3 Things You Should Be Doing Better: Biz Dev, Customer Marketing, and Brand

This is another one that we all screw up to save money. It's a huge mistake. Do biz dev and partnerships earlier. Okay? What tends to happen in most SaaS companies is, you know who does partnerships in biz dev? The CEO. Right. Somehow the CEO builds a great relationship with mailchimp or Zendesk or someone at Salesforce or someone at AWS or someone at Datadog or someone. You're a great many of you will be a great partner to some bigger company, okay? And that will be great as CEO. And you will build this relationship and that company will be delighted to meet with CEO. Right? You may be CEO of a five person company, but customers and partners always love to meet with the CEO. Okay? Leverage those three letters. I'm the CEO. Okay? People will take that meeting. So CEOs are great to build BD relationships. They are abysmal at maintaining them. Okay, you met Bob, who runs this division at Zendesk. What about the 38 people that were important to Bob that actually make the partnership decisions? How many of them will you meet as a CEO? None. Okay? And all that great goodwill you had with Zendesk will just evaporate just when it gets good. Because none of the rest of her team will have ever heard of you. Right? And if you've built this magical relationship with Zendesk and your competitor hasn't, lean the heck in. Lean in on that relationship. And you know what? That may only get you two leads this quarter, but that competitive advantage and differentiator will last a decade. Right? So as soon as you have I broke this up into enterprise customers and partners, but on partners, if you have a partner channel that's working a Shopify, a Salesforce or Zendesk, as soon as you have any traction, somehow find the money to hire someone to manage it full time, to learn it left and right, to bring them cookies, to be at every event, to map out the org chart, to always be there. Because this is how you win. When you go long, it will work this year. And if you don't, your competitors will win. And the flip side is to go from 1 to 10 faster. It's a similar point. As soon as you have big customers, like if you're a startup, you have to shower them with love. So if you want to get this word of mouth going, if you want to build these references account, as soon as you even have two big customers, have someone just do nothing but manage them full time. That's how you'll grow faster. Not in a week. But take those big customers that you worked as CEO so hard to close and make sure someone sweats nothing but from dust and sultan making them happy again. You can't own this yourself. So, just in brief, one last thing that, like, we were a little late to figure out how to specialize sales, Something that a lot of us just really figured out in the last couple years is that customer marketing is the most important part of marketing. So what is customer marketing? Well, think about it for a minute. Customer marketing is marketing after you close a deal. Like, I don't know how many of you even have a marketer on your team. But go back and ask how much of her time she spends not getting leads, not working the funnel, how much of the time does she spend after closed one in Salesforce, it's usually nothing or a little bit. Or if there is some time, it's here or there, managing maybe a drip campaign, maybe a program. Remember what it took us a while to figure out in SaaS? Our best customers last a decade or longer, okay? They last forever. If you have net negative churn, if you have positive retention, if your customers grow more than 100% each year by revenue, that means as a corpus, your customers will last until the 23rd century, okay? Until Picard is here, okay? So you're spending all your marketing budget on that little period of time to build awareness because you don't have. You're stressed, you don't have enough customers. You're not growing fast enough, right? Give me revenue, give me revenue, give me new names. But what you really want to do is say, hey, I'm gonna spend 30% of my marketing budget on my time post sales. And if you do that, you'll start doing things that you wouldn't think to do earlier. For example, you might have a customer event this year, even with 30 customers, if customer marketing's your priority, right? But if customer marketing isn't your priority, you would never have a customer event until you're big enough to fill a room like this. But it turns out if your customer event is 10 customers and you just have two hours of content and a steak dinner, that may be magical, those 10 customers may get you 10 more customers, they may buy more from you, they may buy more of your product, et cetera, et cetera. So I said, After 100 customers dedicate someone 100% full time. That's a simple rule. But bear in mind, probably almost everyone in the room gets an F on customer marketing. And if you think about going long, this is an easy course correction to make. How much of my time do I spend on customer marketing? Not enough. 20, 30. A full time person at 100 customers, that's what you want. And your marketer's core goal is, is probably gonna be something on the funnel. It could be leads, it could be an opportunity commit, it could be MQLs, whatever it is, we all have different metrics on the funnel. We'll run out of time to talk about them. Today, your marketer and customer marketing, her number should be probably like CS numbers. Net revenue retention. Okay, I want you to do enough customer marketing so that this year. Great. Last year we had 120% net revenue retention. Your job this year is 130. So I want you to spend a year building a series of programs, events, communications, webinars, not just for leads, but webinars for existing customers. If you even do webinars, which most of you don't do, how many of them are for leads versus existing customers? Okay, they're probably all for leads. So if her goal is either is to drive up net revenue retention, these magical marketing programs will come out of the woodwork to retain and grow your customers. And so remember, it's a 10 year journey. And we all get this wrong. We all get this wrong even today, even at the biggest customers. But the very best marketers I work with today that are doing this the third or fourth time in SaaS, we talk about customer marketing, customer marketing, customer marketing again and again and again. Because this is how you go long is doing customer marketing. And this was just me, this was a slide I did. I started what is Adobe Sign echo sign in 2005 and then Adobe wrote this press release, this was a couple years ago. All these great salesforce companies, they have Groupon, Netapp, Tivo, Ceridian. Like I closed all these myself. Like they last, I closed these like a decade ago. If you close $100,000 customer this year and that customer grows to 500,000 over a decade and you keep them for a decade, how many millions of revenue is that from that customer? 