Anand Vatsya

I listen to a SaaS marketing podcast weekly. 2 weeks ago, I tuned into Ishaan Shakunt’s podcast(CEO@Spear Growth) with Madhav Bhandari(Marketing Head@Storylane). What I learned 👇 Context: During the podcast, Madhav discussed Storylane's journey from $1 to $10 million ARR. They are investing heavily in demand generation to grow both Storylane and the relatively new interactive demo software category My Key Takeaways: Market Awareness: Only 5% of your target market is aware of your category. The remaining 95% represents a significant demand creation opportunity, which can be done through education.  Leverage existing demand: Since Storylance operates in the interactive demo software category, where there is not a lot of existing demand,  it leverages pre-existing demand in adjacent categories. For example, there is already existing demand for website conversion optimization among marketers. Storylane uses this existing demand to educate marketers about why the current approach towards conversion optimization is okay but it can be made better using Storylane.  Stay Close to Your Core: When creating demand, stay closely aligned with the problems and needs of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Relate to Your Audience: If you can relate to the personas your company sells to, it makes understanding their needs much easier. Madhav, having been a freelancer, found it easier to work with companies like Bonsai, which caters to freelancers.  Continuous Learning: Initially, you might passionately listen to sales calls to understand your customers. However, it's crucial to maintain this habit by listening to at least one sales recording weekly to keep your insights fresh. "Fire Yourself": Occasionally, internally "fire yourself" to reassess your role and focus on neglected important tasks. This advice from one of Madhav's mentors encourages continual self-evaluation and improvement. Measuring Channel Effectiveness: Use three sources to gauge a channel's performance: website traffic data from Google Analytics, self-attribution fields in demo forms, and prospects' responses to sales inquiries about how they discovered your product. Achieving Revenue Targets: Break down revenue targets into controllable inputs and uncontrollable outputs. For example, if the goal is a certain revenue from blog SEO, the input target might be 200 quality articles per year. Meeting the input targets increases the predictability of achieving the output goals. The Buying Journey: The buying journey is as important as the product itself. In fact, 85% of buyers believe the buying experience is equally critical.

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Special shoutout for clever outreach! 👏👏 My inbox gets flooded with cold outreach every week, but Ankita's message managed to rise from the pile and grab my attention—got an instant reply, too! For all the SDRs out there: taking the time to check out a prospect’s profile can significantly boost your chances of getting a reply and securing a meeting. As someone who’s built and run cold sequences, I’m a big fan of this personalized approach. Big kudos to Ankita Jha from SyndiQ for putting in the effort! While SyndiQ isn’t the right fit for us at the moment, with outreach like this, I’m sure you’ll be reeling in prospects soon enough. ==== And hey, if you’re on the hunt for a company that guarantees a 4-5% conversion on content syndication leads, Ankita’s your go-to. Drop her a DM. #outreach #coldoutreach #sdr

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Your product is a means to an end but not the end itself. However, many sales, CS, and entire go-to-market teams treat their product as if it's the main event and not one part of the bigger picture. Here's how this misguided mindset plays itself out in the real world: - Customer Success often focuses on the adoption of features rather than the ultimate outcome that the usage of those features is supposed to achieve. Too many CS teams still measure by usage only and not outcomes and it shows in the way they communicate. - Sales teams are still giving too many demos that are a feature show and tell versus a demonstration of how a prospect can solve their problems and achieve their goals. Then, sales leaders wonder why it's so hard for their teams to produce business cases that help them win. It starts with being focused on the right thing—the Stakeholders' problems, pains, and goals. - Marketing teams are creating websites that try to dazzle with things like AI capabilities but aren't clearly communicating the problems they solve. I kid you not; I sometimes Google a company and look at other sites to figure out what the heck they actually do. Then they wonder why their bounce rate is so high, and conversions are so low. - Product teams sometimes build based on feature demand without doing proper customer diagnoses and discovery. Even worse, sometimes they focus on the fun things to build instead of the useful things to build or solve tech debt that actually makes their product useful and usable. Then customers churn; despite CS's fire-saving efforts, many misguided leaders lay the blame solely on their customer success team. Then the vicious cycle continues. Does this sound familiar? Do you have a slight heavy feeling in the pit of your stomach because you recognize yourself or your company in some of this? If so, it's all too common, so you aren't alone. The good news is that a deceptively simple trick can help change this internal-centric product and feature focus. I'm not saying this trick will fix these issues in and of itself, but it will put you in a mindset that will help get you on the right track. The trick is to start constantly asking yourself these questions; Am I communicating in a way that: 1) Clearly addresses the problem the client is trying to solve (vs a usage push or feature show and tell). 2) Demonstrates a clear path on how they can solve these problems. 3) Creates a vision of what solving these problems looks like for my target personas and how the pain will be resolved. 4) Demonstrates a viable path towards achieving their goals. Or, more simply put, am I focusing on our customers' end goal and not just on my product, which is Just a means to an end? And I do mean Just. Prospects and customers don't care about you and your features. They care about solving their problems, the pain those problems cause, and their goals. Communicate accordingly. #gotomarket #sales #customersuccess

