Digestly

Jan 24, 2025

9 Things You Can Do to Grow Faster This Year with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

SaaStr - 9 Things You Can Do to Grow Faster This Year with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

The speaker emphasizes the importance of engaging with top customers and prospects through events, suggesting that hosting a half-day event can be a cost-effective way to meet customers in person and leverage existing customers to sell to prospects. This approach is presented as a 'cheat code' to maximize customer interactions without extensive travel. Additionally, the speaker outlines nine strategies to add layers to a business, such as enhancing outbound marketing efforts by crafting targeted emails that address specific customer problems. An example is given of a company that successfully transitioned from outbound to inbound marketing by initially focusing on high-value prospects. The speaker also stresses the importance of launching a second core product before reaching significant revenue milestones to avoid stagnation. This involves ensuring the new product targets either the same or a different buyer to unlock additional budget. Furthermore, the video highlights the necessity of visiting customers in person and maintaining a strong customer success team to reduce churn. The speaker advises against cutting customer success roles, even for smaller customers, as personal engagement can significantly impact retention. Lastly, the importance of global expansion is discussed, with a recommendation to localize products early and hire local representatives to manage growing markets effectively.

Key Points:

  • Host small, cost-effective customer events to engage with top customers and prospects.
  • Enhance outbound marketing by sending targeted emails that solve specific customer problems.
  • Launch a second core product early to prevent growth stagnation and unlock new budgets.
  • Maintain a strong customer success team to reduce churn, even for smaller customers.
  • Localize products early and hire local representatives to manage international growth.

Details:

1. 🎉 Host Events for Customer Engagement

  • Hosting half-day events for top customers and prospects can significantly enhance in-person engagement and relationship building.
  • These events are strategically effective for meeting multiple customers in one location, thus optimizing travel resources and time.
  • By creating a community atmosphere, these events can foster stronger customer relationships, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
  • Consider incorporating workshops, product demonstrations, and networking opportunities in these events to provide additional value.
  • Utilize feedback from attendees to continuously improve the format and content of future events, ensuring they remain relevant and engaging.

2. 🚀 Kickstart the Year with Strategic Planning

  • Strategic planning at the start of the year is essential for success.
  • The difference between a successful year and a mediocre one often lies in early-year planning.
  • Begin the year with clear goals and strategies to set a strong foundation.
  • Focus on actionable steps that align with long-term objectives.
  • Incorporate specific examples of successful strategic planning, such as a company increasing revenue by 45% through early-year initiatives.
  • Consider detailed steps like setting quarterly milestones, reviewing past performance, and adapting to market changes.
  • Utilize case studies to illustrate how strategic planning has led to measurable improvements in business metrics.

3. 📈 Grow by Adding Strategic Layers

  • Achieving growth requires adding new strategic layers beyond repeating past efforts. Prioritize actions that increase Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and reduce churn.
  • Address feature gaps and build integrations to enhance product value, leading to improved customer retention.
  • Implement one of nine strategic layers to boost agility and performance, such as refining customer segmentation, enhancing personalization strategies, or developing strategic partnerships.
  • Despite discussions on platforms like LinkedIn about these strategies, effective execution is often lacking. Companies should focus on actionable implementation plans.
  • Choose one strategic layer to prioritize and implement starting in January, setting measurable goals to track progress and impact.

4. ✉️ Perfect Outbound: Email Strategies That Work

  • Outbound email campaigns often fail due to poorly targeted messaging, highlighting the need for precise, valuable communication to potential customers.
  • Successful outbound strategies require understanding the market and crafting emails that directly address the problems of the target audience.
  • A blended approach of inbound and outbound strategies can enhance growth, with potential increases from 100% to 110-120% by adding an effective outbound layer.
  • Even if initially more expensive, outbound strategies can be worthwhile if the core business remains efficient.
  • Within 60 days of implementing a targeted outbound team, a company saw immediate success by focusing on high-value prospects.
  • Creating a list of top prospects and customizing emails to solve their specific problems can achieve notable success.
  • Precise outbound communication can lead to immediate engagement when offering solutions to pressing problems.

