Dan Martell - How To Differentiate Your SaaS Product From Your Competitors

00:00:00.160 Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur,

00:00:02.000 investor and creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:03.760 In this video, I'm gonna teach you how to differentiate,

00:00:06.240 separate yourself from the competitors in the market so that

00:00:09.200 you can cut through all the noise and work with incredible

00:00:12.480 companies that want your solution.

00:00:14.480 And be sure to stay at the end where I share with you my core

00:00:16.720 target framework to understand the three F's of figuring out

00:00:20.880 where to invest your time and energy from a marketing point

00:00:23.680 of view and in that video, I share the perfect placement.

00:00:26.720 It's essentially how I'm able to run and scale companies

00:00:30.560 from a paid acquisition point of view.

00:00:33.220 Stay to the end, I'll share that with you.

00:00:46.680 So building a solution in a competitive market is super hard.

00:00:49.900 I remember when we were building my company Flowtown,

00:00:51.740 we kind of splintered out this tool called Timely

00:00:54.220 that competed in the, check this out,

00:00:56.320 social media publishing space.

00:00:59.520 I mean, that's probably the most reddest ocean.

00:01:01.820 It was like 2012 and there were so many companies in there.

00:01:06.100 We're talking TweetDeck and Hootsuite and CoTweet

00:01:09.660 and all these other ones and we thought

00:01:11.440 we had this unique approach to publishing content

00:01:14.440 based on the timing of when the tweet would go out.

00:01:19.780 So essentially, we would analyze our social stream,

00:01:21.680 figure out when you had the most engagement

00:01:23.040 and then you gave us the queue of content

00:01:24.880 and we would decide when it get published.

00:01:27.380 And that turned out to be an incredible product hook.

00:01:29.920 Now we got lucky because we figured that out early

00:01:32.880 but had we not figured it out,

00:01:34.160 it's something we could have backed into

00:01:36.080 by really looking at the market

00:01:37.480 and figuring out how to differentiate our solution

00:01:40.400 even though there's a ton of other ones.

00:01:41.720 My friend Laura did this with Edgar.

00:01:44.200 She's in the exact same space.

00:01:45.800 She's built a multi-million dollar SaaS business, 0.86

00:01:49.140 meetedgar.com, using the same concept of saying,

00:01:52.700 okay, well there's a bunch of publishing tools

00:01:54.300 but what are they missing?

00:01:55.360 And for her it was repurposing old content, okay?

00:01:58.840 And then building the queue.

00:02:00.140 So we did it on time-based, she did it on repurposing

00:02:02.840 and what you figure out is there's a ton of different ways

00:02:05.320 that you can different yourself against competitors

00:02:08.420 and what I'm gonna share with you in this video

00:02:10.320 are the top five that I've discovered

00:02:12.280 that might inspire you to tweak a bit of your approach.

00:02:15.080 Number one is nail a niche.

00:02:17.020 Now, some of you are scared because,

00:02:18.820 well if I pick a niche that is so small

00:02:21.460 then maybe there's not enough customers in it.

00:02:23.360 I agree, but typically what happens is we try to boil the

00:02:26.140 ocean and then we're not relevant to anybody.

00:02:28.140 One of my favourite examples is one of my coaching clients.

00:02:31.440 They have a gas engineering software,

00:02:35.080 talk about super focus, in the UK that they are

00:02:38.520 maniacally focused on serving that customer base.

00:02:41.680 Now I always say until you get about 20 to 30% of the market

00:02:45.380 then you're not saturated and there's probably a big

00:02:47.360 opportunity to continue expanding.

00:02:48.780 Then what you want to do is then go into the bowling pin

00:02:51.380 strategy, the first pin could be this specific customer

00:02:54.820 segment so you nail that niche and then you go into the

00:02:57.320 second and third pins right behind it that could just be a

00:03:00.280 little tangential off of that but number one thing that you

00:03:03.800 need to consider is can you nail a niche to differentiate

00:03:06.860 yourself from other people in the market.

