Nail and Scale

companies that get their target market make money. To win, you need to nail a niche first, then keep expanding to new markets, all the while building up mental availability across all category buyers. And the success depends on the quality of your insights about those target customers, what resonates with them, and your speed of execution and making the right bets. Welcome to How to Win with me, Pei Plao. A deep dive into studying winners in B2B SaaS to determine how much your strategy, how much is luck, and how do you win? All of this relies on fast target market feedback loops and strong intel. Your target market needs to be a primary input on how you run your strategy. Really, you shouldn't do marketing until your team knows the top three big problems of your ICPs. What are the symptoms the target customer is feeling because of those pains? What's the value of solving those problems? What triggers them to seek out solutions like yours? What channels ICPs use to learn more about your category of tools? Who in the company owns the budget for it? And what the bias process is generally like? This is not expensive. It doesn't take much time to figure out yet. If you know the answers, it will make all the difference to your marketing effectiveness. Invest 1% of your marketing budget into knowing this. It will make the other 99% go much further. It's crazy that in this day and age, there are so many businesses that are not doing target market research on the regular. Yes, it used to be very expensive, very slow, not anymore. Still, only one in five companies have a buyer persona or ICP. Only one out of ten companies actually do target market research on a quarterly basis. And those who do, their willingness to pay is typically higher, the funnel is more efficient, LTV to CAC is much higher, and those companies are typically growing at a 15 to 20% higher rate. This is your opportunity to be smarter, do strategy better, and grow faster. People skip target market research, wrongly thinking it takes too long. Instead, they spend weeks, sometimes months, discussing, debating, arguing about what the target customers want, what they value, what value props might work on them. Yes, research used to take forever while peeing at total pain in the butt. But today, you can skip all that and have answers about your ICPs in 24 hours. You only meet to discuss findings and insights. This will dramatically speed up your feedback loops and make your go-to market more efficient. Skipping target market research will actually result in taking way longer to figure out how to do effective marketing. A much needed mindset shift is this. Go from capital R research to lowercase R research. The idea that research needs to be this big, scary, super expensive thing that takes many months is outdated. The world moves fast and changes fast. The reality for your customers can change a lot from quarter to quarter. Most CMOs only think about the next two quarters. A lot can change in that time, and priorities will have shifted by the time the third quarter is here. You should seek out answers to the questions about your target customers when those questions arise, not when it's time to do your annual study. As one VP told me, we went from a big $100,000 research report once a year to lots of micro testing throughout the year that helps us stay nimble and continue to refine our messaging. In the world of SaaS, we operate in dog years and needs change with the wind, so it's important to make sure messaging is adaptive. It's not just that your messaging needs to adapt. It's your whole go-to-market decisions, who, where, what, how much, etc. that need to evolve with the times. The quality of your decisions comes from the quality of your information. Instead of once a year big expensive research, do lots of lowercase R research throughout the year. Get fast insights or move on. Even if companies are large enough to have an internal insights or research team, marketers often bypass them. As one marketer told me, if I ask them a question, they take four to eight weeks to find an answer. It makes sense. Ain't nobody got that kind of time. If the goal is to deliver something by a given date, then target market research is too often skipped. I get it. Faster companies win more, but nothing worse than running enthusiastically in the wrong direction. This leads to checklist marketing. What you need to optimize for is the speed to aha moments. How fast are you able to generate customer and market insights? You should be able to answer most questions within a day or two. Don't settle for less. If you have your website redesigned and then you think, oh, man, well, we already built this, so we're going to launch this, because otherwise, you know, we're going to just delay the process. No, that's silly. But how do you get more budget for insights and research? Rule number one, don't ask for more budget for research. Nobody cares about research. There's no demand for research you can harvest. You need to create demand. Know what the top executives are worried about. What strategic issues is your CEO or VP thinking about every day? Those are the elephant problems. If you want research funding for your mouse problems, you won't get it. Show the executives where the gaps are. What is it that we don't know? The demand for research comes from the realization that we have an important problem worth solving. Tie insights to revenue. If we were to know this, what's our hypothesis on the value of this? Every time there's a win in the organization because research data pointed us towards something documented, be ready to pull up all the examples as firepower to make your case that this has worked before. The foundation of marketing is mental availability. People don't know what they don't