Having spent time on both sides of consulting engagements, I’m intimately aware of the frustration you feel when consultants don’t deliver on your expectations.
Each engagement we form has a different setup because each one requires different things. Engagements fall anywhere between owning all the marketing implementation and being a strategic coach with your existing marketing and product team.
Gaining a true understanding of your desired future state and where you’re coming from helps ensure our engagement is built to achieve our shared desired outcome.
That’s why every engagement kicks off with a download and assessment of your current state and future state goals so we are in alignment.
Mind Merge
Any successful engagement is built from a foundation from which to work from. During this phase, we’ll deepen our understanding of your business and Saas product so we can get alignment on values for how to best help you and work together moving forward.
Before we dive into the rest of our audit to clarify the opportunity and tactics to accelerate your Saas success, we’ll get on the same page for how we can best work together to achieve your desired outcome.
Working backward from where you want to be in three years, we’ll identify the lead, user, and customer inputs necessary to achieve this future state within the product/solution fit, product/market fit, and the scaling stage of your Saas growth lifecycle.
What you’ll get:
- Increased clarity on our engagement
- Minimum success criteria
- A preliminary audit of your opportunity
- Recommended next steps
Problem Extraction/Market Audit
Review the problem you’ve identified, and dig deeper into this problem space with potential customers to verify the opportunity so you can confidently move forward developing the *right* solutions that the market values.
What you’ll get:
Validation Plan
- Problem/solution definitions
- Validations, key risks/dependencies
- Opportunity assessment / Size of the market
- Value assessment (how much value can be captured? Cost of the problem compared to your solution)
Positioning/Targeting Audit
Gain an understanding of your relative positioning in the market. Better define your unique selling proposition (primary benefit) and how to convey that to the audience you are targeting. This phase will help us better identify the messaging and beachheads we’ll use to validate your product-market fit.
What you’ll get:
- Value/Pricing Analysis
- Persona Development – This will inform our messaging and content/contact strategy, in addition to our marketing engines.
- Content/Contact Strategy – The who and how to reach and activate your target market and accounts.
Sales/Marketing Engine Development
Now that we have a great foundation to readily identify and speak to your target audience, we’ll move into the marketing and sales phase for your Saas to test your new positioning within this niche.
The work we do evolves depending on which stage of the Saas lifecycle you’re in.
The product-solution fit stage will focus most on bringing in more qualitative leads so you can better understand the problem, position your solutions, and craft offers that will validate your on the right track to developing a minimum viable product.
The product-market fit stage will identify the marketing engines to acquire more leads and paying users of your product, reduce churn, and create evangelists for your Saas.
The scale stage indicates you’re Saas has resonated with your target audience. During this stage, we’ll focus on expanding your market, improving lead and customer throughput, increasing retention and referrals, and systemizing effective marketing and sales tactics.
As part of your ongoing Sales/Marketing Development engagement, we’ll review 25+ engines of growth and prioritize tests to bring in right fit leads for your Saas.
Content/ Contact Strategy
This is the foundation of your marketing and sales engine.
- Persona Development
- Ideal Account Identification
- Contact Acquisition Plan
- Messaging Areas of Focus
- Convertible Pillar Content
- Content Ideation, Creation, & Curation
- Website (Prospect to Customer Design, Conversion Optimization)
Marketing & Sales Engines
Awareness and customer acquisition and revenue engines.
- Paid Media (SEM, Social, Retargeting)
- Partnerships (Biz Dev)
- Engineering as Marketing
- Social Media
- Events (Tradeshows, Speaking)
- Public Relations
- Community Development
- User Onboarding
- Account Expansion
- Retention Marketing
- Unconventional (Viral, ?, ?)
Optimizing Outcomes
Optimize marketing outcomes through hypothesis tests that:
- Increase Leads
- Increase Activation
- Increase Customers
- Increase Revenue
- Shorten Sales Cycle
- Reduce Churn
- Lower Cost of Acquisition (CAC)
- Increase Lifetime Value
- Improve Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A key tenant of my approach to build, measure, and learn through each of these stages. During your engagement, we’ll be running parallel experiments to learn more quickly and accelerate your growth.
Additionally, we’ll budget for and develop an overarching product marketing plan for your Saas.
What you’ll get:
- A fractional CMO to oversee or run your marketing efforts
- Rank order of the most optimal marketing and sales channels
- Validated learning from experiments using a hypothesis testing system to identify channels with lowest Cost of Acquisition (CAC) and highest Lifetime Value (LTV).
- Leads, Users, Customers
- Ongoing optimization
Business Model Benchmarking
We regularly discuss progress, reviewing your business model to benchmark it against your minimum success criteria.
We’ll review your customer segments, target market, positioning, messaging, pricing, and marketing channels to assess approaches we can take to improve your path to more predictable revenue over the next quarter.
What you’ll get:
- Updated key learnings
- Constraint identification
- Updated goals for the following quarter
- The next experiment to run, e.g. an ebook with a landing page will generate 100 leads.