The B2B Buying Model For Ambitious SaaS Brands

Speaker A: Foreign. Hey guys, Ben here from Session Media and welcome back to another episode of SaaS Crunch. Today we're going to look at something slightly different. And recently I was back at university and it reminded me of all the marketing models which are uh, positioned out there. The one in particular M, was the ADA model which you see plastered pretty much everywhere when referencing B2B marketing cognitive stages. And it stands for awareness, interest, desire and action. So the traditional funnel and it got me thinking a lot recently and I feel like this was a good model maybe 10 years ago. And for general B2B, but especially in saturated spaces like B2B, SaaS or tech, this process to the cognitive stages and how people go through a buying cycle isn't quite as effective or pretty much as linear or doesn't really work as well as it does. Because creating awareness isn't that easy. Anyone can just talk about their product. But how do you actually go about creating awareness? How do you actually create interest? How do you then actually get that person to come to your site and fill out a form? And then how would you create an advocacy program around your tech product or software which allows you guys then to pump that information back into your top of funnel awareness, then actually start creating more and more relevant content for your audience to consume and resonate with. So what we've done is we've looked at a lot of high performing SaaS companies which are fast growing. We've worked with a lot of them as well and we kind of want to look at redefining this model. So this B2B buying model for SaaS, as typical as it may seem when it comes to a lot of academia is we've created the four A's and it wasn't actually done to try and keep them all the same letter, but it just ended up that way. So what we've got is instead of awareness in this modern day and age, a great alternative would be what's your angle for a company, what's your angle, how you, what do you stand for and what don't you stand for? And I'll go into all of these in a bit more detail a bit later on. The second one is application. So once you have your angle, what's the application? How can the user who believes in the way and your methodology and your vision of how uh, an industry should be, how can that then person use what you have to offer your product or service or brand, how can they use you guys and your sort of partnership come into fruition? How does that work then rather than Action. What's the ask? Is the ask demo? Is it trial? Is what are the different thresholds for someone who has like a freemium versus then going up into a paid plan? What are the asks that you're asking for? What is the best route to market to get someone on board with your product? And then the final A is advocacy. So once you have your angle, you have your application, you um, have the ask. How can you then start creating advocates from your customer success and all the advocates you can then start using to pump back into creating new angles and new ideas for angles for your company, new applications and just social proof which you can then start actually creating what historically the ADA model said would be the awareness. So even though it's very similar with regard to the funnel type setup, it's much more specific as with regard to what the objective should be at each level rather than just creating general awareness. You want to be looking for an angle for example, but let's look at that one first. So if we look at angle like I mentioned, this is the companies who grow fast that we've seen do this very well and it's all about what do you guys believe in, what's your vision and where do you think the future is going in your market. So for example this would be HubSpot. They say the future of marketing is inbound and that's where all of their blog content and all of their other content they've created is based around. They don't only just stand for inbound marketing, they also stand a lot against outbound marketing. So it's saying that way is no longer the way, inbound marketing is the way. So it's not only important to create awareness for what you do do and what you do believe in, but create awareness of what you don't think is the right way of doing it anymore and have facts, have stat have empirical evidence uh, to back that up, not just saying it for the sake of saying it. Another good example would be drift. And drift not only said that chatbots are the future. Not sure I necessarily believe with it but they're such a fast growing company and it's gone off the back of a lot of uh, it their angle creating the awareness for them being that they don't believe forms are ah, cutting anymore and forms are dated and all of that methodology behind or messaging behind what they don't believe in and where the marketing should be going and the marketing space has eaten it up and they've grown very fast obviously along with a lot of other things but at a very foundational level from their creating awareness of the traditional funnel. Their angle has been very strong in that and it hasn't even got to be on a large scale of companies. You can have much smaller um, software brands doing this or you can have even um, tech companies or even service based businesses like ours for example. We're very clear on the fact that that B2B attribution isn't how it should be set up from a last touch point and instead there should be new ways that you should attribute and measure B2B marketing. And also trying to go against just sort of traditional marketing methods and trying to think of new ways to do things for buyers in the modern age. And what we do stand for is the way we attribute now. And what we don't stand for is traditional last point direct touch attribute, direct response attribution, um, in all its forms because it, it creates bad marketing. So just think about what you guys do stand for and then ultimately what you guys don't stand for. And you can create a messaging plan around that. And I'll get into a bit more around amplification soon and how you can go and push this messaging out, um, and the best channels and everything else. But