The Overview #13

This week: ABM, living your brand promise, silos kill SaaS, increase rev/decrease costs

👋 Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You'll find interesting tweets and articles from around the internet, plus highlights from my personal swipe file.

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Degrees of separation

Lucas Walker @WalkerLucas

Increasing revenue / decreasing costs is what every SaaS does. The key to growth is being able to clearly articulate how you do these things.

How tight can you connect your product features to how your customers will increase revenue, or decrease costs?

You can compete with features, benefits, service… but ultimately the fewer degrees of separation between your customer using your product, and driving more sales or cutting costs, the better.

It’s a really nice, simple way to think about what you’re saying today. “The all-in-one, best-of-breed, omnichannel…” means nothing unless it can be tied to $.

“ABM is stalking customers”

I really liked this quote from Dave Kellog on account-based marketing:

In the end, traditional marketing is hanging a sign to attract customers; ABM is stalking customers.

His post tears down a book (ABM is B2B) by the co-founders of Terminus (ABM software), and then offers rational tips on getting started with B2B account-based go-to-market:

• Many startups get pushed to do ABM too early for the wrong reasons.  If you don’t feel the need to do ABM, I’d argue that you shouldn’t.

• ABM is, however, a muscle that develops slowly so you should probably start your ABM program about 2 years before you think you’ll need  it.

• The best way to start at ABM is not by asking everyone to do a little, but by asking a select few to do a lot.  Create a small dedicated strategic accounts team focused on the customers you want to pick and consisting of, e.g., 3 salesreps, 2 sales consultants, 2 SDRs, 2-3 CSMs, and one marketer.  Measure that team not by your regular functional, funnel metrics but first by ARR [13] and then by an ABM scorecard.  If that doesn’t work, fix it.  If it does work, expand it.

What we can learn from the Marble Arch Mound

dan barker @danbarker

I went to the Marble Arch Mound today. It cost £2 million to build, and today was launch day, but it was still quite quiet. Here is a short thread with info. First, the original plan drawings and the marketing description do not quite match reality.

As well as the enormous waste of money, this thread is really relevant for all those involved in creating value propositions.

If you read through, you’ll see the comparisons made between the marketing material, and reality.

As a customer, there’s nothing worse than being misled. You invested time, effort, money and status in something that turned out to be not what it claimed. This feels worse because we’ve invested emotional capital - so the cognitive dissonance is painful.

Prevention is key: make sure your brand positioning and product experience is aligned. Sometimes, that means reducing the claims that your positioning makes. Most of the time (hopefully) it means encouraging your product/service teams to step up.

The company is the product

Tristan Harward @trisweb

This this this. It is *not* that your product sells itself, or markets itself. It's that the product, marketing, sales are all the same system. It all has to point to the customer and their needs together.

Justin Jackson @mijustin

I used to invest heavily in marketing automation, tracking, attribution, configuring funnels, and retargeting. But after 13 years of doing marketing for SaaS companies... I'm convinced that 90% of it is unnecessary.

Silos kill SaaS.

Unlike other companies, where go-to-market happens almost like a waterfall delivery process, SaaS is everything, all at once, all of the time.

Product has to iterate, marketing has to promote, sales have to close deals. But at the same time, marketing has to support product and sales. And sales has to give feedback to product and collaborate with marketing. And product are working with marketing, and learning from sales.

So focus on the customer. Who are they? What do they need? What’s going on in life for them?

Hire 2 people to understand customer insights and turn them into easily-consumable snippets for the rest of the business:

• Product/UX researcher - to create job-to-be-done maps and user personas

• Product marketer - to own buyer personas, map customer journeys, manage

• Both to collaborate on customer and prospect feedback, helping prioritize the product backlog and marketing/sales enablement, and acting as quarterbacks for the customer amongst all GTM teams

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That’s the Overview for this week

Hope you found something interesting in this edition!

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to momentum.

James