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Hey hey everyone, We’re hosting a webinar on how to maximize your ROI using G2 Buyer Intent Data. Praveen Das and Chris Perrine will dive into: 🔷 The Role of G2 in the Buyer Journey: How G2 shapes key stages of the buyer journey and why that’s crucial for boosting engagement. 🔷 Using G2 Buyer Intent Data: Practical ways to integrate G2 with other platforms and enhance lead nurturing by building a more complete view of your buyers. 🔷 Measuring G2’s Impact: How you can measure the true ROI of your G2 efforts combined with other marketing channels If you’re ready to turn G2 intent into sales, this session is for you! Register Now - link in the comments!

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Aggregating contact scores for accounts used to be a giant PITA in HubSpot 👀 → Now, with the new health scoring feature (private beta) it couldn’t be easier Here’s how it works: 1. Keep track of whatever scoring information you want on a contact - NPS, CSAT, product usage, engagements etc 2. For each input group in your HubSpot health score, click association settings 3. Choose which associated contacts you want to include in the company score based on their association label 4. Choose how you’d like to aggregate the contact scores: → Min → Max → Average → Sum This used to take a whole series of super hacky workflows… ✅ now it’s just one more item checked of the list of objections for using HubSpot for customer success. The list is getting really short! P.S. I’m building a niche B2B media company for HubSpot admins starting with a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe to get step-by-step use case playbooks to implement in your own account each week. https://lnkd.in/en942kTf

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6 must-ask questions for every early-stage founder: 1. Why? Articulate the real customer pain or problem. 2. Who?- early customer, ICP, persona, customer segment 3. How do we know if it's a real problem? (Validate w/talking to customers) 4. What? Solution to solve the problem (Pain & Gain) 5. How? Your Go-To-Market 6. Are we succeeding? (Metrics- learn, and iterate)

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Too many SaaS landing pages fail to attract and convert prospects ❌ Instead of driving conversions, they distract visitors with unnecessary information. It’s not only about getting the structure right and adding some social proof. Many landing pages fail because they don’t resonate with the real pain points of their audience. ✅ Do qualitative research on your existing customers. ✅ Understand their pain points and address them. ✅ Show how your product can solve them. Many SaaS buyers have never purchased a product like yours before, so it’s your job to explain how product features benefit their business. Imagine transforming your landing page into a high-converting machine. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽-𝗯𝘆-𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗴𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 (𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀): 👉Research: Product, customers and competitors 👉Messaging clarity & differentiated value 👉Guide their journey from their current pain points to solution 👉Establish (relevant) Trust 👉Address key pain points and offer a better solution 👉Explaining the Solution Step-by-Step 👉Drive action with urgency 👉Remove anxiety & distractions 👉Make it relevant Your landing page is critical for conversions and revenue. By following these steps and focusing on clear, differentiated messaging, you can create a landing page that effectively attracts and converts your ICP prospects. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interested in boosting your pipeline with paid media or solving your tracking issues? Let's discuss how. DM me to chat!

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Mr. CEO, what can I do? The inbounds are just not there anymore! - If you have heard something like this already - Read on 🤘 Once a CMO addressed his meeting like this: 📢 The inbounds are gone, and what we are getting are not as good as before, all the leads we are getting through our website is either junk or unqualified. I think we will have to trim our growth targets this time. ........................................................................................................................... I hope you have not heard such statements ever in your company but if you have, Welcome to Growth. 📈 In the past decade, IT consulting and SaaS, just thrived, thankfully not like a bubble, but still it did not fail to put countless sales and marketing teams in jeopardy. I remember, not long ago, the same companies, doing massive lay offs today, hiring employees at their named prices and offering 100% hikes and man (the parties!) Well, what went wrong?, The party got over! (Actually, the inbound party got over) For the past decade, the surge in demand for IT solutions sent all the businesses to the Indian IT consulting agencies and the agencies minted money out of their pockets, but hello??, just like every market the IT market got mature. And the inbound party is now over. 😌 To cater this, people who were smart, didn't try to loot their existing clientele anymore and started delivering quality for retainers. Well, some got it. But those who were smarter, did create a system that scales and delivers quality leads to you in a predictable fashion. Counted on the fact, that people just can't come to them forever, and someday, they will have to build on a strength, which attracts their prospects to engage with them and marry them. 💍 Invested in outbound teams, prospectors, SDRs and people who can pitch their strengths in 30 seconds or less in order to solve a potential problem their prospect has. Not unless you see yourself in the shoes of your customers, you cannot do that. But once you do, you can build that because it scales, and it is the only way to predictably generate leads which will add in your ARR every year. The challenge: Below is the attention window you got whenever you are going cold. ☃ And remember: No matter how great your inbound and referral engine is today, it will plateau one day, so please prepare well in advance Good luck with growth! Ciao #leadgeneration #b2b #SaaS #itsales #outbound

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