- If you're the SaaS founder or the CEO of a successful SaaS business, scaling your SaaS business
is likely top of mind. Having worked with over
250 SaaS founders and CEOs there are three common mistakes
that I see all the time when you are actively looking
to scale your SaaS business. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the
three exact mistakes to avoid and when you do the opposite of these you will be able to accelerate the growth of your SaaS business. Intro. (upbeat music) What's up everybody,
welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK, and on this channel I help SaaS founders like you
grow your size business faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now if you new to this channel, welcome, I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies
and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster. So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon where
you'll get notified every single time I drop an
episode with the TK energy. Now, if you're already
part of this community, if you're part of my SaaS
go-to-market coaching programs, my people, welcome back. It's really awesome to see over here. So in my experience in the SaaS industry, I took ToutApp from zero to one million and then one to three million
and then three to six million. We then sold ToutApp and I joined Marketo as a member of their executive team, as their SVP of strategy and that was driving towards
half a billion in ARR. And then since then we
sold Marketo to Adobe. Since then, I've worked
with over 250 SaaS founders and CEOs anywhere from pre-revenue upwards of a hundred million in revenue in growing their SaaS businesses. As I've gone through the
twists and turns of this road I've seen some patterns on
exactly where SaaS founders and leadership teams go wrong, the mistakes they made as they are looking to get
to that next stage of growth. And depending on when
you're watching this video it could be growth at all costs or it could be predictable
growth and profitable growth. Either way, these three mistakes
have come up all the time. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through
those three mistakes and if you do the opposite of these then you will be able
to accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. If you're excited to dig
into principle number one, go ahead and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It really likes it when you do that and let's dig right into it. Okay, so the first thing
that I work on with founders and leadership teams when I work with them and even when I think about
my own SaaS businesses is the flywheel. This is a SaaS business flywheel, and every successful SaaS business, heck, every single business ever has mastered their flywheel. When you're just starting out, when you're just starting to get to that first stage of growth all you're trying to do
is get those customers. But once you have customers
and you have revenues it's all about the flywheel. And the way the flywheel breaks down is this is your ideal customer profile, this is your target market. And what you are doing is
essentially doing a bunch of sales and marketing motions to
actually get this flywheel going. So the first piece that you are doing, I'm gonna put these in blue
because these are the stages, is acquisition. This is where you're generating leads, you're generating pipelines,
you're generating free trials, you're getting attention
of your ideal customers. Then you are focusing on activation. Now, depending on whether you
are sales led or product led, if you are sales led you're trying to turn these
into real opportunities, if you're product led you're trying to get
them into active trials. Once you have that, then you
are driving towards revenue. If you are sales led, then
this is opportunities one, if you are product led, then this is someone
swiping the credit card or maybe a salesperson coming
in because it's a hybrid setup and helping them convert
to real paid customers. And then it doesn't stop there because we are SaaS businesses, we are recurring revenue businesses. And so the next piece you're
working on is retention meaning you want happy
customers continuing to pay, continuing to renew, continuing to upsell, and then finally they're so happy they're actually driving referrals back into your target market which is driving even more acquisition. Once you have all of these pieces going then you have a flywheel. Now, the mistakes that I see
when scaling a SaaS business tend to come at each of
the inflection points of this flywheel. So the first mistake
that I see all the time is founders and leaders that have gotten to the current stage of growth. Let's just say you got to a million era, or 3 million era, or 10 million era, or 20 million era, or
a hundred million era, in each of those stages what got you to that point isn't necessarily going to get you to that next stage of growth. For example, I work with a
lot of early stage founders and in the early stages they go after their target market, they work on their existing network, their existing contacts, and they get that initial revenue going but very quickly they
run out of that network, they have no more friends to sell it to and they still don't have a
scalable way to drive growth. Similarly, let's just
say you got to a million or three million. Well, once you got to that point, maybe you got there through two SDRs or you just called
emailing and cold calling, but to get to the 10 million you need to actually get
more marketing going. 'Cause if you don't have marketing you can only hire so many SDRs so quickly and send so many cold emails profitably. And so it ends up being a blocker. And so the number one
