Greetings from Playa Del Carmen,

Here are the top 3 things I tell people on a regular basis on how to grow their B2B SaaS businesses.

Let’s get down to business.
-Jason Long

🧲Know who you are talking to

Are you actually talking to your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)? So often, I see businesses struggling to get traction because they aren’t talking the right way to the right people.

If you don’t already have customers or very many of them, then the best way to do this is to call people you think may be your customers and ASK THEM what they think about your services and prices.

That’s right, actually talk to real people on a real phone ☎️. I recommend having conversations with between 50 and 100 of your potential customers. If you do that, you’ll discover so much about your product, your services, your customers, and your pricing and these changes can make a huge difference in how you sell your products and services.

If you do already have customers, it’s time to look at doing a quantified market segmentation analysis. This is where you analyze each customer segment, understand what your valued features are from them, and then get the following metrics on each customer:

• % of your customers in this segment

• The amount the segment will pay

• MRR per segment

• ARPU (Average Revenue Per Unit)

• Churn Rate

• LTV (Lifetime Value)

• CAC (Cost of Acquisition)

It looks something like this:

Once you have all of this, then you have real data that quantifies your ICP and we can start testing out some messaging.

📌Narrow your messaging

Now that you know who you’re talking to, you need to speak JUST TO THEM. Many entrepreneurs think that by narrowing their messaging they are narrowing their market.

But in reality, when you narrow your messaging you open🗝️ your market because if you’re not narrow in your messaging, I guarantee someone else is and your customers are going to go to them.

So build out a set of different messages that you think will ring with your most profitable, but also attainable, market segment. Build some landing pages for this with different messages or even different versions of your products or services and let’s go get some testing🧪 done!

🎯 Find Your Targets

Now that we’ve got the basics of your ICP identified and messaging worked out, it’s time to make a list.

Below are some of my favorite places to go for lead generation and enrichment:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator - One of the top systems out there for lead list creation. It’s not cheap though. Last I checked it was

• ZoomInfo.com - This is a costly one, but probably the best overall solution.

• Apollo.io - Apollo is a solid next in line, after Zoominfo for enrichment. Questionably, just as good, but a lot less expensive.

• Find That Lead - this is a newer company that I got from Appsumo a few years ago and it’s been a great investment.

Next, don’t forget to look at who is coming to your website already! Two great tools for this that I have used are:

• Leadfeeder.com 

• Happierleads.com 

Finally, don’t forget about the best old-school ways of finding leads:

• Join the association that serves your target group. There are very often a lot of ways to get access to your target market through this association.

• Go to tradeshows. So many companies are hesitant to do this, but if you have a great product that solves a big problem, it’s a great way to generate leads.

🔬Test your messaging

You’ve got your target audience, you’ve got your leads list, and now you need to start targeting.

There are two ways to test your messaging. Either get on the phone and start talking to people, which is best if you don’t have many clients, or go buy some ads.

A lot of entrepreneurs that I have spoken to think that because they are targeting business people, they need to focus in on LinkedIn. Sometimes that is true, but often it isn’t. Don’t forget that Facebook and Instagram has great info on your buyers and you can target very precisely with those platforms as well.

Next, one of my favorite, and one of the most underutilized channels to consider is YouTube. YouTube ads can be very, very effective for testing messaging.

Once you’ve selected your channel, it’s time to test ⚗️

You’ve got your channel selected and now it’s time to see if this is going to bear fruit. I recommend a $500 to $1000 test budget, but you can run with as little as $250.

The goal isn’t necessarily to get sales-qualified leads out of this. Initially, it’s just to see if people are responding to your messages. You build creative assets that target that exact person with a message that speaks to them, or so you think.

Are they responding😉? Are they clicking👉? Are they reaching out to you🤩?

🛁Rinse and repeat

Ok, so now you’ve got some data on who’s interested in talking and who’s not. You rarely get it exactly right the first time. So you need to take what worked, improve on it and try again… and again… and again, without going past your budget.

That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to do this with a small budget.

Test a few times —> figure out pretty well who responds best to which messaging. I wish I could say it’s that easy, but it takes some skill to do all of this, so if you need some help, we’re always here to help you out.

Other cool stuff 🤪 for the week:

• There is a solid link shortener on sale at AppSumo right now: https://appsumo.com/products/pxlto-plus-exclusive/

• There is also what looks like a good signature system on Appsumo here": https://appsumo.com/products/boloforms-signature/

• I just wrapped up some hiking in Patagonia with amazing friends. Take a look at the highlight pics here.

  

• During the Patagonia trip, with stops in Buenos Aires, I read through most of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. I was interested to see what Asimov thought about future technology back in the 50’s (and into the 80’s). It was a great series and I recommend it if you enjoy Sci-Fi.