Dan Martell - What To Look For In Your First 10 SaaS Customers

00:00:00.000 Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor,

00:00:02.240 and creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:03.800 In this video, I'm gonna teach you what to look for in your first

00:00:07.640 10 SaaS customers to make sure that they don't suck the life

00:00:11.800 out of you, send you down a rabbit hole of product roadmap

00:00:15.440 and development but instead teach you things, bring you insights

00:00:20.100 and help you get more customers and be sure to stay at the end

00:00:23.060 or I'm gonna share with you a framework called the Customer

00:00:25.520 Case Study Creator where I'm gonna show you four steps to

00:00:29.980 creating case studies that sell potential prospects

00:00:33.420 and visitors to your website to sign up for your trials

00:00:36.160 or sign up for a demo.

00:00:50.800 So I've been in the SaaS space for almost 20 years

00:00:53.400 and when I look at some of the titans,

00:00:55.580 we're talking Basecamp, FreshBooks, Shopify

00:00:58.480 In ClickFunnels more recently,

00:00:59.980 100 million a year AR business in like four years,

00:01:03.560 there's something I've seen that all of them shared

00:01:05.820 in regards to their early customers

00:01:07.480 and this is where I think the real power comes from,

00:01:11.320 making sure that you don't make the wrong commitments

00:01:14.160 to the wrong communities too early.

00:01:16.340 What I've seen as a general rule of thumb

00:01:18.160 is many of them came from agencies or consulting, right?

00:01:21.340 So if you think about it, when you're serving a customer

00:01:23.740 that has a problem and you build the tool either for them

00:01:27.080 or because you had the problem servicing them

00:01:29.220 so you built the tool to do a better job working with them.

00:01:32.060 That's where the real innovation comes from

00:01:34.420 and what I've done is I've extracted the five traits

00:01:38.200 for you to make sure that you get the best

00:01:40.620 out of those first 10 customers to help you be successful.

00:01:44.360 Here they are.

00:01:45.200 Number one is you gotta make sure they're early adopters.

00:01:48.140 Now, I've said this so many times in other videos

00:01:50.740 but you can spend a lot of time with laggers.

00:01:53.480 Just cause somebody's willing to give you money

00:01:55.100 for your solution does not mean they're the right customers.

00:01:58.200 Why would you want to work with somebody that's a late adopter,

00:02:01.800 they have a crazy pain, you're like,

00:02:03.040 but Dan, they're willing to pay us.

00:02:04.200 It's like the reason that customer,

00:02:06.140 if they're a laggard or a late adopter,

00:02:07.740 the reason why they're buying is because they're in big trouble.

00:02:10.880 Their business is not growing.

00:02:12.280 Their business is being challenged

00:02:14.080 and they're going to have you come in and build a solution

00:02:16.120 and customize what you've built so far for them

00:02:18.280 that's going to bring you down the wrong track.

00:02:20.720 You're going to build a solution that's relevant for people

00:02:23.420 that are failing, not that's gonna have the feature sets

00:02:25.880 and the flows and the structure to actually support those

00:02:29.860 that are innovating in their industry.

00:02:32.300 So number one, you've gotta make sure

00:02:33.960 that those first 10 customers are early adopters.

00:02:38.040 Number two, pay you. 0.92

00:02:40.640 Now, you might think, well Dan,

00:02:42.280 what if I can get inside a customer to get a case study

00:02:45.300 and a reference and they're like a,

00:02:47.780 what I call a lighthouse customers.

00:02:49.680 I hear what you're saying,

00:02:50.780 but here's what I've learned over the years.

00:02:52.480 And trust me, I did a deal with a major bank and that would

00:02:55.380 have been incredible social proof on our website to have them

00:02:58.580 but I still, in the early days, made them pay.

00:03:01.960 Even for them, a rounding error in their revenue, okay?

00:03:06.800 Literally, it was 50K and to them it was like they probably

00:03:10.340 didn't even notice it but I wanted their commitment.

00:03:12.660 There's something that changes magically when somebody

00:03:16.100 exchanges money for your solution.

00:03:18.440 All of a sudden, they prioritize things properly,

00:03:20.880 They value it.

00:03:22.040 They give you high quality information

00:03:24.380 and if you don't get them to pay you,

00:03:26.280 then you're gonna be frustrated.

00:03:27.760 Your team's gonna be pissed off

00:03:29.320 because they're gonna be like,

00:03:30.160 hey, I wanna get this customer using our product

00:03:32.160 but they're not responding to my emails.

00:03:33.920 They're not using the solution.

00:03:35.600 They said that they would do this

00:03:36.820 and they haven't gotten back to me.

00:03:38.240 So you will waste a lot of time

00:03:39.940 if you don't use the payment as a filter.

00:03:42.700 So you have to make sure that those first-hand customers

00:03:45.140 pay you something to use your solution.

00:03:47.980 Number three, teach you.

00:03:50.240 Probably my favorite thing about the best customers is

00:03:53.920 they're gonna teach me more about the solution and the

00:03:56.480 market and the pain that they're trying to solve than

00:03:59.120 anybody else or any kind of customer research or customer

00:04:01.620 development I could pull off on my own.

00:04:03.820 Because if you think about it, the best customers are ones,

00:04:07.900 ideally when you're going to validate the market,

00:04:09.800 are ones that had the pain and solved it themselves with a

00:04:12.920 custom workflow, a script, they hired some developer to build

00:04:16.860 a little solution but essentially they felt the pain

00:04:19.400 so much they solved it themselves because they probably

00:04:22.500 already went out to the market,

00:04:23.840 evaluated different solutions.

