Latest / GTM Made Simple / The 1 Question Every SaaS CEO Must Answer
Transcript
- Most CEOs can't answer this very important question. Which products create the highest customer value? I'm going to show you exactly how to answer that question. So, let me start with a quick story. I ran marketing at Pardot, which was about a $10 million company. We got acquired by ExactTarget for $100 million, and then all of a sudden, 6 months later, we were got we got acquired by Salesforce for over $2.7 billion. That's with a B, right? So, I went from a $10 million company to a $10 billion company in no time. And I had to learn this question of, "How do you think about what products do do sell?" And then, [music] at at especially Salesforce, we had multiple different products. We had literally over 100 different products all over the place. And I was trying to understand, "Well, how do you know which products are good and and create most value? And how do Salesforce really figure that part out? Does sales rep in every company just think at Salesforce, do they just try selling whatever?" And I learned something really interesting. I learned that they had this categorization of highest value products, which means they knew where is the highest margin for every single product. So, the way they did that was they literally divided their entire business into what they called clouds. [music] We If you know anything about Salesforce, they're big on cloud. They have this big event called Dreamforce that's all cloud. And what they have is a sales cloud, a [music] marketing cloud, a customer success cloud. And that did for them was they were able to get customers to hop in to which cloud they want to subscribe to so that they can create the most value. And the way they did that was they answered this really really hard question, "Well, which product actually is creating the greatest value, the highest value, the highest customer value?" So, here's an example. When Pardot got acquired, we were part of the sales cloud. And I was like, "Well, it's a marketing product. What is it doing in the sales cloud?" The reason it did was because Salescloud was specifically for B2B and Pardot was a marketing automation platform for B2B. So, they knew that when they attached Pardot to the Salescloud, they would be able to sell the same product that my little small company at 10 million revenue at that time before getting acquired, we were selling it for 1,000 bucks a month, they were able to sell it for 20, 30, even 50,000 and now we're 100,000 a year. And that was because they created this this idea of the highest customer value because they knew the customers would value marketing automation at part of the sales CRM that they have as the highest value because that's how they looked at it. I took that lesson to my new company Terminus. Right when we built Terminus, we went to a million in the first year, five in the second, and 15, and then we kept growing, and we had to answer that exact same question. So, here's what we did. We said, "We're going to launch this brand new category called ABM, account-based marketing." [music] You can research all about it. We're going to have books on it. And what we learned was, well, if you wanted to do account-level advertising, this phrase that we're using, we had to figure out what is the highest customer value. At that time, this is 2015, nobody nobody was able to do advertising at the account level. So, for example, if you wanted to advertise to Coke or Pepsi or Lowe's or Home Depot or whatever, if those were the customers that you were trying to have, you couldn't advertise [music] to just those companies. That's why we called it account-based advertising to begin with. [music] So, we literally launched the whole category of account-based marketing with this one tiny little product called ABM within this company Terminus. And because people could target companies that they actually were trying to sell to directly, we went off really fast. We were literally did a million in the first year, five and 15. The reason we grew that fast is because we understood [music] the highest customer value was the ability for marketers to target the target accounts they [music] want to go after fast. And that's how you know you have the answer to the highest customer value. You can literally go to ronanjtmoses.com/move and that will literally give you that assessment to figure out do you know how to find the customer value? How do you figure that part out? It will literally help you answer all those questions. Now that you understand why this question is important, this is something that every CEO misses, which is you [music] learning what to do and what not to do. The answer to the question which products create the highest customer value is going to help you answer that question. It will tell you if you should launch a new product or not, if you should open an office in a different location or not. All these things can help you answer the question which products create the highest customer value. You can go to ronanjtmoses.com/move [music] and it has an assessment that will help you figure this thing out. And when you do that, you'll be able to answer this question with a lot more confidence which products create the highest customer value. [music] Now let's get moving.