Dan Martell - Position Your SaaS So It Sells Itself

00:00:00.080 Hey there, I'm Dan Martell,

00:00:01.040 serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:03.720 And in this episode,

00:00:04.880 I'm gonna share with you the six components

00:00:07.520 for you to consider when positioning your product

00:00:10.320 in an obviously awesome way.

00:00:12.800 I'm gonna share why I call it that in a second.

00:00:15.240 And because maybe you're frustrated with the fact

00:00:17.960 that people think that you're just like everybody else,

00:00:21.040 or it's not distinct or unique in the market,

00:00:24.200 or you feel like some people love it

00:00:26.560 and a lot of people don't.

00:00:27.520 I'm gonna break down exactly how to think

00:00:29.600 about your products, share some stories about mine

00:00:31.760 and give you some specific things that you need to do

00:00:34.940 to improve that positioning.

00:00:36.700 Be sure to stay to the end

00:00:37.700 where I'm gonna share with you an exclusive resource

00:00:39.400 called the Trowel Converter.

00:00:41.200 It is a framework that my clients use

00:00:43.300 to improve their trowel conversions

00:00:45.400 to get the right people to show up,

00:00:46.740 walk them through the setup flow

00:00:48.160 and most importantly, get to their aha moment.

00:00:51.640 So let's dive in.

00:00:59.600 One of the hardest things that you could do is position your product. It means the message that

00:01:10.060 you go to the market, how you describe what you do, what you describe, what you front load. What

00:01:14.880 do you expose first so that people understand the value in your solution? And if you've ever

00:01:20.180 felt frustrated with this, I totally feel the pain. I had the problem when I built Clarity.fm,

00:01:24.460 my last company. A lot of people see it today. We got acquired in 2014, huge success, but you didn't

00:01:30.700 see the struggles along the way. When I launched it, it was a tool because I wanted a system to

00:01:35.840 allow people to get on my call list and that morphed slowly into a marketplace. And our growth

00:01:41.040 was very slow because we didn't have a public directory for a long time. And slowly we understood

00:01:46.540 the customer's use case and why they used it and eventually launch it as a more broad publicly

00:01:51.920 available marketplace. The idea is if LinkedIn had a call button, that's what Clarity is. It still

00:01:56.560 exists today. It's extremely successful. It continues to grow because of the marketplace

00:02:00.840 dynamics. And it was while I was building that where I saw a user do about $9,000 in calls in

00:02:08.000 one day. Okay. This guy named Omar from Miami. And I decided to call Omar because I had his number

00:02:13.140 because it's in our platform. And I said, Omar, I need to understand what did you believe to be

00:02:18.460 true when you obviously spent it was an irrational amount of money no other user had spent how much

00:02:24.400 money in a day and he did about six or seven calls and I said what was it that you believe to be true

00:02:29.580 that made you want to use our product that obviously you thought there was a lot of value

00:02:33.360 and he said dude I can't even believe more people aren't using this it's the best kept secret it's

00:02:37.360 amazing I said why is that he said in the past when I've wanted to connect with those people

00:02:42.020 to get our advice I'd have to find out if they were speaking an event go to the event wait in

00:02:46.400 line for the Q&A time, ask a question and get a watered down response to my challenge. Now you've

00:02:51.820 got those same speakers on your platform, able to reach out to them, schedule a time, get 30 minutes

00:02:56.440 to an hour, contextually specific to my world for a fraction of the cost, because I used to have to

00:03:02.280 spend the time on the ticket for the event, to the flights, to the hotel, et cetera, the time away from

00:03:06.500 the business. He goes, this is amazing. And that's when I went to the team and I said, look, I know

00:03:11.440 wanted to build this like global call thing and any person with a twitter account could use it

00:03:16.560 but we need to focus on entrepreneurs and not just any entrepreneurs entrepreneurs that were

00:03:20.560 growth-minded that that that believed that investing in information was important but

00:03:25.600 most importantly if we had to like get down to the specific positioning is entrepreneurs that

00:03:30.480 go to events why because they were willing to spend the appropriate amount of capital to solve

00:03:35.040 their problems faster from the experts they were seeking and once we change the positioning our

00:03:40.400 our growth almost tripled overnight.

00:03:42.720 Now, everything I'm gonna share with you in this video

00:03:45.100 is 100% from April Dunford's book, obviously awesome.

00:03:49.360 It just came out recently.

00:03:50.560 It's amazing, I read the whole thing.

00:03:52.520 It's very rare that I've done kind of a book review

00:03:54.960 and this is not a detailed book review.

00:03:57.080 The last time I think it was Victor Chang's book,

00:03:58.860 Extreme Revenue Growth, but it is that important.

00:04:01.460 These five core components and then a bonus component,

00:04:04.860 she called it in the book, so that's why it's six.

00:04:06.840 I'm gonna go through and explain my perspective

00:04:08.920 and why I think you need to consider these

00:04:10.720 when you're doing your position

00:04:11.660 so you can have a product that the market absolutely loves.

00:04:14.440 Product, market, fit.

00:04:15.820 Sometimes the messaging and the positioning

00:04:17.580 is what you need to tweak to make that happen.

00:04:20.680 Let's get into it.

00:04:21.700 The first component is competitive alternatives.

00:04:24.480 I think it's really important that you ask your customers,

00:04:27.740 what would they use if they couldn't use your product?

00:04:30.880 Most entrepreneurs actually don't know

00:04:33.200 what the competitive set looks fully.

00:04:35.020 Sometimes, yes, it's, well, if we didn't exist,

00:04:37.080 they'd have to do it manually.

00:04:37.880 I get that.

00:04:38.920 But there's many times that I've discovered

00:04:41.460 when I ask a client, hey, what would people use

00:04:43.640 if they couldn't use you?

00:04:44.540 They didn't have the full list, right?

00:04:46.500 What I'm looking for is, well, depends on the customer.

00:04:49.240 If they're in this, they probably use this product,

00:04:50.680 this product, this product, they do this, this, this,

00:04:52.540 and this.

00:04:53.000 If we don't know what the competitive alternative looks like,

00:04:56.180 then we don't know how to differentiate our product

00:04:59.160 and how to position it properly.

00:05:01.280 Number two, unique attributes.

00:05:03.060 What are the features or capabilities

00:05:05.980 that make you different or that your competitors lack.

00:05:11.220 Understanding clearly kind of what differentiates you.

00:05:15.240 You might think, well, it's this, this, and this,

00:05:17.120 but when you look at the market, they also have this.

00:05:19.440 You wanna find the opportunities,

00:05:21.080 the holes in the competitive set that they lack

00:05:24.020 that you've got because that'll give you some indications

00:05:26.280 of how you can properly position things.

00:05:28.100 Number three, value and really proof, right?

00:05:31.860 What are the benefits from the features

00:05:34.680 that add a ton of value for your customers.

00:05:38.120 This is where we're looking for,

00:05:40.060 ideally you have customers or early beta testers,

00:05:43.140 that you've got examples of customers

00:05:45.900 that have gotten real value from your product,

00:05:48.720 like that it's solved a problem, okay?

00:05:51.260 We need to figure out what value does our product derive

00:05:55.280 and not what we hope it to say,

00:05:57.540 but asking our customers how they explain the value

00:06:00.360 that our product solves for them or delivers for them.

00:06:02.640 Number four, target market characteristics.

00:06:05.980 Here's what you want to find out in,

00:06:07.560 maybe you think you've, if you have a thousand customers

00:06:10.280 within your customers, there's a group of buyers

00:06:13.360 that absolutely love what you've built.

00:06:16.260 And you got to find out what's true about those buyers.

00:06:19.100 Just like in my example,

00:06:20.420 when I reached out to Omar around clarity,

00:06:22.480 what's true about those buyers that create some concept,

00:06:27.020 some ideation around the target market that you want to serve.

00:06:31.480 You've gotta look at the customer base or your idea

00:06:34.020 and say, what is it that's true?

