Strategy, growth targets, messaging, and funnel focus: get ready to solve four of the biggest problems that B2B SaaS marketing teams face on a daily basis.
Identifying and eliminating these problems in your organization should be a top priority.
In Episode 65 of the B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks Podcast, we discuss how to unlock new levels of performance by fixing these common issues:
Get ready to tackle these common issues and get more traction tomorrow in gathering new customers through a better funnel.
B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks is one of the most respected voices in the SaaS industry. It is hosted by two leading marketing and revenue growth experts for software:
B2B SaaS companies move through predictable stages of marketing focus, cost and size (as described in the popular T2D3 book). With people cost being a majority of the cost involved, every hire needs to be well worth the investment!
The best founders, CFOs and COOs in B2B SaaS work at getting the best balance of marketing leadership, strategy and execution to produce the customer and revenue growth they require. Staying flexible and nimble is a key asset in a hard-charging B2B world.
Resources shared in this episode:
Brian Graf: Hi there, and welcome to episode 65 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'll discuss some of the biggest and most prevalent issues that B2B SaaS marketing teams face on a daily basis.
We'll cover problems with strategy, growth targets, messaging, and funnel focus. We'll also discuss how we'd like to go about fixing problems in those areas. Hopefully this is helpful for founders and marketers alike, as you use this to either identify and eliminate problems in your organization, or avoid them altogether.
Let's get into it. Welcome back, Stijn. Thank you again for joining me today. I wanted to bring up a topic that, that we get to experience almost on a day to day level, or at least every time that we take on a new client, definitely with Kalungi's work and also with the work that you do with your clients, every client that we go into and company has their own special set of marketing issues.
And some of those can be strategic issues. Some of them can be team issues. But I wanted to take this episode and discuss a few of the themes that we've seen in a lot of our clients. Some of the details behind them, and then some ideas in terms of what our audience can maybe do to avoid and or fix.
Those issues with their marketing teams. And hopefully in doing so can help to unlock some new levels of performance that they haven't been able to achieve so far. So let's just start with, you know, in your experience, what are some of the most common mistakes that you've seen at clients for B2B SaaS companies?
Stijn Hendrikse: So the first thing we always go to is how big should your strategy be? Strategy versus technical execution is an interesting balance. We want to make sure that companies are moving their marketing investments in the right direction. The right audience, the right market with the right value proposition, things like positioning.
But you also can overdo that. At what moment have you theorized enough and do you just want to get, get going and start building the ads and testing if the messaging works. And getting the creative out there and starting your campaigns and testing the different channels to reach your audience.
So I think small companies sometimes have a hard time striking that balance. They either jump into execution blindly and now they waste maybe a year in time and resources without really having thought about, you know, how big should my market be? How do I make sure I'm relevant? How do I position myself versus the position, versus the competition?
And then you have sometimes companies that are a little bigger, let's say 10 million in ARR that have an ability to actually really go beyond just optimizing their funnel. And, and just, you know, getting their ads to run a little bit better, but really consider a new go to market opportunity that they haven't invested in yet.
And they just don't take the time to think about it. They keep blindly executing the one thing that worked. And the book that I wrote, T2D3, is a little bit about that. When you get to that point, You've reached product market fit, let's say you have eight, nine, 10 million in ARR, you know, optimizing that one or two, there's one or two demand gen channels that work for you will only get you so much more growth.
At some point you gotta diversify your demand gen, you got to go and revenue expansion per client and get your churn under control, all these other things. So I think between those two. Like figuring out when is your strategy to ground and you just got to go execute and when do you need to actually make a little, some bolder bets and not just execute.
That's where I find most of the mistakes that we'll probably talk about in this episode derived from striking that balance as well.
Brian Graf: Yeah, it's almost about right sizing your go to market strategy and tactics to either your company maturity, your product maturity, or your marketing team maturity.
There are plenty of early, early stage startups that have huge ideas on how they want to go to market. And even can bring in a fractional CMO that builds this amazing strategy. But the strategy needs to be supported by a 20 person marketing team that the startup can't afford. That doesn't help.
