the GTM that took Intercom to 50M ARR
Morning! Obviously no one went to SaaStr Summit this year because there wasn’t one to go to. BUT they are going to start sharing talks from their Virtual conference earlier this week. None are up on the website yet, but you can check out their YouTube channel to see a few that have been posted already.
Rounding out quarantine week 7, keep your head up!
⛽ We have two B2B SaaS case studies for you this week, the first about customer messaging platform Intercom. While not a household name outside tech, they were the second fastest SaaS company to scale from 1m to 50m ARR (Slack was first). Their early success was fueled by their top notch content strategy. The team invested loads of time developing high quality blog posts that provide real value to readers, and in turn, increase shares and search rankings. Their rapid growth also had a touch of virality, as their “powered by” logo at the bottom of every customer’s websites links to a targeted landing page which still gets tons of traffic now. And one tip you can implement today: they cleverly post blogs on Medium a month after they do on their site for maximum exposure.
🐝 A shorter one if you only have a few minutes was this look back on social listening tool BuzzSumo’s first year, in which they achieved 2.5m ARR, 160,000 freemium customers, 2,000 paid, all while being profitable. Early on they leaned on well-known marketing influencers like Larry Kim, Rand Fishkin, and Neil Patel, who sent massive amounts of traffic to their site. To win over influencers you need a stellar product or the money to pay for their praise. Luckily, BuzzSumo had the former. They also tried to keep churn to a minimum (you could argue whether their 5% MoM is bad for a SMB focused martech tool) by constantly reminding users of their value—their push notifications trigger every time BuzzSumo finds a mention of your brand online. Lastly, they doubled down on unique content with more links/features, which led to more shares.
😨 When you hear “I need to think about it” from a potential customer, it can feel even worse than getting a definitive no. You leave the call with the deal totally up in the air and a high level of uncertainty that it’ll ever get moved to closed/won. But the numbers show that dreadful phrase actually has a beneficial impact on your close rate. But don’t expect to close the customer quickly—deals in which prospects said “I need to think about it” were 173% longer than deals in which they didn’t. Here’s how you can respond depending on where the prospect is in the sales cycle.
Early/Mid – Label their statement with something like: “When most people say they need to think on it, it’s typically because they’re not interested”, to give them the opportunity to clarify.
Late – They are likely trying to determine how to sell the product internally. So give them ammo and ask if you can make a suggestion that will help them get the team on board.
👺 Elon Musk famously didn’t patent his SpaceX technology because he feared the Chinese government would use it to reverse engineer their work. He’s not alone; many entrepreneurs find it tough to determine whether to pursue a patent. In addition to Musk’s fear of reverse engineering, other reasons some skip the patents include the upfront cost and the fact that if you’re just starting, you may want to pivot at some point (which would make the patent obsolete). On the other hand, patents can deter pesky patent trolls, would-be competitors while attracting investors. In the early stages it makes sense to stick with a trademark, which will afford a lot of the copyright protections needed for software.
👍👍 The Lean Startup author Eric Ries is doing a new pod called Out of the Crisis, featuring business leaders who are providing and coordinating relief efforts for COVID-19. We’re only a couple episodes in (some of the first guests include Mark Cuban and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman) but so far our review is two thumbs up. The most recent episode featured former US Deputy Chief CTO Jen Pahlka and Stripe lead engineer Raylene Yung. The pair just launched the US Digital Response, a group that connects governments with tech resources essential to weather this pandemic. Expect more great content from this pod over the coming months.