How Guillaume 'G' Cabane identifies growth opportunities for businesses
How Guillaume 'G' Cabane identifies growth opportunities for businesses
Guillaume Cabane (00:01):
If you enter a feature war, you're never going to win. It's a terrible thing to do. So it's about saying, "Hey, we're going to create our own market, our own category. We're going to rename it." It's not, "We're not a live chat. We're conversational marketing," right? And you can say, "No, that's just some marketing BS, but it works."
Peep Laja (00:21):
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. Maybe some high fives. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck and how did it win. This week, Guillaume Cabane, also known as G. Co-founder and journal partner at HyperGrowth Partners. An advisory fund that helps B2B companies grow faster in exchange for equity.
Peep Laja (00:47):
G is a name you need to know. He's kind of a well-known secret. Let me explain. He might not be a mass market name like Gary V or Seth Godin, but he's the name with the people in the top growth circles. He's the guy CEOs and VP Growth type of people consult with. After being the head of marketing at several high growth companies, he was the VP Growth at Segment, Drift, Gorgias.
Peep Laja (01:09):
He's been a growth advisor to G2, Ramp, Capchase and so on. His requirements for choosing who he works with are sky high. I can't tell you how much he charges, but you'd be floored when you hear the answer. And he also takes equity yet there's a line out his door. There's a way more demand for his expertise than he can supply. He's the most expensive growth consultant around and the best companies can't get enough of him.
Peep Laja (01:34):
Basically, you'll never be able to afford it and he won't have time for you anyway. So how does he help companies compete? How do HyperGrowth Partners build winners? In this episode, we'll talk about getting to the right message.
Guillaume Cabane (01:47):
Maybe using Wynter to test the copy and then what happens? All of that very granular insights gets mashed up into one onboarding. We no longer care about what you came in. This is the product.
Peep Laja (02:01):
We hear about a three-step process for growth.
Guillaume Cabane (02:03):
I try to understand what's going on. I will push them to test a couple things, which I know have been ones elsewhere. And the most important is training them on how to find new ideas and how to experiment on their own.
Peep Laja (02:16):
When we talk about the importance of having respected ambassadors, speak out for your brand.
Guillaume Cabane (02:21):
If you think of a leader in marketing, let's say Udi from Gong, all right? I respect Udi, great leader. And if I see Udi saying good things about this product, it's probably legit.
Peep Laja (02:32):
Let's get into it.
Peep Laja (02:37):
G, you are in the business of making, winning repeatable. How do you do that?
Guillaume Cabane (02:44):
I'd say most of my job is pattern matching. It's about understanding the conditions a company, a startup isn't. What's their market, what have they already tried? What have they maybe not tried? What are the opportunities? I'm a marketer. If you look at marketing teams, the couple of pillars are understanding what's happening, okay? So are you able to understand how your business is doing. Then knowing where are the opportunities versus what's happening. What is best in class? Do you have the experience for that or not? And then when there's a gap knowing what can I try? What are the experiments that are likely to be successful?
Guillaume Cabane (03:25):
And that's where pattern matching happens. When I see that we have maybe a 15% activation rate, right? Now, a couple of ideas pop in my head immediately, do we have the right audience coming to site? Are we finding them for the right experience? And are we creating the right incentives? And I already have ideas of experiments in my head like, "Oh, I've tried this before. I tried this at Segment. I tried this ad Drift. I tried that at Gorgias. Which one is the closest? Which ones is the most likely to succeed?
Guillaume Cabane (03:55):
That's what I do. So when I see new opportunity, a new business that comes to me and ask for advisory, I'm picking, "Is it likely that I'll be able to use many tricks for my big bag of tricks?"
Peep Laja (04:05):
So when, let's say, you're working on a company that is competing in a saturated market or category, and most companies are in these days in B2B.
Guillaume Cabane (04:13):
Absolutely.
Peep Laja (04:14):
So where do you start? Are you looking at what the competitors are doing? Are you starting with, who are the customers and what do they want? What's your starting point?
