Hey - it’s Alex!
Welcome to Startup Business Tips, a bi-weekly newsletter, where I share with you 3 actionable growth tactics that will help you quickly grow your SaaS business from €0 to €1 million ARR 🚀.
Today we cover:
1️⃣ Referral Sales - Getting warm intros with the right sales blurbs
2️⃣ Content Distribution - Key Success Factor for Content Marketing
3️⃣ GTM-related Miro templates - Ready for you to use
👉 Bonus material - 100 new European VC funds by Nikola Yanev
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1. Referral Sales - Getting referrals/intros with the right ‘sales blurbs’
We all agree that prospecting to referred leads (aka. warm leads) is easier and more effective than cold prospecting.
‘Warm’ leads have a higher trust in you and therefore show higher win rates.
A great opportunity to get these ‘warm intros’ are all your interactions with your existing customers and also prospects (people you are selling to right now) - It’s called Referral sales.
The goal of referral sales is getting your existing customers (and prospects) to give you contact information (ideally including introductions) of other relevant leads in their network, plus using their names when contacting the new leads.
But if you are successful in getting referrals and intros to other relevant leads depends a lot on HOW you ask them.
That’s why I’ve created some blurbs that you can use straight away.
Here are 3 ways how to get more intros/referrals:
1. End of your Discovery & Demo Call
if the prospect was not interested / not a good fit
“Okay, thanks for the demo. I see that (your company name) is probably not a good fit for you. But now that you know who we work with (your ICP) and what our product can do for them, who are 2-3 other companies/people you think can benefit from it?”
…and then if they tell you some names, respond the following:
“Thanks. Would you mind making an email intro for me? If you want, I can also send you an intro template to make it easier for you”.
if the prospect is interested
“Okay, thanks for the demo. Great to see that (your company name) is a good fit for you. Now that you know who we work with (your ICP) and what our product can do for companies like you, who are 2-3 other companies/people you think can benefit from it, too?”
…and then if they tell you some names, respond the following:
“Thanks. Would you mind making an email intro for me? If you want, I can also send you an intro template to make it easier for you”.
2. Calls with existing customers
“Great to hear that you are happy with the product. Now that you know what impact (your company name) has on you, who are 2-3 other companies/people you think can benefit from it, too?”
…and then if they tell you some names, respond with the following:
“Thanks. Would you mind making an email intro for me? If you want, I can also send you an intro template to make it easier for you”.
Bonus:
If you want to increase the chance that they refer you to other companies, make it easy for them.
So instead of asking “…who are 2-3 other companies/people you think can benefit from it, too?” you can do your research upfront (e.g. LinkedIn connections) and find leads that fit your ICP and are somehow connected to them.
You could ask
“…I saw that you are connected with X and Y. Based on my research, I believe they could benefit from our tool as well. Would you mind making an email intro for me?”.
It’s all about the mindset. Once you realize that you can turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to get intros, you can explore the same strategies for Cold Calls, Onboarding Meetings, Customer Support Calls, Product Calls, etc. - it also works of course via email conversations.
Here is a quick summary of how to be successful with referral sales:
✅ Ask for referrals throughout your sales process
✅ Make referring easy
✅ Use blurbs to ask the right way
❤️ Get exclusive benefits for sharing my newsletter with your SaaS network.
2. Content Distribution - Key Success Factor for Content Marketing
Being successful with Content Marketing consists of 5 steps:
Content Research
Content Planning
Content Creation
Content Distribution
Content Optimization (for SEO)
Most early-stage founders know the importance of Content Marketing as one (or primary) growth channel in the early days. Creating valuable content creates trust and puts you and your company as a thought leader.
But here’s the thing: It’s not enough to ‘just’ create content, publish (the long-form) content on your blog, and then hope for the best.
Distribution of the content is neglected by most founders. I would even say that the distribution part is as important as the creation part.
So to be successful with content marketing you need to focus on all 5 (to begin with the first 4) steps.
Step #1: Content Research
Customer Insights
It all starts with getting to know your ICP (if you don’t know what this is, check out my Ultimate ICP Guide). Jump on customer interviews and learn about their status quo, challenges, pains, and desired outcomes.
Learn about your ICP by joining relevant communities or online platforms where your audience hangs out.
Follow thought leaders on social media and learn from them.
