How to be Emotional in Early-Stage Marketing?
This article is a reflection of what we learned from our talk with Madhav Bhandari, Head of Marketing at Weflow. Madhav is also the founder of Remote Marketing and Earlystagemarketing.com, and has previously worked with other well-known SaaS companies like Bonsai and Close.io and has helped Hubstaff go from $200K to $5M annual revenue as the first marketing hire. Watch the full episode here.
Key takeaways 🥡:
- Love the problem, not the solution
- Reiterate & refine your intentions
- Cheer from the sidelines, don’t come in the way
- Adapt to the new normal without letting go of your quirks
… a cookie 🍪, and a couple of books to read 📚
Going from Zero to One in Early-Stage Marketing!
Most of the PLG evangelists are overly rational creatures. They try to calculate everything as if everything is calculable. In a growth story, every stage has its challenges that demand varied emotional responses from a marketer. Hence, be emotional in early-stage marketing.
- How to be emotional in early-stage marketing 101 – “you should love the problem, not the solution”
In the early stages, when you know who your persona is, you can identify how you can target them, where they hang out, and what messaging might work for them.
In the 0 to 1 phase, it’s really all about
- Understanding what your strengths are,
- What your bread and butter is in terms of customers.
- Your competitive landscape.
And then you mold your strategy around it. But remember, be emotional in early-stage marketing.
How to Grow in the B2B SaaS ESM Landscape as a Leader?
Be specific when you talk about a leadership role. And be more specific when you talk about it the next time. And be even more specific when you talk about it the next time. After all, the joke’s on you if you can’t tell a joke again because you are afraid of failing.
- How to be emotional in early-stage marketing 102- “Reiterate your intentions 1000 times, until you have the 1001st chance.”
Where do you see yourself five years down the line? Where do you want to be on that shining leadership ladder? Don’t have an answer? Look for one. Lock-on a position.
Fun fact: Human beings can crab walk under special circumstances!!!
Once you have visualized it, map your current skillset against the one required to reach there. And then try to fill that skill set gap. How to do that? Try to find opportunities to fill the gap at your workplace or in future companies. {If nothing’s working, show your crab walk 🦀}
Remember you’re essentially defining where you want to be? Where are you at? And bridging the gap. Besides,
- Learn to take full ownership of your leadership role
- Start thinking through critical business challenges.
- Develop high-level thinking: Take yourself away from tactical work from time to time and remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Suggestions for B2B SaaS marketers diving into Product-Led Growth(PLG)
On a high-level, product-led growth is really just about getting the user to the value of the product as quickly as possible.
- How to be emotional in early-stage marketing 103- “Cheer from the sidelines. Don’t come in the way”
The product-led journey is really a combination of what you do on the product as well as what you do on the marketing side. And more importantly, how you do not come in the way of your user.
That’s essentially what you are trying to do with PLG.
Opening up the product (self-serve) for someone to try out on their own, helps you improve the conversions. Just try to find friction points within that onboarding process. The involvement of needing a demo absolutely shouldn’t be there at the beginning. Because ultimately, it’s all about coming back to your persona! and not falling into the “Forgetting What Made You Successful” trap.
How does a SaaS company keep Product-Led Growth in its DNA?
If a buyer is in the market and they are evaluating five solutions at the moment, the ones who are adopting a product-led self-service approach (onboarding the prospect and making them experience the solution) definitely have an edge over the others.
- How to be emotional in early-stage marketing 104- “Adapt to the new normal without letting go of your quirks.”
Adapt to the new normal: How can you get the user to product value faster??!!??
When someone has experienced the product beforehand, it’s a lot easier to make the sale. Hence, it’s called Product-led Sales (PLS).
“We are moving towards a product-led world.” Actually, Madhav Bhandari said it on another episode of the podcast. Watch it ➡️ here.
🍪 Focus on Personal Branding, focus on Company Branding ⤵️
1. Positioning: Think about it as your personal brand. Think about how you compete against the hundreds of other marketers. Positioning your brand is an ever-going and growing process. Before landing the job or in-between job you position yourself, and while in the job you help your company establish its credentials.
2. Messaging: Secondly, what’s your story? Just like you are telling a story through your CV, your company should have its own real story to tell to its ICP.
3. Thirdly, how you are getting noticed by other employers. On a company level, that’s essentially how you get in front of other users.
- Generating demand on all fronts.
- Conversion rate optimization.
- Helping your customers make money.
Add to your to-read:
The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky
The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier
Sell more, understand your customers’ journey for free!
Sales and Marketing teams spend millions of dollars to bring visitors to your website. But do you track your customer’s journey? Do you know who buys and why?
Around 8% of your website traffic will sign up on your lead forms. What happens to the other 92% of your traffic? Can you identify your visiting accounts? Can you engage and retarget your qualified visitors even if they are not identified?