Guillaume Cabane (04:22):
So I have a new client recently in FinTech, expense management and corporate credit cards, pretty saturated manner. Those things have been around forever. So I'm looking at what do we have right now? We have pretty good volume. We have pretty good traction. Most of it is organic. They have not tested many non-organic channels. Okay, that's one opportunity. Should we focus on that or not? That's the first question.
Guillaume Cabane (04:46):
Two, what are the conversion rates? Conversion rates are average and that's the first mistake most people do. They look at the average and say, "Well, it's pretty, okay." I look at the distribution, you got to cut your audience in multiple buckets and understand like, well, some of it converts really well. And some of it converts really poorly. That's always the case is because we are bringing the wrong people to our product or because we're pushing the wrong promise. And it's often a bit of both. So I'm going to start understanding the audience. I'm going to start testing hypothesis. If I change something, does it produce the expected lift?
Guillaume Cabane (05:24):
I'm going to give you an example that I do almost all the time, almost all say fairly mid-stage, late-stage companies have good acquisition strategies with very granular campaigns and landing pages. Maybe they're using Wynter to test the copy on the landing page, whatnot. And they get leads. And then what happens? All of that very granular insights and experience gets mashed up into one onboarding, into one product and one welcome email chain. So it's kind of a funnel of information where there's compression, which is really weird because we felt that we had to personalize and to cater the message to them, the top of thought, to get them to be interested and then say, "Hey, now that you're in, we no longer care about why you came in. This is the product." And I said, "This is wrong. This is absolutely wrong." If you understand that you have multiple different audiences, you got to keep that differentiation towards the very end.
Guillaume Cabane (06:24):
I'm French. And I live at the border of France and Italy right now. So I like to speak of... A good parable is Italian dishes, right? You got to think of the cannelloni versus the lasagna. Most teams organize like cannellonis, right? They actually have isolated teams. And somebody does paid ads and does a granular job. And then the other person is another silo, is it cool? Like I just have a product and I'm going to do the best onboarding for everyone, right?
Guillaume Cabane (06:50):
You got to think in terms of lasagna, which is from end to end, you got to preserve what made that person tick. If somebody came for expense management for free, which might be a reason, right? Well, if you push them eventually into a page or a product that says, "Hey, pick your plan," and there's only paid plans, obviously that's not going to work well.
Peep Laja (07:17):
An essential prerequisite for improving conversions is to create and maintain scent. Make pre-click message and post-click messages look and feel the same. There needs to be scent. The ad they see, or the email they read needs to smell like the landing page they land on. You have to maintain the same scent.
Peep Laja (07:38):
I once saw an offer for a free SaaS growth consultation session offered by a prominent X startup founder. And I thought to myself, "Well, why not? The new perspective always helps." But as I explored the offer, it turned out that the consultation was supposed to be with one of his hired coaches, someone who had never started a company in his life. I passed. That's a classic bait and switch. Don't do that.
Guillaume Cabane (08:08):
So you got to preserve the information. If you have expanse management for large enterprise, put them into something which respects what you know about them. So it's really about coherence end-to-end. And that's what we miss most of the time in organizations, we miss the end-to-end coherence.
Peep Laja (08:23):
Your starting point is then the company itself, what are they doing or not doing? And where are they currently underperforming? And then that is a way to optimize the machine.
Guillaume Cabane (08:35):
Yeah. I've got a three step approach. I try to understand what's going on, as you said. Two, I will pattern, match myself and push them to test a couple things, which I know have been once elsewhere to gain confidence that they can actually execute. And that the truth that I have, the knowledge I have from elsewhere actually applies here. And third, which may be the most important is training them on how to find new ideas and how to experiment on their own.
Guillaume Cabane (09:04):
And that's very important. Sure, I have a pretty large bag of tricks, but eventually I'm going to run out and that's not a long-term competitive mode. The mode is from helping. It's giving them the wins, so they get excited. Then they have this need for more. You have the gateway drug to hyper growth and eventually you want more. So then you need to spin up your growth team, right? With an experimentation framework, which I provide and helps them find those new ideas, evaluate sort and pick and then test the ideas, okay? At a very high pace because that's how they're going to win over and over, over multiple years.
