Behind most successful go-to-market motions is a strong Revenue Operations Leader. The challenge, however, is finding the right hire whose skill set and background align with your company's priorities. For example, are you hiring a leader to 1) Put out fires, 2) Build a revenue operations roadmap, or 3) Gather requirements and manage projects to completion? This article walks you through how you would approach a hiring process differently for these three categories.
Looking to increase your reply rates from your cold emails? If so, you may need to add more personalization to your outbound cadences. A few best practices to do so include tailoring your emails to a specific segment and using dynamic (smart) content to drive timely and relevant action. However, it's recommended that you use no more than three to five personalized properties in an email (or it can start getting creepy).
It’s a lot easier to win over a prospect when an existing customer raves about your company. But instead of hoping a customer will do so, SaaS companies can create customer advocacy programs to systematically convert customers into advocates, and build content around their praise. This article walks you through the five layers of a customer advocacy program and how to design a strategy for your own company.
From creator economy pioneer to PLG poster child, Uscreen, a video-on-demand platform for brands and creators, bootstrapped its way to $20 million in ARR and now supports over 8.5+ million end users globally. Despite, at the time, operating in a nascent market, the company found early growth through SEO and leveraging its blog for thought leadership. The company followed a five-step checklist to building its SEO engine, one of which was doing organic outbound to gain coverage on related websites.
Then to kick the company’s growth into high gear, Uscreen double down on having its product market itself. The company couldn’t afford to focus on brute-forcing sales unprofitably. As a result, Uscreen allocated 85% of its resources to engineering and product and built out features that would help the business grow organically.
Taking on Goliath makes for a good story, but for startups, this is almost a near certainty. However, going toe-to-toe with the giants in the market doesn’t mean competing with them head-on; instead, SaaS companies can adjust their go-to-market strategy to insulate themselves from industry incumbents.
This article offers four ways to do this: 1) lower costs and improve usability, 2) focus on a niche, 3) surf a technology wave, and 4) build a strong guerrilla marketing game. These are just a few tactics to help your company navigate the market dynamics at play and can help you find greenfields in your industry. But it’s important to remember that out-selling, out-partnering, and out-spending are often not winning strategies (so you can remove those from your list).
What motivates a customer to purchase your product is not its appeal, but rather how it helps them achieve the outcome they are looking for. However, to get them to convert from a free trial to a paid user, your messaging and user experience need to encapsulate how your product will make them successful. There are a number of ways to do this, but one way is to 10x your user’s motivation by speaking to the frustrations that motivate them to take action. This article walks you through three steps that can help improve your conversions.
Are you ready for a hot take? (This one almost made me spill my coffee this morning). As more companies adopt a Product-Led Growth (PLG) motion paired with a Usage-Based Pricing (UBP) model, the traditional subscription-based approach could become obsolete. A PLG and UBP motion is arguably a better model for vendors and customers as it allows for a more flexible and transparent billing process, lower customer acquisition costs, and improved net dollar retention. This article walks you through why companies that don’t adopt a usage-based pricing model could be disrupted by those that do.
Everyone knows that SEO plays an important part in acquiring customers efficiently, but where do companies start and how do they keep track of their initiatives? The answer: creating an SEO roadmap. An SEO roadmap helps marketing teams align on the right priorities, effectively allocate resources, and generate buy-in for long-term strategies. This article walks you through the seven steps to create your own SEO roadmap and offers templates to help guide you.
Reporting on Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) helps SaaS companies prioritize their initiatives and stay focused on achieving their quarterly and annual goals. At the end of the day, what get’s measured get’s managed, right? One way to keep your team accountable is to track three to five core metrics weekly and then report on the initiatives and their impact at the end of the quarter. This article walks you through a few considerations to help reduce the lift on reporting on OKRs but ensures they remain front-and-center for your company.
Before falling victim to FOMO and the elusive appeal of an in-house data team, startups should evaluate two primary questions. First, has your company reached a point where you have enough data to generate quality insights? And second, do you have the right tools and support to realize the ROI from a data scientist’s insights? This article helps you answer these two questions and walks you through what you should consider before making your first data hire.
The enterprise HR and payroll market are dominated by heavyweights like ADP, Paylocity, Workday, Ceridian, and Quickbooks, which have a combined market cap of over $280 billion. But enter in the contender. Gusto, valued at $10B (as of May 2022), is the underdog in the market, serving over 100,000 companies with payroll, health insurance, HR, and more business essentials.
Gusto's rapid growth is driven by aligning content with users' needs and adjusting to the evolving digital landscape in the marketing industry. The company has built a catalog of content that increases its page ranking by targeting long-tail keywords. In addition, Gutso converts site vistors into leads through their collection of helpful online calculators.
This article is filled with strategic advice and valuable insights from Craft Ventures. So much so that I had to read this article a second time to soak in all the information. But getting straight to the point, it’s no news that tech markets have experienced a paradigm shift. Valuations have declined from their peak in 2021, and growth at all costs has shifted to revenue durability, growth efficiency, and healthy unit economics.
This article offers eight initiatives to help companies operate more efficiently that can serve as inspiration for strategic conversations among executive teams. All in all, the strategies outlined by Craft Ventures help SaaS companies focus on conserving cash, deepening relationships with customers, and doing more with less.
The focus has shifted towards efficient and durable growth, which adds pressure to cut costs. As a result, SaaS companies are looking for areas to reduce costs, but this often means cutting marketing initiatives, which typically have a hard time quantifying the ROI. This article walks you through a few ways to make marketing more efficient, such as performing zero-based budgeting, having good data and a reasonable attribution methodology, and focusing on the right metrics and targets.
Improving your website's navigation has a number of benefits for your SaaS company. First, great navigation enhances the user experience for site visitors and increases the likelihood they’ll convert into leads. In addition, good navigation can help increase your site’s page ranking by making it easier for Google to determine the relevance and importance of different pages on your site. This article walks you through 12 best practices to master website navigation to help drive more organic traffic to your site and increase your website conversions.
A SaaS company's CRM should be the source of truth for all go-to-market data. From the top of the funnel to the groundwork of the pipeline and even to renewals, all of this data should be captured in the CRM. By automating processes within a CRM like HubSpot, SaaS companies can see quicker sales cycles, fewer data gaps, and more accurate reporting. This article walks you through three essential HubSpot adds 1) consistent naming conventions, 2) lifecycle stage back-filling, and 3) cohort reporting vs. dynamic reporting.
