Creating a SaaS Sales Funnel for Your Startup in 2020

Summary

In this video, TK teaches SaaS founders how to build an unstoppable sales funnel for lead generation. He emphasizes the importance of differentiating from competitors by establishing authority and leading a movement through a well-defined manifesto. The process involves honing in on the ideal customer profile, creating a compelling manifesto, and running a 'Broadway show' of consistent, high-quality content. TK also offers a SaaS advisory program to guide founders in implementing this strategy for accelerated growth.

Takeaways

• 🚀 **Sales Funnel Importance**: The video emphasizes the critical role of an effective sales funnel in generating leads and fueling SaaS business growth.
• 🌟 **Differentiation Strategy**: To stand out, a SaaS business should adopt a differentiated strategy that focuses on building authority and leading a movement rather than just competing on volume.
• 🎯 **Identify Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)**: The first step to building an effective sales funnel is to hone in on the ICP to target efforts more effectively.
• 📜 **Create a Manifesto**: A central piece of marketing content, the manifesto, should clearly articulate the company's unique perspective and value proposition.
• 📢 **Teach and Lead**: By teaching people about the transformational potential of the software and leading a movement, a SaaS business can out-teach the competition and build trust.
• 📈 **Cost-Efficient Pipeline**: It's crucial to maintain a healthy LTV to CAC ratio, ensuring that the methods used to build the sales funnel are cost-efficient.
• 🔍 **Competitive Edge**: The video suggests that by focusing on teaching and authority building, a SaaS can rise above competitors and generate leads more effectively.
• 📅 **Consistent Content**: Regularly posting content that links back to the manifesto helps in driving the message home and building a consistent brand narrative.
• 🎭 **Broadway Show Metaphor**: The idea of running a 'Broadway show' implies creating high-quality, recurring content that is refined over time rather than constantly creating new, disparate content.
• 📝 **Content Linkage**: All marketing efforts should lead back to the manifesto, creating a cohesive and reinforcing brand message.
• 💼 **Advisory Program**: The speaker offers a SaaS advisory program to guide founders in creating a manifesto, identifying the ICP, and running a Broadway show to improve their sales funnel.

Q & A

What is the main focus of the video?

The main focus of the video is to guide SaaS business owners on how to build an unstoppable sales funnel to generate more leads and grow their business.

What does TK offer to SaaS founders?

TK offers a SaaS advisory program aimed at helping founders scale their go-to-market machines and build an unstoppable sales funnel.

What is the significance of having a 3-4x pipeline coverage?

Having a 3-4x pipeline coverage is significant because it ensures that there is enough potential business in the pipeline to meet sales goals.

Why is it important to maintain a good LTV to CAC ratio?

Maintaining a good LTV (Lifetime Value) to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio is important because it ensures the cost of acquiring customers does not outweigh the revenue they generate over their lifetime.

What is the standard way of generating leads mentioned in the video?

The standard way of generating leads includes activities like content marketing, blogging, social media posting, demand generation practices, webinars, events, and outbound emails.

How does the differentiated strategy differ from the standard way?

The differentiated strategy focuses on building authority by establishing the founder as a brand, teaching people about the transformation the software offers, and leading a movement by out-teaching the competition.

What is the first step in building an unstoppable sales funnel according to the video?

The first step is to hone in on the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to identify the market segment that creates more LTV and a more efficient CAC.

What is a manifesto in the context of the video?

A manifesto is a central piece of marketing that articulates why the company is a change agent in the industry, why it has a unique view, and why it can take people into the future.

What is meant by running a 'Broadway show' in marketing?

Running a 'Broadway show' in marketing refers to consistently delivering a high-quality, focused message or content (the 'show') to the market, rather than creating new content every week.

How often should a SaaS business run their 'Broadway show'?

The video suggests running the 'Broadway show' every week, with the aim of teaching people something new and linking back to the manifesto.

What is the benefit of focusing on a specific ICP and running a Broadway show?