00:04:26.380 They've looked at those and realized that those ones were

00:04:28.980 good in some areas and lacked other ones.

00:04:31.080 And they went and they moved forward without it.

00:04:33.080 And your solution could be a replacement for those scripts

00:04:35.480 or those workflows and they'll tell you so much more

00:04:38.920 about the industry after the fact.

00:04:40.320 They're gonna be excited for your solution.

00:04:42.460 To me, when I think back of all the different products

00:04:45.260 I've built and the customers that really helped shape

00:04:48.400 the future of the solution and how we went to the market

00:04:51.300 and how we messaged the product.

00:04:53.180 Those customers I owe so much.

00:04:54.800 It's almost like they were an extension of my team

00:04:57.640 and that's what I want for you.

00:04:59.380 I want you to make sure that you ask yourself,

00:05:02.120 would this customer teach me stuff about the industry

00:05:05.380 or are they just looking to use our product

00:05:06.780 and then kind of move on?

00:05:08.060 Four, repeatable process.

00:05:10.420 At the end of the day, if you get a new customer

00:05:14.160 and you had to change anything about that process,

00:05:16.860 how you got them as a customer, what you presented to them,

00:05:19.860 what they bought, the solution.

00:05:22.140 If you have to tweak that every time you talk to a customer

00:05:24.560 then you're not building a repeatable process.

00:05:26.640 And to me, the first 10 is this kind of like

00:05:31.200 trying to connect the dots.

00:05:32.700 What was true about the conversations?

00:05:34.880 What did I say? What did they say?

00:05:36.340 What problems did they explain that when we said

00:05:38.640 we have a solution for that, they got the most excited

00:05:40.480 about it and can I in the next conversation,

00:05:42.660 so customer number three, four, five,

00:05:45.080 Start to build some repeatability in the conversation

00:05:48.280 and the marketing flow and the sales process

00:05:50.880 so then I can take that to the next level.

00:05:52.920 I think it's so important that even in the early days

00:05:55.760 you're looking to pattern match.

00:05:57.960 You're looking for the things that are similar

00:06:00.660 in that process so that you can build repeatable,

00:06:03.560 scalable growth in your business.

00:06:05.900 So even though it's early and you don't even have

00:06:08.140 any customers, if you're going for those next 10,

00:06:10.380 try to build some repeatability in how you reach out to them,

00:06:13.280 get them engaged and eventually have them as customers.

00:06:15.880 Number five, case study.

00:06:18.720 At the end of the day, birds of a feather flock together.

00:06:21.920 Your role in a sales process is to not only identify their

00:06:25.500 pains and talk about your solution but then tell them a

00:06:27.960 story of a company just like theirs that are using your

00:06:32.360 product and getting results today.

00:06:34.200 So if you're gonna go after and try to give discounts or get

00:06:37.580 people on board and really invest in those first early

00:06:40.140 customers, you wanna make sure that they're open to do a

00:06:42.880 case study if they deliver or you deliver the results that

00:06:45.540 you've committed to and that's an early conversation.

00:06:48.620 But in doing so, and this is cool because you can do it a few

00:06:51.560 ways, you can ask them to do a podcast interview,

00:06:55.220 you can ask them to do an interview for your blog,

00:06:57.520 you can do a formal case study for your website,

00:07:00.140 you can do a bunch of different ways,

00:07:01.560 you can ask them to put their logo on your homepage.

00:07:04.500 But to me those early customers are really going to set the

00:07:08.440 tone for the market you're going after and other kind of

00:07:11.540 companies that you know you could create a lot of value for

00:07:13.700 that are like them that are gonna see those logos and go,

00:07:16.180 oh, well if they're using it then I need to be using that.

00:07:18.580 But if you can't get that commitment up front and really

00:07:21.080 write that case study properly then it's not gonna have the

00:07:24.260 impact that you need and you might as well save your energy

00:07:26.880 with that customer, go find the next one and have them come

00:07:29.700 back later when you've kind of built out the business further.

00:07:32.500 So quick recap on what to look for in your first 10 SaaS

00:07:35.840 companies, one, early adopters, two, they pay you,

00:07:40.160 Three, they teach you.

00:07:42.320 Four, repeatable process.

00:07:45.040 And five, case study.

00:07:47.700 As I mentioned in the beginning of the video,

00:07:49.000 I wanna share with you an incredible resource

00:07:50.740 called the Customer Case Study Creator.

00:07:53.140 It's a four-step process that you should be using

00:07:56.100 to extract case studies from your customers

00:07:58.780 that are getting incredible results

00:08:00.380 designed to tell a story that connects with a visitor

00:08:04.220 or a potential prospect to show them

00:08:06.820 that your solution has helped other people just like them

00:08:10.060 and really reinforce their pain and the opportunity

00:08:14.040 of using your solution.

00:08:15.260 So be sure to click the link below to download your copy of

00:08:18.040 my Customer Case Study Creator and if you like this video,

00:08:20.600 click the like button.

00:08:21.900 Be sure to subscribe to my channel.

00:08:23.240 If there's anybody you think this video could serve,

00:08:24.980 feel free to share it with them.

00:08:26.500 As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger

00:08:29.340 life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.

00:08:33.980 Make some money, learn.

Dan Martell - November 19, 2018

What To Look For In Your First 10 SaaS Customers

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