The Key to Creating Landing Pages That Convert? See Data From the 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report

How do you go from product market fit to unicorn status?
Let’s talk about the sales tactics that get you there on this episode
of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning into Closing time the show for Go to Market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley,. VP of Marketing at Insightly and Unbounce.
Today, I’m joined by Stijn Hendrikse.
He is a go to market coach and author of T2D3
A Playbook for Mastering. Software Startups.
Thanks for joining us today.. Thanks for having me, Val.
Great to be here. Awesome.
So I’m going to start off with the title of your book T2D3
and ask you to tell us what it means.
T2D3 stands for Tripling
your revenue two years in a row or your ARR your recurring revenue,
and then doubling it three more years in a row.
It was a very common term coined really in the VC world in
2015.
I think that’s when you started to hear it a lot.
There was a managing partner at Revengers who was credited with the
coining of that acronym, but it was so common at some point
that people started to ask, and I was in this space, how do you do it?
You get so many different answers, and it was definitely
some kind of playbook to it or some form of
methods, but was definitely not well defined and it was not documented at all.
There were so many books around, you know, how do you get from 0 to 1?
Lean startup, how do you get going?
But how do you get kind of through that next stage after you got to one?
How do you get to ten?
There was far less of that, and that’s what the book is about.
I’m sure you are super popular with all those VCs and PE firms, though.
Let’s go ahead and talk about the six
kind of pillars for growth that are in the book.
It starts with the first one
uncovering and choosing your company’s growth priorities.
Yeah, it’s one of the challenges when you have, let’s say you hit product
market fit, you found a market that likes your product or service
and they’re willing to pay you for it and stay actually. Right.
That’s the essence of a SaaS business that people will retain.
You can retain them as clients.
But now growing beyond that product market fit sort of bar
becomes really a multi-tasking effort for you.
Now you cannot just stick with one demand gen lever,
you have to have multiple you have to invest in customer retention.
You have to think about your pricing and packaging strategy. Right?
How do you improve your ACV?
So all these things are starting to happen in parallel.
You’ll probably now have a board of directors
and you have other a lot of well-intended advisors who will tell you what to do.
So figuring out what of those bets you are really going to make is really critical.
So that’s number one. Got it. Okay.
So the next one, I’ve heard this this term coined before.
Nailing your niche. Right.
Defining your identity, understanding your differentiation.
Yeah.
When you and of course, you know the CRM space very well.
But if you’re in a category that is starting to mature
and it’s very hard to find the category in the software business that doesn’t have
already an existing set of players or other providers of solutions.
If you’re in that situation where you know that
you have something really meaningful to offer
for a group of customers who are not getting what they need today,
maybe they get too little, they get too much.
That is
usually a subset of the category that you are competing in and nailing,
that’s what nailing the niche stands for, kind of what the dimensions of that
new subsegment really are and how you define that in a way
that you can use that to focus and to focus where you put your sales
focus, where you drive, content marketing, etc.
is really critical.
And especially, again, when you’ve hit product market fit, you have this amazing
asset that nobody else has that you know some of these clients
better than anyone else because they’re with you.
They have stayed with you for a while
so they can tell you a lot more about what they need.
So nailing a niche is really about doubling down on that.
And the niche can usually be
relatively small as long as you’re so relevant for these clients that they
become very sticky that they’re not really having any reason to go somewhere else.
It feels like a lot of startups can get stuck here, you know, trying to be
jack of all trades, master of none, or not being willing to walk away from
what could be maybe some lucrative deals because they’re outside of that niche.
So how do you coach them through that?
Yeah, and especially when you have gotten maybe a little bit of funding
or you have the luxury of profitability and you’re able to invest in new areas,
it’s extremely hard to stay away from, let’s say, bright, shiny objects, right?
Opportunities that are meaningful, that are not necessarily,
not worth pursuing,
but they can just not be pursued at the cost of losing focus.
Right.
And so when you think of what happened in the last two or three years,
especially in the SaaS
world, Val, that that funding has been a little harder to come by.
Right.
And investors are expecting a little
more return on their, you know, the go to market dollars,
this is actually becoming easier because it’s far easier now.
So there was a world before that late 2021 is really when the kind of
the SaaS investment bubble like burst not burst, but reset a little bit.
Before that, there was this environment of grow
more, grow more or grow at any cost in any way.
Right.
And we’ll talk about profitability later, Right.
Those days are over.
So it’s a little easier now, whether it’s at the board level
or in your executive team or even with your marketing team,
it’s a little easier to make the case for,. Hey, let’s not try five things.
Let’s do two or three really, really well.
Ideally, do one well, right, or do one this week, right?
And then we’ll do the other one next week.
But it doesn’t mean you closed those doors.
But being extremely focused will allow you
to really nail a niche and build some form of a moat around it.
Right.
That you can defend that against the competition,
even if your product is not much better.
But by just focusing on a very specific part of the market
better than anyone else.
That in itself is a competitive differentiation.
I got to say, as a marketer who was working in the 20 teens
during growth at all costs, it certainly was fun, but not sustainable.
So I agree that those days are definitely over.
So there’s two next on your list.
One is build a modern marketing function
and maintain its focus, which, you know, super important that second part,
and then knowing, sizing and segmenting and defining your audience.
So both of these feel like they’re firmly within marketing and sales to me.
Yeah, and Building. Modern Marketing Function,
I’m not going to spend too much time, it makes sense, right?
To have people who understand the latest user’s technology and understand
like how you do TikTok, these days instead of YouTube. Right.
Especially if you want to.
even in B2B, val,. I hear that over 70% of decisions now
being influenced or made through TikTok content
because maybe the decision
makers are millennials, they’re still in the YouTube generation,
but the people in their team should do a little bit of the research
to help kind of, they are more on the TikTok.
So anyway, so but that’s maybe less interesting for the audience, but
on the knowing and sizing and segmenting kind of the market, that niche,
you’ve probably heard the term. TAM, SAM, SOM.
Right.
Total addressable market, serviceable part of that market and
then the serviceable part of the market that you can realistically obtain.
I’ve mostly seen challenges with that last step.
It’s very common for people to describe the total addressable market
as kind of, Hey, this is the opportunity, this is why we are excited about this,
this is why we’re going to invest in a certain campaign, etc.
And then people are relatively good with saying, well,
we are not going to be able to serve a total addressable market.
There’s only a part of that market
that’s going to be interested in what we have to offer
or better, who can actually use what we have to offer.
And that’s where your term like ICP or what’s the ideal customer profile?
Who are the personas that we’re trying to serve?
That’s usually that step from TAM to SAM,
but the last step is almost more important that you also are realistic.
Even if the serviceable addressable market is relatively large,
what part of that market can we obtain, given the amount of resources
we have, the amount time we have, the amount of languages
that we can support or local, you know, execution, etc..
And that last part I often see is not really done well.
And that leads to practical example.
If you run paid ads,
which is still something that works today, although it’s not as easy anymore.
But doing that, for example, with a limited budget in a couple of zip
codes, only a certain amount of time of the week
makes it much easier to win those auctions and to optimize than trying
to run ads in the whole country and during the whole week.
Right.
And so that’s an example where when you are realistic
of what part of the market can you really obtain, it also becomes
easier to make your execution a lot higher ROI.
That TAM number can seem kind of sexy.
But you’re right, getting it down to something that’s
truly achievable, it takes some discipline.
Next, you say we want to focus on creating relevant messaging
for the entire customer journey.
I think people sometimes get it right on the on the front side of that, but
getting it right through the whole journey. I think is a challenge in and of itself.
Yeah, So I started my marketing career,. I was a software developer first
and then at Microsoft I somehow morphed into becoming a marketer.
And when I started I was in B2B and that’s where I’ve been most of my life.
I did marketing for SMB Small and medium business segment at Microsoft,
and the last ten years,
I focused mostly on smaller software companies servicing B2B.
And one of the things that I always kind of cracked my teeth on is that we used
personas that were more like consumer style personas that describe
what someone likes, how they, when they bring their kids to school.
You know, they’re all those things which are interesting
for when you think of the individual and you want to capture their attention
and you want to capture their engagement, etc..
But what I find is a missing step is that in the B2B
world of marketing and sales, that the persona
might be the same individual, but the role
they play and the way they behave really changes in during the journey.
So if you think of the journey to simplify, it’s really these three stages
of like awareness and consideration and converge hard.
When you think of the the typical marketing sales funnel,
what happens in
B2B where in B2B people are trying to spend someone else’s money?
Right?
That’s the biggest difference with B2C is that in that first stage awareness,
you might be marketing to people who are the receivers of your solution.
They’re a potential user.
They will say, Hey, this is important.
We need a solution for this specific problem that I encounter in my role.
That’s a different type of persona than the person
maybe in the consideration part of the journey
who gets tasked with the research to, Hey, what type of options are out there?