00:03:08.600 Number two, product hook.

00:03:10.800 At the end of the day there's this concept called drafting.

00:03:13.600 When you build a software product you could be building

00:03:16.400 on top of somebody else's solution so what drafting is

00:03:19.380 is figuring out what's the hook in the market.

00:03:21.440 Maybe I build something that has the exact same features

00:03:23.520 of my competitors but what they don't have is integration.

00:03:26.980 So one of my favourite examples is a company called

00:03:29.260 Churn Buster and initially they built a churn solution,

00:03:33.360 an email campaign for kind of getting credit cards updated

00:03:36.340 and reducing churn on top of Stripe because they saw Stripe's

00:03:40.360 growth to build momentum in the market around e-commerce

00:03:46.240 transactions so they said well if they're growing so much,

00:03:49.280 Why don't we build a solution that's specific to Stripe?

00:03:51.580 Now they've added other integration since then

00:03:53.860 but I just think that kind of product hook,

00:03:56.020 that toehold in the market's gonna allow you

00:03:58.420 to differentiate and compete today

00:04:00.920 and really get some initial traction.

00:04:02.920 Number three, be remarkable.

00:04:05.300 Seth Godin wrote an incredible book

00:04:07.340 called The Purple Cow and the whole premise

00:04:09.460 is that be so different or unique

00:04:11.800 that you're remarkable, okay?

00:04:13.740 That means that people remark about you,

00:04:16.200 that they talk about you, that what you did was so unique

00:04:19.040 that they wanted to share it on social media

00:04:20.480 and tell their friends about it and tell their coworkers

00:04:22.480 and say, you gotta check out this company.

00:04:23.920 I remember I had a friend, Marty, he approached me

00:04:25.820 and he said, hey, you gotta call this plumbing company

00:04:27.780 because of the way they answered their phone.

00:04:29.160 And when I called, they said something like,

00:04:32.520 I just hope you have an amazing day.

00:04:34.060 Or how can I help you have an amazing day?

00:04:35.460 It sounds so trivial, but it was interesting enough

00:04:38.800 for Marty to tell me about it.

00:04:40.020 Or my favorite story is WooFoo.

00:04:42.200 They were a form company in the software space.

00:04:44.940 They were bought by SurveyMonkey.

00:04:46.800 And one of the things that they were committed to

00:04:48.500 It was just excellent customer service.

00:04:50.160 So every time somebody would sign up for a paid account,

00:04:52.180 they would hand write a thank you card, a postcard,

00:04:54.800 and send it in the mail.

00:04:55.900 Now again, it might seem trivial,

00:04:57.240 but when's the last time you got a handwritten thank you card

00:05:00.720 from your SaaS vendor that you just signed up for

00:05:04.120 as a customer?

00:05:04.780 Probably never.

00:05:05.680 So things like focusing on the customer experience,

00:05:08.520 focusing on the UI and the UX,

00:05:10.920 and just making sure that maybe you have integrations,

00:05:13.220 but doing something that makes you remarkable is one way

00:05:16.860 to differentiate against competitors.

00:05:18.520 Number four, positioning.

00:05:20.620 Understanding how you message yourself in a market

00:05:23.800 and what the customer thinks about your solution

00:05:26.240 is so important.

00:05:27.080 Here's one of my favorite examples

00:05:29.280 is ClickFunnels versus Leadpages

00:05:31.740 or every other landing page solution out there.

00:05:34.120 Most of those other tools look at their product

00:05:37.140 as a conversion application.

00:05:39.820 What Leadpages from my perception has done really well

00:05:43.560 is really positioned themselves as a opportunity

00:05:47.060 for people to generate revenue

00:05:49.640 from being a more excellent marketer,

00:05:51.600 from building this thing called Funnel.

