How To Efficiently Monopolise Your Market in 2024 (B2B SaaS)

okay so this one's for B2B SAS companies how to monopolize your Market in 2024 without needing to raise money by becoming a master of attention and building an efficient goto Market engine so how I know this stuff works what I'm going to be talking through is plain and simple because I've done it I've applied it for dozens of B2B SAS companies so we can see top left here is a B2B SAS company that I helped grow from0 to 20 million AR in less than two years completely bootstrapped still working with them today top right we can see some ad spend and results bottom left we can see the results of a a single ad within an ad account over the last 14 days this ad we're pumping you know over $15,000 per day uh profitably and the reason why I bring this up is because attention is going to be a massive pillar in what I talk through here and I just wanted to show the receipts that um I'm actually doing this in practice and then a quick background if you know it's your first time watching a video on this channel uh my name's Liam um my journey in SAS started as an SDR at an American scaleup I then joined an early stage startup where I had responsibilities across all of the goto Market um functions so sales trial activation retention Etc and then I actually went ahead and founded my own company which exclusively works with B2B SAS company so if you'd like to learn more about me you know the type of work I do the process the proof just go to dig.com and you'll be able to see all of that so by now I've worked with dozens of 789 figure B2B SAS companies and my sweet spots are demand generation go to market Sol in product Market fit and messaging development so to give some context as to what I'm going to be talking through in this document it's really really important to understand where where we are right now with regards to software um and What's led us here so in 2011 Mark andreon who's the co-founder of a VC firm and also a tech billionaire he wrote a famous essay titled why software is eating the world which described how quickly software was being adopted across the world and it predicted future Trends and he wasn't far off as we can see in this chart here by SAS Capital index so Mark wrote this essay in 2011 and so we can see here um if you look at this chart you know software just absolutely exploded um you know outdoing everything else um and this growth was catapulted even further after the world experienced you know the Big C in 2020 because overnight companies or or the whole world was first uh was forced to go remote and so the cloud-based infrastructure which is really a foundational element of software companies they're all cloud based um it actually served its purpose despite all of the the Skeptics who who think it who who thought it wouldn't um and so people didn't believe in software before then they certainly did when this sort of migration happened you know the world's educational system was being delivered um via zoom and so it held out and so things continued to grow uh peaked in 2021 where there were 121 Tech IPOs and so this was the largest number of tech IPOs that took place since the boom of the '90s so you can see here by University of Florida 121 Tech IPOs out of 311 total um you know the previous year 46 37 um and then we can see things sort of dropped at around uh 2022 so this is when the bull market came to an end and you know a significant amount of value was wiped from the market really it was a market crash and so companies went from these insane valuations just you know growth growth growth to move towards being default alive so this is a definition by Paul Graham and so below is an email sent from YC y combinator to its portfolio companies where essentially they're suggesting that um these companies need to lean up you know they need to cut their costs they need to extend their Runway if they want to survive um but by the time this email was sent as we can see on this chart you know it was just simply too late and so that's why in 2022 we had over 1,000 tech companies laying off 160k employees in 2023 we had over 1100 tech companies laying off 260k employees and if you look at 2024 you know we're only two weeks into the year and already tech companies have laid off thousands and thousands of employees so we're really still in the in The Hurt Locker and so why did all this um you know positivity this this high growth era um come to an end why did the market crash so a lot of things happened during this period before and during this period you know we had Russia invading Ukraine in February 2022 uh all the money that was printed and pumped into the global economy as a result of the big CA caused hyperinflation and just in general consumer sentiment changed after Big C you know as life went back to all as you know lessons didn't need to be delivered over Zoom but I think in the context of software we can really um we can really reduce it down to being known as growth at all costs which was really a culture that was being pushed during this period And so low interest rates made access to venture capital easier than before you know more companies were being started because entrepreneurs were now incentivized they could get funded they could build these companies to insane valuations with the dream of going public and getting their payday you know this was happening all around them 121 Tech IPOs in um 2021 and so this desire to take cheap capital and and ride this wave of software it just resulted in chaos you know companies threw money at problems because they had it long CAC paybacks were acceptable they were even welcomed by investors you know startups would grow um from small teams to hundreds of people within the space of a year uh they purchased expensive Enterprise software with the hope it would increase Revenue sales and profitability was really put on the back burner all in the name of growth and so this culture caused ineff icies and you know really incentivized bad behaviors at every level within an organization and so these bloated goto Market teams were just doing whatever um it takes to hit their growth targets even the wrong type of people were being hired because they just needed more people and so now we're entering the era of efficient growth operational and growth models that prioritize efficiency are really how SAS companies are not only going to survive um but become the next C category leaders um in contrast to their competitors who are bloated and and not prioritizing in efficiency and so now that the party is over access to Capital is harder um you know companies are really struggling to raise or the terms are just not favorable um and now that the fat has been trimmed we're entering a period where efficiency has now become you know the Hot Topic in town and so I've been fortunate to have a front row seat with SAS companies who were well ahead of their time and you know were being built in the shadows while all of this chaos was happening and they were able to do this because they prioritized attention they prioritized velocity um and you know most importantly profitability and so in this document I'm going to be outlining a very very small part of the methodology that we deploy in these companies and we continue to deploy today to really help them become these high high growth orgs and you know take market share from these incumbent category leaders who have become complacent but first really important to get something straight you know magic pills do not exist um after working with you know one to one with dozens of Founders and you know actually operating businesses myself most success can be attributed to sheer hard work and picking the right opportunity you know even the latest and greatest tactics are not going to work if you haven't built your company on solid foundations and this is why YC's uh why combinated slogan is build something people want it's not something crazy filled with buzzwords it's really really simple simple principle and it's because successful Founders they they do the basics well um you know as humans to live a healthy life it's recommended we drink plenty of water we sleep loads per night and we eat a healthy balanced diet but you know these are just the basics but it's clearly evident that doing the basics you know is in fact very difficult because most people don't do that and you know this would be the world if everybody did the basics well and so if you're looking for a magic pill that will solve all of your growth problems then this is not the video for you if you're looking for like short-term growth acts that sound great and you know just require minimal or low work then again this is not the video for you I'm not going to be sharing that uh type of stuff and if you're at the idea stage and your pre-product then this is probably not the video for you it's probably just not the right time because you need to focus on building a good product and getting those first paying customers but that being said if you have an existing product with paying customers paying happy customers and you're looking