BSMS 59 - Setting the right foundation before driving growth

Brian Graf: Hi there, and welcome to episode 59 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf, I'm the CEO of Kalungi, and I'm here again with Kalungi's co founder, Stijn Hendrikse, who's a serial SaaS marketing executive and ex Microsoft product marketing leader. Today, we discuss why it's so important to set your go to market strategy and marketing foundation before you put Try and put effort into demand generation and growth.

If you're an executive in a B2B SaaS company that needs to grow fast or hasn't met growth expectations lately, the pressure can be incredible and it can be really tempting to cut corners and try and scale through quick wins and growth hacks. However, more often than not, these initiatives become distractions that pull you away from the effective strategy and you end up wasting time, money, and resources only to deliver subpar results.

On the other hand, if you take the time up front to do some good research, audit what's really working, what's not, and why, and make some really tough decisions about prioritization and focus early, growth is much more likely to be smooth, consistent, and ROI positive. We hope this helps you to build a great go to market strategy, convince the rest of your leadership team to buy in, and scale your company to the next level.

Let's get into it.

Okay, fine. Thank you for being with us again. Today we have a topic that I talk about in almost every conversation that I have with CEOs that are just trying to get their marketing off the ground. And it comes from a really good place, but I think that there's kind of, there's a misunderstanding in terms of how to effectively start your marketing or, or, you know, build your marketing team and your go to market strategy.

And that is Whether or not, and how far you should really invest into a go to market strategy before starting to tactically execute and deliver, you know, generate demand, capture demand. I have talked to a lot of different CEOs who, when they realize that they need to invest in marketing, right, they want to do it now.

They need to grow fast. They don't have time to wait or don't want to invest a ton of money in a marketing strategy and want to get going really quickly. But there's a lot of pitfalls with going too far, too fast. And I wanted to, I wanted to discuss those with you and, and so that our audience can, can make smarter decisions on where and how deep to go in terms of building a strategy before, you know, going out into the world and, and starting to run demand gen campaigns and start to try and generate revenue through marketing.

From my perspective, a lot of the things that drive CEOs to make these decisions and to want to go fast, right, have a lot to do with software production. A lot of it is, you know, we need to fail fast and we need to move forward . Let's just A B test. Let's try and run with it. You know, let's, let's be agile about marketing, but, you know, in doing so, they can end up, if they go too far with that, they can end up far away from where they need to be

The tests can lead them down a dangerous path, or they can not run the tests in the right way, and it can end up hurting them in the long run. So you've worked with tons of different companies and different industries across the B2B SaaS landscape. Tell us a little bit about, you know, your experience in having these conversations.

How have they gone with you and what's your typical response? 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, it's a tricky topic. Most people may have heard the term big M marketing and small M marketing, kind of referring to the things that are often seen as strategic, like your product marketing. Choices, your positioning, a lot of that, the piece that people talk about

What are the kind of products I'm going to market? How am I going to position them? What's the place where I go to market? Often these are go to market strategic choices. Am I going through a channel or direct? So let's call those the big M marketing questions. And then, But often referred to as small m is more the sort of day to day tactical execution, the demand chain optimization, the conversion tactics, the channels that you optimize for, etc.

And I think there's sometimes a faulty assumption that you can replace the first by the latter, that you can kind of figure out your strategy by doing a ton of real quick, short iterative testing. And while you need to test your strategy and you need to prove it. And that's why you have things like getting to product market fit and how do you establish a beach hat in a market?

And how do you figure out whether you, you know, found channels that you can really double down on and scale with good ROI. All those things have to be proven with real good data. data with testing, with iteration, et cetera. But the real early strategic work that you need to do to figure out, Hey, this is my total addressable market.

And what part of that is the part of the market that I can service, the serviceable addressable market, because that's the part of the market where I have a solution for the problem that we, that I think they face to then also make the jump to the SOM, the SOM, the, the serviceable, obtainable market, given that you have limited time, limited resources that you need to focus.

That doesn't start with some form of an A B test on a landing page you don't even have traffic on your website, maybe, when you're asking that question. You need to do a lot of more strategic work on a piece of paper, in a little bit more of a leadership discussion. And the same goes to the And branding choices and how do you want to show up and what do you want to stand for and what do you think the real personas are behind the ideal customer profile that you're going after?