Focusing on a specific ICP and running a Broadway show helps build authority, out-teach the competition, lead a movement, and create a differentiated go-to-market strategy that builds trust and drives sales.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 Building an Unstoppable Sales Funnel for SaaS Growth

The video introduces the challenge of generating leads for a SaaS business and proposes a solution: building an unstoppable sales funnel. The host, TK, offers to guide viewers through the process of creating such a funnel to increase leads and pipeline. The video is part of a series aimed at helping SaaS founders scale their businesses. TK also mentions his SaaS advisory program for founders looking to scale their go-to-market strategies. The importance of having a 3-4x pipeline coverage to hit business targets is emphasized, along with the need to maintain a healthy LTV to CAC ratio. The video promises a step-by-step guide on how to build a differentiated sales funnel that stands out in a competitive market.

05:01

🔍 Differentiating Your SaaS Marketing Strategy

TK explains the difference between standard demand generation practices and a differentiated strategy for lead generation. The standard approach involves various marketing activities such as content marketing, blogging, social media, webinars, events, and outbound emails, which can be expensive. To differentiate, the video suggests building authority by establishing the founder as a brand and teaching people about the transformation their software offers. This approach can lead to out-teaching the competition and leading a movement, which in turn generates more leads and pipeline in a cost-effective way. The video outlines a three-step process for implementing this strategy: honing in on the ideal customer profile (ICP), creating a manifesto, and running a 'Broadway show' with a consistent, high-quality marketing message.

10:02

📈 Crafting a Manifesto and Running a Broadway Show for SaaS Success

In this part of the script, TK elaborates on the second and third steps of the strategy: creating a manifesto and running a Broadway show. The manifesto is a central marketing piece that articulates the company's unique viewpoint and vision for the industry, serving as a rallying point for all marketing efforts. The Broadway show metaphor suggests running a high-quality, consistent marketing campaign (the show) that is refined over time and delivered regularly, rather than constantly creating new, less impactful content. TK emphasizes the importance of focusing on a specific audience (ICP), teaching them through the manifesto, and building trust and authority. The video also promotes TK's SaaS go-to-market advisory program, which helps founders implement these strategies to increase pipeline coverage, generate quality leads, and accelerate SaaS business growth.

Keywords

💡SaaS

SaaS stands for Software as a Service, which is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and centrally hosted. It is a key concept in the video as the speaker addresses the challenges and strategies specifically for SaaS businesses, such as generating leads and managing pipeline coverage.

💡Leads

Leads in the context of the video refer to potential customers who have shown interest in a company's products or services and may potentially be converted into actual customers. The video focuses on generating these leads through an effective sales funnel.

💡Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is a marketing concept that illustrates the journey potential customers go through from being prospects to becoming actual buyers. In the video, building an 'unstoppable sales funnel' is presented as a strategy to generate more leads and pipeline in a differentiated way.

💡Pipeline

Pipeline in a business context refers to the set of potential deals in the sales process that are expected to close in the future. The video emphasizes the need for a sufficient pipeline to ensure business growth, aiming for a 3-4x pipeline coverage to hit sales targets.

💡ICP

ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile, which is a detailed description of a company's most valuable customer or client. The video suggests honing in on the ICP as a crucial step in building a sales funnel and generating leads more efficiently.

💡Manifesto

In the video, a manifesto is described as a central marketing piece that articulates the company's unique point of view and serves as a rallying point for the brand's message. It is used to mobilize marketing efforts and establish authority in the industry.

💡Authority

Authority in the video refers to the status or position which gives the power to influence or make decisions. The speaker advises building authority by establishing oneself as a thought leader in the industry, which can then be used to out-teach the competition and lead a movement.

💡Differentiated Strategy

A differentiated strategy is a business approach that focuses on distinguishing a company's products or services from competitors. The video advocates for such a strategy to stand out in a competitive market and generate leads in a cost-effective way.