to build a repeatable growth process and this is going to be the video for you so let's jump in and I'm going to be talking through a bunch of stuff there's going to be like a bunch of resources um and so if you want access to any of those just shoot me a DM or email me and I'll send them over to you and so step one you really want to discover what your Market cares about you know people buy SAS products to solve a burning problem or to achieve a desired outcome and really your product is the mechanism to solve that problem and help customers get to the promised land so we've got State One which is where your ideal customers are now they're trying to get to state two and really it's your product's job to take them there and so most teams won't try to uncover these problems or desires they'll just make assumptions they'll cut corners and you know they'll copy competitors instead and so the outcome of this is usually surface level um ideal customer personas or Surface level buyer personas that just have firmographic and and demographic attributes you know firmographic is company attributes demographics Are People level attribut but if you want your message to resonate on a personal level and you want your campaigns to convert then you need to be able to read the minds of your target audience you know these firmographics they tell us the what the demographics tell us the who but to achieve resonance we must understand the why and this is where the psychographics come into play and the best way to do this is not by copying your competitors or you know looking at HubSpot blogs it's just by going to the horse's mouth which is your market and you know sure B2B purchase decisions are ultimately based on logic you know nobody's going to buy a 20K product because it makes them feel happy or makes them feel secure um but emotional resonance is especially important when creating demand in the first place because if if everything was just based on logic you know all B2B purchase decisions were based on logic then the first ad you ever saw from a company would just be a list of features pricing and then a phone number to call the salesperson and sign a contract and it would be done right it'd be logical um but these decision makers like BP SE Suite um they don't really have time to Surf around for products and so they actually enter the buying process at a later stage you know yes they might be signing the contract and they might hold the pur swing uh Pur strings but they enter the the uh the sales process at a later stage initially you'll be creating Demand with the end users and internal Champions who will influence that purchase decision upwards to the decision makers and so if you want to resonate with these personas you emotional buying is required ired you know they're likely the ones your product will solve a problem for so they they either have the problem that your product solves or they manage the problem that your product SS and so decision makers are going to have the final say over here on the left Champion these are going to be your internal Advocates um so they're probably responsible for the problem you know a department lead or something um and the end user is probably going to be the person actually using the product who feels the problem all right and so there's a lot of emotions within this you know feels the problem there's going to be emotional connection there responsible for the problem you know again there's going to be emotional connection there and so I have an internal methodology for this called desire Discovery and it helps us when we're working with B2B SAS companies to understand those underlying desires those challenges those behaviors that motivate buyers to purchase um and so if we look at the Three core human desires we have wealth Health relationship slm in the world of B2B you're probably going to be over on the the wealth side um unless you have a software product that can help people I don't know lose weight and and find their mate um skip this step though and you risk following the status quo and you just going to sound like everyone else and it is the safe option and it does work and it will generate results but it's not how you become a category leader and take the line share you know if you want to beat the competition you need to play at a different level you can't copy an existing Playbook um because everyone else is already copy in that Playbook uh and so yeah cognitive bias that affects uh software teams is uh the curse of knowledge so it's when um an individual communicating with other other individuals unknown only assumes that others have the background to understand so in in the context of marketing these marketers know their product so well inside and out and so they assume the target audience has the same level of knowledge and so it just means there's a disconnect between their messaging and Market perception and so one of the activities to um achieving this to actually understanding what your Market cares about is a voice of customer research uh so going to be going through some activities you can do to to do this so when it comes to scheduling interviews we want to select a varied group of customers I like to speak with customers who have recently converted as their motivations and challenges are still fresh as well as customers who have renewed uh a minimum of a few times so if you're monthly subscriptions minimum of like a few months if it's annual subscriptions minimum of um one year and that's because you know there's a reason they must have stayed um and so you really want to uncover those and as says here nobody understands the value of a product better than the ones willing to or who are already spending money on it right again you know we think our products are so great and we think we know what the value proposition is um but our thoughts are bias whereas if somebody's actually you know spending money on our product or putting their reputation on the line because if it goes wrong they could get fired they're going to understand the value of our product so it's really really important to uncover that um so I've got a a oneto one uh interview email here so send this email out to people to to get them on the interviews and just as like an FYI I've conducted a lot of interviews um most people don't want to hop on interviews it's plain and simple and so using incentives are going to increase your success rate by like 2 to 3x um you know you need to give and take make it beneficial for them so when actually conducting the interviews you want to introduce yourself and set the uh set the scene give them context you know you're taking their time here so be polite um really important that you have open-ended questions uh don't ask close uh close-ended questions so close-ended questions they can be answered with yes or no you really want to get the thoughts flowing that's where you really you find the the golden nuggets um and so if interviewees give you a vague answer you just need to dig deeper um and this is why interviews are the best option for research because you can ask them why like why did you say that how did that make you feel you need to go down those rabbit holes um and so a really important element of uh these interviews are the questions themselves the type of questions you're asking because you can uncover all types of insights related to you know who you should be targe in how you should communicate to them even how you should price your product and so if you want access to the questions that um I've perfected over time um just shoot me a DM and so really important that you turn these interviews into insights you know don't make them or don't make this process another checkbox exercise this is why companies um you know fail in the first Pace because they're just paying lip service to it and so information becomes an Insight when it is analyzed and the dots are connected so as we can see in this um illustration here you know data is just kind of all this Randomness uh you know gives you a bit of a headache um and then slowly you want to connect the dots you want to understand the context behind what they're saying you know where does it interconnect with other parts and so we're trying to identify patterns and insights that can be leveraged as wedges and so this is what I mean when I say a wedge right so these are little like wedges they put into these massive um pieces of rock right that weigh tons and tons but they're able to crack them straight down the middle with just a sledgehammer because they're using wedges so it concentrates the point of force um and so we're trying to um listen for the the type of words they use to describe their problems because that's how we want to describe their problems you know how motivated are they to solve these problems what happens if they don't solve these problems you know what happens if they don't get to state two what goes wrong because we can really um use that in our marketing to to stir up emotion and how do their problems appear in of importance you know we all have problems but what problems do they really really care