know about, nor can they buy what they can't find. Easy to mind, easy to find. So you want to be running ads, producing and distributing content with an effective message. You need to get in front of your target buyers at a consistent basis while being compelling and consistent with your messaging. As Andrew Davies, the CMO of Petal said, invest in brand or pay more in cash forever and ever and ever. Yeah, 100%. I like to say that you either invest in brand or you pay the price in customer acquisition cost for every quarter from now to the future. So 100%. It's really interesting that sometimes when you're talking to sales leaders, you'll often get this, why are you spending on that versus something that's going to generate pipeline in quarter? But I know all the best sales leaders I've worked with, they want to have, they want to be listed on Gartler and Forrester. They want to be out there with a brand that's known and understood. They want to have a community of practitioners that love speaking with each other and chatting with peers. They want everyone in the company to be connected to their target market so they can help. And so, yeah, I think it's just about taking a step back and making sure, as marketers, we operate on two tie frames. It's this quarter, how do we make sure our company can win right now? And it's sometime in the future. And because that sometime in the future is not quantified, sometimes we don't invest in it, but it's vital to make sure in every day that we're working and every week that we're working, we're spending some time on this quarter and some time on now and in the future. Building high mental availability requires repeated exposure to your brand, media, messaging, so that we can strengthen the buyer's mental structures over time. But if the messaging they come across does not resonate, it's all for nothing. And messaging is not binary, of course, bad or good. It's a continuum. There are levels of how good it can be. The better the messaging, the more it resonates, the more it will get stuck in their mind with repeated exposure. Yes, you need a great product, but it's no longer enough. You also need to win on things beyond the product, your narrative, positioning, messaging, and point of view. Positioning is an internal exercise that defines which ICPs you serve, what use cases are you solving, and so on. Positioning is kind of like picking one thing to be famous for. And that thing also determines who cares about that. If your positioning is done well, it's not likely to change frequently. Another key thing is that positioning is an internal strategy exercise. Once the positioning makes it to your website, it's messaging. Messaging, on the other hand, should be tested and optimized often. Your messaging should evolve with your customers, reflect the realities they are in and take into account the changing competitive landscape. Imagine if you would remove all words from your website. What would that do to your conversion rate? Yeah, it would sink to 0%. Words are the most important part of a website. Yet, most companies overindexed optimizing the look and feel of their site and grossly underinvested in messaging. The only purpose of design is to help communicate the message, invest accordingly. If the message is wrong, the channels don't matter. Winners invest heavily in messaging and ICP research first. The rest just go straight into spending more or trying more channels. Effective messaging requires curation. What's the one thing you want the target customers to know about you? The more ideas you want to communicate, the fewer people remember any of them. Contourers studied this in the context of ads and concluded that the more messages and ad attempts to convey, the lower the likelihood of a single message being communicated. Your key pages, homepage and top landing pages, ideally communicate just a single big idea. And the rest is details. Throw too many ideas their way and it will result in shrugs. I'm here to tell you right now, we don't care. Let me tell you. This is especially important if you're in a saturated category and folks want to understand how are these guys different? What's your one big idea? Messaging has four layers. If you want your messaging to convert more customers in case you're into more consideration sets, you have to improve all of its four layers. Number one, clarity. What is it? Lead with the category like you're a marketing automation tool and then use simple language to make your case. If they don't get it, they lose all interest and nothing else matters. Number two, relevance. Is it for me? As soon as people figure out what a particular tool or company is, they now want to understand if it's for them. Is it aligned with their priorities, their challenges at hand? Talk about the pain points, the desired gains you help them achieve, the use cases. Number three, value. Do I want it? This is about increasing customer motivation to take action. Here you tease the promised land, paint the picture of the future the customer could have. Your goal is to make them want it because if they're me about it, the game's over. And finally, number four, differentiation. Why you? Once they get it and want it, they're wondering if there's anything better out there. Or if it's a mature category, how are you better than the status quo? The more mature and competitive the category, the more you need to focus on your differentiated value. Note that these steps are in order. They don't care about the value until they get what it is. The differentiation doesn't matter if they think the tool is not for them. When you construct your messaging on your home page or elsewhere, focus one layer at a time. One of the key benefits that message testing does is that you will learn what the prospects don't