Peep Laja (09:41):
What about competing on product in your approach? Are you like, "Oh, well you're mostly like the other products or at least not worse. So let's focus on marketing"? Or you have a me-too product or inferior product maybe.
Guillaume Cabane (09:55):
I'm a marketer, so my job is not to do the product. Most companies that succeed through the product because have a great product. And the marketing is just supporting the product. You got to be respect the marketers were able to push up an inferior product and succeed. Those are the good marketers, right?
Guillaume Cabane (10:13):
When you're hiring marketers, don't do the mistake of having people who had a very successful brand and who are successful by default because then the product is great. Do the opposites. Companies that are successful with a crappy product or if not crappy, at least like a me-too product, an average product. I'll give you a harsh, brutal example that I lived in. I worked that Drift. Look at Drift in the early days, Drift as a live chat competing with Intercom and 20, maybe a hundred other live chat products, most of which were free. If you want to look for a saturated market, that's one, saturated with free products. Was Drift in 2016, 2017, a much better product than all the others? I argued not so, right? It was a good product, but not very differentiated. Did Drift succeed on the marketing side at creating a nice wedge in the market? Absolutely, absolutely. That's a good example, right? Of winning through marketing and not through product.
Peep Laja (11:16):
Drift introduced a new narrative. They offered the point of view about the market and the world and how companies need to adapt to the new reality. The story was that everyone is doing real-time communication today, chatting and texting. And if you have old-school Legion forms to say, "We'll get back to you in 24 hours." That is so last century. What you need is to have real-time conversations with the customers. And that's where Drift comes in.
Peep Laja (11:43):
Drift in a lead with features and capabilities that would've positioned them as a commodity. Instead of playing the feature parity game, lead with a narrative that gets people to lead in, heads nodding. Change the context around your capabilities, work on your strategic narrative.
Peep Laja (12:01):
So in Drift's case, let's say the feature set was a commodity, you can do live chat and bots and then send some emails. But then in terms of their brand and messaging, they did not talk about conversational sales, conversational marketing, revenue acceleration, all those things. That's competing on story, competing on brand. How important is that?
Guillaume Cabane (12:23):
When you have a me-too product, very bolted, obviously. But I think in that case more specifically, it was about understanding that there was no winning the legacy market, right? Drift was in a legacy market where live chat has been around for 20 more years. And it was already labeled by Gartner and Forrester and all the analysts, as this is how live chats are supposed to work. And this is all the features. And if you enter a feature war, you're never going to win. All right. It's a terrible thing to do.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
You won't be able to react, but you will be reacting. And the speed at which you can react will largely depend on how well you've prepared your company to change and innovate. You have to design your business to constantly evolve the experiences that you're delivering to customers.
Guillaume Cabane (13:12):
So it's about saying, "Hey, we're going to create our all own market, our own category, we're going to rename it." It's not, "We're not a live chat. We're conversational marketing," right? And you can say, "No, that's just like some marketing BS, but it works." It works in the sense that it's now a category that Drift was able to define the controls and other features of that category and be listed as a leader in that category. That absolutely works.
Peep Laja (13:36):
How often do you go into a client's business and say, "Hey, you guys should consider creating a new category."
Guillaume Cabane (13:42):
Don't worry. Everybody wants that. So the clients already know that they know they want that. The question is, is it possible? Right? And it's not always possible. If you look at the companies that have been able to do it, there are few of them. Everyone wants to be the lead of their own category.
Peep Laja (13:58):
Gainsight said it requires millions of dollars. Do you agree?
Guillaume Cabane (14:02):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Look at Drift. It's more than millions of dollars. Look at all the events and conferences, all the sponsoring, all the podcasts and content, all the people working on it. Tens of millions.
Speaker 5 (14:14):
The reality is there's the big dark side to creating a category. It's actually really hard because you're trying to create something that didn't exist before. Educate people on the new way to do things. Some of you know that expression, "Fighting with your arms tied behind your back." It's kind of like doing that, but underwater, blindfolded and surrounded by sharks with lasers. That's literally sometimes what category creation feels like.
Speaker 6 (14:35):
It's a big metaphor.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Big metaphor. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6 (14:37):
If you take anything away from today in the session, it's this, don't create a new category.
