SaaS Growth: Targeting Is Key

Closing a deal with a customer starts with having accurately targeted the right Ideal Customer Profile.

That is true at any SaaS (or non-SaaS) company life stage. That is even more important at an early stage.

And, I’ve learned it the hard way, it is critical in the tech SaaS world.

Targeting is a science.

Why I write about this

This very morning, while drinking my coffee, I opened my LinkedIn messages.

Note that five days ago, I went public on the launch of my activity as an independent advisor “helping B2B SaaS and tech companies build product strategy and go-to-market execution that creates measurable impact”. I’m thankful to my network, as the message got me some exposure.

Most likely as an outcome, a person I didn’t know subsequently asked to connect. I saw they had the same activity and targeting as I had just launched and thought, “oh, cool, maybe we can share learnings!”.

And this morning, this is the message I got from them.

(* Heimir Consulting is just the name of my individual company)

Personally, that’s typically the kind of message that keeps me from accepting LinkedIn invites from people I’ve never heard of. How poorly targeted could this message be?

Have you ever feared one of the following, while letting teams run outbound lead generation tactics?

• That reaching out to the wrong person with the wrong message would simply make your entire company and product look silly, impacting your brand image.
• That (repeated) intrusive cold messages would generate pushback from your leads, even though they could have shown intent to buy down the road.
• That each time they reach out to the wrong person, all of the effort put into it is pure waste of time and money.
• That each time they reach out to the wrong person, you’re breaking your learning curve: your open rate and response rate drop dramatically, for a good reason. But it’s irrelevant to your product; it’s noise that won’t let you understand what you can improve.

I have. All of it.

It’s precisely what I’ve spent the past years fixing, and what I can also help you fix.

But before you click on this link, let me tell you what I believe is key.

The right people, through the right channel

Let’s smash through some open doors. Yet science is also about properly defining your hypotheses before you demonstrate anything.

Who

The ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is an exact combination of:

• The exact firmography you should target (company size, industry, etc.)
• The exact persona you should target (their job and responsibilities, aspirations, challenges, etc.)
• The exact use case you should target (what is the pain point those people experience that your product fixes, and for which they’re ready to pay for a solution)

Basically, missing out on any of those can get you to land on just the wrong planet. And of course they’ll say “no”, or won’t even answer.

You can always wish for serendipity, and have one chance in a billion that you’ll actually generate an interesting deal.

Or you can decide to focus, and make sure that you can draw conclusions out of success or failure.

Where

There are nineteen “traction channels”, according to Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. Nineteen different ways to reach out to who might someday become one of your customers. And it might be worth trying each of them: who knows, if your competitors haven’t, you might just find the one that drives most of the market.

Now, if you are still finding your product–market fit, or questioning your next step, there is one thing that you cannot set aside: you must talk to people. And as much as possible, given previous points, you must talk to qualified leads.

It narrows down the channel options pretty fast, since you’ll also want to talk to those people really fast. My take? Outbound and in-person events (trade fairs, conferences, …). In any case, combining multiple channels gives you more chances that the person you want to talk to has multiple touchpoints with your brand and messaging, and that you get in touch with them if they have the right pain point.

The great part of in-person events is that a major part of the qualification will be done by the event organizers for you. The downside is that you have no guarantee of intent from the person you’ll meet, and that such events might be expensive (I have a couple of recommendations on that).

So here we are, talking about those LinkedIn messages and emails you’re getting by the hundreds, 99.99% of which you never read, or regret that you did. After years of experimenting and building outreach campaigns, I can tell you that, done right, it really helps you close deals, or learn a lot.

So, once you have a fair belief that the person you reach out to would be interested in your product, how do you make sure that your messages are opened, read, and responded to?

Outreach practiced as a science

It is all about being strict and disciplined, from the start. You must:

• be aware of all of the parameters you’re playing with,
• ideally change only one parameter at a time when iterating,
• measure everything,
• perform experiments with “statistically satisfying” numbers (start with 100, but don’t waste your time going for 1 million).

Experimentation and customization

At first, this means you’ll do things that don’t scale. Premature automation is the root of all evil, since there is a fair chance that too many people you reach out to might just not be qualified at all.

It is about manually selecting each person you will reach out to by reading their LinkedIn profile and getting enough clues that they can be a fit. About going to check in depth their company website, or any relevant content available online.

It is about crafting each and every message manually to each and every one of your leads, even though taking inspiration from a template.

This one is key: you’ll want to iterate on the “promise” of the pain point you solve, and therefore get statistically relevant numbers, yet the sentences cannot just feel like you had an email template with placeholders you simply replaced with their first and last name, and company name. It is obvious, and it shows you do not care at all about them. Definitely not the best way to start building trust.

Automate only once you have enough key parameters well defined so that you trust your ability to land in the right mailbox, with the right message.

Expertise is your edge, your customer’s pain is your focus

It’s true for your product. And it’s true for any moment you get in touch with a lead. You can’t just “do the same as X or Y”.

Your expertise means trust from your customer. You close a deal because they trust that your product will solve their problem. You retain a customer because you actually solve it, and because they trust that you will support them for a long time, possibly with new adjacent problems, which you might be aware of before they experience them, thanks to your expertise.

You will maximize open and response rates because, from the very first touchpoint, you show your expertise in their problem. Not because you have a fancy product and great customer references.

Your first message (and almost all of the others, for that matter) should be about them. It should be about a problem that, ideally, you have clearly identified for them, and that you know they have. Not that you think “hmm, maybe they have it”, or that they’re not aware of it yet. Just showing that you understand that problem and its strategic impact for them shows your expertise. You don’t even have to sell your product in that first touchpoint.

Back to this morning’s exemple, the message:

• completely missed its target: no, I’m not building or selling a SaaS
• is just too generic, and the typical case of a template with some {insert first name} and {insert company name} placeholder.

The start of it all

The earlier you get interested in your lead, the stronger the relationship will be with them if they become a customer.

The best customer relationships I’ve built were with those I reached out to with such a highly customized outbound approach, and whom I assisted throughout the entire benchmarking and tool selection process, helping them formalize their thoughts into documents which then became the key strategic briefing for their onboarding phase, and later Quarterly Business Reviews, during which we kept assessing their satisfaction and upcoming needs and problems.