sell your brand story, not your product features
Happy Friday, hope you all enjoyed the first official week of summer. This week we saw Slack announce the launch of Slack Connect, which enables users to communicate with external contacts – up to 20 different companies can join a single channel to chat and send secure files. Their goal has always been to replace email, and external company communication is a big step in that direction. Watch out email.
🚀 This week the Basecamp crew did a soft launch of their new email product hey.com, which made us immediately think “god that must have been an expensive domain.” While Basecamp CEO Jason Fried hasn’t shared the cost, he did outline the process of buying it in a recent blog. Their launch did well, thanks to these 5 strategic components that really any SaaS tool should incorporate in their strategy. Our favorite: selling your brand story, not your service’s features. If you can create a strong narrative that your audience can connect with, they’ll be more likely to recommend you to their network and less likely to leave when the next big thing comes along.
🧲 More leads translate to more sales – simple, right? Not necessarily, because as Singlegrain suggests, that idea completely ignores the quality of your leads. Adding poor fit leads will make your sales team’s lives miserable because they’re unlikely to close. And your success team will bear the burden as well because while some low-quality leads will actually convert, they’ll have a higher chance of churn. So try to work backwards and pay attention to where customers with high churn are coming from, then scale back your initiatives on those channels. You should also keep a close eye on your visitors' behavior to see where they are in the buyer's journey, poor fit leads will generally exhibit different behavior.
🔎 Last week we discussed the importance of having product-market fit before scaling your business. But admittedly, that’s easier said than done. In reality, it’s not a complicated process, but you have to know where to look. Stijn Hendriske broke down how we should think about service markets to find your sweet spot. Start by looking at your total addressable market, from there, you can break out subsegments of your market where your product would be a good fit and build your go-to-market strategy around solving that audience's pain points.
🏴 By now, you’re probably familiar with David McClure’ Pirate Metrics, so we’ll skip the intro. But which one of these metrics is most essential to your business growth? It’s a constant source of constant debate, and We like Appcues take on why more companies should pay attention to activation. There are three main reasons why it’s so critical to sustainability and growth:
It’s an early signal of efficiency.
This is when your customer achieves your product’s promised value.
Directly impacts revenue.
While activation will look slightly different for each company, it’s astoundingly clear that defining it and closely monitoring the number is an underlooked aspect of growing your MRR.
🚌 Marketing teams are often the first passengers on the struggle bus at SaaS companies. It’s hard to keep messaging consistent, creative, and resonant when the product you’re marketing is continually evolving. Rippling’s CMO, Matt Epstein, is known for his unconventional and inventive approach to marketing. We caught his recent talk with The Growth Hub, where they broke down the deficiencies in SaaS marketing and how teams can harness their creative powers. One quote that keeps replaying in our minds, “If you're generating tons of traffic for a crappy product, great marketing will just make your product die faster.”