get. They read your whole pitch and they still have questions. That's a problem. Why? It's mostly due to a lack of understanding but usually not a lack of information. IDC reports that up to 50% of B2B purchases are not completed due to insufficient information. Gartner says that 89% of customers report encountering high quality information during the repurchase process but they lack the confidence in their ability to make a good buying decision. Yeah, sure, the internet is full of your product information and prospects do self-educate. But it doesn't matter if you have 457 reviews on G2, average buyers read only 10 anyway. The buyers either lack the context for how to decide and most buyers are not category gonna serves or your value is vague. The key emotion here is fear. What if it doesn't deliver? If it's hard? What if it's a waste of money? What if there's something better out there? And this lingers even after making the purchase. Research by CB shows that such second guessing occurs in more than 40% of B2B purchases. What people look for in a vendor is certainty of success. If they could be certain that the vendor delivers on the points they need, there would be no hesitation. Usually the web copy and sales pitch focus too much on the features and not enough on market insights, which is like context for how to choose and not enough on customer value and why it matters to their business and not enough on how the product fits into their existing workflow. But still the most important part of your messaging is communicating value. The point is to make people want it prioritizing and emphasizing attributes that customers care about make your messaging effective, especially if it results in meaningful relative differentiation from the competition. So the key move here is identifying what your target customers find valuable and relevant enough to justify buying from you. Yes, it used to be pretty tricky and time consuming to figure it out, but winter makes it so easy now to tap into your target market to determine what they really care about. So messaging is about ideas. One of the key things we want the target customer to remember about us. But once those ideas get communicated to the target audience on our website, emails, ads, whatever, this is copyright. And copy is often where great messaging goes to die. Senior leadership like the CEO, product marketing leaders and all these folks are involved working on the messaging, strategic, very important. But then they usually designate somebody juniorish, somebody who's written very little copy before, or worse, someone outside their organization, some upwork freelancer to write a copy on their website. It's usually someone who was not part of the messaging strategy discussions. And that is a mistake. I've made a huge mistake. This is why SaaS companies use category defining impact maximization type of buzzword filled language on their site. It's not because their CEO or product marketing leadership are clueless. It's because mediocre copywriting renders even the best messaging strategy semi useless. It was a fun exercise, but it will have little to no effect on your good market efforts. Copywriting is much harder than messaging. What makes copy good? The copy is good when your ICP, the intended recipient for your message, will find it clear, relevant, differentiated and compelling. So you got to optimize and iterate until you're there. And you also have to remember that your website is not Wikipedia. The point is not to just convey information, but to make them want it. And nobody gets their copyright with the first draft. Nobody. Even if you nailed the messaging, getting the copyright takes iterations. But what do you do when your team is not aligned with what your ICP or messaging should be? Most companies are in a situation where marketing was to say one thing sales another, and the CEO or something else. This kind of lack of alignment around what our messaging or strategy in general should be comes from lack of unified data and insights. Most executives are rational actors and care about what works. They care about what the ICPs think, need and want. They care about their company's messaging and they want it to head home. If they would have data that the customers don't get it or don't understand it, don't value it, don't find it relevant, they would invest money in improving it. So the solution is ongoing ICP insights. If everyone would have access to the same information about what the ICPs are thinking about you, and what are they thinking in general, everyone knows they should be talking to more target customers, but they don't. And why is that? It used to be a considerable pain to do it. And yes, it's scary to reach out to people, it's painful to follow up. And so the hassle can be too high of a cost for many. However, speeding up market feedback loops is a massive advantage. That's why target market research platforms like Winter can be a game changer. Every time you have a question about your target buyer, Katie Donsford, within 24 hours, it's the fast feedback loops that separate winners and losers. So you need to nail a niche, you need to nail an ICP. You need to understand the ICP better than your competitors. Then when you expand to other markets, you bring out new products. There's a new ICPs we're talking about, you need to understand them. You need to test the messaging, you need to understand what's going on with these buyers. All of this is qualitative research. All of this is almost real-time information. This can be your competitive advantage. Thanks for tuning in to How to Win, where in each episode I unpack one aspect of winning in B2B SaaS. All your feedback is much appreciated. For more insights and opinions, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter.