3 must-know growth tips for B2B SaaS
I find that nothing quite inspires me more than seasoned professionals sharing their stories and experiences.
Equipped with insights and the benefit of retrospect, they can help us face our challenges and provide comfort in our follies.
Patrick Campbell’s recent appearance on Dreamdata’s LinkedIn Live session proved to be one of those particularly inspiring conversations.
Having successfully grown his B2B SaaS (ProfitWell) from a bootstrapped one-man show to an 8 figure behemoth - counting with a huge audience of loyal fans - Patrick had plenty of good tips and comforting words for anyone in the B2B go-to-market space.
That’s why I’m unpacking 3 nuggets of advice that really struck a chord with me from the conversation:
Commit to the test - things take time.
Watch who you take advice from - most success stories are from people who worked in a very different market from today.
Audience building is undefeated - make the connection with people.
Video: The Growth tactics that led ProfitWell to a $200 million sale
A little more about Patrick before we jump in:
For those who don’t know him, Patrick Campbell is the Founder & CEO of ProfitWell - a B2B SaaS helping subscription companies with their monetisation and retention strategies. He’s perhaps best known for his SaaS insights and the huge following these have garnered.
But this undersells Patrick, who one could say is a little bit of a human Swiss Army knife. An econometrician-cum-rhetorician by training, who prior to ProfitWell led Strategic Initiatives for Boston-based Gemvara, was an Economist at Google and had a stint in US Intelligence.
1. Commit to the test - things take time
It’s easy to be discouraged by the slow pace of success with content - especially in the early days of your content journey. But this, according to Patrick, shouldn’t stop you from “committing to the test” and seeing through the outcomes.
Having very few people engaging with your content initially, as I too have come to learn, is the rule, not the exception.
“In the early days it was like ‘oh 30 people read this thing that I spent 8 hours on’”.
Things take time.
To overcome this hurdle, you need to:
Understand your time dynamics and sales cycle
Shorter sales cycles mean you probably have to focus most on nailing your ads. And find a strategy that is easily repeatable.
Whereas for those with longer sales cycles, such as in B2B, your strategy needs to be built around sales and content - or as Patrick call is, “true media”.
You might be interested in this report on B2B go-to-market benchmarks.
Pursue quality and then “chasing where you get the most leverage.”
In B2B, with long sales cycles, “you’re probably going to want to move away from inbound marketing, as this is more about signalling from people to get from the top of the funnel to the bottom.”
Instead, you need to look at refining your content to ensure it adds value to your audience. Doing this to build relationships with your audience (more on this below).
But this in its own right doesn’t guarantee success. You need to experiment with different channels, media and topics, to see what makes your audience click.
And, “like all these things, make sure you do a hundred of them, don’t just do one and call it a failure. Commit to the test.”
2. Take into account the current market and watch who you take advice from
- most success stories are from people who worked in a very different market than today’s
There was a refreshing twist in the conversation when Patrick cautioned listeners on who they should take advice from. Highlighting the problem of changes in the market.
“[It’s] really, really important you realise where you get your advice from”. Most of those we seek advice from ‘made it’ between 2000 and 2015. “The issue with getting advice from those individuals was that they were in a market which was very different.”
This was a market where you could have “a reasonably ok product” and where your marketing didn’t even have to be “that successful”. All you had to do was ride the wave of the internet and the marketing channels that came with it.
“You just had to be good at following.”
Current market
The current market is a whole other ball game. Not only are things different, but things, as Patrick reminds us, are harder.
Fewer marketing channels innovation
Now we’re in an environment where marketing innovations are coming in at a much slower rate, with really only Snapchat and Tik Tok in the space of 5 years.
16x more competitors than 10 years ago.
The amount of content out there presents a challenge in its own right. “Even if you’re not competing with them directly, your competing with them for mindshare.”
There’s a lot of noise. Making standing out that much harder.
The only, or at least the easiest, way to break through the noise is by serving quality content and building up an audience. You can’t compromise here as you could previously.
Even the algorithms are now optimised for quality, meaning that your SEO too will benefit.
3. Audience building is undefeated
Finally, Patrick pulled no punches when highlighting how important audience building is for B2B go-to-market.
Some things are “undefeated” though, like “building a great audience”.
“Relationships that you have a connection to is something that as long as you nurture that relationship you can keep going back to it.”
Patrick outlines how by comparison, an ad doesn’t make that same connection. Sure, someone might click an ad, or a retargeting ad. Maybe over time, there might even be enough brand will to push the customer to purchase.
But this is much shorter term.
An apt interpretation of what Patrick mentioned here is the saying ‘Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.’
And while he acknowledged that this is also getting harder to do in the current market (recall the online noise, competition, etc.), he is confident in the power of a quality audience.
Monetising the audience should be a secondary objective
But does audience really translate to $? Steffen challenged Patrick on this point.
How do you monetise an audience?
According to Patrick, money shouldn’t be the first thing you think about.
Something like audience building relies on brand, which although measurable in ‘pieces’, is not measurable overall.
”And if you’re a marketer who only cares about measurement, you’re probably going to fail.”
Where ‘Fail’ = a lot lower success than you think
Monetisation comes from the software. As long as you’re building the right audience, and measuring engagement of that audience, all of a sudden the money takes care of itself.
Like this take? Follow Patrick on LinkedIn and make sure to tune in to Dreamdata’s LinkedIn live sessions for more B2B go-to-market nuggets.
