The 5th episode of The Technology Crystal Ball had us peeking into the business side of the technology, primarily focused on B2B SaaS markets. Vinay Mahajan extoled the importance of this session as nearly 95% of the B2B SaaS innovations apart from other start ups fail. With that staggering percentage hovering on almost all the founders, it is important think of laying a strong foundation. To get into the subject of identifying various ways to strengthen the basics we invited Shiladitya (Sunny) Ghosh, Founder and CEO of Brewra Ventures to explore what the founders of B2B SaaS companies can do better.
Sunny, got down to business explaining the importance of focusing on ICP – Ideal Customer Profile and how important it is to make the GTM work. Almost 60-70% of companies have a challenge with the ICP, they do not know how to narrow down on the customer segments. At Brewra, Sunny’s team focuses on filling this gap for the clients where they help do Customer discovery, where they understand if the product can solve the customer problems or not and if it is who are those customers who should be approached. Customer discovery is followed by Market development, and then the all-important Customer engagement.
The Brian Balfour Model is one of the proven models that helps build a successful business and drives you to reach a $100 M valuation. This model shows 4 pillars that the founders must investigate, these are – Market, Product, Channel and Model. Signals has mastered this model, focused on, “bulls’ eye”, a very small niche area from where they expanded to adding a tool to data capture, a tool for CRM etc. which lead Signals to mature into what we all know today as HubSpot.
Another example discussed was of Ninepoint capitals Market fit model which talks about – Elephants, Moose, Rabbits, Mice, Flies which basically help define the products based on their price points.
Steve Blank says, “Get out of the building”, which primarily refers to getting to know your customers in their own environment. This helps a company better understand their customers’ wants and needs to build a product that they want, not what the business thinks they want.
GTM is derived by understanding the customer and not derived in silos, it is by figuring out how is the customer conducting a job. Customers are not looking at product, they are looking at solutions. They want to do their job lot better and a very cost-effective way. Hence it is all important to align the Market, Segment, and the customer.
Marketing in this process plays a critical role in hyper personalizing the User journey mapping and creating user persona. Below is video for the complete webinar where Sunny addressed all the questions from the panel and attendees. Do leave your feedback and help us know if this was useful to you.