about what problems are really burning deeply um because again we want to leverage those and at the end of this section I'm going to be giving you a framework so you can actually be a bit more strategic with uh categorizing these insights because if you're doing interviews and surveys and all this stuff it it can just get quite noisy and so it's really important that um you package them correctly so they can be used across the funnel all right um message mining so message mining is research and instances of um bi personas or ideal customers voicing their challenges desires and fears about your category so it lets you spot useful patterns and swipe you know this precise syntax used by your target audience so you can speak to them in a Common Language and Target pain points they care about this is kind of ties back to the um curse of knowledge you know B2B marketers or just companies they they use all these buzzword and jargon that you know their their Idol customers would never use all right and so message mining helps you speak to people in a language that resonates with them you know if you're going to explain a product to your friend at a bar or at a cafe um whatever you like to do you're probably not going to use all these buzzwords that marketers use all right so we need to speak to them in a casual language because that's what's going to stand out while everyone else is using these buzzwords and so I've got like a 34 Minute video on YouTube um uh about this message minding process that you can um watch after this but just to quickly explain the process so we want want to find the watering holes um and so the internet is filled with communities where groups of people with similar interests Network and seek advice from each other and in most cases you want the information you're consuming to be as close to the source as possible so a lot of content online is optimized for views and clicks this is not the information you want to consume right like these videos very low edited um I'm not going for like entertainment or wow factor I'm going for Value whereas a lot of blogs online um a lot of YouTube videos just a lot of content is all about engagement it's not really about value and it's not about truth um and so the more closed a community is the more valuable it's going to be because you know people um feel more confident to share you know perhaps things that are a bit vulnerable right so water and holes as you can see all these animals congregate around the water and hole to drink water we're looking for the water and holes on the internet where your ideal customers congregate so the type of places you can go to are public forums uh private communities and review platforms which is uh review mining I'm not sure if we talk about that in this video so just some examples of me doing this in the wild so his Discord I'm looking for uh so this is in the context of lead generation I'm in a Discord Community looking for people talking about cold emo lead generation on quora uh redit you know there's loads of subreddits about lead generation and then looking at reviews uh so going to like the um review pages of competitors or similar products you know there's there's lots and lots of gold out there perhaps looking at negative reviews to see what's wrong with those products to find those are like cracks in the armor um and so this example the same for a cold email to I think it is it only allows you to add one email inbox at a time which is very expensive compared to its competitors right that's like gold dust that's something we can use in our uh marketing we can use this paino that this person ex experiences into our own value proposition so other people are experiencing this problem you know it's going to resonate with them and then eventually you can create your own Watering Hole you know community LED growth is a massive thing at the moment um you know ideally as soon as possible you want to start funneling people to your own Community because again they're going to be sharing um insights they're going to be communicating with each other and you know you can learn more about what features to build you can uh start building a better product road map or a more informed product road map you know use the things they're saying for messaging hop on interviews with these people you know invaluable so again the type of things we're we uh the type of questions we're trying to answer is what words are they using to describe their problem you know how motivated are they what happens if they don't solve these problems and how do their problems appear in order of importance always as marketers or you know you're responsible for sales or anything like that always you want to be having these questions in the back of your mind and then um you know we do want to have a look at competitors but if you truly want to create a category lead in product then in most cases you will need to walk the unbeaten path you know do what others aren't and so the edge or these wedges are often discovered um from conducting your own research and then capitalizing on it you know Peter Teal calls these uh Secrets um and so analyzing competitors is useful for keeping a temperature check on Trends but avoid taking too much inspiration from them there's a reason why um when it comes to research I've talked about customers and go into your Market far more impactful than just copying competitors so as Peter till here says um basically all failed companies failed to escape competition right um You need to be operating in a lane of your own um so we got a private file here which isn't very useful for anyone but uh this will be I think this was um related to competitive analysis as you can see you know I do this I I live and breath this I'm not just um preaching stuff that I haven't done myself really really important so as promised um you know there's going to be a lot of data points here a lot of information a lot of noise it's kind of sometimes tough to make sense of it all um and so here's a strategic way to categorize those findings and so here um is a a horis it's based on thousands of hours of research and just really gives us um a mind horis to increase the probability of conversion so it might look complicated but it's not um at a high level this tells us that people are most likely to buy when they're motivated that's the M they understand the value proposition that's the V uh they are incentivized that's the I um and friction is minimized um because this is a detractor and then finally risk is um reduce so that's anxiety and so when analyzing your research you need to consider what buckets your insights fall into you know is it related to motivation which are desired outcomes pain points challenges purchase prompts or is it related to Value propositions which like features and benefits nice to haves deal breakers or anxiety which is like these uncertainties these objections they have you know perceived risk is this going to work for me is it too expensive all that kind of stuff our anxieties so if we go go back to this review that I showed up earlier this user of a competing product you know they're sharing their frustration related to features and pricing of a product and so this is going to be categorized under V the value proposition as it's related to desired features and benefits and so this is something you want to leverage in your messaging you know perhaps when they're uh lower in your funnel that's when you want to maybe start doing a bit more product marketing and talking about features and so that's when you will then bring that in like hey look with our product we have XYZ and kind of you know thrown Stone at the competitor all right so key takeaways for this section then so you want to view your ideal customers as people not companies although you might be selling B2B you're trying to influence people who have their own desires problems and biases you know really think about those end users those internal Champions who are going to be fighting the good fight um you want to collect insights from multiple sources to minimize your own biases like the thing with voice of customer research is it's good but you're speaking with people who have already converted have already purchased your product so probably going to say positive things right um and you want to close the loop on your research by categorizing it into buckets don't just let it be crazy noise and data you know connect the dots because then you can leverage those insights in your goto Market motions all right moving on so number two we want to develop a narrative with unique points of view so a narrative is an overarching framework for communicating your message so completing the previous step is going to give you the inputs required to develop a compell narrative um or very minimum uh hypothesis of what should be your narrative so you know these things are always Dynamic Ever Changing you don't want to just put all of your eggs in one barket uh basket and and stay with that um so you might just have a hypothesis of of what the market cares about and how you should communicate your message but