Speaker 5 (14:43):
Don't. Just don't do it.
Speaker 6 (14:43):
Just don't do it.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
Learn that it's not worth it. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (14:45):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (14:45):
Thank you.
Speaker 6 (14:45):
Thank you everyone.
Speaker 5 (14:45):
Appreciate it.
Speaker 6 (14:46):
Appreciate it.
Peep Laja (14:47):
So what do you do if, let's say, you are early or you're not well funded. It's a mature category. Your product is okay, but it's not revolutionary. Don't have the money to do category creation. Then what strategy would you bank on? Or where would you start then?
Guillaume Cabane (15:04):
You got to find some angle of differentiation. Obviously, right? Look at Gorgias, okay? Gorgias former client of mine, a help desk for e-commerce stores, pretty successful, right? Help desk, man, everybody's a help desk, right? And there's a leader, Zendesk, public company, huge one. Now, they understood that they could carve out within the entire market, a small niche, which is e-commerce. And there were not many players in that category, okay? Now, there's no such category such as help desk for e-commerce at least yet. And they don't have the means to create the category yet, but it is a market. It is an niche with underserved needs.
Guillaume Cabane (15:43):
So they built feature sets, namely integrations with Shopify, with all the e-commerce platforms and the marketing side, we started outreaching hard on the populations that did not have anything, basically matching all the tickets in Gmail. And the population that has Zendesk, which was basically underserving them by not having any integration with the e-commerce tool stack. And the win rates were above 50%. And that's when you understand that you have something fair.
Guillaume Cabane (16:12):
It's not so much, at least at the beginning, having a very differentiated, awesome product. It's about having the right angle and saying you have an e-commerce store. It's very successful. And we understand that where you make money is with repeat customers. It's now with new customers, in e-commerce margin on new customers is very low. So repeat customers. And the only way to bring repeat customers to offer a great experience, Amazon style. How are you going to do that? If you take 48, 72 hours to respond. And just by having a messaging that is very acutely on the e-commerce situation, we're able to create that connection and win. And then, once you start having that momentum, then you create more features and more features. And then you start winning there. And Gorgias is now Series B, raised a ton of money, very successful, 130 people.
Peep Laja (17:06):
The most common strategy in business is playing the brand preference game. My brand is better than yours. The problem is that customers don't find incremental improvement exciting. When you create a new market or subcategory, winning is no longer based on my brand is better than your brand, but rather on being the only brand for this subcategory. Competitors lose because they like the new must-haves this subcategory brings.
Peep Laja (17:33):
The requirement to win the positioning game, by building a new subcategory is new or improved must-haves that provide a different or significantly better capabilities. Like in this case, deep integrations with e-commerce. You find an opportunity to develop a new subcategory, you need to create a new set of must-haves. Offerings without those new must-haves, won't be relevant, visible nor credible. Ultimately this is about differentiation and why the customers would choose you.
Guillaume Cabane (18:03):
And I think there's something what we're forgetting here, which is my general approach to B2B SaaS is an identifying mapping, the entire market trust. Most people will have what I call a passive approach. They create a product. Then they create some outbound and inbound, like mix of channels, some ads, some content and some outbound, whatnot, everything. And they wait for the leads to trickle in. And I'm like, "That's cool. We don't know if we're talking the right people by doing that." What is the total market revenue? So what I try to do is I identify every single company here and within each company, let's identify every single buyer. So if you think of ABM, that's like ABM at mass scale. And then say which companies are likely to close now. What's the right channel, what's the right investment, what's the right message, and who should we reach out now? Because most of the people we should not reach out to now.
Guillaume Cabane (19:00):
And we are now closer to being like farmers who are optimizing the total revenue of a total market. That's what I did at Drift. That's also what I did at Segment, is also what did at Gorgias recently. We mapped all of the e-commerce stores in the U.S. that had over a million dollars worth of transactions per year. There's a 100 K each of them, right? That's not that big. So we could say, "Hey, in the old approach, we had identified like 30,000 of them and it were hammering those 30,000 stores every month with email and whatnot. But there were 70% of the market that we were just ignoring because we just didn't know about them. By mapping the entire market, we were able to be a lot more strategic about why are we not talking to those people? Why are they not coming to our content? Why are we not engaging with them? And what can we do to change that?
