This post was first published on LinkedIn
When everything seems to be failing, it's time to clean the slate and start again.
Stop the hiring, put that software purchase on hold and stop wasting money on Google ads.
It's time to reassess your go-to-market strategy, messaging, marketing approach, and sales practices for today's B2B SaaS buyers.
During the past few months, I have had many conversations with directors and CXOs of B2B companies. Each company struggles with stagnant revenue, weak pipelines, and inadequate lead flow.
They all want advice about what to do, and some want to know if I can help.
Anyone who reads their LinkedIn thread will see a familiar pattern. Outbound is increasingly ineffective, lead generation campaigns fail to produce quality leads, and salespeople struggle to make their numbers. I’ve seen predictions that between 60-80% of salespeople will not make their quota this year.
I am often called to diagnose and help fix sales revenue problems when companies fail to meet their targets and their sales leader has either been replaced or is about to be. Invariably, the sales problem I get called in for isn’t the underlying cause of weak revenue.
Throughout my consulting career, starting in 2004, I have observed that the primary issue faced by most early-stage software businesses is not with their sales team but with their go-to-customer strategy. Weak lead flow is usually the result of poor messaging and irrelevant marketing content that fails to connect with potential customers. This results in marketing messages being ignored, and consequently, marketing cannot generate the desired lead quantity or quality.
We are here because buying behaviour has changed somewhat more quickly than vendors have changed their marketing and selling practices. The current predictable B2B SaaS revenue models were created 5-10 years ago and are obsolete.
I caution sales and marketing leaders to rethink their go-to-customer strategy before investing in hiring, buying tools, or more Google ads.
The place to start is with your messaging. Over the past twenty years of consulting, I have used three different messaging models. A team of marketers and top salespeople developed the first two messaging models internally without consulting customers. This gives rise to a product-centric view of the world.
The messaging model I use today is based on the "jobs-to-be-done" theory developed by Bob Moesta and Clayton Christensen over 20 years ago but is still relatively unknown in the B2B SaaS space. It involves interviewing your best customers to learn why they switched to your product or service. This insight is then used to identify prospective customers who are most like them. Jobs-to-be-done theory captures the language used by top clients to describe their problems, motivation for change, approach to finding alternatives, and desired outcomes.
Understanding their struggling moments, the underlying cause and context of their problems and their motivation to explore alternative approaches that led them to you can yield insights that, when applied correctly, will enable you to tap into the vast demand for your service.
I was introduced to Jobs to be done via @MarkLittlewood, who runs the #BusinessofSoftware Conferences annually in Cambridge, England, and Raleigh, North Carolina.
I had just been fired as an interim sales leader, having failed dismally in growing revenue at a now-defunct software company, and was looking for new ideas. Mark Littlewood suggested I read Bob Moesta’s Demand-side Sales 101 when I pleaded ignorance of Jobs to be done.
Two Business of Software Conferences, half a dozen more books and three clients later I am beginning to understand the transformative power of this approach.
"Effective customer conversations are fundamental to a successful sales and marketing strategy."
The first conversation with prospective customers is the “Hero Message” on your Website or the banner in your trade-show booth. When a visitor arrives at your homepage or walks past your tradeshow booth for the first time, do they leave confused, or do they think, "this is what I've been searching for?"
Try this simple test on your Website. Add the words “Now you can”… to the hero message. If it makes sense to your visitors with a problem they are looking to solve, then you have passed the first and most critical test. If it doesn't make sense—and 85% of B2B SaaS companies get it wrong—then you are leaving it up to the visitor to figure out if the product-related message is a fit for the problem they are trying to solve and the outcomes they seek.
Here are two examples of banners from a recent HR tradeshow. Which one would resonate with a prospective customer looking for HR solutions?
1. World’s first customer-centric AI powered super App.
2. Hire, manage and pay your global talent with one platform
I’m looking for clients who want to accelerate sales revenue and if you failed the “Now you can test”, an initial conversation could make sense. There are no silver bullets in reversing a weak revenue problem, it takes time, process and requires a rethink of your go-to-customer approach. If you want to learn more about my methods, this brief video animation How to Accelerate Revenue in 2024 could help you decide if it’s worth an initial conversation.