A lot of those things in an early stage company are not easy to test yet as soon as you can, you should. And every time when you run, and we'll talk about that later in this conversation, Brian, that whenever you do, Execution. You need to be learning something all the time, but it doesn't mean that you cannot, that you can skip thinking about what is really the ICP.

What is really the positioning? Who's it for? What's it for? And it takes time. You cannot just shortcut that. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, absolutely. The, the, the curse of marketing, I think, is that, you know, everyone seems to think that they know how to do it. And while that could be true and it's good to, to get as many collaborative minds in the room as possible sometimes.

Absolutely. Often it can lead to the oversimplification of what a really good strategy is, right, and how effective it can be. And so, like you said, right, you really need to balance the strategy and the A B testing and execution in order to have an effective go to market and in order to make sure that you don't Look back six months after launching and realize that you're miles off course.

Also, I mean, from my perspective, right, I think the marketing without a clear go to market strategy, right. It's very easy for the marketing team to fall prey to randomization, which happens so often and can happen so often to marketing teams, right. Where again, because marketing is such a broad discipline and supports so many different functions within a business and everyone, you know, likes to think that they know how to do marketing.

Right. Everyone wants a piece of marketing and it's very easy for marketing to get spread too thin across too many initiatives to be effective without the right strategy, you know, Stein, you like to say that, you know, the Strategy is often more about saying no than saying yes and so having that strategy allows your team to really dig into the right areas and use the testing

you can use A B testing, you can use Agile methodology in terms of the execution, but dig into the right areas and say no to the wrong ones to make sure that you can actually drive the results that you need. 

Stijn Hendrikse: It's just so easy to get going with things like Google Ads it's also very easy to spend a lot of money.

on landing pages that are not really thought through, on ads that are not really designed well, on copy that's not really written by a good writer and, and if you do those things, then you know that those ads are not going to perform very well. You know that one will perform better than the other, and maybe you learned something.

But did you really achieve a goal there? Right. There's a real good balance to strike and I think you had a conversation at some point with someone in the Columbia sales journey who wanted to do things in two, three week iterations I think the word agile was used as a methodology and when you were kind of saying, Hey, it will take probably a month, month and a half to build some foundation to get some things.

Really created so that we can do the right campaigns and actually run the right tests. That was kind of hard. Can you talk us through that? 

Brian Graf: Yeah, like you said there was a there was a prospect that came in the door and and was really again We live in the b2b SAS world so very software oriented right and wanted To treat marketing like software development

and let's, let's map this out. Let's map out the marketing foundation and marketing execution in a timeline and let's make it agile. Let's go in sprints and we will just, you know, we'll iterate and improve and we'll fail fast, basically, was, was there. their methodology. And, you know, it makes a lot of sense from the outside

like, why wouldn't you want to just, you know, let's, let's be as efficient as we can and as focused as we can, and we'll move fast and yeah, fail fast. And we'll be, that will create the best outcome. But the problem is that, you know, in doing so you'll, like you said, Stein, you'll, you'll launch Google ads, right.

From the beginning to try and get. Get off the ground as fast as possible but if you don't have the right landing page, for instance, right. Or you haven't spent the time to build the right strategy behind the landing page and people don't convert on that landing page, how will you know if the reason people aren't converting is because the copy is bad or because the design's bad or because there was a break between the messaging in the ad and the landing page

or the. Or your CRM isn't set up right. And so you, you can't figure out, you know, what the right source of truth is. Right. There's so many different variables that impact the effectiveness of a marketing campaign that starts, especially with the agile methodology from zero in particular, but also if you're, if you're just trying to build up an underperforming marketing team, I think honestly creates more frustration and friction.

to create the Agile methodology than it is to build the foundation. The thing about Kalungi too, and not to pat ourselves too much on the back, is that we've, you know, we've done this a lot. We have T2D3 at our backs, we have a methodology, we have a proven playbook. The reason that we don't need to do Agile, is because we've already figured out the most efficient way to go to market

we know all the boxes that need to be checked, we know everything that needs to be put in place before, A campaign is launched to make sure that you don't end up wasting a lot of money or, or time or energy, right. On initiatives that may or may not pan out. And of course sometimes sure you could launch a campaign and just by sheer luck alone

time it right. And you happen to have the right messaging and everything, but. But it's impossible to know and the thing is, with marketing in general, right, is that there's too many unknowns, right, and there's too many variables. And so it's really important to control for as many variables as you can, right, with the right strategy, with the right foundation, before launching.

So that when you get that initial bunch of results back, right, you can actually use them and they can be actionable. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, the run game example that we've talked a lot about in football, and I hope the international audience can appreciate this as well, American football has a concept of either running the ball or throwing the ball.

And when you run it, It usually doesn't immediately work in the game. You kind of have to stick with it for usually multiple quarters. And quarters, of course, are a quarter of the game, so there's four of them. And what you often see is that teams, when they run it for one or two quarters, they start to get All kinds of insights on how the defense reacts to it and that's the learning that they use to then often get a lot of success with the run game in the second half of the, of the game.

But when teams then give up on the run game, maybe a quarter into the game, they kind of, you don't really use the learnings that you had and you, You're never going to see the, the yield, the yield results. And I liken this a little bit to account based marketing and marketing, but there's also other marketing campaigns that suffer from the same problem.

That a lot of what you do when you do marketing is learning on what is the messaging that's working? What are the Channels that work best? What is the copy that is in the ad that seems to get the right clicks or the conversion rates? Which markets respond to what type of influencers that we seem to be able to get engagement with?

Those things take time to learn. And, and the worst thing that can happen is that you try a lot of those things, and you just don't give them enough time to actually capture the learnings. And then you start doing something else. And now you waste both the investment and the opportunity. And it happens a lot in marketing where there's just so much impatience.

And, and there's this illusion that the data that you get in the first couple of weeks is enough to build some, base some of the decisions on that something is not working. And it usually isn't because you can, by definition, assume. that the first couple of ads that you're going to run, the first couple of landing pages that you're going to use for a Google ad, are not going to be great, because you don't know exactly what your audience is going to respond to.

So you, by definition, you know, even if you hit gold early on, that's kind of luck, you know, it's luck. You usually need a couple of weeks of data before you actually can say, hey, this seems to be not the thing that resonates, this is it. And this is the persona that we feel we get the best engagement from.

And now let's go double down on that and do a lot more testing to really optimize conversion, etc. 

Brian Graf: And even just you'll have to, you'll have to fact check me here, and this will show the limits of my football knowledge, but I feel like we can honestly just take that analogy one step further the people think of football as, you know, coaches reading defenses and, and improvising these beautiful plays that they have

and to maximize yardage and put as many points as they can on the board, but the beginning of every Professional football game, I wanna say that the first 25 or 50 plays are preset the team goes into the game with that series of plays set they know what is, what plays are gonna go to the point of, to your point of learning how the defense will react, which, which ones expose weaknesses in the defensive line versus the, you know, the backfield.

It's the same thing with marketing you can't go into a game without, you can't go into a market without a clear plan. To get yourself off the ground because you will become too randomized. You'll, you'll be reactive and you won't be able to put your best foot forward. Versus if you go in with a strong go to market strategy

you'll, you'll have those first 25-50 plays mapped out. Because you'll be testing a You'll be testing a hypothesis across different channels, with different assets, with different nurturers, right, with the right system in place to truly test that. And then, of course, you can start to test and iterate more as you start to get off the ground.

But you need that strategy to get yourself going. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, and it's just so important. When you think of the limited amount of resources you have, a small budget you have, when you start to do webinars, for example, you need to be ready to do five or 10 don't quit after two. That doesn't give you any ability to make it better.

Or a podcast or whatever you are planning to launch. You need to make sure you, you, you do a couple of things and do them well and sustain them for at least a couple of months so you can, can get the most 

Brian Graf: out of 

Stijn Hendrikse: it. 

Brian Graf: So, let's talk quickly about, let's get a little bit more tactical here. What elements do you think are really critical to get put in place and, and why, before?

Really starting to hit the gas on a demand generation tactic or, or something like that. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Well, we have, we work a lot with smaller software and technology companies, Brian, and making those companies look bigger is a very important part of the work that is foundational and things like credibility and dependability and secure and all those things are really critical for a B2B SaaS venture.

So, whether that's the way, you know, the website is designed, or the quality of the branding in general, the follow up on form fills, right, that the email follow up is solid, that there's no confusion with people, how they can unsubscribe from your newsletter. It's those small things that actually make you look bigger, if you do those well.

It's not about putting a photo of your team on the website, especially when the team is not that big. I, I see these teams who put that, they have a team, People, 50 people. And of course, the team is now 10 times bigger than when they were five people. But even putting a picture of 50 people in your web doesn't, it immediately makes you look small

because if you're really big, if you have hundreds, if not thousands of people, you wouldn't put a picture of the team on the, on the website anymore so all these things add up to when people first land on your content, whether it's in an email format or a podcast or a website, what's the impression they get?

So. Doing a few things really, really well there and being very buttoned up goes a long way and it's not just what you look like and what you sound like, it's also the automation, it's the technology, making the small things count. And we often get a lot of questions like, Kudos, Brian, for the SEO quality of things like Kalungi website and the follow up, etc.

And it's partly because I think we do a couple of things really well, and that's why things like SEO, et cetera, almost come automatically. Because when you do the basics right, that will be rewarded by how the funnel performs. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, that plays in really, really nicely into you know, we've talked about this a bunch, but just to reiterate it, right, having the right Ideal customer profile and the right personas picked out, right.

And having a really narrow focus on them. What you've basically described Stein is, is, you know, the customer journey, right. And, and really knowing that well, and creating a seamless customer journey from start to finish, right. For whatever target customer you're on, right. To your point, right. The website needs to look clean.

The landing page needs to target that persona in that. ICP, right, at that stage, you have to have the right thought leadership to bring them out of stasis. You have to have the right automation and follow up and nurtures to bring them down the funnel into the next stage once they get to that, once they maybe get to the demo, right, the salesperson has to have the right deck.

They have to have the right Intel on the lead and then you have to have the right follow up and the right tracking on the sales side to be able to convert them down the funnel. To put it, you know, to overly simplify, even though that's, that's not as simple of a process as, as some might think. And so really taking the time, I think, to map that customer journey is really important.

And I think we're going to probably beat the dead horse of Google ads, but it's a, it's a nice analogy because you're paying every time somebody clicks on an ad not to mention just the marketing effort and headcount spend that you're using on it. But if you're going to spend money to get somebody into a landing page, right, That landing page needs to look good and it needs to match the website in terms of branding and messaging right and there needs to be a seamless logical flow between all of that right to really convert someone down or to go on the flip side of the coin right and talk about if you were to go in an agile methodology and you were to to just do Google ads

maybe the Google ads perform really well. They have a really solid click through rate. They even get to the landing page and they convert on the landing page, but the landing page messaging and branding doesn't match the website and so they'll break after they, after they get to that point, or They convert on the landing page, but you haven't set up your automation system, right, and your CRM and then they get lost between the handoff of marketing and sales

or there isn't enough follow through there's so many breaks that can happen if, again, the foundation isn't set up correctly. 

Stijn Hendrikse: When I see a CEO and they're starting to do all kinds of Google ads and they're running, you know, Broad match campaigns, which basically means they're wasting all their money and they don't want to spend Money on really thinking about marketing and this this one start doing it I kind of say hey if you would run a traditional business let's say 50 years ago and you would run like a whatever a dine in and the way you would the Outside of the dining would not have really nice looking like windows or a nice sign Or not a great menu, but you would have people, you know, on the street kind of kicking people in Into your door right and and and pulling them in it wouldn't be a great experience

and this is kind of your storefront your digital storefront and make sure it looks good It's kind of basics 

Brian Graf: And if there's not right continuity between Your sign and maybe the flyers that you put out on the street, right. And the menu that you have in the window, you know, you're going to lose prospects and customers in that flow.

Right. And so it is, again, it goes back to the plan. I think what you're talking about too, in general, right. All these new tactics that are available to people, you know, X Meta, TikTok, you name it, right. That you can use to market. Don't excuse them for the need for the basic strategy that, that you're talking about, that was effective back in the day.

If you don't have the right positioning messaging for the right audience and the right compelling call to action, it doesn't matter what channel you're on and you're, you're still, you're, you won't convert or you'll find you won't be able to convert all the way. You'll only convert a third of the way and you'll be really frustrated and not know why.

I think on the more modern side of things I relate a lot of what you were just talking about to more brand plays and you can use even this podcast is a fantastic example we are building this and putting this out into the world without a ton of. Of measurement behind it

we can, we can measure downloads and subscribers, but that's not, you know, we can't, we can't measure how much that's going to hit the funnel or, or hit revenue. And so we're putting it out there because we have a strong marketing strategy. Idea of what messages we want to put out into the world and how we want to help our prospects But this is not something where you know, we're just a be testing a podcast We might a be test the topics that we talked about but we're not going to be a be testing the strategy But you could say the same thing about radio spots about TV ads Right?

Physical mailers, even events or books there's tons and tons of tactics that follow the same, the same thought process. And of course, you could tell me that, you know, Brian, there's, there's ways to track these things with coupon codes and the right links and all this stuff, which is correct

but these things, you know, especially these types of, of, tactics and campaigns are the things that the brand plays that you run in the background that grease the wheels of everything else. And that is something that you cannot measure, but it's critical to really an effective marketing strategy. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah.

And a lot of early stage companies are still doing some form of educating the market too. There's only so much demand capture and you need to do a little bit of demand generation. And that's hard to measure at an early stage. 

Brian Graf: I wanted to just quickly, I guess, reiterate, we've touched on quite a few drawbacks, but just quickly reiterate, I guess.

where we see some of the gaps. If you say you do go, you listen to however long we've been talking last 25 minutes and say, you know what? I'm going to go for it anyway. I want to move fast. I want to, I'm going to get off the ground. We're going to, we're going to get some market feedback. I don't need a strategy yet, I guess, from my perspective, just be aware of the risks that you're walking into.

Right. And, from what I have seen, I guess, it's very easy for marketing to become kind of a. A black box, which a lot of people complain to me about I'm putting a bunch of money in. I'm running a ton of tests, and my team is working overtime. They're there on the verge of burnout.

Right. But I can't tell what's working and what's not. It's it's some things that are coming in, but I can't tell why or, or how, and I can't, you know, I can't measure the ROI of my marketing team and it's just really hard to tell what's working, I guess. The other thing is that your, your marketing team, like we mentioned before, could become randomized by these tests

we're running all these tests and the results are telling us a bunch of different things. And so we're starting to go off in all these different directions and we can't really put a unified force behind the right initiatives. So again, working super hard to not Deliver the results that you need as an organization and then just well, no, I mean, that's that's really it You just you can just become inefficient and ineffective and and then of course because marketing is supporting sales and customer success Then those departments will start to get randomized as well.

I think that's that's the biggest issue that I see 

Stijn Hendrikse: It's a quote from Andy Jassy's strategic patience and technical impatience. I think it's totally fine for a CEO or founder to constantly be asking, what did we learn today? Can we run a new experiment tomorrow? And as long as those things are, are, are kind of, are they called leading indicators for success?

You know, whether it's the performance of an email or the performance of a specific ad, I think that's true, and you should be extremely short term impatient about that. Try to constantly test new things as long as you don't constantly change the strategic course whether it's a channel that you've picked and that you've invested in or a person that you hired that you wanted to really give a chance to build, for example, a good product marketing capability in your company

packing and the pricing strategy. Those things are hard to do overnight. So I think just striking that balance is really critical. 

Brian Graf: Yeah. The phrase that you like to use a lot is either results or learnings 

Stijn Hendrikse: yeah. If you don't get leads, you can learn something. Yeah, exactly. 

Brian Graf: Exactly. And that can be testing

that needs to be testing against that, that marketing strategy, like you said. Yeah, I mean all of those tests, right, that you're, that you're talking about are critical and you need to have, I love, love the strategic patience versus tactical impatience but they need to be, the tests need to be in service of the strategy or to validate or, or disprove, right, the strategy.