How do we compare this solution versus that one?
How do we think about the budget that we need to acquire this solution?
And then the third stage of the funnel, the conversion part is usually influenced
by another part of the B2B decision tree, which are the people
who have to sign off on something, who have to approve something,
could be people in IT, in legal, in procurement.
So you have kind of these three stages of the funnel that’s often
require a different approach to the personas.
And even if you’re marketing to smaller businesses
where this individual could be the same person
who is both, hey, we need this and let’s look at some options and the
should we do this today or postpone it till next year?
That’s kind of what happens in these three stages of the funnel, right?
Why do we need this, why you, and why now?
If you don’t think about those distinct and then your content is just not
going to have the same relevance, right and the messaging.
Where you in the first stage
have to really think about how to convince someone to care.
Where in the consideration part of the funnel is much more about
how to convince them that we are the right option, right? And
then in the last stage
of the funnel, you’re not really convincing anybody anymore.
You’re helping the person who’s already convinced
to convince everybody else in the organization to sign off on the
purchase order or whatever the next step in the funnel is.
Potentially defending against other competitors at that last stage, too.
Right. So you really have to nail it.
Yeah.
The best tactic that I’ve seen complex software vendors
use when they are kind of losing a deal is to create a lot of fear, uncertainty
and doubt in the less stage of the funnel and then hope to live another day,
maybe be able to bit again in a couple of months.
Yeah, right, right.
So the last phase, I’m really excited that you zeroed in here
on account based marketing because I think especially for startups,
it can really be an economically viable
way to market and sell like in a, in a manner
that really gets you focused, hyper focused, on the right people.
So why account based marketing?
Yeah, the caveat here, Val, is that ABM, account-based marketing, it’s
defined by many people in different ways.
The way I’m thinking of it again in a B2B context is that you kind of know
what your ideal customer profile looks like
and you define that as a typical an organization, an account,
and you’re trying to get a really sort of strong campaign
that’s targeted at building our relationships within that account.
And the biggest challenges that you see here, especially with smaller
companies who start doing ABM, is that they’re not willing to
to kind of put the effort in to this being a longer term investment.
Football season has just started.
And I liken to kind of
I think of this a little bit as the running game
when you start running the football, sorry for people
outside of the United States, but talk about American football.
If you start running the football, one of the things you’re doing in its
first quarter was trying to see where the kind of the softness of the defenses
or what are the holes that we can open up and account-based
marketing typically starts a little bit like that.
It’s more like outbound marketing where you’re sending out
emails, you send out LinkedIn request, maybe there are other channels that you
use and you’re trying to kind of see what what lists that we have are working,
what type of channel is working, what content is relevant.
It’s a lot of A/B testing, a lot of figuring things out,
but that can take a little bit of time.
It takes a couple of months.
Especially when you want to understand
and do something with those learnings and make them statistically relevant.
So now you have to go into that second quarter and sticking with it
because now you’re probably able to create the messaging
and the content that’s actually going to resonate.
You’ll see some early conversions, but those still will not be customers
that are paying you.
They might be prospects that now suddenly show up for a sales conversation.
Right.
And so you need kind of the third quarter to actually see this turn into revenue.
And a lot of things that happen in outbound
marketing are not don’t get enough time to mature
and to have that type of learning for it to become effective.
And that’s really sad because if you are a relatively early stage company,
if you’re still trying to build the market, make the market right, you’re
trying to nail that niche, you’re an expert,
you are going to have to knock on some doors.
Inbound marketing, let’s call that
demand capture, right where people already know they have a need.
They’re in the consideration stage of the funnel.
Per the earlier point, they’re like at that second level of persona,
they’re going to find you if you do a good job with like SEO, etc., and SEM.
But there’s probably an audience out there
who you need to make aware of your solution.
Demand generation, not just demand captured, demand generation.
And for that, doing outbound in a way that is meaningful, that is relevant,
where you’re knocking on the right door is extremely critical
and they’re yeah, having that level of patience
that also in a football game where a team that hangs onto that
running game into the third quarter, they start to see results.
Account-based. Marketing is all about that long game
and having the relevant content be able when you interrupt someone to have
enough added value that they at least look, throw the flier away.
Right?
They archive your email instead of saying this is spam.
Right.
And so that’s really
what an effective account based marketing program could look like.
Well.
Stijn, that’s all the time we have for today’s episode.
Thank you so much for joining us on Closing Time.
Thank you so much for having me, Val.
And thanks to everybody out there for tuning in.
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