nonetheless still important to go through this process um because most selling now takes place via online interactions having a narrative ensures your message carries the highest level of potency at all times when you're Distributing it via marketing you know your ads your email your content and also your sales your argument and your script just having a narrative is going to help you communicate the value proposition of your product more effectively um during sales so really really important and so if we take a look at competition um you know here's a uh an illustration of um the number of comp companies within G2 category so G2 is a review platform and it's just you know the the the market is crowded look at email marketing software there's over 500 products marketing automation 390 you get the picture there's so much competition out there and so standing out with a unique message is more important than ever um product categories are overflowing with com um competitive products like we' just seen the barrier to entry for building software has lowered due to advant advancements in AI you know the the sort of time frame for building a product has gone from like years to months due to Ai and that's no exaggeration um and the number of startups launched per year continues to to grow significantly you know people are more incentivized to start businesses now because of the financial upside due to you know um economic things that have been happening and also just because the barrier to entry has lowered more people um are willing to do it now and so companies with weak or absent narratives are just going to fail to stand out you know they're they're going to fail to get demand and subsequently going to fail to stay ahead of their competition whereas in contrast companies with a strong narrative they're going to be able to capture the line share of attention and so they're going to experience more growth um as a result and so having a narrative gives structure and direction to your message meaning it always ties back to your product's value and remains relevant and the further you stray away from this relevancy the weak at its impact really really important um I can't stress this enough the the having a narrative is sort of your your guard rails for your message you know speak about stuff that isn't relevant you know you're not going to create that loyal tribe you're not going to be known as that expert within your product category whereas if you are relevant people are going to think of certain things it could be you know cold email it could be paid ads it could be HR you know if you're in HR software um and they're going to think of you because you're the expert who's been flying the flag in in that place and so to build Authority in a category or with a niche you need to be relevant so when I say the following statements you know what tools do you think of you know I want to record a video of my screen I want to build an e-commerce store I want to send cold emails you know even though there are dozens of products that can provide solutions to these questions you most likely thought of one to two products and that's because you know they've they've worked on their narrative they've worked on building that brand Affinity uh with the market and so looking at the narrative itself uh key variables can be found below but I do have an in-depth video um running through a narrative so you've got core message you've got your audience you know it needs to resonate with certain people you've got story to really get that emot buying that you know that Journey from State one to state two and all the obstacles in between there and then how you differ from other Solutions in the market not just at a product level but a message level as well just how you resonate with the the market so recommend watching that video afterwards if you want to dig into that and so question here what's the difference between a narrative and product positioning so product positioning is something you need to Sol first because it's an input to develop your narrative you know without first having clarity about your product positioning you risk Distributing a narrative that people don't relate with or doesn't position your product as unique um and so you can also have excellent product positioning but nobody knows who you are due to weak narrative so really important to solve both of them product position is an input that you use to develop your narrative right you're selling a product here at the end of the day so you don't want to have all this great marketing um and then you know no product to back it up and so once you have your narrative you can then go on to become um the go-to voice of authority right and so just some context here so only 3 to 5% of buyers B2B buyers are in market right and this is based on research um and so only 3 to 5% of the market are looking to purchase a product at any given time and these are referred to as inm Market buyers because they are in market and so these buyers are the ones that you know search for high intent keywords they're booking demos with multiple vendors and they're scouting the market they are lwh hanging fruit and they come at a price a premium price as a result because you know they're in Market they're looking to buy a product so everyone's fighting for their attention and so if 3 to 5% of the market are in Market that means most of the market isn't actively purchasing software and these are known as out of Market buyers and so they might already have a solution in place and you know potentially their days weeks months years away from being in another buying cycle because you know they might be in annual contracts multi-year deals and so in most cases if your brand recognition is low these outof Market buyers you know they probably don't know who you are they probably don't know who your product does and it's possible they don't even know why your category exists or why they need a solution depending on how um competitive your Market is you know they might not even know why you exist and this this makes marketing really really hard um and so hence messaging that's exclusively focused on product marketing and hardcore to actions it results in a higher CPA because the results diminish due to saturation of the in Market buyers because it's such a small part of the market um and it doesn't resonate with out of Market buyers because you're pitching a solution they just don't need or understand you're pitching features and how great your product is when they've already got a product you know and so um a better argument needs to be formed as to why they should um switch to you and just a statement here yeah so people don't jump out of bed in the morning and decide to spend thousands on software you know people don't just click and add and buy software um unless it's really really cheap you know these purchase decisions often take months you know logical arguments have to be formed internally um but then also there needs to be an emot argument formed from you to them um and so you know this takes time and it requires um comprehensive marketing this is why B2B is so different from DTC is DTC could be impulse purchases right just buy a $20 t-shirts or some perfume whereas in B2B you know these are internal uh internal arguments need to be formed and so it takes time and so uh one of the most effective ways to do this is demand creation so demand creation is the process of marketing to these out of Market buyers and so the ultimate aim of demon creation is to achieve business objectives like Revenue growth right that's the aim of or should be the aim of all marketing is to grow the company um the leading indicators for engagement uh sorry uh demand creation are engagement metrics and really this is a a tough pill to swallow for most teams and most companies because you know historically they've been measured and incentivized to actually like paid commission and bonuses by easily tracked events such as form submissions so this obsession with software based attribution has led to companies incentivizing you know counterproductive Behavior such as prioritizing mqls uh through gated content because it's easy to track and it often leads to high volume of these mqls but poor uh quality leads that don't convert into sales um and so just because somebody downloads a lead Magnet or or you know a piece of content that does not mean they want to buy or they're ready to buy um your product and so a Telltale sign of a misaligned and immature organization is when they cele these high volume of leads and you know their their low cost per lead despite you know only a fraction of them actually converting into customers you know marketing is celebra and they've hit their lead goal but sales is kind of wondering why half the team can't hit their quota and so really really important uh if you want me to dig deeper into this type of stuff it's a very um broad topic uh K do but this is this is a problem this is a plague at SAS companies you know marketing and sales just completely misaligned um not rowing in the same direction and so this sort of um