that's the foundation of angle. The next one we have is application. And I see this not much but in some cases I've, I've heard of companies, I know companies, opinions on things and, and I actually am bought on to what they're saying A lot of the time I know who the founders are, uh, I listen to the podcast but where sometimes you're missing a trick is then the application. So I don't actually know what that company does down to a T. I don't know what their software provides and said I don't know how it can help me. And they spent so much money on creating the angle and the top line messaging strategy and what they believe in and the awareness part of it that they don't focus then on. Actually let's make sure that we're hitting a whole entire target audience market with actual ways of how they can, you know, come to our site, sign up or get a demo and use our uh, product or service. Now I say that it's in a very nice position to be if you have the angle sorted, people bought on then don't have the application of your product because that's a very easy fix because you can create animated videos, video explainers, you can take feature ads, you can do whatever you need to do then to start getting in front of your customer audience. Now that's probably 1% of companies. Uh, what I'd say is more typical is people completely miss the angle or the awareness, the legacy awareness stage and they go straight for application and they say this is how you apply our product to your brand, you should buy it now. And they try and miss out the whole awareness sector. So they're only going to get a very few uh, people that are actually saying actually I would find that interesting. Just happens that I'm interested in fixing that solution or problem right now. And we see a lot of demand generation strategies based just around the application of the product. And I guess in legacy that would be the trying to force someone to be interested straight away before you've created that typical awareness. So if you've got a good angle strategy then that's when you can start and looking at rolling out really good, um, video ads or feature ads or integration ads, what it is for your SaaS which then allows you guys to start ramping up that onboarding, um, and I guess sort of a go to market, um, acquisition strategy. The next one is ask. And this is probably even more common than application where people just start and this is the likes of just running Google Ads for software related terms. For example. This is when you just go out there and you're like, will you buy this product? This information is on the landing page. You know you got a get demo or free trial and you're just trying to push that towards people. And if you've got really good angle and really good application content, then if you ask a lot of people to come and buy it or offer them a free trial, they're much more likely to be like, okay, I know who you are, I know what you stand for. I know how you can work with our business. I'm going to sign up for that free trial or I'm going to get that demo and listen to a bit more about what it is that you guys do. A lot of brands just go straight for the, miss the application even and go straight for the ask. They run ads which like get demo ads to a cold audience and they like why is no one coming through? And then when people do come through every now and then, that person doesn't turn up for the call because they're not qualified. They have no idea of the actual application, it's been gated and they have no idea of what your company stands for and stands against. There's no awareness, there's no uh, sorry, there's no um, angle. There's no application and you're going straight for the ask. So ask can be good when you go straight from, you know, search, but again that's probably kind of where it dies is going straight from the ask, uh, is in search. If you go straight for the ask in social, um, ultimately you're probably not going to have that much luck. So if you're going to go for the good ask, yes, you probably will get people flowing through at the bottom of the funnel. But if you want to nurture them, application and angle are uh, a must. And finally we have advocacy now. Advocacy is a must in scaling up messaging and allowing you guys to not only create new angles but to create more social proof which will then bake into your application strategy. So if you then have people that can use your product and then they give you feedback like I really like this or don't really like this, you can then go actually that's great feedback. We can use that in our angle messaging and say we and our customers believe that uh, XYZ is true, then people are going to be thinking oh yeah, I actually believe that's true. Well I've been doing it this way, maybe I should change the way I think about it and then can go on to the application and you can say this customer used our software, uh, and achieved XYZ because we provided XYZ for them. They think I'm that type of customer, I could use this to achieve XYZ too. So they already have the stuff they believe in, they have the application. So then when they go into Google and type in um, XYZ software or they see one of your ads or they're just thinking about it and go straight to your website, they know the ask there to get the demo or the free trial is much more likely to happen than if they'd just gone cold. So get through that process of angle application and ask and then when you start actually acquiring customers, you can start pivoting that messaging and actually using use cases, testimonials and opinion of customers to be able to start refining your messages throughout. And it's an ever going process. And I'd say the sort of fifth soft A is app, um attribution and you work out then what reach, um, sorry, what angle is an application. M messaging is actually allowing you guys to scale up your inbound lead gen, which or inbound demand gen lead gen, um, hand raises, whatever you want to call them, which messaging is doing that most effectively. And that's when you start looking at attribution. And I'm not gonna go too much in attribution today because that's a very broad topic about how you can actually start to