B2B SaaS Conversations (February 2022)
Conversation
is key 💡
Hi 👋 nice to meet you!
You’ve joined the strategy-is-awesome tribe for B2B SaaS people. I think strategy work is one of the most fun, interesting and necessary jobs in business 🌟🥰 – and I want to make you feel the same. And why should we focus on strategy, you say?
Because unclear strategy will not only prevent scalable growth - it will make your business less competitive, slow down growth, increase churn, lead to lower valuation and - most likely - also the wrong investors.
In this last winter month, the B2B conversation centers around why conversation is key. If you enjoy this conversation, consider sharing it with your favorite B2B SaaS friend 💬
#1 CONVERSATIONS CREATE STRATEGY
“Should we go in this direction, or should we go in this other direction? What if we did that instead?”
These are the conversations we have on a daily and weekly basis, when we’re trying to run a B2B SaaS business. And these are the most fun, most important and interesting conversations that we have.
And we have to bring these strategic conversations out of the boardroom and into the everyday decisions and discussions with our team and our peers 👫👭🏿👨🏻🤝👨🏿
Strategy is the sum of everyday decisions made by everyone acting on behalf of your company - top to bottom. That’s why we need to have conversations about the right customers, customers we should perhaps leave behind, the features necessary to keep the right customers, and how our onboarding process and customer success team is interacting with leads and customers.
And then we need to have a conversation about whether or not our company brand story is aligned with our strategy.
Also. We need to have this conversation on a continuous basis. Let’s begin!
#2 THE LEADFAMLY COMPASS POINTING TO GROWTH AND TALENT
2021 already seems so far away - remember The Oscar Goes to Thomas Vinterberg, Jonas Vingegaard came in second, the dramatic last round that made Max Verstappen the Formula 1 world champion, and a very human heartattack in the middle of a football field 💔 However, one Danish B2B SaaS journey will last in my memory! The impressive expansion of Leadfamly, the marketing gamification SaaS company.
I had a Conversation with Co-founder and CEO, Martin Bjørn (no relation 🐻), to share their story. Here’s how our Conversation went:
“In a very early stage, your business idea is your guide. Then you reach a certain point, and the idea has grown into a company with enough people to fill a meeting room and you start discussing things. This is where you need a compass that helps you make key decisions on choices and tradeoffs.”
I know that Leadfamly was founded in 2017, and certainly you must have needed a compass to guide decisions and priorities when you entered into 2021 with 60 people?
“In 2021 we grew from 60 to 125 people. It’s not a coincidence, that 2021 was also the year that I became convinced about the importance of a clear strategy and a strong alignment through the whole organisation.
One of the toughest disciplines in business are deciding on the tradeoffs. In a startup every option is out there to be tested, and making early decisions on what not to do is painful. But the unique strategic choices and trade-offs are what makes your company unique. This requires a lot of internal conversations and discussions.”
Did you also have conversations in 2021, that made you decide on big tradeoffs in 2021?
“Oh, absolutely, and I know what you’re aiming at here, Peter! We had to opt-out of some central areas years back, but the toughest tradeoff we decided on in 2021 was not to expand further internationally, but focus on our existing markets.”
“When growing so rapidly, your company depends on attracting talent. This was one of the more unexpected benefits of having a clear strategy - it guided us on the necessary hirings, and I believe that it would not have been possible to attract that many skilled and ambitious people without a clear strategy that they could understand and buy into.
We expect to keep growing in 2022, and a key priority for me is to secure that strategic alignment in our organization. I need our strategy to be embedded in our culture before I bring in and unleash another 100 people in our company.”
And as a final question, I asked Martin what conversations he would recommend other Founders and CEOs to have with their team.
“If you let someone interview three or five of your closest leaders about the strategic direction of your company - would they have similar responses? Or not?”
#3 A STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT EXERCISE
Are you still unsure of how clear your strategy is today, you can start by asking yourself 3 basic questions:
➡️ Are you clear on your right fit customer?
➡️ What are the customer needs your product is covering?
➡️ Did you set up your company structure and resources to support the implementation of your strategy?
These are some of the questions that I love starting conversations with!
And these are some of the questions that I started asking crowds of B2B people at the end of last year.
This is from a Morning Discussion Talk about what strategy is - and is not - at Matrikel1, the tech co-working community in Copenhagen.
Matrikel1 is also where I’m located, if you want a quick conversation the next time you are in the neighbourhood ☕️
The talk was titled “Why Unclear Strategy Prevents Scalable Growth - and what to do about it.” And it definitely created some fun and important conversations! Let me know, if you want to join the next one.
Thanks for stopping by!
See you next time ✌️
/Peter