00:06:35.820 What do they look like?

00:06:36.760 What do they share?

00:06:37.540 What are the characteristics?

00:06:38.540 Their buying process, the pain point maybe,

00:06:40.960 but you gotta figure out what's true about that group.

00:06:43.620 Number five, market category.

00:06:46.700 Every product should focus on a specific category

00:06:49.960 that you serve because in describing that market,

00:06:53.700 what you're doing is you're helping your customers

00:06:55.780 decide faster on how to buy, okay?

00:06:59.060 And April has this really great story

00:07:00.840 about a CRM solution that they were building.

00:07:03.180 And it was like a database CRM solution

00:07:05.080 and it was pretty broad in the markets

00:07:08.500 they were going after essentially the category.

00:07:10.320 And when they discovered that for private equity firms,

00:07:14.140 that this was the ultimate solution

00:07:15.740 because a specific unique feature that they had

00:07:18.400 that made it exclusively valuable,

00:07:20.480 they started competing against the existing CRM solutions

00:07:23.240 out there.

00:07:24.080 And that's what you wanna kind of figure out is

00:07:26.200 when we describe the category we're in,

00:07:29.020 It helps the customer decide, is this for me?

00:07:32.340 And make them buy faster.

00:07:34.140 Number six, bonus round, relevant trends.

00:07:37.760 This, what you wanna think about,

00:07:39.380 I think too often entrepreneurs start with this

00:07:41.740 and they're like, there's a trend in the market,

00:07:42.980 that's what we're gonna say we are for why.

00:07:44.820 Look, if all the other things,

00:07:46.380 the other components that you need to evaluate

00:07:47.940 to build obviously awesome positioning are true,

00:07:51.760 you go through that exercise and finally,

00:07:53.880 if there's a trend, but here's the kicker,

00:07:56.340 It has to be a trend that your customer is aware of

00:07:59.780 because for you to say something around like Bitcoin

00:08:02.220 and cryptocurrency and your customers in broadly speaking

00:08:04.660 don't really care or know about it.

00:08:06.100 And it has to be relevant to them.

00:08:08.180 So broadly, they need to be aware of it

00:08:10.260 and it has to be relevant to them

00:08:11.920 in the industry and their trends.

00:08:13.460 So look at the Gartner reports, the quadrants,

00:08:15.560 the Accentures, look at where the thought leaders

00:08:17.660 are saying the market's going.

00:08:19.140 Is there a specific trend that you can latch onto?

00:08:21.940 You'll have that drafting effect

00:08:23.500 and it'll really help the positioning

00:08:25.580 and make it more potent,

00:08:27.020 but that is not a primary thing that you should be doing.

00:08:29.300 You should be starting with the other five first.

00:08:30.880 This is a bonus if it's true, take it and run with it.

00:08:35.080 So quick recap,

00:08:35.980 the six components to consider when you're positioning

00:08:38.500 your product for obviously awesome outcomes.

00:08:42.160 As per April Dunford,

00:08:43.760 number one, competitive alternatives.

00:08:46.300 Number two, unique attributes.

00:08:48.440 Number three, value in brackets proof.

00:08:51.900 Number four, target market characteristics.

00:08:55.120 five market category, and we got a bonus,

00:08:58.320 relevant trends in the industry.

00:09:01.080 So that is how we position our product

00:09:02.960 in an obviously awesome way

00:09:04.720 so you can create traction in your market.

00:09:06.960 As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,

00:09:08.820 I wanna share with you an exclusive resource

00:09:10.320 called the trial converter.

00:09:12.000 It's my process for taking a signup

00:09:14.460 and converting them into a paying customer,

00:09:17.140 getting some of the aha moment.

00:09:18.780 You can click the link, download that below.

00:09:21.240 And if you know anybody that you think this video

00:09:23.500 can support feel free to share with them directly smash that like button subscribe to my channel

00:09:28.060 and as per usual I want to challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business and I'll see

00:09:32.780 you next Monday. Number six

Dan Martell - April 06, 2020

Position Your SaaS So It Sells Itself

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