00:05:53.380 So they've taken a position around that topic

00:05:57.080 and really owned it, I mean, even to the fact

00:05:58.980 that they have their Funnel Hackers Live event every year.

00:06:01.880 Another company that's done this really well is HubSpot.

00:06:04.080 They took a position around inbound marketing.

00:06:06.720 Now, were there blog platforms before HubSpot?

00:06:09.160 100%, but they didn't own the position in the market

00:06:12.760 There's this new trend, this new thing

00:06:14.560 called inbound marketing and they were gonna be

00:06:16.700 the platform for it.

00:06:17.600 So even within a market, you can change the narrative

00:06:21.640 and the message and the story around the solution

00:06:24.940 that you offer to appeal in a different approach

00:06:28.200 or different type of customer to allow you to get a toehold

00:06:31.180 against your competitors.

00:06:32.920 Five, pricing.

00:06:34.840 When you think about product, most people take pricing

00:06:38.520 and think as a separate thing.

00:06:40.020 What I think of pricing as part of a feature of a product

00:06:43.960 or the package that you're selling.

00:06:45.760 Just think about this.

00:06:46.800 If I say to you, hey, I've got this solution, it's $10,

00:06:50.260 you have a certain perception of it,

00:06:51.900 you know, how valuable you think that is for that price.

00:06:54.940 And if I say it's the same solution

00:06:56.200 but it's $1,000 a month, all of a sudden you're like,

00:06:58.440 whoa, wait a second, and you have a different perception.

00:07:00.880 So pricing definitely allows you to position yourself

00:07:05.980 differently within a market, right?

00:07:07.740 And that's why freemium exists.

00:07:09.140 But I'm not saying anyone is right.

00:07:10.840 I'm just offering it up as a potential.

00:07:12.740 I remember recently I was doing a call with one of my clients

00:07:15.580 and it was the early days and we looked at their homepage

00:07:17.840 and I asked them, who do you serve?

00:07:19.480 Who's your, you know, ideal customer?

00:07:21.080 And they said, well, Fortune 500 companies.

00:07:23.120 And then I went to their website and on the marketing site

00:07:25.820 in their pricing page, there was a $10 option.

00:07:29.400 What do you think that said to the Fortune 500 company?

00:07:33.000 So even pricing will be a factor in a customer deciding

00:07:38.760 on how they think of you in the range of solutions

00:07:41.620 out there in the market.

00:07:42.440 Essentially, you compared to all the other competitors

00:07:44.480 and are they gonna move forward with you

00:07:46.880 or will they feel negative about that decision?

00:07:49.500 Again, it can go both ways.

00:07:50.540 It could be too cheap, it could be too expensive

00:07:52.000 based on the position that you wanna take

00:07:54.700 to compete against everybody else in the market.

00:07:57.720 So to recap how to differentiate your product

00:08:00.000 from competitors, number one, nail a niche.

00:08:03.120 Number two, product hook.

00:08:05.720 Number three, be remarkable.

00:08:08.020 number four, positioning, number five, pricing.

00:08:12.360 So as I mentioned at the beginning of this video,

00:08:13.820 I wanna share with you a training called the core target.

00:08:17.060 It's one that I teach at my Growth Stacking Summit

00:08:20.060 and what I go over in there is the three F's

00:08:23.000 of really understanding where to find

00:08:26.280 your specific core customer and once you find them

00:08:29.740 in the center of those three F's is your perfect placement.

00:08:34.040 So click the link below to get access

00:08:35.880 to that free training video

00:08:37.440 and I'll see you on the other side and if you like this video,

00:08:39.980 be sure to click the like button, subscribe to my channel

00:08:43.040 and if there's anybody else you think that it could serve,

00:08:45.380 feel free to share it with them directly as per usual.

00:08:47.720 I want to challenge you to live a bigger life

00:08:49.420 and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.

00:08:55.160 Point of view, cool.

Dan Martell - December 10, 2018

How To Differentiate Your SaaS Product From Your Competitors

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