Slack has been called the fastest-growing SaaS company of all time.
In January 2015, Slack was a little-known business messaging app, born out of the ashes of a failed gaming startup. They had less than half a million users and had generated less than 12 million in revenue during the previous year.
Just 3 years later, in May of 2018, they had over 8 million active users (a 1500% increase) and finished the year with an impressive 220.5 million in revenue.
The secret to their success? An unstoppable SaaS go-to-market strategy paired with perfect market timing.
While very few SaaS startups can replicate Slack’s remarkable results, we can learn from the strategies that they and other successful startups employed in the early days.
This post lays out the go-to-market strategy creation process that we developed after studying dozens of successful SaaS startups and testing our methodologies with real B2B and SaaS brands.
We’ve also included a few examples of successful SaaS go-to-market strategies so you can see how this process plays out in the real world.
A holistic go-to-market strategy describes:
A clear and specific go-to-market strategy helps your team stay aligned and move in the same direction. By collaborating across departments to create your go-to-market strategy, you can guarantee business-wide buy-in.
It’s essential that everyone in your organization knows who you serve, how your product is being positioned in the market, and how the business is acquiring and retaining new users.
Businesses that fail to develop and follow a unified go-to-market strategy often deal with problems like:
The SaaS industry moves fast. The product is constantly evolving to serve users better. By maintaining consistent alignment across departments, you can create a cohesive, positive experience for users. And happy users are the prerequisite to growth.
1. Perform Customer Development
2. Analyze the Competitive Landscape
3. Define Your Unique Value Proposition
4. Test Messaging for Stickiness
5. Build Your Buyer’s Journey
6. Choose Your Channels
7. Launch Your Go-To-Market Strategy
8. Review Results & Refine
Who do you serve? Customer development is about developing an extremely clear picture of your ideal customer. Not just their demographics but their interests, how they spend their time, who they admire and trust, their values and motivations, their fears and doubts… who they are.
It’s important to understand their specific jobs to be done and problems as they relate to your product. How does your solution fit into their life?
Customer development cannot occur in a vacuum. You need to “get out of the office,” so to speak. Go talk to people. Have non-sales conversations with active users, leads who haven’t signed up, and people who have never heard of you.
Try to identify the type of user who has the greatest need for your product, a “bleeding neck problem”.
Questions to address:
Use this data to generate buyer personas for the 2-3 types of users who are the best fit for your product.
Some companies are afraid to talk about their competition. They’d rather bury their head in the sand and pretend that they have no competitors. But this is never the case.
The reality is that your prospects are comparing you to alternatives. Whether the alternatives are other SaaS products, spreadsheets, or some other workaround.
It’s essential to understand the competitive landscape that customers are considering you within. Where do you fit? Are you the low-cost alternative? The easiest to use? The most reliable?
Taking the time to research your space will help you find a corner that you can uniquely own. Research alternatives on Google, LinkedIn, in forums, and, most importantly, by asking prospects how they are currently solving this problem and what alternatives they’re considering.
For each alternative, you should try to define
Use these learnings in your marketing and in sales calls to show prospects that you are an expert on the space and you can guide them in making the best decision for their specific needs.
Your unique value proposition (UVP) is a short, clear description of how you serve customers: what is the core benefit of your product and how are you different from the competition?
Also known as a unique selling proposition, the UVP should be compelling and easy to understand for your ideal customers.
Examples of strong UVPs:
Related: 16 Companies Who Absolutely Nailed Their Unique Value Proposition
A “sticky” message sticks in people's heads and is easy for them to share. If you want your message to stick and spread, make sure that it is clear and easy to remember.
Chip Heath, the author of Made to Stick, says there are six principles to crafting a sticky message: Simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories. Messages that stick are simple, surprising, and emotional.
The only way to know if your message is sticky is to test it. Test different messaging in ads, social posts, landing pages, and in CTAs. Analyze which messaging gets the most clicks and which message attracts and converts your ideal customer.
The buyer’s journey is the process by which prospects become aware of your product and then make a purchase.
According to ActiveCampaign, buyers move through five phases
Building your buyer’s journey is about creating website pages and assets that act as stepping stones for moving prospects toward being ready to buy your product.
Users in the “problem-aware” stage, the cold audience, need your help to better understand the problem and truly grasp how it is affecting them. Create a problem/cold page to educate users about their problems.