💡LTV to CAC Ratio

LTV (Lifetime Value) to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio is a financial metric used to determine the long-term profitability of a customer. The video mentions the importance of maintaining a healthy LTV to CAC ratio while building a sales funnel to ensure cost efficiency.

💡Broadway Show

In the context of the video, a 'Broadway Show' is a metaphor for a high-quality, consistent marketing effort that is refined and repeated over time, rather than constantly creating new, disparate content. It involves focusing on a few key messages linked to the manifesto.

💡Go-to-Market (GTM)

Go-to-Market refers to the process a company uses to sell its product or service to consumers. The speaker mentions a GTM advisory program that helps SaaS founders scale their businesses by honing their GTM strategies, including crafting a manifesto and identifying the right ICP.

Highlights

Importance of generating enough leads for SaaS business growth

Introduction to building an unstoppable sales funnel

The necessity of 3-4x pipeline coverage to hit business targets

Balancing pipeline coverage with cost efficiency to maintain LTV to CAC ratio

Common challenges faced by SaaS founders in lead generation

Differentiating from competitors by building authority

Establishing the founder as a brand to build authority

Out-teaching the competition by leading a movement

The concept of an unstoppable sales call

Three steps to differentiate and generate leads effectively

Step one: Honing in on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Step two: Creating a manifesto as the central marketing piece

Step three: Running a 'Broadway show' for consistent, high-quality content

The difference between traditional demand generation and an unstoppable sales funnel

Focusing on quality over quantity in content marketing

Building trust by being seen as an industry authority

Offering a SaaS go-to-market advisory program for personalized guidance

The benefits of the advisory program for SaaS business growth

Invitation to join the program and apply for a strategy call

Encouragement to share the video with fellow founders and marketers

Final thoughts on the importance of having a strategy for business growth

Transcripts

- If you're operating a SaaS business

the biggest thing that's top of mind for

is how do I generate enough leads,

enough pipeline to feed my growth?

In this video I'm gonna be walking you through

how to build an unstoppable sales funnel

so you can generate more leads, intro,

(upbeat bouncing music)

What's up everybody, welcome to unstoppable

I'm TK on this channel I bring an episode every Sunday

and every Wednesday to help SaaS founders like you

build and scale incredible SaaS businesses.

So if you're new to the community,

welcome, be sure to hit the subscribe button

and that bell icon (bell ringing) so you get notified

every single time I dropped an episode with the TK energy.

By the way, if you are building a SaaS business,

which you probably are, if you're watching this video,

I run a SaaS advisory program to help founders

like you scale your go to market machines.

I'll share more details about that

which is now accepting new members and enrollments

at the end of this video.

Now, if you're operating the SaaS business,

I've been there, you're probably obsessing

about your number.

Now in order to hit your number,

you need to have a three to four x pipeline coverage.

In order to get that pipeline coverage,

you also need to make sure you do it

in a cost efficient way,

so you don't completely screw up your LTV to CAC ratio.

These are all the things that are probably buzzing

in your head, maybe not exactly in that framework,

but that's basically what you're going through,

I've been there.

Knowing everything that I know

from my Marketo journey and my ToutApp journey,

both very different scale SAS businesses.

In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through

how to build an unstoppable sales funnel,

which helps you generate pipeline

and leads in a differentiated way step by step.

So be excited to get started smash that like button

and let's dig right in.

So firstly, let's talk about

why you need a differentiated way

of actually generating these leads.

So there's a standard way and the differentiator way.

The standard way, which you're probably already doing

is a lot of activity, a lot of action.

You're probably doing content marketing,

you're probably blogging, writing on LinkedIn, tweeting,

you're doing all these things.

You're also doing all the demand gen practices,

webinars, events, although we can't quite do

as many events anymore.

On top of that, you're probably also doing outbound spam,

you're sending a lot of emails to a lot of people

that probably don't want to hear from you and that way.

And on top of that, you may be spending a significant number

of ad dollars on Facebook, Google, and maybe even Amazon,

depending on your target customer.