Or it's that, you know, what the go to market strategy that gets a company from zero to one will not get them necessarily to 10 will not get them to 50. Plus. And so it is kind of constantly balancing the strategy that you build for, for the company that you're trying to support with it. And I think to your point, it's.
From that initial misalignment, there are plenty of other symptoms, I guess, that can come up. With, you know, targets not matching what your marketing team can produce to, you know, having the wrong messaging or funnel focus, or, you know, not the right people in the right seats to support the strategy.
But to your point, typically it does usually just start with. the strategy. So maybe you touched on a little bit on the kind of larger versus smaller companies, but is there anything else that you see that differs between, you know, larger and smaller companies when these issues typically arise?
Stijn Hendrikse: Well, if you're small, it's likely that your team doesn't, they're either really good at execution or they don't, they have some real good strategic thinking. It's hard to find all the different skills you need in a small team. So when you're a little smaller, The more you can find like T shaped marketers who can both execute well, but also understand how to think a little more long term is really, really helpful.
One of the tests I usually do when I'm involved in an early stage company, Brian, is I want to see if the team is able to write the whole positioning and the full kind of go to market strategy. Turn it into a one pager. A one pager could be two pages, by the way. It could be the front and the back of a page.
But to try to build both your positioning and your messaging, your value proposition. And sort of what's it for and kind of who's it for like making sure this is targeted at the right audience with the right from visuals to voice you're on the right brand standards all those things that go into making sure that you're both striking the right tone and looking bigger than you are except for the audience that you're going after.
If they can do that on a one pager, then they're ready to execute. And to go optimize, etc. But if they're not, then you probably need to do a little more strategic work. Because unless you can produce that one pager, it's very hard to imagine that the ads are going to be very good, the events that are going to show up, ads are going to be managed well.
Even the sales conversations are going to be good.
Brian Graf: I don't remember where I saw this, but there was a quote from Sam Altman that was saying that all of the most successful CEOs that he has ever met have been able to sum up their product and why it's important in about 25 words or less.
And so if your executive team can't do that, how are you supposed to market that product? How are you supposed to communicate its value to prospects? I completely agree.
Stijn Hendrikse: And the one page is kind of that, because you usually need that type of length for your claim, what you do. That's like half a page.
And then the other, the first half page is like what you're solving the problem, the market situation, the pain points, the customers that you're. And describing what they go through. And then you use the, if you get to the back of the page, you use that for some of your, whatever, testimonials, proof points and things like that.
Brian Graf: It is really, how can I concisely communicate this with some beautiful graphics. And good design behind it, but absolutely. I feel like I've seen in some of the smaller teams that I've worked with, you know, there's usually a big resource gap. The go to market strategy that they want to put in place is probably a little bit too big for the resources that they have at hand.
And there can be, especially with zero to one startups, but even just one to 10 million ARR startups. The question is really how can we prioritize the right go to market strategy, the small but very effective go to market strategy, with the limited resources that we have.
But the plus side, is that usually the goals for startups in that stage are relatively simple. It's a revenue target that needs to get hit. It's one market that needs to be, to be penetrated. It's one product that needs to be supported. So the nice thing is that it can be really a little bit more simple to align teams behind that goal.
One of the things that I've seen with some of the larger companies is that you know great the budget increases you can have Better quote unquote teams that are either more talented on paper, right or you have more bodies in the room, which is good but at the same time this is when you know diversification can be a double edged sword. You need to diversify to increase revenue whether that's your channels or the products that you bring to market or the markets that you play in.
But doing so can really put a strain on marketing resources and prioritization and incentives within the team. So I typically have seen more misalignment in larger teams. That can be harder to combat.
Let's just start talking about strategy a little bit more. You mentioned that a lot of it just starts with almost biting off a little bit more than you can chew. But talk about, let's say you mentioned quick wins and wasting a year there. Let's start there. Why do you think it is that? It's so tempting for companies to favor execution, that blind execution.