Users in the “solution-aware” stage are educating themselves about alternatives. They are trying to understand what is the best way to solve their problem. What is the best methodology or tool to help them overcome the problem? Create a methodology/warm page describing the methodology that your software uses to solve their problem.
Users in the “product aware” stage know about your product and understand the basics of how it can help them. They need your help to overcome internal and external objections: how does your product fits into their existing workflow? What are the limitations? Is it worth the price? Create a product/hot page to educate users about your solution and how it can help them.
Where are you going to put your message so that your ideal customer can find it? Acquisition channels drive traffic to your website and generate leads. While there are many possible channels, the most successful companies start by choosing just 1-3 channels to focus on first.
Trying to reach customers in too many channels will dilute your budget and focus so that you’re less effective overall.
Pick your focus channels based on where your ideal customers hang out online and look for answers to their questions. If you’re ideal customers get their information from podcasts, then launch a podcast and be a guest on industry shows. If they prefer to Google their questions, then SEO should be a focus.
Some channels to consider include:
You’re finally ready for the big launch!
You’ve taken the time to develop a deep understanding of your ideal customer, their problems and goals, how your product fits into their life, and compares with alternatives. You’ve built a buyer’s journey to move prospects toward a sale, and you’ve chosen the first channels to focus on.
Determine what is required for a successful launch. Do you need to build a new website? Create a content marketing plan? Set up audiences for your paid ads? Book a booth at next year’s SaaStr?
When everything is set up and ready, go live with your new go-to-market.
This may be the most important step of the process. Your go-to-market cannot be something that you set and forget.
Winning SaaS brands are obsessed with iterating: not just on their product, but their entire go-to-market strategy. These aren’t random changes or based on how you ‘feel’; go-to-market iteration must be data-driven.
Make sure that you have reliable data analytics set up on your web pages, landing pages, and ads, and that you have a robust CRM that your sales team uses consistently to track the quality and outcome of their conversations with leads.
Related: HubSpot vs. Salesforce: Which CRM is Best?
Use the data you gather to answer questions like
Your team should analyze data on at least a monthly basis, and use the findings to adjust your go-to-market strategy.
If the metrics aren’t strong, look for opportunities to optimize copy, visuals, and targeting. The goal is to achieve consistently profitable customer acquisition, which typically means that LTV is four to five times greater than CAC.
Slack’s growth story is almost cliche by this point. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can learn.
Slack is a team messaging and collaboration app. From 2014 to 2018, they grew from a handful of users to over eight million active users. Their go-to-market strategy included a few essential pieces
Vidyard is a video software used by sales teams and for internal communications within companies. In contrast to Slack, Vidyard started out as an enterprise-focused tool, only available to companies with over two hundred employees.
This initial focus on big businesses provided them with capital to iterate on the product and improve functionality.
Over time, their sales team noticed there was significant demand for their product from the smaller businesses that they were turning away. Seeing an opportunity to expand, Vidyard launch a free version of the product and removed the barrier for smaller businesses. This move brought in 20,000 new companies in a single year, many of whom would ascend to a paid plan for additional functionality.
Some of the key levers for Vidyard pulled included
Sprocket Rocket is a design tool for HubSpot CMS. Marketers use Sprocket Rocket to build beautiful, unique, high-converting website experiences without needing to code.
The team at Lean Labs actually built Sprocket Rocket to use as a premium HubSpot design tool for all of our website projects.
Some key elements of the Sprocket Rocket go-to-market strategy include
A well-planned, effective SaaS go-to-market strategy is often the difference between massive success and mediocre results. An “if you build it, they will come” mentality will leave you with a great product that no one has ever heard of.
By following the steps laid out in this article, you will greatly improve the chances that your SaaS company will achieve product-market fit and grow profitably.
Focus on your unit economics: if you can’t acquire customers profitably, you will run into major challenges when trying to scale.
The biggest mistake that most SaaS startups make is rushing to market.
Successful companies take the time to build an effective go-to-market strategy, measure results, and iterate their way to profitable customer acquisition.
If you want to see the exact growth methodology that we use to 10x growth for the SaaS startups and scaleups that we work with, check out our free resource The Growth Playbook. This training will show you where to focus your efforts and what steps to follow to achieve remarkable, reliable growth.