1000-001000-00200,0004-000005-00000. Some of these customers that I closed a decade ago probably have generated 10 or more million dollars over a decade now for Adobe, not for me, but for Adobe. So this is where you don't invest enough marketing dollars in this, this magic. And this is how you build $100 million. This is probably how Amy Pressman pushed through that 20% growth year at 20 million and built a $5 billion company. So very last point, which Nick mehta who was here early for gainsight. I don't know if you heard him. We were talking years ago about how we all got this wrong. All of us old timers, we didn't realize how powerful brands were in SaaS. Okay? And what we didn't realize, even five, eight years ago, certainly not in the earlier days of SaaS, is that as soon as you get past the early adopter phase, no one has time, okay? No one has time. Early adopters, like that's probably most of your customers in this room, bless their soul, okay? God, what a mitzvah these people are. Okay? Instead of buying the market leader, which is five fine folks. I know you think these market leaders, I know your team says their software sucks and it's old and it doesn't do these things, but you know what? These are pretty good apps. These Salesforces and these old ones, they work pretty good. Salesforce is doing 120 billion in revenue. It's doing just fine. Yes, it is. Not as slick as it would be today, but they're just fine. Don't drink your own Kool Aid. They're fine. Brands matter. And there is this small group of early adopters that either because an existing market leader just doesn't work for them because they're doing something different. So they will literally seek out a new vendor or that's the most common way you'll get customers. Or once in a while, someone wants to take a risk. They want to see what's out there. They're bored of the 20 year old vendor. That's how you're going to get them. And then you're going to. That's like 5% of the market. And don't forget, after that, everyone's going to buy based on brand. Everyone, Everyone. And it's gonna happen to you. You will have a brand far earlier than you realize. And I wrote years ago this piece, this is too much text. But I wrote this piece years ago on saster that by 2 to 3 million you will have a mini brand. Okay? And it is true. I didn't feel that I had a mini brand at 2 to 3 million ARR. I talked with founders, I just worked with a startup that just crossed 3 million ARR. And we had this board meeting a couple weeks ago. He's like, I have 5% market share on Shopify +3 million. Doesn't feel like it's such a huge startup, but it's like I have 5% of the customers in this segment of Shopify. He has a frigging Mini brand. And if he doesn't screw that up, if he keeps shipping features, he's now getting pulled in as a default vendor at 3 million in ARR. People are now realizing, hey, if I want this particular vendor, these are the vendor of choice. It doesn't feel like it around the office. It's kind of an okay office. It's sort of a junky office in the Mission in San Francisco. But he has a mini brand and we don't invest enough here. So as soon as you have an inkling that you are even number one and two in any the smallest niche in your industry, I'm number one and two in my app, but only for gymnasiums or only for Shopify or only for pipedrive, or only an intercom. That's here, right? I'm number one, but only in the intercom ecosystem. That's magic, right? Like lean in on these brands because that word of mouth thing will just take off once you have a brand. And whatever you can do, protect it religiously. Like have a customer conference. Do billboards. You think billboards are stupid? Why do you think Zoom had them everywhere on planet Earth? Has anyone not seen a Zoom billboard in an airport or anything? It's great that actually Eric read Saster and learned about billboards and did them himself and then brought his marketing team. But he realized he had this brand and Zoom was magical. Even at a few million revenue, he wanted to spend every dollar he had reinforcing that brand, that thing. And so look, Bill, if you get a billboard tomorrow, it probably ain't going to get you too many raw leads. It might, but I will tell you, it will reinforce your brand. I heard about Zoom. I heard about mailchimp. You think everyone's heard about these apps? They haven't. It's early and you see the billboard and your friend at another company uses them. It works. So whatever you can do. We can't all afford 100 billboards, but you can go to the top events, do the customer marketing, do whatever you can. Because if you look at these, this chart on the right. I did this post a year ago. A lot of these top SaaS companies we know are getting into their third decade, right? Look at the top. Salesforce is turning 20. I mean, that means it's on its third decade and it's still growing almost 30% a year. ServiceNow 15. Mailchimp we just talked about, we think Mailchimp came out of nowhere. It's 18 years old, right? And so as soon as you have these brands, just lean in and go forever. And so, you know, there's nothing more frustrating as a founder when you have 10 customers, you meet a marketer and he talks about brand, brand, brand, brand. You got the wrong person. Okay, I need leads. I got 10 customers. Okay? But as soon as you're at 3 or 4 million, it's good to start talking about brand in those marketing means. What can I do to protect my brand? What can I do to invest in uptime? Is your app going down? Okay, maybe in the early days when you go down, nobody knows. When you have 1,000 happy customers, your app goes down for two hours, your brand is destroyed. If that happens three times, okay, it's destroyed the third time. You know, it's bad enough for Slack when slack goes down and it lights up the Internet, but slack is not a mission critical application. I love Slack. Probably a third of your room is somehow mission critical. Like, people rely on it constantly. If that goes down three times, you've lost them forever. So, like, that's a brand investment that you might not be thinking about, thinking about your brand. But brands last for decades. We all thought this stuff was ephemeral. A lot of us that especially that came out of like B2C or Web 1.0, we all thought these things would just like go away like a poof of air, like, you know, whatever. MySpace was killed by Yahoo and Google seemed to kill Yahoo. And like, they keep killing each other and these, there's all these ephemeral things. But in the cloud and the web today, everything lasts. Google not who killed Google. Like, Maybe Yahoo killed MySpace and Google killed Yahoo, but who killed Google? Nobody, right? Who killed Salesforce? ServiceNow, Mailchimp, Guidewire. Guidewire's on its third CEO. They just announced in 18 years Workday who killed any of these SaaS? Companies going, nobody. Okay? Nobody. So if you're ephemeral, of course you don't want to do these brand investments. But if you're selling for 30 years, you want to be the default choice, and you will be a default choice for somebody at 4 to 5 million in revenue. So whatever you can do, think about brand earlier than you ever thought you would be. I think that's all I got. So thanks everybody, and let me know how else I can help.