Which channel delivers max leads in the most cost-effective way?
“Which channel should I pick, Oren? Which will deliver maximum leads in the most cost-efficient way?”
I have a handful of meetings each week with B2B SaaS founders, and some version of that question comes up on about 90% of calls.
Good question, right?
Actually, no, not really. Order of sequence is everything here.
The right question explored at the wrong time can lead to catastrophic consequences.
Whether as an employee or advisor, I’ve worked with more than one hundred tech firms, witnessed hundreds of millions spent on marketing…
And most of that spend went down the drain
Did they pick the wrong channel or mess up the execution?
No.
They were spending money on ineffective messaging sent to the wrong person.
Make that mistake, and nothing else really matters. You’ll burn through your marketing budget like a wildfire in a midsummer forest, with little to show for it.
And those messaging errors always stem from one root cause:
Positioning
One client of mine knew they had a positioning problem. They spent £60k on a consultant (arguably THE positioning expert) to solve it.
And the expert in question delivered insightful recommendations on the changes required to solve the problem.
It didn’t help one bit
Because none were implemented.
They knew their positioning was failing, and they had customised recommendations from a leading positioning expert on how to turn it around, but the B2B SaaS in question couldn’t resolve the problem…
Because implementing effective positioning is excruciatingly painful
Good positioning is about closing doors on opportunities, and that hurts.
It’s about saying ‘no’ one hundred times to say ‘yes’ once.
Fifteen years ago, you didn’t have multiple CRM categories. You simply had CRM.
But, as the demand for cloud-based CRM expanded, so did the number of providers, most of which looked the same.
That’s when sub-categories begin to pop up.
The smart SaaS operators recognise an expanding CRM market, but also that they’ll get lost amongst the noise if they don’t narrow down their focus.
They need to become the primary option for one customer profile rather than the commodity option for multiple.
That starts with one a firm like Pipedrive specialising in small businesses. Others follow.
Then the market gets fragmented further by firms specialising in CRM for Construction, CRM for Architects, CRM for House Builders, CRM for small builders, etc.
And those moves require a painful leap of faith, because the SaaS business that first specialises in CRM for Architects didn’t know how that move would turn out until after the event, and yet…
That’s what takes a business like yours from £10m to £50m annual revenue
That’s what Toast did when they targeted the restaurant industry with their point of sales software.
That’s what Eventbrite did when they launched a ticketing platform for event organisers.
That’s what LandTech did when they launched a data platform to help property developers find and assess land buying opportunities.
Whether through customer selection or the specific pain they solved, SaaS products that broke through the noise all started by closing doors on the one hundred additional problems they could solve in order to focus on one.
But let’s roll back a little…
What exactly is positioning?
There are multiple definitions of the term, but fundamentally, positioning is about answering these three questions:
- Who is it for?
- What does it do?
- Why is it better?
When you nail the answer to each of those three questions, the challenge of how and where to reach prospects becomes relatively straightforward.
And in this 5-part positioning series, that’s what we’ll figure out.
I’ll share my process for identifying and articulating a compelling position that aligns your product with a group of people who desperately need and want it.
Until then, I have a question for you:
What’s your favourite example of a SaaS business that nailed its positioning?
Until next time,
Oren
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