go to market strategy, the five key growth levers that you have. And we have a one page startup strategy worksheet that you can fill out as you're looking at this stuff to flesh out your one page. I believe everyone should have a one page strategy. A lot of you are asking for slides. This video will be available online so you can rewatch this presentation. Slides aren't going to do anything for you. What we'll do for you is if you get to work. So go ahead and get a copy of this five point statistical strategy. You just need to go to getunstoppable.com strategy and you can grab a copy of it, put in your info and we will do that. So the last question I wanna leave you guys with is what would it take for you to actually implement these three critical components to a scalable go to market machine? Right? That sounds ultimately like a lot of people come here and they're dabblers. And I can't help dabblers that much because you may look at it and you're like, I don't know. The question ultimately is, will you actually do the work? What would it take for you to do it? This is my blueprint. This is how I think about scalable go to market machines. Step one, icp step two, manifesto, Step three, Broadway show. And then we go into all these things. So you got to ask yourself, what's it going to take for you to actually do this? Next up is the Q and A. We promised you Q and A and you guys have been loading up questions, which is option, which is awesome. So to close off on this, you clearly have two options for you guys. Like one is you're going to figure it out yourself or you can follow a step by step framework. Now here's how it works. If you work with me, nothing's held back. I run a very boutique firm and so we're very selective and want to work with the right people. And essentially the reason I do this is I already made my money. So I'm on a mission to accelerate growth for your startup. And that's what I do. And I want to remove the headaches and I want to get rid of the stuff that the gurus out there do because. But they haven't actually scaled the company. And that's why I created my go to market program. Here's the biggest reason why I started my go to market program. Okay? You can join an accelerator and you can talk to 24 mentors, all with different advice and you come to a corner and you still don't know what to do. And that sucks. Most of the gurus have never actually started and scaled the company. They just haven't. They were ex pizza boys. Now they read a book on marketing at the early stage. Here's the catch. 22 of everyone. You can raise 3 million bucks. And I had this problem too. But you're not going to get a world class VP of marketing or cmo. You can get some junior marketers that know how to execute. You can even hire an agency that knows how to execute. But no one can help you do the strategy work. And this happened with me. I was just stuck in a room trying to figure out the strategy work myself. All the free content. I have over a hundred episodes. You should watch that. That's our. We have a PLG model. You can watch tons of our free content. It gives you the high level, it gives you the principles and you have to figure out on your own. Ultimately, what I learned is go to market, fall on the founders to figure out. That's what that it's fraught with execution risk. It's just you in a dark room figuring this stuff out. You. And that sucks. And so I was like, how do I offer something where I'm truly your partner? I'm not an investor. You don't have to impress me. I'm a coach. I can help. I've actually done this and I can give you a framework to follow and help you go through it so you can execute, collect data and make those tough choices so you don't have to go at it alone. And that's essentially why I created my go to market program. We focus on three things. Number one, we clarify your market strategy. Number two, we help you develop your value proposition. And number three, we help you build and run your sales funnel. And it's a coaching program. So we're not an agency. We don't do the work for you. We work with you to make sure you have the right framework to follow so that you're not doing it alone. And then people in our program have gone on to hire agencies and hired built out teams based on the strategy work that we did and the initial work that you did and we did to actually get initial results. So you can scale from there if you want in on this. The better the fit, the better the results. The way it works is you can't just swipe a credit card. You have to apply to join. We'll get on a call and we'll evaluate if we can help. And if you can help, then we'll get right into it. So some of my team is here, They've set aside time to make sure they can meet with you. All you need to do is just go to this URL and you can apply to join. And you just have to fill out a couple of questions about where you are. The reason we do this is we're boutique age, we're boutique consultancy. So we can't take on everyone. We have a certain cap, we can only work a thousand founders. And so when you actually apply, you fill out some information and then we'll get on a call, we'll figure out where you are and we'll tell you if we can actually help you with the go to market program or not. So that's super simple. That's what we do. And on that website and on my YouTube channel, you can learn a lot more about the go to market program as well. And you can also learn more about it from that free guide I gave you.

Awesome, man.

That was fantastic. I learned a ton. And I'm a founder with revenue and I'm like writing down notes. Whenever we do these presentations, I tune out. Usually I'm doing sort of a fireside. So this was bomb, man. And I think a few key nuggets here, right? Like my last company, Speakeasy, which failed, it was in the sales engagement space too. We had Hiten Shah, who you probably know as an advisor, he comes in.

One day and he's lloyd, let me.

See your marketing plan. So I had this, you had this giant marketing plan of everything on there. And he sinks in his Chair goes.

Red in the face and he's bro.

Burn those fricking slides out right now. We pre product market fix born those slides down.

And he's, what's the one thing that's.

Somewhat working, that's generating leads? I said, it's outbound. And then he says, you know what, just jam more data. Don't start doing a hundred different things. Just do one thing. And that was my learning. And that's what you've conveyed through. Like you can get very far. One kind of customer, one kind of channel, one kind of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny when we say it now, right? Like the Amazon example, they started by selling books online and people don't realize in 1994, 1995, people didn't even buy. Like you couldn't, what are you gonna put in a credit card? PayPal didn't exist. Like, it was insane. But they earn the right to go broader. I think a lot of founders are afraid of really honing on an ICP because they don't want to limit themselves. But you don't realize you can always expand your TAM over time.

Definitely. Now, one question that probably is on everyone's minds here, right? What is your tool stack for this sort of trifecta product, go to market and so on? What is the tool set that you recommend to most?