short-term Behavior can be uh categorized as lead generation it's a lead generation um mindset where marketing and sales don't work together they work in isolation so marketing is focusing on generating leads and sales is focusing on opportunities so if you pay people you know whether it be commission or or bonus probably most likely bonus in marketing based on the number of leads they're going to get they're going to do whatever they can to get the number of leads but that doesn't necessarily connect to sales right because not all leads are created equal um and so in lead generation they have these short-term behaviors that don't align with how buyers purchase software and so as a result they generate low intent leads you know these gated content where you have to give your email to download a an ebook or something like that um and what they're doing is they're assuming intent they're saying okay well this person has downloaded a piece of content they must want to buy a product let's Hammer them with cold emails let's get the sales team to call them you know let's focus on them them when in fact no they just they just want an ebook they don't want to purchase your software right and so this is known as the mql hamster wheel in contrast to demand generation where Marketing sales are aligned they're aligned on what matters which is pipeline velocity and revenue growth you know marketing are they actually have um a business objective on their shoulders rather than just getting leads you know they're actually um incentivized uh for the company to grow and so this incentivizes long-term behaviors that you know Ed at the market and it enables buyers increasing the volume of inbound leads and declared intent conversion so assumed intent is hey somebody's downloaded our product they must want to uh sorry somebody's downloaded some content they must want to buy our product we're assuming they have intent whereas declared intent is somebody who has requested a demo for example of your product um so clearly they have declared I want to engage in a sales conversation far far higher intent than somebody who's downloaded a piece of content and so here we've got um the the 99% um and the the 1% rule so even if somebody doesn't click engage or take action on your content they're still consuming it the purpose of that content has been served and so this historical obsession with marketers having complete visibility means that companies have been biased towards tactics that involve software attribution instead of tailoring their approach to how people actually buy you know marketers are Mar um markets today are way too competitive for you as a company to be forcing buyers to play by your rules you know they would simply just go to another company where the buyer can play by their rules right and so let me uh Riff on this just for a bit right um so if you post like a piece of content such a small amount of um such a small percentage of The Impressions on that content are actually going to result in engagement right people liking commenting or or visiting your website but there's still the the 99% of those impressions that still might have watched your content or you know might have seen it on their feed um and there's a lot of influence happening with that 99% but marketers and companies have just been so obsessed with this 1% um where you know that they're just leaving so much more on the table and so they've always optimized for this 1% which is just then incentivize the wrong behaviors and so here's um um again some proof of this so this was a data set published by an adte company so they analyzed $42 million in in ad spend um 90% of the budget was allocated to lead gen campaign so people saying hey download this piece of content uh give us your email and we'll send you this ebook and so on average these companies paid $126 on average to get a lead which is really just an email just a contact email which you can get for one cent on um data platforms and it took 333 of these leads to get one customer which is a 0.3% conversion rate right absolutely terrible and so the ad uh ad CAC payback so the you know the customer acquisition cost for these campaigns on average was 21 months 21 months to break even on acquiring a customer right um and so is the demand waterfall methodology still the right methodology to be following today when we're entering this era of efficient growth right probably not right this is the growth at all costs uh mindset just paying stupid money to acquire leads and so um we've talked about demand creation kind of sets the context what's the most effective way to to create demand um and we'll talk through that now so the the btb buyers Journey has changed you know before a prospect searches for these high intent keywords on Google or or books are cool with your sales rep uh which is where software attribution starts you know they the the form submission um adds the contact to your CRM you know they've they've already done their research they've they've already fleshed out their requirements they've watched content whether it be yours or your competitors and they've spoken with their peers to get an honest opinion right they've gone hey who's using this tool what do you think of it right this is what happens um and so there are dozens of similar competing products offering all similar things and so buyers have many options they don't need to speak to sales reps to get their information right they don't need to speak to a a really young sales rep who's incentivized by short-term commission they don't need to speak to these these people um to get their information they'll just go to YouTube they'll just do a Google search they'll just go into their private slack Community with all of their peers and just go hey who's using this software and get an honest opinion and so they can do all of this research without ever actually engage in your company and so if most of the buying process is happening before the sales call then why would you not want to influence this like critical part of the buyer Journey you know the the sales call that's taking place really that's towards the end of the journey that's just where like the then it becomes commercials and and a logical argument and so content is one of the biggest levers to influence uh this part this beginning part earlier part of the buyer Journey um and therefore demand creation and so even if your target audience is not in an active buying cycle they's still going to be consuming content you know LinkedIn meta Tik Tok YouTube all of these social platforms today they're the new television channels I couldn't tell you the last time I switched on the TV and and watched a TV program but I do you know watch YouTube occasionally and uh other social media platforms right and you know research here people on average spend two and a half hours on social media daily I know people that do a lot more than this right and so people are always consuming this content um and as we can see here some of these SAS companies these are all high growth SAS companies they understand this they're posting content you know um G from lire uh instantly I think this is cognism cognism Adam Robinson so uh bootstrapped a company from Z to 20 million AR and he's saying you know he's basically um hammering home the point of how important content has been for that um you know these guys actually reduced their sales team significantly and their growth increased because they focused on demand creation not focusing on like um you know this this sales Le methodology can't remember this company over here I think it's like um hype Fury or something but you know these companies are all high growth they're all extremely profitable because they they know the power of demand creation and so companies who fail to effectively create demand they struggle with high CPAs or high CAC because nobody knows who they are you know they're they're trying to convert cold audiences while having minimal brand Affinity in the marketplace and so as a result they just sound like every other company who's pitch slapping they're just being commoditized they're just being compared you know on features and pricing because nobody knows who they are there's no trust there there's no liability whereas on the other hand companies who do understand this you know all of these companies they're harvesting more attention because they're Distributing constant value um and insightful content that their target audience actually resonates with you know not every piece of content is pitching their product they've taken time to understand their audience and and build um you know these content engines that resonate with them they're increasing Authority and Trust by aligning their content with the overall narrative ensuring it means relevance all of these individual pieces of content connect back to their their narrative that they're trying to push so they remain relevant they become authorative figures for specific topics you know gets to the point where you start searching keywords on YouTube or Tik Tok or anywhere else and these are the guys that are coming