And then why do you think it is so, so critical to really take the time as painful as it may be up front to build the strategy before going hard into execution?
Stijn Hendrikse: So Brian, what really is the problem there is that they have not maybe reached product market fit. Because if you've reached product market fit, you have proven that the problem you're solving is important for a certain amount of customers.
And that they're willing to pay you and they'll stay, et cetera. And if there's a desire to do more and more experimenting without really having a good ROI business case for those investments, it always makes me wonder, maybe we don't really have product market fit. We just had some lucky shots. With both our marketing efforts and maybe some sales heroism. That's really where I would take that. And when I hear CEOs or founders get excited about you know, the lean startup method of quick experiments, that's of course, fantastic. If you have real short iterations where you're really learning something.
You're having a product feature that you want to show to, you know, your customers and see if they like it. If they will use it for that, you know, these sprints it's perfect. You can't really sprint through doing account based marketing because ABM will take two, three months before you basically build the good quality content that you need to have the high quality lists, fine tune some of the mess.
Not to mention the sales cycle. And then of course, turning those into revenues even harder. Leads are one thing, but then can you prove that this is actually becoming. ARR is much harder. And then if you, if you start those things that would take two, three months to really do well and learn from them, et cetera, and you cut the cord three, four weeks, and then of course you just wasted all that money.
An effort, because now you didn't win, but you also didn't learn anything, so you lost.
Brian Graf: Yeah, I like that. I think a lot of the companies that I talk to early on, before they engage Kalungi, all want that quick win. They all are ready, they're chomping at the bit to get revenue in the door, which I can understand.
And they have burn rates that they need to consider, and they have expenses that they need to consider as well. And so it can be really tempting to say, Hey, we just need to launch now and we'll figure it out later, but I think that The problem, and I think what you're talking about, is that we can't, we can't just launch and have that, that iterative testing go in place of a strategic hypothesis or knowledge of the market.
What you're talking about is, in that testing, we are doing it so that we learn about what the market wants and what our ICP wants and what they care about. In which case that's, that's great and that's absolutely what you should do, but if you're doing it in terms of how can we A/B test, you know, messaging or, or even like optimize ad campaigns.
You're skipping a step almost and you're going too far and I think you will regret it. The irony of it is, is that, you know, building a marketing strategy takes, I don't know, a month? Two months tops and in the grand scheme of things it is absolutely worth it. And so you'll actually end up generating much better results
You can't go straight into optimization and launch without that strategy in play and the reality is it doesn't need to take a month or two. It could take two-three weeks if you actually really focus on deep discussions on what should really our ICP and our personas be, how do we position ourselves, putting it into about one pager, doing some testing, you know, talking with customers, doing some testimonial interviews, seeing if what you think they would say is actually what they will tell you.
You can do that in a couple of weeks. And that's better than just, you know, starting with all kinds of digital execution. And hoping that you'll learn faster than you'll run out of money.
Brian Graf: It's just a dangerous game. Okay. So on that note, actually, that's a perfect segue. How important would you say customer communication and feedback is in building that strategy?
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, I always like to, to start with positioning and ICP assumptions from the team. And ideally a lot of the customer-facing team members. For them to tell you, Hey, these are the customers that it's easier for us to sell to. These are the ones that. And we have them on the phone and the customer success teams are most happy and they see the value.
And especially if you can let them ask, Hey, why is this important for you? Why do you see the value? Right? Then you can, you can get gold. And then of course you use some data. Which of these customers are. you know, having higher MRR. And better churn levels and all those things. But then you put all that stuff into kind of a thesis.
This is my ICP. This is my positioning. And you test it. You do customer testimonial interviews with your existing customers. And you kind of confirm that some of your assumptions are holding true. And then you also test it with your pipeline. You kind of see, Hey, what's coming in? That's converting a little easier just to confirm that the ICP we're going to select.
Is the, is the lower friction sale. Is the better fit. So I think you need to really do that, that's the experiment that you do have to run and you can do that in a relatively short time frame.