Competitor Research
Once you know your direct and indirect competitors check out their content strategy.
Semrush and Similiarweb have good articles on how to do a competitor analysis.
Here are a few things you should do:
Do some social media monitoring and see how they leverage content on different channels.
Try to spot content (topics + formats) that show great performance.
Spy how they organize content on their website (topics & types of content)
Keyword Research
On top of the research from your ICP and competitors, it’s useful to do keyword research.
I’m not an SEO expert, but don’t make the mistake of fooling yourself on highly competitive, high-volume keywords, plus are TOFU (top of the funnel).
It’s best to start with BOFU long-tail keywords that are relevant to your product.
It’s 10x easier to rank on the first page on Google, plus you will see higher conversion rates.
Check out the 3 must-have Content Pages for SaaS startups.
Step #2: Content Planning
Once you’ve done your research, you will have a list of topics that are highly relevant to you.
I recommend that you have a ‘content hub’ with all the ideas.
Based on your ‘content hub’ you can easily create a content calendar.
Part of your planning is to get specific on:
✅ Content (pillar) topics
✅ Content distribution channels (blog, social, newsletter, Youtube etc.)
✅ Schedule & Frequency
✅ Repurposing of Content (turn 1 content idea into 250 LinkedIn posts)
Step #3: Content Creation
Now the party begins. I’m not writing a guide on how to write great content, but here are a few things that I can highly recommend:
✅ Timeboxing (e.g. every week 2 hours)
✅ Start with long-form content and then break it down into smaller snackable content
✅ Focus on 1-2 channels at the beginning (e.g. Blog + LinkedIn)
✅ Have your distribution strategy in place
✅ Don’t forget to repurpose your content
Step #4: Content Distribution
This is the step where lots of founders stop. They publish content on their blog post or post organic content on LinkedIn and hope for the best.
But it’s best if you think about how you can best distribute your content so that a lot of your ICP audience gets in touch with it.
Here are some methods to keep in mind:
✅ Share your content on relevant communities
But please stop just posting the link. Instead, provide value by answering related questions and link to your content as a full-length article on that topic)
✅ Have a small group of ambassadors
These are people who engage with your posts on LinkedIn. They should be relevant to your audience. Ask them to interact with your content.
✅ Share content in your outreach
Can you add your content to your latest prospecting campaign?
✅ Cross Promo of Content
Reach out to relevant industry experts, clients, influencers, newsletters, blogs, etc., and ask them to share your content. If it’s relevant there is a high chance they are happy to help.
✅ Promote via paid channels
If you see that your content performs well, you could even think about adding paid channels on top.
✅ Equip your employees with content
More and more SaaS startups equip their employees with content so they can all build their online brands. Ask your employees if they want to contribute to your content marketing.
✅ REPURPOSE your content
Again, distribution is also about repurposing. Imagine you turn your long-form blog post into 30 different LinkedIn posts (listicles, videos, How to, Carousels…etc) - doing so will allow you to post frequently and this will increase your reach.
Step #5: Content Optimization (for SEO)
After you’ve published your first weeks of content, it’s relevant to review your content performance and make conclusions. What’s working and what’s not working?
Here are a few things to optimize:
✅ Structure the content on your website (easy to navigate) - Topic cluster
✅ Internal Linking (between the articles)
✅ Optimize Title and Meta Descriptions
✅ Improve visual aspects
If you want to learn more about it, read the content optimization guide.
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3. GTM-related Miro Templates
Over the last few weeks, I’ve created more and more templates on Miro. Now I want to make them easily accessible for you (so you can copy the template to your own Miro account). That’s why I published them on Miroverse.
You can now get your templates here 👇
1. The Ultimate Framework to build your Ideal Customer Profile
2. The Ultimate SaaS Messaging Framework
3. The Perfect SaaS Homepage
4. The Perfect Sales Deck
💪 Bonus material (software, content, news) - 100 new European VC funds raised in 2023
If you are fundraising in Europe, it’s always good to know which VCs are active.
Nikola Yanev compiled a list of 100 new European VC funds raised in 2023.
For each VC fund, the list includes: Name / HQ / Size / Focus / Stage / Website
Happy growth 🚀.
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List of 90+ actionable SaaS Growth Tactics and Free SaaS GTM Strategy Worksheet.
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