up because of a solid narrative and so they're decreasing their CPAs in CAC because um they're creating this halo effect um with content and so people um you know they cons they're consuming this content on a daily basis and what that content does is it creates this halo effect where when eventually these people do get retargeted or or targeted with your ads they're like oh yeah I recognize those guys I know who they are um and so it has this positive effect which is often invisible but it's happening um and so that means you know they go faster and and more efficiently and so this is the impact of content right imagine you just have this virtual Army of sales reps who are Distributing your message 24/7 365 you know no sick days no holidays um that's what Authority content does you know wherever these people go wherever they're scrolling through Linkedin on their phone or watching YouTube videos you're there Distributing your narrative and so none of these Brands right none of these people they just woke up one day and became content experts um they're able to consistently post this value based and authorative content because of systems right really systems are the the OS of of a business and so um I've got some resources here on how to build these content engines I actually recorded a a 90minut video course um for a director of marketing at a B2B SAS company which I'm giving away to you so if you want access to any of this just DM me and I'll give it to you so content ideation how to come up with content ideas I have a live walkthrough of me doing this with chat gbt I have a live walkthrough of me doing this manually so I generated 17 content ideas in 13 minutes I timed it all how to actually create the content then um so like Frameworks even I've got a bunch of templates here that you can use to create the content hook templates Frameworks to follow all that kind of stuff really giving you the cheat sheets so there's no excuse and then systemizing it all building the engine um you know when I record this video I don't edit it I don't upload it you know there's a system on the back end that happens so that you know I'm focusing on the highest leverage tasks just like all of these guys right they don't edit their own videos there's a system behind it how they can reformat these videos to post them on other platforms to um really amplify the the impact and so I talk through that um so just let me know if you want access to that and then finally um so we've well not finally uh the next one um is how to build an efficient outbound goto Market motion so this is more focused on Authority content outbound really really effective um go to market Motion in 2024 and it's how I know it so impactful is because almost every B2B tech company uses it uh for customer acquisition you know it's a really reliable method uh that was popularized by predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross he helped build the inside sales team processes at Salesforce no really knowledgeable guy um and I'm I'm a big out outbound Advocate you know I started my journey in SAS as an SDR doing outbound for a living getting rejected for a living um and outbound continues to be a source of revenue for my companies and you know across my client portfolio outbound is is a key uh growth driver however because everyone's still running the same Playbook from 2011 it's become much harder uh over time as companies have just rinsed and repeated the same playbooks um and you know even according to research SDR performance has steadily been decreasing so here we can see over time this is the the quality conversations um number of quality conversations that an SDR has per day you know it's dropping um you know lore of shitty click-throughs marketing tactics over time the results diminish um and so these results diminishing combined with companies aiming to be default live this kind of desire for efficient growth the current way of doing outbound and everything associated with it is being questioned rightly so right you know the average salary of an SDR in North America is 57k I think it's actually all the way up to 80k I saw another source um so this is just off one source um you know the entry cost of popular data platforms to fuel these outbound motions is you know $10,000 a pop per um you know annual contract the entry cost for the sales engagement uh um software to actually send these emails again $10,000 a pop so it's really really expensive um and so this predictable Revenue operating model it promoted humans enabled by technology whereas the new model promotes technology enabled by humans you know it's faster better and cheaper and so the old way was scaled by people it was inefficient because scalability was limited you know you needed more people uh at you know 60k a pop it's expensive because the people and tools are expensive it's risky you know just the at like a a technical level the way these emails are being sent they're all being channeled through the primary domain which results in primary domains being blacklisted unfortunately people don't like being cold emailed and so they um a percentage of people will report your emails as spam which affects your primary domain and it's just flawed because because we're putting such a impactful goto Market Motion in the hands of what are often the most Junior people within an organization right typically sdrs are people fresh out of University wasn't my case but still really young very Junior you know um a lot to learn in the world of software and we're put in the responsibility of our goto Market uh outbound go to market motions in their hands right and so it's just fundamentally flawed and so the new way new way is skilled by technology it's efficient because it's infinite scale it's just we're leveraging code right we're just leveraging compute power rather than people it's cost effective because an an individual's output can be significantly increased with this leverage and so we're also reducing the costs and overheads because we require less people um risk mitigation we're using some technical controls to basically preserve your primary domains reputation and also enable horizontal horizontal scale and it's not fundamentally flawed because in this model we're using marketers who know copyrighting they know how to leverage code and they can manage this all programmatically and so this is where we enter growth Ops which is a new trend that's happening right now so if we look at the evolution of growth marketing I'm not going to go through all of this but this is where we are here now the era of generative Ai and so with the recent AI boom and automation being more desirable for companies who want to efficiently and effectively scale their outbound go to market motions there's a new requirement for skills and competencies that has emerged you know the the growth Ops uh and the growth Engineers marketers who sit within this department they already exist you know there's Innovative SAS companies out there I could share a bunch of examples of these companies who are already ahead of the curve and have already been doing this um for years already um however the requirement to build custom systems and processes has become lesser over time as the market heats up when new product so these companies who have been ahead of the curve they've built these bespoke custom systems to do this however with the tech available today you know this this just isn't a requirement you can do it in house and as a result of this 80% of what an SDR does on a daily basis can be automated today there's no doubt about it you know researching leads personalizing emails adding leads to a CRM you know manually clicking send in a sales engagement tool because all your tasks are queued up you know I've done this um and a common objection to all of this is you know is AI really that good um you know AI will never be able to write an email as good as an SDR can and this is just completely false um you know if we break the activities an SDR does to personalize those emails and we break those activities down into their individual parts we then discover the building blocks which we can use to build a system which can be executed programmatically that was a mouthful um but as we can see here you know here's me being complimented on an email that I sent and they're asking like how did you determine our ICP you how did you do research on these companies and you know spoiler alert this was all done programmatically because I you know yes I had to build the system and I had to um kind of do the backend but once that backend was set up you know I can email thousands tens of thousands of leads um and it's just going to execute programmatically so you know this is a big Trend we're going to be see um we're going to see H well it's already happening but we're going to see more of it more companies adopt this this this growth Ops um function and so um some flows of of how this you know you can use this generative AI really basic flow and this is what most sdrs do is you know they visit a prospect LinkedIn profile you know they determine what university