Brian Graf: Just one thing to keep in mind, Is that you just can't build your strategy in, in a room. You can't get into a meeting and build the entire strategy without going out and talking to the customers in some form or fashion.
So doing that to get a direction is fantastic. But then it absolutely needs to be validated in the market. Like you're saying.
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, the problem, you always have the salespeople that are going to be a little, if they provide the input, who are of course the closest to the actual prospects and what they ask for, but they're going to give you input that's sometimes a little bit too, I guess, careful or not bold enough.
But then the product people or the founder might be a little too bold. And oh, everybody will love this thing that we built.
Brian Graf: And that's a whole other, a whole other can of worms as well, is right? Making sure that the feedback that is given from customers makes it to all the teams. It's not only, you know, it's great if it influences marketing messaging, but if marketing is going to market with a message that doesn't match The one that sales gives or even the one that capabilities of the product, then you're in a world of hurt.
So that's another great point as well.
So let's talk about messaging. Now you mentioned the one pager earlier. What do you think are some of the biggest issues with companies building the right messaging that will ultimately convert. And, and really, you know, messaging is at the core of every single, every single ad campaign, every single go to market motion.
And so it's critical that you get it, but what would you say are some of the biggest issues with messaging that you've come across in new clients and how have you worked with them to fix it? It's very hard for an early stage company to not talk about themselves. You feel that you have so much work to do to drive awareness, to get people to even know about your great solution.
And so you'll end up falling into the trap of talking about your features, your capabilities, why you're the best thing since sliced bread. And that is of course fantastic. If you're testing if people actually mind, if they even care, but that's not really what you're trying to do. You're first trying to get them to even listen to you.
So the biggest messaging issue is really not, we have a framework called pain, claim, gain. To not talk about them in the form of their pains, what's relevant for your audience first, before you try to talk about what you're doing to solve that. And the claims. And then of course you always close with the gain, which is what people now miss out on if they don't end up buying your product.
Pain, claim, gain. It basically is answering the question, why should you care? And why, you know, about your company and then why now? And every early stage company that I'm interacting with Brian doesn't do this well. So it's kind of the most, the most easy. Quick win if you, if you can, can even improve that like a little bit, it will go a long way.
Brian Graf: I think that's a fantastic piece. I think the other, the other piece that I've seen and, and that will add in, or will, will contribute to the next topic as well. But it's just adding real value to prospects and, and customers throughout the customer journey. I think that There are plenty of companies, startups who, who don't know marketing, maybe they're more product focused or something like that.
And they will just say like, we, we just need to make content. Because that's what marketing is. And that's what marketing does. But they don't think about how we can really add value in that content? How can we, how can we answer real questions that our prospects have? How can we Help them with their jobs?
How can we establish ourselves as a real authority in the space and without asking those questions, finding the answers to those, the content can come across as very generic. The value propositions can be weak and it can be very difficult to, you'll, you'll run all the campaigns on all the right channels.
And, they won't convert because the content and the value propositions just aren't there. So I think combining that with what you're saying, you know, you need to pull somebody out of stasis, stand out from the noise, convince them to even look at you. And then have those, Those value propositions and that content that really adds value will, will go a long way.
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, now at the age of AI, all the messaging will get even more vanilla or it's already like I did today. A salesperson showed me a demo of one of those list building tools, ZoomInfo that allows you now to immediately when you're working on the list, you figure out who you want to contact to immediately write the email, all these things that you can do in ChatGPT, but it's completely integrated.
And it is so vanilla. So we were talking about there's probably five people who look at the same zoom in for a record, the same individual, and they click on that button, like generate the email, they got five similar emails. And all going to that same person. So this is where when you do, This well, you really understand what your customers are looking for, what they're going through, and you can talk to them like nobody else can, because you know them so well, that's how you can really stand out.
AI cannot replace that anytime soon.