Yeah, it's funny you ask. It's interesting you ask that. We had to put a lot of work to limit the tooling. It's very easy. Again, I come from Martech and we want to always sell you more tools. And we took a really conscious effort to figure out exactly what tooling should people be using. Our principles are the less tooling, the better and simpler the better. That's the principle we apply. So a lot of it is spreadsheets, and we have specific templates that we want people to plug into. So spreadsheets can take you really far on collecting the data on ICP work, on market trends work. And Google Slides can generate lead magnets just fine. They don't need to be fancy. So that's number one. Number two is we want to make sure that the product is very well instrumented. So we recommend a product tracking tool like Mixpanel to make sure that you are understanding what's happening inside of the product once, regardless of whether you're product LED or you're sales driven, to make sure you understand that. And then the third one we ask is you should have some sort of an email system. HubSpot works really well. And people that Work with us, get like a 90% discount on HubSpot because we're a partner. So you should have some sort of a CRM and an email system. That's the central nervous system for it. And you should have two free tools. One is Google Optimize and the other is this Microsoft click tracking tool. They're both free and they're really well done. Clarity is the Microsoft tool and that's it. That alone can be sufficient for you to host the manifesto and the landing pages, flash out your icp, collect the right data, and get the initial motion machine going. And then once you start to graduate from there, we can get into more sophisticated marketing automation systems, ABM systems, you can get into more sophisticated AB testing systems. But we try to keep the tech stack as low as possible. One of the things we found is a lot of marketers try to cover up for their lack of skill with excuses around tech stack. And the greatest marketers follow the same principles that they did 50 years ago. It's not about the tech stack. In fact, the tech stack often gets in the way. So we try to keep it as simple as possible so that founders can implement them or bring in their marketing team to implement it as quickly as possible.

You need the process nailed down. If the process is working really well, then you can find the tech stack that fits it.

Right.

That's awesome. A couple more questions here on your a product strategy. I think a few questions around more about the three golden types of SaaS.

Right.

You talked about the system of engagement and the value those you had those dollar multiples. I take that as being valuation multiples, but maybe walk us through those three.

Yeah. If you look at just SaaS today, the system of record as a company or valuation multiple or market share, market size or even their market cap when they're public is bigger. Salesforce as a CRM is bigger than what sales loft and outreach ever will be because a wider set of customers will use the system of records so that they can use the system of engagement in SaaS. What was the third one?

What was the third one?

System of decision. Decision, yeah. Yeah. And so that's traditionally your BI tools, your analytics tools, your AI tools. And if you think about it, if the system of record is the database layer, system of engagement is the application layer, the system of decision is the cherry on top. And if you don't have the system of record, these two things are not going to be useful. And these two things are never going to be good enough to be the system of record unless they really try hard. And so just naturally in SaaS there is those three golden types set the precedent of how big you can get. And sometimes the system of engagement is trying to displace the system of record over time. And that's okay. It doesn't mean what you start with is what you end up being. And so that's why I always get people to think about like where do you fit in the stack? Because it's a lot harder to sell a system of record or displace a system of record than a system of engagement. But you can get ripped out a lot quicker. System of records have the greatest retention rates. So there's pros and cons to each of these three golden types. Definitely.

And then my I have two questions here. One, I'd love to have you back sometime later this year on on referrals. I I love the referral stuff.

I read it.

Would love to have you back. We'll get hundreds of people again.

Absolutely. We have a. We we have some exciting stuff coming out around referrals. So yeah, love to. Please check out my LinkedIn. Grab your free copy of the Five Point Strategy Guide. If you'd like to work with me, apply to join the Go to Market program and literally BINGE Watch the YouTube channel. There's a lot of content there.

Awesome. And my final question is as you from your learnings and the companies you've coached, what is the order of hiring at a startup as they go from I'm validating the market, I'm getting the product market fit, I'm getting the product channel fit and now I'm at scale. What is the order of key people you've seen hired?

Yeah, it depends a little bit on your so I focus primarily in B2B SaaS. That's all we do. Mainly because that's what I've done. I don't like to do. I don't like to coach people on things I've never accomplished myself. And given that a lot of it really comes down to your average deal size. So if your average deal size is let's just say 50 to 150 plus, if it's a large average deal size then naturally you're going to have a little bit more of a sales driven motion. So you're better off starting to build your sales capabilities before your marketing capabilities. If you are a little bit smaller deal sizes then really the marketing has to do a lot of the heavy lifting and the salespeople are a little bit more order takers so you're better off hiring a VP of Marketing before VP of Sales or building on the marketing capability. And it's interesting you ask this because there's literally a video we did VP of Marketing or VP of Sales. Who do you hire first? Like we have a video on that on the channel where I go a lot more in depth. But that's the first thing. Once you have those two, then whichever one you pick first, the other one should come next. So I think it should be VP of Sales, VP Marketing somewhere along that you and you'll know. But as soon as you start approaching like a millionaire R, you really need to take customer success and renewals seriously and treat it as a separate sales process. And so you should hire a VP of Customer Success. And then once you have those pieces down, then as quickly as possible you want to actually get the founders out of the discipline of trying to build roadmap or build product features and you want to get a proper VP of Product discipline in place. That's the order of operations that I generally recommend to make sure that you're going through that scale journey to 10 million.

Awesome. We're 20 minutes past the top of the hour. I think this is the first session I've ever done that's extended 20 minutes.

Past people are still here, which is crazy.

People are still here, man. Knowledge Bombs Fire. Absolute Fire. Would love to have you back. Thanks everyone for joining us. TK Absolute Fire, man. Love and peace. Stay in touch.

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Thinking it was brilliant. Now I know that it's no way for you to build a unicorn. You need distribution to get growth in the truest form.