they went to and then they create a personalized message based on University like uh this is classic with American sdrs like hey noticed you went to University X go bucks or something like that you right they that's how they personalize their emails whereas we can go super Advanced of AI um that would take you know several minutes for for a human to do so we can visit the company's LinkedIn profile we can determine how many marketers just checking we're still recording yeah we can determine how many marketers they have at that company if uh the company has more than five marketers we can continue because that's this company now become becomes qualified you know um otherwise not qualified we can use the company's website to determine their ICP we can research that ICP to uncover demographics and psychographics and then we can create a personalized and relevant email right and so we're just going to absolutely blow these people away showing hey look I've done this research where whereas under the hood it's actually being executed programmatically um but I will say AI does still have its uh limitations um and there will always need to be a human element the point here is that the majority of what happens today can be automated and you know one thing is certainly true is the future is lean we just do not need these um people intensive teams to be doing all these tasks manually a lot of this can be automated and that's really where you know the growth Ops function come comes into into play with these these growth Engineers who understand marketing they understand how to persuade but they also understand how to build systems there's going to be a massive massive uh demand for these and there already is this is what we're already implementing um for companies we work with Okay so taking it a step further with intent so we can estimate that 5% of buyers are in an active buying cycle so these in Market buyers but how do we identify these before competitors do right everyone's going to be fighting for their attention how do we get there first um and or how can we identify when when these out of Market buyers do move in Market because it's going to happen eventually we don't know if it's tomorrow next week but how do we identify when that happens and if you've done a lot of outbound you'll know that timing is key you know the amount of responses I've had they're like oh yeah we're actually looking for XYZ at the moment like good timing um so it's absolutely key and so there are lots of tools out there today that can help you do this they can help you target the right person with the right message at precisely the right time you know some examples of different triggers when a new job advert is posted um you know you can trigger send an email and what this means is you know that maybe company is looking to expand into a particular Market or uh a new team you know they're expanding their sales team they might need some sales software or marketing software to give you an example um we can trigger uh campaigns when a new technology has been installed so perhaps they're building out a new capability perhaps they've installed your competitor and you want to provide an alternative opinion um a negative review has been posted on platforms we can monitor this and Trigger um um flows you know so perhaps company is dropping a ball and you know they need assistance in a particular area somebody visits your website you know they could be browsing options they could be in Market they could be solution aware looking for Solutions and so you know we want to follow up with them and this is sort of one of the most basic ones um and look at here so this is a series a company um you know quite known in the software space and they've attributed over 46% of their growth to outbound using the signal right so they work um you know the proofs in they're put in and so just imagine if you could monitor your your whole Tam and just know exactly when companies within that Tam are showing purchase intent right you can today and you know the response to the setting up these triggers and the response to those triggers can be fully automated you know when somebody comes in Market you can be the first there um you know providing some some support and so companies that take advantage of this will be able to move um past these previous inefficiencies and focus on higher leverage tasks such as demand creation and sales you know the the whole aim of this stuff isn't just to have this fully automated AI um run business it's to automate or try to automate most of the stuff that was previously just taken so much time you know you do not need expensive people doing these manual tasks you know put them onto higher leverage tasks that are going to increase your sales velocity increase your your Revenue sales and try to automate um as much as possible OB lower leverage tasks and so in 2022 uh in context of outbound you know you are ahead of the game if you're using secondary domains inbox rotation and domain warming but today this is all the base standard you know if some of this stuff I'm saying to you like um using secondary domains and all this kind of stuff if that's you know new to you then apologies but you're already behind the game you know this was New Years Ago um and it's quickly becoming the base standard quickly becoming adopted um and so as the market sophisticates you need to level up if you want to stand out just using secondary domains and um sending more emails you know that's not going to get you ahead you need to level up you need to be using you know these um intent um signals you need to be using generative AI to get ahead right and so yeah if this is news to you apologies you're behind and I actually recorded a short loom video breaking this outbound engine uh down in more detail again know if you want access so key takeaways of this section high growth out found go to market motions are going to be scaled by technology not people people are still very much in the picture but they're going to be focusing on high leverage tasks growth Ops will emerge as a critical function to enable this um actively monitoring for purchase intent will help you get there before competitors do really help you proactively um spot uh purchase intent or when people are moving in Market okay so I think this is the final one pour in fuel on your narrative with paid media so notice how this the sequential order here paid media um is is once you've kind of figured the other stuff out and so paid media campaigns are guaranteed distribution to Ideal customers you know um you can get your message in front of Ideal customers right and so but if the message you distribut is bad whether that be related to the offer you know your overarching narrative or the ad creative itself you're you will struggle to succeed with paid media you know just using a channel such as paid media doesn't guarantee it doesn't uh entitle you to results right it's how you leverage the channel this is what I see with SAS companies they're like oh we're running paid ads and it doesn't work for us and then you scratch beneath the surface and they're just doing it terribly um and so just just paying Facebook to run ads isn't going to uh get your results it's actually the the tactics the methodology of how you do that is what gets the results because everyone else is doing it uh so historically paid advertising has been quite technical um but all this technical stuff the tactics like you know campaign structures bidding strategies all these optimizations these have just become table Stakes you know you can learn this stuff within a few hours or you know just um uh a week on on YouTube you can learn all the technical stuff whereas today most of the leverage and paid advertising is via the creatives it's creative Le when everyone's following the same tactics and playbooks the same campaign structures the same bidding strategies you know all that stuff um it's the campaigns of most residents that stand out and so this is messaging that speaks directly to your target audience uh your target audien's fears wants desires and interest so this is why PID media has come now and developing your narrative has come first you know using a healthy mix of campaigns and not just exclusively focusing on product marketing uh to effectively create demand remember those out of Market buyers probably don't care about your features um and so we want to get that emotional Buy in with demand creation and then consistently testing different ideas Concepts in a systematic way to maximize ad spend you know the the example I showed you at the beginning I think I'm about to show you again you know this is the result of testing new Concepts um you know in a in a scientific approach it wasn't luck you know we we engineered this ad to to go viral and nobody has ever beat the competition because they had the right bidden strategy in place right just doesn't exist um so ideally you're going to form and validate your narrative through efficient channels first and then you can take the winning Concepts from those channels from your outbound campaigns from