Dan Martell - November 15, 2021


5 SaaS Growth Strategies I’ve Learned From Non-SaaS Businesses


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

191.46431

Word count

2,439

Sentence count

128


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dan Martell shares 5 different industries and 5 specific lessons he has learned from them to help you grow your SaaS company. If you re an entrepreneur, you re going to want to pay attention to these 5 examples.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.080 You can study the best of the best.
00:00:02.240 If somebody is growing, they're leaving clues.
00:00:04.520 You know, Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues.
00:00:19.640 Hey there, I'm Dan Martell,
00:00:20.640 serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:22.640 In this episode, I'm gonna share with you
00:00:25.000 five different businesses that I look at,
00:00:27.760 or I've learned from as a software,
00:00:29.660 as a service SaaS entrepreneur,
00:00:32.260 to be inspired to help me come up with growth ideas
00:00:35.100 and be sure to stay with the end,
00:00:36.220 we're gonna share with you an exclusive training,
00:00:38.100 it's called the Idea to Exit mini course.
00:00:40.720 So if you wanna learn how I identify opportunities
00:00:43.320 in the market, build a clickable prototype,
00:00:45.700 pre-sell that to get funding,
00:00:47.320 to eventually recruit dev team
00:00:48.960 and all the process around that,
00:00:50.420 be sure to stay at the end,
00:00:51.840 but let's get into the different markets
00:00:54.340 that you can use to be inspired to grow your SaaS company.
00:00:57.440 One of my favorite sayings,
00:00:58.860 I actually don't know who said it,
00:01:00.120 but it's learn wide, practice narrow.
00:01:03.680 And I like that idea because I'm always looking
00:01:07.080 for inspiration in the world
00:01:09.920 to find things that I can use inside my businesses.
00:01:12.240 I mean, it doesn't matter if, you know,
00:01:14.340 Henry Ford learned about building the assembly line
00:01:17.260 from a meat packer in Chicago.
00:01:19.080 If you are eating at a restaurant
00:01:21.540 and you see something interesting,
00:01:22.680 the way they bundle up maybe the menu,
00:01:25.040 that might be inspiring.
00:01:26.180 or you're talking, you're hiring somebody
00:01:28.000 to come deal with your, you know,
00:01:29.940 some like lawn care at your house.
00:01:31.420 And maybe there was something,
00:01:32.700 the way they did their promotion
00:01:33.940 and the offer that you can be inspired.
00:01:35.600 I mean, the world is full of smart entrepreneurs,
00:01:40.500 systems, repeatable systems.
00:01:42.580 If you've ever read the E-Myth by Michael Gerber,
00:01:44.500 Franchise Prototypes,
00:01:46.220 where folks have figured something out.
00:01:48.560 You know, it might be the way they deliver the service.
00:01:50.480 It could be the way they price something.
00:01:51.860 It could be the way they market it.
00:01:53.220 And your job as the entrepreneur
00:01:55.520 is to learn wide, to be inspired,
00:01:58.220 to take those learnings and go narrow in the implementation
00:02:02.280 so that you can get an unfair advantage.
00:02:04.220 If you're doing what everybody else is doing,
00:02:06.880 I guarantee that you're gonna have the exact same results
00:02:09.400 as your other peers in the market.
00:02:11.340 But if you find those nuances,
00:02:13.240 those opportunities to R&D,
00:02:16.240 what I call rob and duplicate from other industries,
00:02:18.880 non-competitive,
00:02:20.040 that's where things start to get interesting.
00:02:21.900 So I wanna share with you five different industries
00:02:24.240 and the specific things that I took from those industries
00:02:27.300 to help me grow my software companies.
00:02:29.320 Upsells, this is one of my favorite.
00:02:31.720 I learned this from the gym industry, the fitness industry.
00:02:35.340 I've been blessed to have two friends of mine,
00:02:37.960 Leila and Alex Hermozzi,
00:02:39.300 who are arguably the top experts in the world of gyms.
00:02:43.400 They have a company called Gym Launch.
00:02:44.660 They help fitness studios, group studios, et cetera,
00:02:48.260 personal trainers to kind of build and scale their businesses.
00:02:52.520 And one of the things that they taught me,
00:02:54.740 cause I was involved in a CrossFit gym, was how to upsell.
00:02:57.800 So when people come in to your gym,
00:03:00.560 a lot of people will just sell them a monthly membership.
00:03:02.480 It's like, oh, we have a discount, here you go.
00:03:04.480 But that's not the full solution.
00:03:06.460 To me, the way I think about an upsell is, okay,
00:03:08.760 if they came in for one specific problem to be solved,
00:03:11.720 I got to look at other opportunities to truly solve it.
00:03:15.080 So I've always joked that SaaS, software as a service,
00:03:17.840 really should be success as a service.
00:03:20.660 And you can look for opportunities in your offering
00:03:23.540 where you could upsell people to a higher level of service
00:03:27.240 in the initial conversation.
00:03:28.960 That might be by adding some success coaching
00:03:33.260 as part of the upsell.
00:03:34.480 That might be getting them on a better tier
00:03:36.600 that's gonna meet their needs
00:03:37.720 in regards to integration with their CRM tool.
00:03:39.760 Maybe they use Salesforce.
00:03:41.300 But I love the idea of having somebody
00:03:44.640 think they're coming in this way,
00:03:46.420 and I do this with all my coaching clients,
00:03:48.500 to buy a package, but as soon as they come in,
00:03:51.200 get on a call with them, do what I call an account review,
00:03:53.940 and then see if there's opportunities for them
00:03:56.260 to be upsold in the higher tier program.
00:03:58.540 Number two, use cases.
00:04:00.640 So one of the things you'll learn quickly
00:04:02.300 if you're growing your software company
00:04:04.380 is your product probably has different use cases.
00:04:07.920 Maybe you have software, one of my friends, Ryan,
00:04:10.140 he has a body shop software,
00:04:12.000 and some customers use them for lead generation,
00:04:14.360 others for selling their quotes,
00:04:16.080 and others for scheduling the appointments
00:04:18.520 of the body shop service.
00:04:20.100 So those are different use cases.
00:04:22.140 Well, one of my favorite industries that I learned
00:04:24.660 because I used to do this was consulting.
00:04:27.120 So consulting industry has this solution selling approach
00:04:30.900 to their model because the truth is,
00:04:32.140 is they can do a lot of things.
00:04:33.380 Maybe you have a product that can be a lot of things
00:04:36.040 to a lot of people.
00:04:36.880 It's not the best situation.
00:04:38.420 Maybe you've got a little, what I call feature-itis.
00:04:40.420 Maybe you've been building people's features.
00:04:43.380 you're like a really expensive custom dev shop
00:04:46.260 or very inefficient custom dev shop for your customers.
00:04:48.760 So you just keep building a bunch of stuff.
00:04:50.300 So you've got, I mean, I've seen some cases
00:04:52.840 where there's a dozen use cases.
00:04:54.720 What consultant companies do really well
00:04:56.780 is even though their offering is intangible,
00:05:00.340 they kind of package them up into solutions.
00:05:03.380 So think of, you know, when you're doing marketing or sales
00:05:07.080 that you're trying to identify a use case
00:05:09.580 and you're using that to sell your solution,
00:05:12.540 not just trying to sell your solution broadly
00:05:15.020 in regards to the positioning that it serves,
00:05:17.080 but a specific outcome
00:05:19.020 or delivering a certain set of value to your customers.
00:05:22.180 That will increase your win rates by almost double
00:05:25.260 by just using use case selling or solution selling
00:05:28.620 and reduce your sales cycle by half
00:05:31.260 because you're speaking specifically
00:05:33.440 to a problem they have today.
00:05:34.380 And then once they come in,
00:05:35.360 you do what's called land and expand.
00:05:37.000 You get the deal, then you expand the account.
00:05:39.520 Number three, activation.
00:05:41.480 So when people use a new product that they're new to,
00:05:44.700 they've gotta learn some terminology,
00:05:46.680 they gotta learn how the product works,
00:05:48.000 they gotta learn the flows, the success paths,
00:05:51.100 the actions to set it up, to configure.
00:05:53.340 And I always look at the gaming industry
00:05:56.880 and like how does the new user signup process look?
00:06:01.720 How does the level one?
00:06:02.840 See, most people will realize in the gaming industry,
00:06:04.540 because maybe you don't play video games,
00:06:06.360 in the gaming industry,
00:06:07.360 the level one is essentially a tutorial level.
00:06:10.640 You can play it, but as you're playing it,
00:06:12.880 it'll pause and it'll go, okay, now this is how you jump.
00:06:15.420 And you learn to jump and then you're doing things like,
00:06:17.400 oh, this is how you duck
00:06:18.920 and you slide underneath an obstacle,
00:06:20.820 or this is how you jump onto a wall to be able to climb it.
00:06:24.080 And to me, when I look at a lot of software
00:06:27.540 that's struggling to retain customers,
00:06:30.820 most of the time they have an activation problem
00:06:32.760 because if somebody understood the value served
00:06:35.640 on the website, the promise you made,
00:06:37.460 and then they come into the product
00:06:38.820 and they don't stick around,
00:06:40.040 and you have like double digit monthly churn on logo churn,
00:06:43.220 then that means there's probably something
00:06:45.020 in that activation step that needs to be resolved.
00:06:47.580 So you literally don't have to build anything new.
00:06:49.340 You just gotta make sure the customers feel the value
00:06:53.020 that you promise on the homepage.
00:06:54.200 And that's usually done through activation.
00:06:55.840 So go and study video games.
00:06:57.760 Yes, I'm telling you to go
00:06:59.780 from a research mindset point of view
00:07:02.260 and go play a ton of video games
00:07:04.260 and make notes of how you can take those inspirations
00:07:07.280 and apply it to your product.
00:07:08.760 Number four, product.
00:07:10.220 You know, it's been written about lean startup.
00:07:13.060 Eric Ries, good friend of mine,
00:07:14.280 he was an advisor to my last company, Clarity,
00:07:16.840 where he talked about lean manufacturing techniques
00:07:19.300 approached or leveraged to drive product decision-making
00:07:23.740 and creative kind of product rollout
00:07:26.700 and marketing strategies.
00:07:28.360 And for me, as a kind of a self-taught programmer
00:07:32.080 and systems nerd,
00:07:33.380 I went deep in things like the Toyota production system
00:07:36.420 and Six Sigma and like quality assurance.
00:07:39.740 And how do you build product that has low defect rates
00:07:43.620 and, you know, just solves the customer's problem
00:07:46.440 and has longevity and is creative in the solution
00:07:49.900 that creates a platform that can be extended.
00:07:52.240 And I just think if you've never studied
00:07:54.300 the manufacturing industry to really inspire, you know
00:07:57.860 people think like, oh, software is such a new thing.
00:08:00.600 It's been around for like 20 some years
00:08:02.220 software as a service anyways, but manufacturing objects.
00:08:05.760 And especially when the stakes are high,
00:08:07.340 like industrial design or cars,
00:08:09.300 where the cost of a prototype in R&D
00:08:11.540 and then trying to manufacture it.
00:08:13.820 Elon Musk said, you know,
00:08:15.760 prototyping an MVP is table stakes,
00:08:18.240 like rockets to cars.
00:08:19.920 He says, what's really hard
00:08:21.580 is how do you mass produce those things?
00:08:23.960 And I think that if you wanna,
00:08:25.480 if you're struggling with product
00:08:27.100 and how that connects to engineering
00:08:29.020 and how do you make sure you solve customers' problems
00:08:32.280 and do it in a way that's not wasteful, right?
00:08:34.340 where you have to rewrite a feature
00:08:35.820 or you have to rewrite the implementation feature,
00:08:38.000 be sure to go study the manufacturing industry
00:08:40.220 because they've been doing it for hundreds of years.
00:08:42.100 They've got a lot of cool principles, best practices.
00:08:44.880 One of my favorites at the Toyota production system
00:08:48.860 is the idea that anybody can stop the line.
00:08:50.780 If somebody discovers something being done wrong,
00:08:54.460 they have the power, they're empowered to pull that string
00:08:58.060 and the whole line stops.
00:08:59.600 That means in that moment,
00:09:01.220 somebody that's their manager rushes over
00:09:03.480 to figure out what's going on to fix it
00:09:05.600 because you have hundreds of people
00:09:07.400 and hundreds of thousands of dollars of product
00:09:09.440 that's supposed to be produced every day,
00:09:10.700 if not millions of dollars,
00:09:12.040 but at least that's a really neat way.
00:09:14.720 How do you do that in your software process?
00:09:17.080 I don't know.
00:09:17.920 I'm gonna let you figure that out.
00:09:19.000 I actually know how we do it,
00:09:20.460 especially if you're using things like continuing integration,
00:09:23.160 CI, if you don't know what that is, go Google it,