quantify different messaging and audiences and channels and platforms. But again it just allows you to see how the above are affecting your bottom line activity. So how do you work with internal teams or, or with agencies to achieve this? And what I'd say is if you're working with an agency for example, agencies typically are going to be very good at uh, looking at application content, ask content and creating advocacy content. And I'd say in best case scenario they're very good at consulting on the types of angle or the angles that you should be putting out there. But if you're looking to outsource all the angles to like some agencies or people that sort of um, middle management for example in your organization you're never going to get the exact messaging um that you're looking for because you have an idea of the direction of the company as sort of a C suite. You have an idea of the emerging trends that you're going after and the purpose behind what it is that you're building and all that indicative data from all these different touch points. There's no blind spots with the information that you can be receiving. So if you're quite senior in an organization then the angle is going to come down to people that uh, have a very deep technological or deep industry understanding which can therefore push people forward. And if you try and outsource that to an agency, unless they're a specialist agency, even if they are competing for lots of others, it's still going to be relatively generic. Try and find your standpoint and internally own the angle and then the agencies can help with the amplification and um, the actual um, rollout of that across social channels and set up the attribution modeling and set up um, how you're actually going to control the reach and the return and all the testing. But internally work out the angle and then the application and the ask whether regard to whether it's crow ah optimization from different types of call to actions or whether that's landing page copy or Google Ads or LinkedIn ads or whatever it may be that can as at most be most part be outsourced if it's done well. But the angle I'd say is very much within the company's realm of what do we stand for, who are we? And then using agencies or performance or demand gen marketers internally to use that as an amplification to really hit your target audience market and your Ideal customer Personas on a consistent basis to get them educated within it. And like I said, reach or angle is much more impactful than just awareness because anyone can just talk about their company. But because it's 2022 and we getting saturated in a lot of markets and the noise out there online is very very busy, we need to work out what you guys do and don't stand for and quickly. When it comes to top line channels there's no hard and fast rule. But if you're looking at ah, indicative ways that you can get started angle I'd say 80% would be through the likes of social, paid social, um where you can start pushing that out cause you're pushing your messages towards people. That's podcasts, snippets of podcasts, amplifying them through paid search. Oh sorry, paid se, paid social. Get your message out there and then 20% I would say through likes of content people looking at um, certain queries which may be slightly related to your industry and you're trying to educate that market. I'd say that's probably quite a good split for application. I'd say 50, 50. So 50% likes of um, paid social which are like LinkedIn video ads, Facebook video ads, um, you know, sponsored content around use cases, whatever it may look like or feature carousels or whatever it may be from that end and then 50% on search. So for example our friends at Cognizant uh do it really well where they rank really well for go to market strategy and they rank for it and that person may not have a plan for a go to market strategy so they spend half of the um, blog post overview of um what go to market strategy is with some top line ideas and then they go on to how Cognizant as a brand can help them plug that gap. So that's a really nice way of using search and content marketing on your own media on your website to actually inform and educate and go for the application um side of your messaging ask. I'd probably flip it from angle and say that's 80% search, 20% paid social. Um so we have 80%. So that's the Google Ads, that's the high intent SEO. It's the sort of mid funnel potential SEO as well. And then you look for that, using that to go to landing pages which have you know um, conversion focused which you then push them through to try and convert on that page you can then have about 20% I'd say on um, paid social you don't want to go too heavy on the buy now ads on um, paid social because it's not a direct response channel by nature, so be careful with it. But I still think sponsored in mail for a warm list or, or a warm list ad potentially we could be looking at testing the water. We're trying to get some demos and free trials. If someone you can tell has already bought into it or they've been on your site before or they're in your CRM list or whatever it may look like. And then advocacy, you can use that across all channels, use it across your website, use it across your socials, whatever it may look like, just look into one, leverage it for use cases and case studies and then just amplifying that. Because the best way of creating content I've always believed is showing not only angle, you can show angle advocacy and an ask all within good use cases and case studies because it just takes you through a natural progression story and you're telling your story and what your brand's about through the eyes of a customer, which is always the best way to tell a story, um, around um, what it is you guys do and what you're looking to achieve, um, as a brand. So that's everything I've got for you guys today. Um, hope you found that interesting. Sorry it was a bit, uh, tongue in cheek with regard to the academia forays, but there we go, it's a must. And any questions, as always, feel free to email me at Ben Session hyphen media.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. But have a great week and speak to you guys very soon.