mistake that I see founders and leaders make when
they're looking to scale is not switching from
their unscalable strategy, their unscalable go-to-market
to a scalable go-to-market. And this essentially
focuses right over here. How do you actually get
their attention of people? How do you generate demand? How do you capture demand? This needs to turn into a
proper go-to-market machine that you're actually executing on. And a lot of times I find people kind of conceptually know like, yeah, we should be doing a lead magnet, we should be doing ads, we
should be doing content, we should be doing SEO. They may have the strategy but they don't quite know how to actually turn it into action at the scale they need to be to get to that next stage of growth. So mistake number one
that I see all the time is sticking to the go-to-market
machine or lack thereof instead of saying, "You know what? That got us here, in order to get to this
next stage of growth, how do we revamp that
go-to-market strategy and the execution so that
we can scale our reach and do it more profitably based on everything we have right now?" So that's kind of where
the first part gets stuck. The second biggest mistake that I see happens all the way over
here, the retention. So kind of like how you have to turn this into a real scalable go-to-market machine, a lot of founders and
a lot of SaaS leaders as they are scaling, they get so fixated on
this point of acquisition, they don't think about what
their retention machine looks like. And what ends up happening is they put so much attention over here, they keep getting customers,
but they keep losing customers so they never hit escape velocity on how to drive growth
for their SaaS business. Remember, SaaS businesses are
recurring revenue businesses. And so in order for things to compound, you actually need to make sure you're retaining your customers. So the biggest mistake I see over here is basically a lack of a success machine. Now, there are a couple different things that come into play to
do the opposite of this. You wanna start thinking about having proper
customer success people. You wanna make sure you have
a customer marketing machine where you're actually enabling
them and educating them to take advantage of your product. You wanna make sure
that you prevent a churn by detecting when someone's
not actually activating in your product or using your
product on a consistent basis. You actually wanna make sure that just like how you
are building a machine to generate demand and capture demand, you are also generating a machine to keep the demand you
already have captured, to keep the customers and the
revenue that you already have. Few things that come into this when you actually have a
proper success machine, you have actual reduction in churn. So that's obvious, right? That's really good. When you actually have a
proper customer success machine your roadmap actually becomes clearer, because your successful customers tell you what you should be building next. And also when you have
a successful machine you actually have success stories which you can then take back into your acquisition machine and say, "Hey, look, here are all
our successful customers," which then gets this
flywheel going even faster. So not only is retaining
the revenue important for the flywheel of the business, retaining the customers and
capturing the success stories of the customers and
having a proper machine to manage the customer success
actually helps you be better in your go-to-market as well, which is really powerful. Now there's a third one which
ties this whole thing together but before I go into the
third mistake that people make and it's often missed, let me
just pause here for a second. And you're starting to
see the power in this. Are you starting to see the power in how actually building a
proper go-to-market strategy that's scalable and executing on it through a go-to-market machine
can be the difference maker in actually driving scale? And you're starting to see where instead of just thinking about, well, how do I get new customers thinking about your
business as a full flywheel can actually unlock true scalable growth for your SaaS business. You start to see the power in this, can I just get a yes
in the comments below? And also smash out like button
for the YouTube algorithm, it really likes it when you do that. And by the way, if you're
operating a SaaS business and you are wondering, well, how do I get this
full flywheel going? How do I build a proper
go-to-market strategy and execute on it? How do I have a proper
customer success discipline? How do I make sure that I'm
measuring the right things? This is exactly what I do inside of my SaaS
go-to-market coaching program. I'll tell you more about it
at the end of this episode. I'll also link to it below. Don't go anywhere yet. Let's go into the third big mistake that founders and leaders make. Okay, the third big
mistake that founders make and leaders make is lack of compounding. And this is true for the
overall flywheel analogy to begin with. When you get all these pieces going, you start to get this flywheel turning and it turns faster and faster and faster, meaning the more leads
and pipeline and demand that you capture and generate,
the more that they activate, the more revenue you make, the more you retain, the more you can get
customer success stories and the more people will buy from you because you start to elevate your brand, the trust starts to go up. So that already gets this flywheel going. Well, if you actually
get your best customers to start referring you to
your ideal customer profile that starts moving the
