When was the last time you revisited your pricing strategy? Your SaaS Pricing Strategy impacts everything:

💰 It impacts your Ideal Customer Profile.

💴 It impacts your Win Rate.

💶 It impacts Churn.

🤑 It even impacts your competitive dynamics. And yet so often – we end up undercharging for our products. I've seen companies 5X their pricing and their win rates went UP as a result.

I've seen companies revamp their pricing strategy and realize how they need to dramatically shift their ICP to make their numbers work.

The year was 2016. My high flying SaaS company was declared a “zombie” almost overnight because 3 things happened all at once:
1/ A board member retired
2/ My VP Sales quit after 3 weeks
3/ SaaS multiples crashed

But we survived and exited. Here’s the 3 things we did: 👇🧵 It was the worst year of my life. And it was this year the ethos of Unstoppable came alive for me and my team. “If I don’t quit, I don’t die. And there’s always a way forward so I’ll never quit” became our mantra.

Here’s what I did first….

There are 121 days left in 2022. Here are 12 ways you can kickstart growth and finish this year strong for your B2B/SaaS business: 1/ Get a hold of your Marketing Math. Math never lies. For starters, just look at your Traffic to Lead %, Lead to Oppty %, and your Win %. Go focus on the one that sucks the most.

I was at an investment event last night and the folks there asked me what're the top 3 reasons I see Founders fail. Having worked with 250+ Founders and served thousands through my Youtube channel -- I had to pause to think but the answers came quickly: 1) The "One more feature trap" -- Founders who keep building and hoping that they're that one feature away from product market fit and everyone clamoring for their product never quite ever hit product market fit.

I wake up at 4am.

I journal.

Then I meditate.

And then I start my first Zoom call around 12pm.

Just Kidding.

Anyone that is telling you that’s how an Entrepreneur lives is lying.

The truth is… when you’re scaling a company….

It’s like narnia. The first thing you do is you wake up and check your phone and see if things are still OK. And then you’re doing some sort of dance of skimming emails and showering, and double checking your calendar to make sure you’re not late.

That’s the reality.

If you've built a product.

And you've got some revenues.

But it's not consistent and scalable yet.

Then it's time to double down on your Go-To-Market strategy.

Over the past 15 months, I've worked with about 100 SaaS Founders on building scalable Go-To-Market machines. Bootstrapped companies drove profitable growth. VC-backed companies raised Series A and Seed+ rounds.

So if you're in the midst of building your GTM Strategy, here are 6-steps you need to follow (based on our experience of what worked vs didn't) 👇

The ONE secret weapon in startups that not enough VCs nor Founders talk about: Stamina.

But.... here's the BIG question. How do you build stamina as a startup founder?

(a thread) 👇 The definition of Stamina (google) is:
the ability to sustain prolonged physical or mental effort

I believe that in startup culture, we've been done a disservice. We talk about the hustle, and the grind, and the hours as a badge of honor. But we don't talk about Stamina.

Having hired 3+ VPs of Sales and 20+ AEs in my career, here are 3 things to look for when you're hiring your VP of Sales or AE that are counterintuitive and I had to learn the hard way 👇 1/ Were they actually in a quota carrying role and do they list out quota attainment? The best AEs and VPs of Sales wear this as a badge of honor and list out up front what their attainment was. The shitty salespeople? They avoid talking about it. And you have to ask.

If you’ve built a SaaS product.

But you don’t have predictable revenues yet...

Then it’s time to get serious about a Go-To-Market plan.

If you're a Technical Founder, this may sound like a waste of time. It's not.

Here's six steps on how to create your SaaS GTM plan 👇 1/ Market: Get clarity into the market you're serving that has the urgent + important + frequent problem. The more specific you get the faster you can grow in the early days. Look for the most underserved part of the market to win; bake it into a written Ideal Customer Profile.

1/ One of the best pieces of advice I got right after raising my seed round was this:

"Build your Series A Pitch Deck"

Honestly that was the last thing I wanted to do after having just gone through a fundraise, but I did it... 2/ Going through the exercise helped me realize what was important to prove to be able to raise our next round and what wasn't.