You're doing all these things

and what this usually tends to lead to

is really expensive sales and marketing.

So the question becomes, how do you differentiate?

Now one more thing I'll add to this,

while you're doing this, it probably looks like

your competitor is marketing as well.

It's not very differentiated.

So how do you actually rise above,

how do you generate leads and pipeline in a better way?

How do you stand out in a competitive and crowded market

and how do you do it in a cost effective way?

This is why you need a differentiated strategy.

The differentiated strategy

focuses on a couple of other things.

It focuses on actually building authority.

It says you know what, if you the founder

and the leader of this company

actually establishes yourself as a brand,

instead of just the company

and you go out there and start teaching people

about this big transformation you're doing.

The software unlocks, you can start to build authority.

As you start to build authority,

instead of just doing a webinar and a tit for tat,

and an event sponsorship and a tit for tat

with your competitors,

you can actually out teach the competition.

And if you can out teach the competition,

then you can actually lead a movement.

Because if you're teaching people something,

they will follow you and they will want more.

And by the way, they'll buy from you.

This is the differentiated approach

of building an unstoppable sales funnel.

This is where an unstoppable sales call comes from.

So the question becomes,

okay, if you want this differentiated way

of doing this, sounds awesome, right?

How do you do it?

I'll break it down into three steps.

The first thing that you do and this is very,

I do this for anyone that I work with

in my SaaS advisory program.

The first step is we really hone in on your ICP,

your ideal customer profile.

Chances are if you've got a bunch of revenues

you did in a whole bunch of different ways

because you tried a whole bunch of different things,

but within your revenue base, you have a set of customers

a market segment that is actually creating more LTV

and a more efficient CAC,

and you're not thinking about it that way.

And if you double down in that set of customers

that market segment, you could actually grow faster.

So the first thing that we do

is actually hone in on your ICP.

Once you've honed in on your ICP,

the second thing to do is to create your manifesto.

Your manifesto becomes the central piece of marketing

that you do.

Everything that you do leads into your manifesto,

your manifesto articulate why you're the change agent

in this industry,

why you guys have a wildly different view on things,

why you guys are the ones that are actually thinking

about the future and can take people into the promised land.

The manifesto is the core asset that you use

to actually mobilize everything else that you do.

Everything leads into the manifesto,

and you take that manifesto,

and you go teach people that manifesto,

you go lead with that manifesto

and every single touch point leads back into that manifesto.

Now before I go to step number three and explain the rest of

this process, let me just pause here for a second.

You might be asking, okay, TK,

what's the difference between

your traditional demand generation content marketing,

where you have a lead magnet,

and building an unstoppable sales funnel?

The difference here is that you start to do less.

Here's the thing.

You could do 50 blog posts, you could do 50, tweets,

50, LinkedIn messages,

and it could be on eight different themes.

And they're all about, hey, BIO software, right?

What you're doing there is just looking just

like your competition.

But instead, if you take a step forward

as the leader of the company,

and take a step forward towards leading the industry,

if you actually say, here's our unique point of view,

your manifesto, on how we think about this stuff.

And you start to say, here's what we believe

every single day, everything links to that one manifesto.

You start to teach your audience,

you start to hone in on that very specific audience

with your ICP, and you start to differentiate

and build authority and actually lead and you teach,

you start to build more trust.

That's a wildly different way of sales and marketing,

versus the standard way, which does a lot of volume,

spends a lot of money, and just spreads it evenly

across a bunch of different channels.

We start to see the difference in this

we start to see the differences,

can I just get a yes, in the comments below

so that I know you're with me.

Let's dig into step number three.

Step number two is once you have your manifesto,

there's a very specific way to craft this,

and this is one of the things that we go through

in the GTM advisory program.

This is a very specific way to do this.

Once you have your manifesto,

you start to run your Broadway show.

Why do I call it a Broadway show?

This is not something I invented,

it's kind of well known in the consumer marketing side,

a broadway shows you have this one really great show,

a Broadway level show and you run it in different locations

across the country or across the world.