Peep Laja (19:51):
The marketer's dilemma, should we go after the customers that we want as customers or should be focused on the type of customers we have? That's actually a false economy and the wrong way to think about it. To win, you need to be objectively better and/or clearly differentiated. You can't be better at everything. So you got to carefully choose your customers. What kind of customers can you serve the best, which would also result in high quality, lots of word of mouth. And who are also high profit and long retention? You need to get two things right. You have to target the defensible market segment and you have to create a best supply model that enables you to win against competitors who are also going after the same target segment.
Peep Laja (20:38):
In developing a high profit business model to engage your target customers, you have two basic choices, one, increase your customer value or two, lower your cost to serve or you do both. It all starts with going after the right customer.
Peep Laja (20:56):
So once you have that list of hundreds of thousands of prospects or whatever, how will you then decide how to engage them? Will you run ads or do cold outreach, via email or LinkedIn?
Guillaume Cabane (21:07):
We bucket the populations in, either some personas or some... We have some leads going different ways, right? And we try to identify and test different approaches for each bucket. It's a simple way. Let's just cut it by company size. That's how most people do it. So you can say, "Well, maybe the larger companies, we can test outbound, but it's unlikely to work," right? If you do some outbound to VPs of CS at large Shopify stores, nah, right? Seen something more personalized, a better approach. So you test different approaches.
Guillaume Cabane (21:37):
So there you need the marketer who knows all the possibilities and knows what's likely to work at different levels of seniority and company sites. So I know ads unlikely to work, right? Outbound email, unlikely to work, you need a personal touch. What's a personal connection? In that specific case, we went through agencies, all those large stores work with agencies and going through them, we're able to leverage the trust of the agency to get to the store. So, that's one example, but you need to be a about to identify and be strategic, what is the best mix of channels for each bucket?
Peep Laja (22:15):
Are there any broad stroke rules that you go by that, if you're this, then that?
Guillaume Cabane (22:20):
Yeah, absolutely. I try to avoid burning the market and that's very important. I could blast an email to the entire market this day and make the quarter and then fail at every year in the future, right? So you got to understand, what percentage am I converting? What percentage am I burning? And am I converting more than am I burning? And what's the refresher rate of the market? People who are changing jobs and getting promoted, whatnot. So you got to be like tactical about that. That's number one.
Guillaume Cabane (22:51):
And number two, for me to leverage the intent. If you have the entire market mapped, you got to think within that market, there are some part of it, which is likely to convert better than the rest of the market at the same, let's say, score or leads going, right? It's those that are expressing the need to change, whether they're doing willingly or not. So example, if they go to the G2 category and they view your competitors and you can buy the data from my friends at G2, where they're expressing a buying intent if you get that information. So those should bubble up the top of the people who should get more no outreach from you. Obviously.
Peep Laja (23:29):
Yeah. Some of the intent data that I've seen is fairly useless because there's so many intent data providers and some it's like, "Oh, interested in semiconductors," and then you're like, "Well, so what, what exactly do we do with this?"
Guillaume Cabane (23:43):
I hate that kind of intent data. I'm not going to name the vendors, but I hate when I can't validate the intent data myself. So I'll give you two cases of intent data. There's intent data I can prove that it works, okay? So example my friends that PredictLeads, sell intent data on hiring. So they basically scrape all the job boards. They do natural language processing and they identify this company is hiring a VP of customer success. I can look at 10 records, go to the jobs and teams page and check the job posting is there. I'm like, "Okay, I understand how it works. I can verify it myself. I can get pretty good confidence. This stuff is legit." In my case, they're hiring a VP of CS. It's a good sign, right?
Guillaume Cabane (24:28):
When I was at Drift, I was buying the data for increasing sales team. Hey, are they like doubling the size of the sales team? If they are, they need more leads, they need a chatbot. Cool. That's the internet data you can validate. That's true for hiring data. It's true for G2. And then there's the internet data, which is like kind black box that are looking for those cues that they're reading articles about that. There's no way I can validate that. Just like you could tell me anything that I want to hear, how would I know?