Brian Graf: We gotta have a whole, whole separate episode on that that will come to you in one of these weeks, but, but I couldn't agree more. And then quickly, I guess, let's jump into more tactics. Like, let's say that the strategy's built. And built, well, one of the things that I've seen has been a funnel focus being an issue amongst like between the marketing team and say, executives.
Where it could be partially executives wanting quick wins, but. What's interesting is that in the notes, I feel like you, you're saying that marketers tend to focus more on the top of the funnel than the bottom. And I actually, in my experience, I've seen an executive want marketing to focus more on the bottom than the top.
So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. So in your experience, you've seen some kind of fluffy top of funnel campaigns that don't add any value or what are you seeing?
Stijn Hendrikse: So what you sometimes encounter, you're in an environment where there's maybe a sales leader, there's a CEO who answers every idea that the team comes up with, or every question they ask, or when they have a need, or they have a resource request with how many leads will this add to the funnel?
Or how much value will it add to the funnel? And the problem with that is that it's not necessarily an unfair question. Of course, when you're the business owner, it's totally fine to say, Hey, what's the bottom line impact here. And why should we do that? Yep. But it can easily kind of, because it's so hard sometimes to, to connect the dots of a very specific thing you want to test, you want to try like, hey, is this persona going to be interested in what we have to offer?
Okay. Is that going to yield us 12 leads next week? No, but we still need to know that because otherwise we're not going to build content for this persona, et cetera. So you have to be careful with funnel focus so that it doesn't become so artificial… Oh, let me show how much I care about the business.
And it shuts down any attempt to build some foundational insights or materials. And that's, I think where I sometimes see it get a little bit overused. And it doesn't mean that you can't always ask yourself, how is this going to impact whatever leading metric? We can define that will impact of course the business.
Brian Graf: Yeah, I think that's fair and I think we're actually pretty pretty aligned on that I think what i've seen is I have seen a lot of what you just said right of the CEOs and executives saying okay show me how this is going to impact pipeline right with every single channel And that to your point right is not necessarily that, that thinking won't get you very far with marketing.
It will work with one or two channels, but it will keep you in a purely, we like to call it demand capture mode. Where you're really only focusing on a small portion of the market. That's actively searching for your product. It won't allow you to capture or to start to convert those that aren't.
Looking for your product yet. And so my recommendation for something like this is to map out your customer journey from start to finish. And you really need to start building content and campaigns for the entire journey. And almost as a marketing leader, I would almost require that part of my budget and part of our portion of our campaigns are focused on the top of the funnel, purely focused on the top of funnel with minimal attribution.
Like say a podcast, for example, to use this. You're not going to get any attribution out of it aside from downloads and a kind of a vague indicator of traction, but you're not going to, it will be few and far between the indicators that you can see where you can actually attribute it to revenue.
And of course you can put a “how did you hear us” on the form. But you're doing it because you want to establish yourself as a thought leader, you want to join the conversation, and you want to add real value with zero friction to people. So that when they start thinking about considering a purchase or a solution, you are the one that comes up.
Stijn Hendrikse: And what really helps is that you then actually start measuring whatever those things are on a very regular, like weekly basis. If you build a product, software product, you're not going to measure how many products an individual developer ships. But you can measure how much code they check in.
And how many bugs they face.
Brian Graf: Yep, absolutely. And I guess the last thing on that is just because you don't have as many measurements or KPIs that you can track on those things does not mean that the pressure isn't on to ship on time and at a good cadence and really high quality content.
That, that absolutely needs to happen, but you just can't tie everything to revenue. It's a broader picture and marketing, especially marketing today with so much noise in the market and within the competition. You need so many different touch points. On a customer journey to be effective. And so you have to build out that top of funnel, more brand awareness content to be successful.
Stijn Hendrikse: Cool.
Brian Graf: Cool. Thank you, sir.
Stijn Hendrikse: Thank you.
Brian Graf: 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 for choosing to spend your time with us. As a reminder, all the links we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes.
If you want to submit or vote on a question, you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi.com/podcast. Every time we record, take one of the top three topics and jam on it.
Thanks again.