There are numerous new companies born every day. They have their own ideas and visions of how they want to achieve them. However, there is one crucial factor that makes a company successful: its go-to-market strategy.
SaaS startups have the task of competing for their first dollar of revenue against many potential challengers. Without a compelling go-to-market strategy, it's possible to undercut yourself with every piece of noise you make.
This piece of content will help you master this extremely important sales process and build stellar executive presentations that propel new business wins and give you the competitive edge needed to scale your business from startup to unicorn status.
As this blog will show, there is nothing more rewarding than being able to say: "I'm not just selling a product anymore but creating real value for my customers."
When you create a new product, it's important to have a go-to-market strategy that includes reaching customers, designing an effective sales and marketing approach, and developing pricing strategies for your new SaaS product.
Doing so enables you:
- Formulate the right business plan by focusing on customer value.
- Launch your products by launching effectively and efficiently with correct pricing models.
- Setups to Gain Early Buyers in Your Market: For example when Loopmaster launched its Mixtape Toolkit app, it knew what prospective users needed from their solution: They wanted budget control while they were learning how to make their own mixtapes.
However, the app needed to be priced low enough for household amateurs that could benefit from it but still allow them to get occasional professional mixes made on a budget by hand.
In order for it to sell quickly and at high margins, new ad campaigns needed to reach targeted audiences in any way possible: online radio ads were first used on free sites along with message-based emails publishing content relevant specifically designed as "what the industry needs" to know about Mixtape Toolkit.
Next, Facebook ads on specific pages were used along with email marketing sounding as if we'd just acquired the most important company in Hip Hop history - telling stories of how our new service can change people's lives and give them great mixes for a really cheap price.
(Of course, there are trends that any small startup should keep their eye out for and follow: We instantly reached over 40K of our target audience in the very first week, and we've slowly been building a userbase that screams volume.)
Finally, an optimized landing page was launched with messaging about how consumers will be able to make great instrumental mixes easily for less than $10.
With social media campaigns delivering highly engaged audiences over time - combined with old-school advertising on radio and TV networks waking up interested professionals -- it took just 94 days into the beta launch for our startup to make a distribution deal with the most successful independent record label of all time.
Over the last year and some change, we now have basic toolkit features on 9 mp3 players along with improved version 2 feature set offerings that provide users unlimited sessions – by eliminating expense-based limits in between makes -- offering one free professional mix and extended songs up to 8 minutes long at $10/monthly access rate.
The success that we've seen over the last year and a half far exceeds what I could have expected originally going into this, but it's been incredible to watch from a first-hand perspective.
Recently, the number of SaaS companies launching innovative and secure products has fluctuated. But in mature markets like healthcare and banking, startups feel they still have to work hard to get a customer’s attention.
Therefore, as a SaaS startup‘s price decreases and gets better competition, things are not looking up for you anymore. Hence, building up a go-to-market strategy is essential if you want your business to grow in the long run.
In addition to product marketing efforts (e.g., SEO), it may include technical sales support, online advertising channels & e-commerce efforts.
One of the most crucial things to do when building a tech product is customer research always comes with its own set of challenges, in particular; More often than not startups fail because they do not have an idea where and how they should go out there first before undertaking important and costly projects that may be time-consuming or could end up being unsuccessful.
Hence, one must understand all aspects specific to his or her industry – many times the insights from startups may be very useful to other companies who are tackling similar problems.
Therefore, it’s important for every startup out there especially to be relatable and garner respect at all times since if not a term of endearment could be defined as an “unpolished or unfinished product no matter how amazing its design may appear, ultimately put off potential users.
The view that customers on your platform see (how do you want them to see) will define the degree of your company’s visibility to other buyers or customers.
Hence, start-ups need to ensure that their service is user friendly, easy for users and clearly defined with every material raised at all times during the development & marketing stages.
A poorly designed product is as bad as a poorly marketed one because in both cases I am sure no buyer may be interested enough in buying it let alone making something great.
Always ensure that the stage at which your product is made available to customers- be it on the net or offline – is timely and relevant enough because more often than not potential buyers out there are extremely busy people who will want their products under them to review with as little time spent getting in touch with market representatives over phone lines, social media platforms & website forms.
'Apple wants to make your assistants available on every device, anywhere. So Apple made a phone with Siri in it and turned that thing into its flagship.'
The audience matrix is based on target characteristics of potential customer.
It’s a valuable tool for selecting the focus markets and also gives you an idea of how different industries are using each product.
In Slack, they identified two core groups: Teams & Messaging Users. On the other hand, Mailchimp chose Employee Communication Tools (ECT) as their target segment because Solo ads were found to be less effective at increasing conversions in the segment.
Such matrix guides you as to which product your SaaS should be developed for. Channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube often yield a huge market share due to their visual or audio-visual properties.
Landing page companies use a variety of channels when developing the targeted landing page. For this reason, the aim is not only to identify which channel stimulates higher conversion rates but also where these triggers get activated in terms of user demographics, geography and psychographics.
Here are some tips and best practices that can guide you through this process:
In general, the go-to-market strategy is a lot more personal than B2C or B2B sales.
The success of your company will depend on how different the inside of your business feels compared to those who work for you.
Sitting down with every person in the organization will be very revealing, but our advice is not to avoid all contact with employees at all costs.
It’s okay for executives like CEO and CFO to be absent from these conversations because it’s better if there are “only a few ears that heard the uncomfortable truths.” But don't cut off key brand influencers at this stage, as they can be really powerful voices of team messaging and will represent your company's image to customers if you ignore their feedback completely.
One thing I need to say is that on the go-to-market side do not expect immediate (or any) results - things take time, sometimes it takes even years until the company gets properly recognized.
When planning how this process will be done, especially when it comes to data collection and analysis - think about your competitors' strategies.
You can use competitive research on Moz or Google (or any other search engine) to analyze what actual companies are doing as well as comparing with competitors:
How do they describe their business model? What mentions at least 15 times match that brand or product name in keyword-rich terms? You can use an innovative tool called CanIRank that helps salespeople understand how their competitors are approaching a problem, which will allow them to take advantage of those problems.
The strategy to market the SaaS products is to focus on the market need and provide a solution that is unique and not available in other markets. The market needs must be clearly defined before you can start developing your solution.
For example, if you are working on an IT product then it should be able to answer all of the following questions: - What are the users of this IT product? - What do they want from this IT product? - How do they use this IT product? - Why do they need this IT product? Once you have answered these questions, you will be able to build a value proposition for your solution.
That's all for now! See you later with a different topic!