Peep Laja (24:56):
You mentioned about a classic competitive strategy mistake waiting harder for the leads to come in and as opposed to going after them proactively, what other classic mistakes are you seeing when it comes to competing in a saturated category?
Guillaume Cabane (25:12):
The lack of differentiation, and also just talking about your product. Many companies when I look at the copy, I look at the ads and it's just me, me, me, me, me, me, me, all right? If there's 20 companies like yours, I'm not going to feel the subtle difference and I'm not going to care. I'm going to spend three seconds looking at your ad. I'm just not going to care.
Peep Laja (25:41):
We're just focused on the customer. And don't look at the competition. Sounds great than paper, but it's not smart. Most for brands operate in saturated categories. And there are hundreds of alternatives. Most of which look the same and say the same things. If you speak about yourself as if you're the only one doing what you're doing, you are making it needlessly hard for yourself. So many SaaS tools lead with product-based messaging and state the plain obvious as if that's unique or impressive.
Peep Laja (26:09):
Marketing has always been about the customer and not the competition. Too much focused on the customer and you end up with sameness. Most customer insights are category level insights. So everyone ends up solving for the same problems, quite the same way. This results in companies playing a game, they actually cannot win.
Peep Laja (26:28):
The barrier of entry to starting a new business has never been lower. So if you want your me-too tool to be picked by someone, is a heavily stacked against you. Differentiation is about standing out and providing a reason to choose you over others. You think companies would be all about that. Curiously, not so much. In fact, the opposite is true. Sameness is the default. Sameness is to combine the fact of companies being too similar in their product, poorly differentiated in their branding and indistinct in their communication. Most companies say very predictable, obvious things focused on their product. As Andy Raskin said, "Product differentiation by itself has become indefensible because today's competitors can copy your better, faster, cheaper features virtually instantly. Now the only thing they can't replicate is to trust that customers feel for you and your team."
Speaker 7 (27:26):
If you are telling a why, a story, why these solutions are better than similar ones that you might find elsewhere, it's very self-centered, it's like, "Here's how we solve your problem. And here's how we're better than the others." And this seems like a reasonable approach. I mean, we do have competitors after all, and maybe it worked back when markets had few enough players that buyers could ignore the bluster and sort through all the claims. But that's not what markets look like today. I mean, each of you probably competes, not against a handful of competitors, but dozens, all screaming, "Why us," at customers.
Guillaume Cabane (28:12):
What makes your audience care? What makes them resonate? And there's only one thing that makes them really resonate right, is social proof. And the fact that I will see that, "Hey, I know this person." If you think of a leader in marketing, let's say Udi from Gong, right? Like, "I respect Udi, great leader. And I feel if I see Udi think good things about this product, it's probably legit."
Speaker 8 (28:38):
I'm interested in what Lego and Adidas and Disney are doing more than I'm interested in most B2B brands. And that's where we get a lot of our ideas.
Guillaume Cabane (28:48):
Now, even more important if you compete with Gong and you see gong using this product, I want to know. So one of my key strategies has been to try and present, not the customers that they may know, but the competitors that are using my product that they might have. And so I use data from Owler to identify the competitors. And then I present all the competitors that match my customers because I know that's going to intrigue them a lot more, right? If I see the logo bar of five of my competitors, I'm like, "Cool. I'm going to read everything. Why are they using this and not me? Why am I missing?" Because that's what people are afraid about. Afraid about missing stuff.
Peep Laja (29:32):
Right. Some of it is also then B2B influencer marketing. So how do I get Udi or some other famous person to mention my thing.
Guillaume Cabane (29:40):
I'm not a relationship expert, but relationships take time to blossom. You got to find everybody's interest, right? Obviously, Gong is very successful, so if your small startup has Gong as that client, that's great. They're unlikely to see value from them mentioning you. A partnership is not in their favor, it's in yours, right? So you got to understand that and what can you do for them?
Guillaume Cabane (30:03):
But I'd say one of the easy ways, if you're the founder is to open your cap table to some angel investors take some 5, 10, 20 K checks from 20 people, you really respect you'll get the success stories, right? Because then you have an alignment of the incentives.