I guess I conceptually knew it, but going through the Pitch Deck exercise made it blaringly clear.

Mature SaaS businesses are fast embracing Account Based Marketing to drive growth.

But Early Stage Founders don't embrace ABM -- even though it is the fastest way to grow a SaaS business.

A thread on Account Based Marketing and why early stage SaaS should embrace it 👇 1/ For B2B SaaS Businesses, there’s the old way of thinking in terms of Leads. And then there’s the new way of thinking in terms of Accounts.

How do you stop your SaaS business from dying in obscurity? Don’t over-index on Product and under-index on Go-To-Market. A thread on how to build a sound GTM strategy 👇 1/ It’s easy to get overwhelmed on how to generate demand and awareness around your Startup. Don’t let it. There are really on three ways to generate demand:
a) Inbound
b) Outbound
c) Channels and Partnerships

1/ There may be a time for your SaaS business when things aren't going well and you can't raise that next round. You may feel like giving up, but there's a way to turn it around. A thread 👇 2/ So you've got a stalled SaaS business...

Growth may be slowing.

Competition may be fiercer than ever.

Maybe you're falling "out" of Product Market Fit.

And costs and your burn are quickly suffocating you.

What do you do?

If you're an early stage Founder -- (while tempting) it is a terrible idea to outsource your Marketing & Sales.

At the early stages, it is super hard to land great marketers so a lot of the work lands on Founders. A thread 👇 So as a Founder, how do you drive growth... so you can raise more money... and THEN hire those great Marketers and Salespeople?

When I was CEO...

I constantly struggled with context switching.

You know how it goes right?

By 11am on a given work day, you have to master the ability to zoom in to a nitty gritty detail...

And then zoom out to figure out the bigger picture.

And then zoom in... and then... But here's the thing...

SO often, we get so bogged down into the details...

We forget to take a step back, zoom out, and figure out our medium to longer term strategy.

I finally figured out a pragmatic way to escape this.

And master the art of zooming in and zooming out.

Category Kings.

Market Leaders.

Being up and to the right of the Gartner magic quadrant.

What do all these things have in common?

They’re the championship rings in the SaaS industry.

Here’s the big question though.

How do you become #1?

A thread 👇 1/ Firstly, let's talk about the goal of being the LEADER. Being the perceived leader in the category affords you a 10x premium on everything. 10x on valuation. 10x on deals. 10x on exits. 10x on recruiting.

So you’ve raised a seed round. Congratulations! Now what? What’re the three things you need to do so you can raise a Series A in 18 months? A thread 👇 1/ Once you raise a Seed round, it likely means you’ve raised a decent amount of money on a “good idea” and a promising product. At this point, the countdown timer has started to show how much progress you can make to go from a “good idea” toward a “good business.”

Every CEO should have a 1-page growth strategy written down on paper. A thread 👇 0/ Who is our core customer? A lot of us have this in our heads, but this is your opportunity to get *specific*. A great way to do this is to find your Top 10 highest LTV customers and map the patterns you find from that list.

Three things that are holding you back from accomplishing your Entrepreneurial dreams (seriously). A thread 👇 1/ “I’m not good enough” - entrepreneurship is hard, and you have to face a lot of rejection and silent passes as you’re trying to go from *nothing* to *something*.

Be honest, how often do you say deep in your mind... man... maybe I’m not good enough?

YOU ARE ENOUGH.

96% of Seed stage companies will not graduate to a Series A. A thread on navigating the shawshank crawl to product market fit 👇 1/ Navigating the path to PMF is 50% luck. 50% of it is how you navigate the path. That’s the tl;dr. But how do you navigate the path? There are 4 questions you have to ask incessantly every day.

For your early stage SaaS business, should you first hire a VP of Sales or a VP of Marketing? And how should you go about recruiting a great early stage VP? A thread 👇 1/ The first decision to make is whether you should hire a VP of Sales. Or a VP of Marketing. The simple rule of thumb I use for this is this:

If you have a "Talk to Sales" button on your website, then VP of Sales must come first. If you have "Start FREE Trial" then VPM.