5. 🔄 Expand Product Lines Early

  • Founders regret not expanding to multiproduct lines earlier; growth often stalls when companies wait too long, such as when a company reaches $100 million and growth slows to the teens.
  • Launch a second product before reaching $10 million in revenue unless the total addressable market (TAM) is exceptionally large, like Canva or Stripe.
  • Ensure a second product is a true core product, not just a feature upgrade, to unlock more budget.
  • Consider whether the second product should target the same buyer or a different one; targeting a different buyer can unlock new budgets but is more complex.
  • HubSpot's CRM launch targeted a different buyer and eventually grew larger than their original marketing product, despite initial challenges.

6. 🎤 The Power of Customer Conferences

6.1. Strategic Growth through Product Diversification

6.2. Cost-Effective Customer Engagement through Conferences

7. 🏢 Enhance Growth with Enterprise Editions

7.1. Planning and Logistics of Customer Events

7.2. Benefits and Outcomes of Customer Events

8. 🤝 Build and Maintain Strong Partnerships

8.1. Cost-Effective Customer Conferences

8.2. Pricing Strategy

8.3. Leveraging AI in Enterprise Markets

9. ✈️ Connect with Customers In-Person

  • Founders often fail to properly staff partnerships and channels, which is a critical mistake.
  • Adding a dedicated Business Development or Partnership role such as a VP or Director is essential for managing enterprise relationships.
  • Many founders establish initial connections with platforms like Shopify, HubSpot, Salesforce, Stripe, or OpenAI but do not maintain them effectively.
  • Relationships in enterprise require consistent engagement with multiple stakeholders; competitors who engage comprehensively can displace less engaged companies.
  • Successful enterprise engagement requires specific roles to manage partnerships, such as a dedicated team responsible for ongoing communication and relationship building.
  • Developing a strategy for maintaining and deepening partnerships, including regular check-ins and performance reviews, is crucial.

10. 🙌 Prioritize Customer Success

10.1. Assign Dedicated Resources to Partnerships

10.2. Customer Engagement is Crucial

10.3. Approach Meetings with Value

10.4. Understanding Customer Importance

11. 🔄 Invest in Customer Marketing

  • Avoid overpromising during customer engagements by sending summary notes post-meetings to manage expectations.
  • Dismantling customer success departments or integrating them into sales risks reducing their effectiveness to mere upsell functions.
  • Instead of reducing customer success support for small customers, consider enhancing it to retain valuable long-term clients.
  • Example: A company paying $1,000 monthly reduced their usage because they lacked engagement from the provider, indicating a need for proactive customer success initiatives.
  • A $500 million revenue company risked losing $300,000 by not engaging with customers paying $15,000 annually, showing the importance of maintaining customer success teams.
  • Ensure one and a half to two million in revenue per Customer Success Manager (CSM) to balance customer support with profitability.
  • Avoid defaulting small customers to self-service tools or AI solutions without human interaction to maintain customer relationships.

12. 🌍 Go Global Early

12.1. AI Support Tools for Customer Experience

12.2. Reducing Churn and Enhancing Customer Retention

12.3. Value-Driven Customer Events

13. 🌐 Localize and Personalize Engagement

13.1. Localization Strategies

13.2. Personal Engagement Strategies

14. 📊 Conclusion: Implementing Growth Strategies

  • Hire a full-time trusted person in a new geographic location once it begins to grow, aiming to scale from 2 million to 4, 8, and eventually 16 people.
  • Wait until reaching revenue milestones of 10, 20, or 30 million in a new geography before hiring a leader there.
  • Centralize functions such as customer success and sales initially, leveraging the presence of a trusted ground representative.
  • Ensure that initiatives in new geographies are ROI positive and never ROI negative.
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