Peep Laja (30:21):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Have them be literally invested in you.
Guillaume Cabane (30:26):
Absolutely. Even without that, you understand, what's the alignment of incentive? Can they access your market? Do they need some validation on something on some category, which you're really good at? What do they want?
Peep Laja (30:37):
You mentioned also when it comes to differentiation, you need to know what really resonates with the person you're trying to sell to or influence. So what are your top ways to go about figuring that out?
Guillaume Cabane (30:50):
Understanding who I'm about, who I want to influence. So understanding my personal better. It's interesting. I had a call about this with a client of mine where they were about to embark on a journey whether we're going to sign up a huge wait list into a customer discovery questionnaire. And they told me, "But we don't want those as clients." And I'm like, "That's weird. Why are you asking them all those questions?" Like, "Oh, well, because we have them on the wait list. We might as well ask them what product they want." That's weird, even if they answer, you don't want them as clients, because they're all gmail.com addresses, all right? And I said, "Let's change what we're going to ask. Let's not ask what they want. Let's ask them first who they are. And who's behind that Gmail."
Guillaume Cabane (31:40):
So again, B2B SaaS, I'm always about to understand what's the company, what's the person. Can I buy the data? Or do I need to sniff for the data? Very often, if you look at sign up forms, demo forms or survey forms were expanding too many fields that there's a cost in conversion to every field on stuff that we could get elsewhere. Drop title, company, name, company size. And we're not using that real estate for stuff we can't get also, which is like, "Hey, what's the pain, what's the real need. What's your budget. What's your team size. What's number one problem." Okay?
Guillaume Cabane (32:20):
That is what is critical is who they really are. Can I get the data? And what is their problem? I like to relate burning to gym experiments, right? When you pay into gym and I know that you do, right? You exercise a lot. So when I do that is because you have hope of a better future of yourself. You have this image like, "Hey, I'm going to improve." Like you want that when you don't go to the gym, you don't churn immediately because you feel bad about giving up on that hope. The inside of you are like, "I'm going to be fat and ugly for the rest of my life now," okay?
Guillaume Cabane (32:58):
So it's a very similar process that you can apply here. Asking what is their pain and what they want solving when they use the product. And if they don't activate, remind them of why they came, use that thing, bucket it and say, "Hey, you told me that you had problems with your tickets on your e-commerce store. Have you solved that problem?" They are now responding faster, is your repeat rate higher. And obviously it's not. And so it's going to make them feel bad. So they're going to come back. So use exactly the same process.
Peep Laja (33:31):
Awesome. G, thank you so much.
Guillaume Cabane (33:34):
Thanks.
Peep Laja (33:38):
So what are the three key tools that G and HyperGrowth use to guide their customers to growth? One, they will map out the landscape of potential customers. Make a plan to reach each segment in that list.
Guillaume Cabane (33:51):
My general approach to B2B SaaS is in identifying mapping the entire market first. So what I try to do is I identify every single company here and within each company, let's identify every single buyer. So if you think of ABM, that's ABM at mass scale.
Peep Laja (34:11):
Two, they rely on social proof and showcasing which competitors of the prospect are using the tool.
Guillaume Cabane (34:18):
One of my key strategies has been to try and present, not the customers that they may know, but the competitors that are using my product that they might have because I know that's going to intrigue them a lot more.
Peep Laja (34:34):
Three, they use trusted data and metrics to work out who is buying so they can target their marketing efforts.
Guillaume Cabane (34:41):
My friends at PredictLeads, sell intent data on hiring. I can verify it myself. When I was at Drift, I was buying the data for increasing sales team. They are doubling the size of the sales team. If they are, they need more leads, they need a chatbot.
Peep Laja (34:56):
And a final takeaway from G.
Guillaume Cabane (34:58):
I have a pretty large bag of tricks, but eventually I'm going to run out. That's not a long-term competitive mode. It's giving them the wins, so they get excited. Then they have this need for more. You have the gateway drug to hyper growth.
Peep Laja (35:11):
That's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.
