sketching your roadmap into reality

Happy Friday, hope everyone had a great week! Some congrats are in order for these 3 SaaS companies that just reached 100m ARR, which made TechCrunch’s list hit the dirty 30 mark. 

Webinar platform ON24 was one of them who might be riding the pandemic wave to an extent, curious to hear if any of you have used or tested it. Another more familiar member of the group was Active Campaign, which can best be described as marketing automation, though we never loved the ambiguity of that term... Free SaaStock ticket to anyone who can actually give us a clear definition.

On to this week’s best practices.

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🥒 There’s power in creating a story around your brand (see our thoughts on Donald Miller’s “Building a Storybrand” a couple issues back). DesignPickle took it to another level and sketched out a roadmap for success to quite literally build their growth story and communicate business goals to the team in a memorable way. Their two main goals were to increase ARPU while continuing to drive customer count upwards, and doing both in tandem to ensure they weren’t just extracting revenue from a flat or shrinking install base. We hear the results were good, so you might just see a SaaS Playbook roadmap to success soon...

✍️ We generally think of SEO as a long term marketing strategy – set it up now and you’ll start to see better results way down the line. Shane Barker used his own website as an SEO test subject to prove that there actually are some changes you can make that will increase organic traffic in the short term. The one which we all should start doing (if you haven’t already) is long-form content. It seems counterintuitive as our attention spans grow shorter, but through a series of content testing, Barker found that developing lengthier articles had the greatest impact on his rankings. He also found that a keyword density of 1-1.5% was the optimal amount to noticed by a search engine while not overdoing it.

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🕰️ While much of the world has slowed over the past couple months, sales reps and anyone in a business development related role have trudged on. We liked these insights from David Priemer on how they can sell more by losing faster. The key ideas here to remember:

• Limit time the spent on lost deals, cut your losses and move on to the next one

• Hyper-focus efforts on highly engaged prospects, they are your best chance to close

• Streamline your discovery process, Premier found that the deals they lost had a 3x higher discovery phase length than wins

Moral of the story: In a time where each sale matters, shifting your strategy slightly and cutting out the fat early on in the sales process can yield worthy results.

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📜 Whether or not you know it, your company’s content doesn’t just come from your marketers. It’s any material that you share with your audience, from the product blogs the CS team publishes, to the email sales reps send, to the decks management assembles. So really, and as Ann Handley’s bestseller is titled, Everybody Writes, and should strive to improve their abilities! The book details her own strategy for content creation, including how those of us who are “adult-onset writers” can be better writing planners and in turn, produce better content. Highly suggest it as a way to get the whole team on board and excited to contribute.