Instead of coming up with a brand new show

to run every week.

Right now, whether you have a marketing team or not,

you're probably running a brand new show every week.

What you do instead is you run a Broadway level show

that you improve over and over over time.

You just run that over turnover every week.

How does that come together?

The way that comes together is that you do.

And this is you, you as the brand, not your company.

But you because you're the leader,

and you're running out of stock, a sales funnel.

You do one to three posts every week.

And the one, two posts can either cover a macro trend,

a macro trend related to your ICP,

or it can cover your journey, your personal journey

as leader of this movement,

or a customer story,

from an actual conversation you had from your story.

So you do these one to three posts,

and they always link to your manifesto,

that's your broadway show, that's it.

So every week, you're going out there

and you teach people something new,

either through a macro trend, or from your own journey,

or from a customer story, you teach someone something new

and you say oh, by the way, here's how we think about x

and x is the bigger space in you are in.

And if you want to learn more about that,

be sure download my guide.

So I do this for example, I do a Broadway show

every single Wednesday, every single Wednesday

I talk about building an unstoppable sales funnel.

This is a wildly different way to actually

generate pipeline and generate leads.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to learn more about this,

I run a webinar every week on go to market secrets

and how to implement an unstoppable sales funnel,

I'll link to it below, which, by the way,

is my manifesto that you can go and check out.

So I started to see the difference here.

When you actually run this Broadway show,

you're essentially doing less

you're driving a clear message to the market

and saying, "Let us teach you,

"let us give you our point of view.

"Let us show you how the world can be wildly different

"when you are with us when you believe in the same things

"that we believe, which we articulate in our manifesto."

When you do that, to a very specific ICP,

using your manifests when you run that Broadway show,

you end up with a very differentiated go to market strategy.

You build authority, you actually out teach the competition,

and you lead a movement.

All of these activities will help you

actually create a mini brand around yourself

will create a halo effect, it'll help you differentiate

from the competition, but most importantly,

it'll drive trust in industry

because they will look at you as an authority.

And the people tend to buy from people they trust.

So now you know why and unstoppable sales funnel works

is differentiated and why you need one.

You may not know the details of exactly

how to hone in on the right ICP,

how to actually craft your manifesto

or how to run your Broadway show

is a very different playbook

than your traditional sale and marketing.

This is why I offer my SaaS go to market advisory program.

In this program, I actually guide you

in creating your manifesto.

I guide you in honing in on the right ICP,

and I guide you in running your Broadway show

so that you can increase your pipeline coverage,

generate quality leads, and actually accelerate

the growth of your SaaS business.

So if you're interested in that

we are open for enrollment now listen,

on sample sales fall is not perfect for every leader

and every company, it works when the fit is right.

This is why I have an application form

so if you want to learn more about this

just go to TKKADER.COM/GTM.

in there you will get all the details

including market advisory program,

and there'll be a little apply button

that you fill out just to get on a call with me.

On that call, we'll do a strategy call,

we'll talk through where you are,

whether or not several sales phone is the right fit for you.

If it works, then we'll work together

to actually build out your ensemble sales funnel

so that you can generate more pipeline,

you know, why don't we differentiated way

and accelerate your growth for your SaaS business.

I've been so excited about this program,

and we've already gotten a number of founders

and it's been really really exciting

to see the early results that they're getting.

So I would love to work with you,

If you're interested in this

Be sure to follow the link to TKKADER.COM/GTM

And I will see you on our strategy call.

If you got value from this video,

if you love what we're talking

about in terms of billion on self assessment,

please smash that like button.

And also remember I drop a video like this

every Sunday and every Wednesday.

So be sure hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.

If you have a fellow founder, a fellow marketer

who would get value from this video,

please share this video with them.

It would mean the world to me and my team

we put a lot of effort in the videos.

And lastly remember,

everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business.

When you are with us, yours is going to be unstoppable.

I'm TK and I will see you in the next episode.

(upbeat music)