00:09:25.400 but be sure to be inspired from the manufacturing industry
00:09:28.560 because it's an old industry.
00:09:30.140 They have a ton of cool best practices and principles.
00:09:32.500 And I think you'll really be inspired
00:09:33.960 by how they solve some of the problems
00:09:35.100 you're probably dealing with today.
00:09:37.420 Number five, pricing.
00:09:38.920 This is one where I'm not gonna even mention
00:09:41.440 a specific industry.
00:09:42.680 I'm just gonna say it's all around you.
00:09:45.580 Everything from my friend, Matt,
00:09:48.040 who runs a company called Pila Case
00:09:49.560 and the way they were doing a buy one, get one free,
00:09:51.880 the buy one, wash one case cover.
00:09:54.260 So they actually do this cell phone case.
00:09:56.740 So go check out Pila.
00:09:58.900 to just like pricing discounts,
00:10:03.900 getting people to decide to make a decision,
00:10:07.140 guarantees the offer, the packaging.
00:10:09.580 I mean, pricing is really value metrics.
00:10:12.020 There are so many people around.
00:10:16.000 And I like to study the folks that have been around
00:10:18.200 that grow the fastest,
00:10:19.180 because there's usually something around the offer.
00:10:21.100 There's something around the way they price their product
00:10:23.620 that really allowed the market to understand it quickly
00:10:27.680 and cycle through and get success
00:10:29.620 and feel like whatever they invested to pay for,
00:10:33.020 what they actually wrote a check for,
00:10:34.600 that it's valuable.
00:10:36.100 And if you can look at these successful companies,
00:10:38.560 one of the ways I do is I go look at the Inc. 100.
00:10:40.900 The Inc. 100, fastest growing companies, not 500.
00:10:44.440 Skip the, make it just the 100.
00:10:46.560 Go look at their product sites.
00:10:48.240 Go look at their pricing.
00:10:49.060 Go look at how they communicate their offers.
00:10:51.760 Get on their email list.
00:10:53.220 Get on their ad remarketing.
00:10:54.940 Start seeing their ads and offers showing up
00:10:57.440 in your Facebook feed so that you can study the best of the best. If somebody is growing,
00:11:02.800 they're leaving clues. Tony Robbins says success leaves clues. You want to get into their world
00:11:08.420 so you can be exposed to those clues to really perfect your pricing because that is where the
00:11:14.160 magic is going to happen. And it is all around us. Anytime you see an offer, just make sure you
00:11:19.220 pattern match against people that are actually successful. So quick recap, five industries to
00:11:24.200 learn from to grow your SaaS company.
00:11:26.740 Number one, upsells from gyms.
00:11:28.760 Number two, use case selling from consultants.
00:11:31.240 Number three, activation from the gaming industry.
00:11:34.320 Number four, product design from manufacturing.
00:11:37.860 And number five, pricing from all people around us
00:11:41.600 selling anything, especially the fastest growing ones.
00:11:44.880 That's how you will take things to the next level.
00:11:47.340 As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
00:11:48.740 I wanna share with you the idea to exit mini course.
00:11:51.360 Click the link below to get access
00:11:53.360 of the exclusive training,
00:11:54.420 where I'm gonna show you the three stages
00:11:56.680 that I use to launch new software projects
00:11:59.560 to give you the roadmap.
00:12:01.000 Maybe you've been software curious,
00:12:02.540 you've been following me for a while,
00:12:04.080 and now is the time that you decide to jump in
00:12:06.900 with both feet.
00:12:08.360 Click the link below to get access
00:12:09.820 to that free mini course to inspire you
00:12:12.520 to approach it without wasting all your money,
00:12:15.160 wasting your time or building something
00:12:17.360 that nobody wanted in the first place,
00:12:19.120 but they were kind to you because people are nice,
00:12:22.380 but that does not mean they're gonna part with their money.
00:12:24.480 So click the link to get access to that.
00:12:25.880 If you liked this episode,
00:12:27.240 be sure to click the subscribe button,
00:12:29.700 share it with somebody that you care about
00:12:31.880 and leave a comment.
00:12:32.880 Let me know is the number one thing you took away
00:12:35.340 from today's episode.
00:12:37.160 And as for usual, I want to encourage you
00:12:40.180 and challenge you to live a bigger life
00:12:41.920 and a bigger business.
00:12:42.860 And I'll see you next Monday.