your um Authority content to then scale them and get guaranteed distribution with paid media you know if you failed to do this if you kind of mix the order of events you're going to pay the price and that might be absolutely fine if you've got the capital to do so and you know you'd rather get there faster and pay the price but for most companies if efficient growth is the priority then I really recommend you know coming up with the narrative validating it through organic channels and then when you hit the nerve scaling it with with paid media and so looking at the campaign hierarchy that we use you have your narrative at the top depending on if you want to create demand or capture demand um you have these different campaign buckets so these are the ones I recommend you know don't put all of your eggs into one basket just you know exclusively launched product marketing ads because what of that doesn't resonate and so you always need to test which variables resonate with people so demand creation thought leadership content product marketing social proof whereas demand capture you know these are people who who already have intent they're already solutionware product aware you know then okay we can make it more logical talk about features capabilities benefits of your product why it's better than other uh products on the market and show proof of people getting value from your products performance creative so you know as I said uh highest leverage in paid advertising today is creatives um and you just know when this is going well right your CPA drop your traffic increases your pipeline velocity and celles increase you know an individual High performing ad just one ad can outperform the total the sum results of the previous 20 ads like that's how uh impactful this is right it's the at20 principal so here we can see an example uh filtered last um 14 days and as we can see it's filtered to a specific ad so I'm not trying to pull the wool over your eyes here and for this ad today um at the time of this recording uh which is a bit later than this time frame we're pumping over $15,000 per day into this ad and it's extremely profitable and the reason we're able to do that is because we engineered um you know an ad that we we knew would would um would perform well right so millions of Impressions here uh yeah we can see thousands of of um conversions as well and so whether this ad you know an argument could be made that oh well Liam you know um it's how do you know this ad is the one that got the conversions right especially in B2B where sales Cycles are longer and you need those multiple touch points you know really they're all playing a part um but you know objectively speaking if you're able to consistently create ads like that perform like this you're going to succeed you're going to perform better than everyone else else who is not creating ads like this right so multi touch attribution aside you know if you're creating you know Banger ads like this you're going to perform better than everyone else and so one of the secrets for us um being able to achieve this is our creative feedback loop and we do this because ad creatives are such an important variable in the paid advertising that said that weird paid advertising um you need to have a robust system for for testing and um measuring the performance of those C so for this we use our creative feedback loop you know it's enabled us to keep the costs low and maintain a high velocity of growth because we're keeping our campaigns fresh and we're continuously expanding into new audiences you know when you're scaling um paid ads audiences saturate very quickly they get used to seeing the same ad all the time so you constantly need to refresh things you know um we replicate success because we're identifying you know what's working at a tactical level we're we're identifying what's working why are these ads performing well we really break it down into a science you know what the colors we're using what's the framework we're using what angle is it what type of content bucket does it um does it fit into so then we can replicate success um and you know the inverse is that is to figuring out what doesn't work and then you know avoiding that um and then so it enables us to maintain an edge because we're avoiding inertia which is just doing nothing and just going oh my ads are performing well I'm just going to leave them spending because we're always testing what resonates with the market you know with we're not doing what everyone else is doing we're trying new innovative ideas and this is why copying your competitors is just such a poor strategy because it's just a great way to to remain average and so we split the creative data report uh sorry feedback loop into three uh sections so we've got the creative data report this is the what this is the Quant uh quantitative report you know often we put it into a spreadsheet there's tools out there that can do this automatically but I prefer to be deep into the numbers because then I get the clarity and context um and it helps us understand you know what ads are performing well what ad aren't performing well and we compare these numbers with our internal creative benchmarks that we've built up um you know just over time working with these companies so we know what industries what sort of benchmarks should they be hit in and so depending on the format of your ad metrics tell a different story you know for example if a motion ad has a low thumb stop ratio which is calculated by this but a high conversion rate you know it tells us that the hook fails to grab attention and so this enables us to focus our effort so we're really trying to break it down into a science you know how engaged are the first 3 seconds of the video how many people are converting how many how um many viewers are being retained because then that helps us focus our efforts to a specific area within the ad so we really need to break it down into a science um and it's important especially in the context of B2B you'll notice that ad platform data and CRM data usually tell a different picture and so in the ad platform it might be oh this ad has a low click through Ray and uh isn't performing so well but then you look in your CRM and this ad you know has tens of thousands of dollars of pipeline generated well then it's probably a good ad although the has a low clickthrough rate and the ad platform saying it's bad really it is resulting in business so we're always looping it back to business objectives you know don't get tunnel vision by ad platform uh creative Insight report so this is where we're turning the what into the why uh so this is qualitative um data so yeah we're turning the quantitative data into a why and a so what so it can be action so we're actually turning these numbers into insights now so for example the what could be ad one has a low uh thumb stop ratio and a high conversion rate why uh why this is happening is because the hook fails to grab attention and so the so what is okay well now we're going to experiment with two new visual hooks to make the ad more captivating so we've turned the numbers into you know qualitative insights into actions to to take very scientific um and then finally the new creative batch uh so then you know we're um actually turning the numbers and the the qualitative stuff into actually taking action and and pumping out new ads and so this is when we actually in the insights create a new batch of ads often we will create new iterations of losing and winning ads you know even if an ad is performing well we're always trying to beat that control the that winning ad I I showed you um we were trying to beat the current uh control of the ad account and man we beat it by like 5 to 6X um and so you know what most companies would do is oh well this ad is performing well let's just leave it um but you know we're always trying to beat the control always trying to improve the the losers as well yeah if you'd like to see the the process of all of this just let me know and I'll put together a training okay final thoughts I don't know how long this video is but I think it's pretty long um so growth at all costs this culture is well and truly over you know the next category leaders um of of software companies will be companies that put efficiency into the picture and really prioritize it you know if you want to lower custom acquisition costs and you want to stand out from the competition you need to focus on building a unique narrative and then you need to ruthlessly distribute that narrative via marketing channels you know validate it organically and then amplify it with paid media and so hope you found this valuable if you'd like a team that can help you with any of this whether it be actually execution or just providing a second opinion and a fresh perspective just DM me you know I love geeking out about this stuff um you can DM me on social channels you can go to the website and book a cool um and you know happy to provide some case studies of us actually doing this in practice uh a upon request so right hope you found that available see you on the next one