We talked in, we've talked a few different times about kind of what you need to look for in In a CEO as a, as a marketing leader and, you know, do they, do they get marketing or, or like you said, right, are they willing to put faith in you that you get marketing right? And, and allow you to lead them in that?

And I think a lot of that strategy putting the right strategy in place allows a CEO the comfort of knowing that this is all going in the right direction versus a series of random tests. They'll start to get, in my experience, they'll start to get impatient. They'll start to. Want to dig in because they don't understand where this is going

they're just getting a bunch of random numbers and it can, it can Strain, we'll say strain the relationship between marketing and sales or marketing and the CEO and not give you the air cover or the buy-in that you need to really be successful in the long run.

Okay, so you've spent the last 30 minutes listening to Brian and Stein talk about this and you've been convinced, right, that okay, you're right. Let's try, let's build the strategy the right way. Let's try, Put the foundation in place the right way and then we'll start to really go to market. What, you know, what benefits can, can you expect to have?

And I think from my perspective, right, it is kind of the opposite of, you know, what I was just saying, your team will have the right direction. They'll have clear KPIs that they're going against. They will be able to put full force behind the most important objectives, right, and say no to the ones that, that randomize them

they will be able to say no to, say a request for swag or an overnight request for a deck because they will know that they need to launch, you know, whatever campaign or run these tests they will understand and will be able to effectively push strategic patience versus tactical impatience.

They'll be able to do to create that customer journey that we've talked about right where they have a unified message all the way from the top of the funnel through the bottom of the funnel with the right assets in place, the right automations in place, the right tracking in place to be able to really effectively lead people down that funnel and then they'll be able to But because they have all those things in place, but the right tests and the right measurement in place to tell what's working and what's not and what needs to be changed all in all, this changes marketing from the black box where you pour a ton of money into it and you can't understand where it goes

or how much ROI you're getting out of it. To a, I don't know, a magnifying glass where you can really see what's going on, what all the different pieces are, how they connect and how they end up producing results and hitting your bottom line. Not to say that this strategy alone will cure all of your marketing problems, but it is a big problem to get out of the way.

And if you do this right, it makes a lot of other things much, much more simple. 

Stijn Hendrikse: That was a find, especially when a founder or leadership team gets really involved in this and is focused on it. It doesn't take that long. It's usually a couple of hours of really good strategic discussions, and then a couple of hours of follow up as a leadership team.

And then the marketing leader or the team or the vendor that you have to help you can get turned into something real in a couple of weeks. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, absolutely. I agree. If you, if you put your heads down and kind of really focus on it for a couple of weeks, you can, you can build all this stuff out. And so, you know, again, tactically, I guess what I would push for, right.

Is, The right ICP, the right personas, the right points of differentiation, your positioning against your competition solid brand book the right website, the right CRM and analytics let me see if the right content strategy and then you can start to get into demand gen. As well, I'm sure I missed something in there, but those are kind of the building blocks that I like to have in place before, before I even ask somebody or a client to start thinking about paying me for demand generation.

Stijn Hendrikse: And all this can start with doing customer testimonial interviews. It's a tip we always give. If you don't know, What to work on next? 

Brian Graf: When in doubt no matter no matter how mature your marketing function is the answer to that question is usually a customer testimony Okay Anything else before we wrap up?

Stijn Hendrikse: No great topic brian. I think giving marketers a little bit of Backing when they want to do the big m marketing pieces before they jump into execution. This is really critical. It doesn't mean You don't have to do both. I started when I did my first sort of marketing leadership, strategizing and started to work on the book.

This is a long time ago, 2012, 13. I think I had a graphic that you remember, Brian, the balance between short term and long term, and it's a graphic we still have, I think, in the Columbia sales deck. How do you kind of do things that have short But also diminishing returns because you need to show traction while also doing things that can get lags and don't have a, you know, a too low of a ceiling and that will help you pay the bills tomorrow.

And, the most successful marketing leaders are able to do both. It's not easy, but it's really important. 

Brian Graf: Yep. You got to keep the lights on while building for the future. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the Kalungi team for helping us make this whole thing work. And of course, you chose to spend your time with us. If you want to submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi. com slash podcast. Every time we record, we take one of the top three topics and jam on it.

See you next time.

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