flywheel even faster because referral pipeline
actually converts way faster at a higher price and
the win rate is higher. So it's better quality pipeline because your successful customers are already telling their peers like, "Hey, this is really great. You gotta get in on it." And that makes a world of
difference in your sales process. And when you start doing that,
I'm gonna do this in green, all these pieces start to
feed off of each other. The more pipeline you generate,
the more they activate, the more they convert your
revenue, the more you retain, the more referrals you get, the more referrals you get,
the more people know about you, the more success that you get, the more you feed it in
your go-to-market machine. And all these pieces start
to fly that flywheel. So all of these pieces
actually get your flywheel to move faster and accelerate your growth. This is what true scaling looks like. Everyone thinks that scaling is just like, let's just do more of everything
and just spend the money. We all know that doesn't work and that doesn't get rewarded anymore. But if you can meticulously
instrument this flywheel you can build your scalable
go-to-market machine. And when you start to
actually make people activate and convert your revenue, and you have a proper
customer success discipline, and then you're driving referrals, and the success stories back
into your go-to-market machine then your business truly starts to scale. So to recap, mistake number one, you don't build a scalable
go-to-market machine, what got you here isn't gonna
get you to that next stage, so revamp your go-to-market strategy and execute on that machine truly. Mistake number two, lack
of a success machine. Make sure you have a proper
customer success machine. And as you get that going,
drive up your retention but also capture those success stories and feed it back into
your go-to-market machine so you can actually
accelerate your growth. And as you get your successful
customers to be successful and staying and happy,
ask them for referrals and on top of that will further fuel your go-to-market machine. You'll avoid these three mistakes; the lack of a skill of go-to-market, the lack of a success machine,
the lack of compounding. You do the opposite of these. You actually build a skill
of a go-to-market machine, you build a success machine,
you turn on compounding, then you'll be able to
accelerate the growth of your SaaS business, and
that's all you have to do. Now, what you may not
know is how do I actually build a scalable go-to-market machine? How do I actually build
a proper success machine? How do I build a proper
compounding machine, a referral machine? How do I do these three pieces? This is exactly what I do inside of my SaaS
go-to-market coaching program. Inside this program, I
work with you one-on-one to actually help drive
growth for your SaaS business using these exact principles
that I just gave you. How do we do it? Well, there's three core
components to the program. First, we flesh out your
ideal customer profile. That's a big part of really building a scalable
go-to-market strategy. We really identify how we're gonna expand in the market you're already winning at. Number two, we build out a manifesto. A manifesto is your
positioning, your messing. It's how you compete against
the competitors in a market. If you're scaling, chances
are there is competition and you have to differentiate yourself with a strategic message
that really resonates with your customers and
attracts their attention. And then lastly, we teach you
how to run a broadway show. A broadway show is a
consistent set of sales and marketing activities, the actual execution of
your go-to-market strategy that creates demand and generates demand and captures demand. And when you do these three things you get this full flywheel going. It's an incredible program. We've shared incredible success stories about the program just on this channel. So if you wanna work together just go to tkk.com/gtm, tkk.com/gtm. And on that page you'll
get all the details about the program and what
it's like to work with me. If you wanna work together, just fill out that little
form and we'll get on a call. We'll make sure that we're the right fit, the better the fit, the better the results and that we're off to the races. We'll work together inside of the SaaS go-to-market coaching program. Just go to tkk.com/gtm. Also link to it below. Also, if you got value from this video please smash out like button
for the YouTube algorithm. Put a lot of love into these videos and it'll just mean the world to us if you actually hit that like button. Also, if you have a fellow founder, a team member that will also
get value from this video, please share this with them. If you're part of a WhatsApp
group, a Slack group, a mailing list of other
SaaS leaders and founders, please share this video. We do a video like this. The reason we do these is we wanna help as many SaaS companies and
leadership teams and founders as possible. Also, I drop an episode
every single Sunday with actual strategy
and tactics like this. So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon where
you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode, you guessed it, with the TK energy. And lastly, remember,
everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours,
it's gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK and I'll see
you in the next episode or inside the SaaS
go-to-market coaching program. Take care, everybody. (upbeat music) You five with starts to fly which is I think I made
up, but is it a real thing? Did I do TK energy? I think I did. Hopefully I did.
