Strategic Planning for Startups (How to Create Your One Page SaaS Growth Strategy)

Strategic Planning for Startups – How to Create Your One Page SaaS Growth Strategy

Overview

When I was the SVP of Strategy at Marketo, when I was the CEO of ToutApp, there’s this one thing that I always kept in my mind. You’ve got to tether yourself to a strategy. We eventually sold ToutApp to Marketo, and then Marketo to Adobe for $. billion, and through that entire experience, it got validated that when you actually take the time to get the crazy ideas out of your head and onto a piece of paper, to craft your strategy and get everyone aligned, it actually helps you go faster.

Introduction

I help startup founders, entrepreneurs and business owners craft and execute on an unstoppable strategy with belief and discipline. If you’re a startup founder, you probably have a billion different things just going through your head, and as you pick up more information, you’re tweaking those things that model that strategy for your company, but you’re keeping it all in your head.

As I was scaling ToutApp, which went from zero to seven million ARR and then we sold it, is I helped run strategy for Marketo, which we then sold to Adobe for $. billion. As I did all those things, I learned the power of getting it out of the heads of all the key execs and all the key people, and actually writing it down on a one-page strategy.

When you did that, it actually helped everyone get aligned, and it allowed us to constantly iterate on that strategy by staring at it and tethering ourselves to it. And most importantly, it helped us go faster. In this video, I’m gonna walk you through the three stages, the three key components you need to actually put into your one-page strategy.

Overcoming Strategy Inhibitions

Because let’s be honest. A strategy can be a very scary word. It can sound like a low-value activity or a froufrou thing, but in reality it’s the most critical decision you’re making about your business every single day. So if you’re pumped to dig into this, go ahead and hit the Like button and let’s get started. Now, the first thing that I always like to address, no matter which startup I’m advising or which company I’m in charge of, is, number one, the market strategy.

The market strategy actually outlines who is your ideal customer profile, what is the macro trend impacting that ideal customer profile, and what is the problem solution that we’re bringing into the market? Let me walk you through that. So the first is ICP.

Ideal Customer Profile

ICP is an ideal customer profile, and I’m going to be doing a few more episodes that digs deep into exactly how to build an ideal customer profile. But for your one-page strategy, it’s just a one-liner that you can use to describe the perfect person for your product, the perfect customer. Their title, what they do, what problem they have, what preferences they have. If you can distill that down to a couple of sentences, that is good enough for your initial strategy, your one-page strategy. Once you have that ICP, once you have at least the basic version of it, you have to identify what the macro trend or the big change for that ICP is.

There’s a reason that you exist in the market. There’s some sort of big problem that they have, and you’re gonna bring this new way of doing it, this new solution to their problem, and this new way of addressing that impending danger. And so you have to write that down in your strategy. Now when you start out your company, you may have an idea of what that is, but as you have more customer conversations that’ll evolve, which is why it’s so powerful to actually tether yourself to this document and write out what is the macro trend, the big change that’s happening for them, and what you are bringing to the table in terms of the problem to a solution.

Step number two is product strategy. So obviously you are entering this space. You are talking to this ideal customer. You are entering the conversation with them around this big macro trend, this big change, this big problem solution conversation, because you have a product that can make their lives better. The second thing I always look for and I always advise startup founders to do is actually think about product strategy.

Product Strategy

Product strategy also is an incredibly deep discipline. You can go into a lot of detail in that. I don’t even know how many slides we had around our product strategy, both at ToutApp and at Marketo. But when it comes to your one-page strategy, there’s really one very important thing you need to address, and that is how you take your idea customer from the problem that they have to the result that they have. Pretty simple, right? But there’s a trick to this. The trick that you always need to apply is this three-step process. The first one is, what is the problem? Okay, that’s easy, we addressed that. The second one is, what is the result? Okay, your product should get them from that problem to a result. Pretty easy, right? Here’s the key. You need to make a lot of decisions as CEO or as Head of Product, or as whatever executive you are on how you invest your R&D dollars.

And the one thing I always say is, the most important thing, especially in the early stages, is how many clicks does it take to get to the a-ha moment? The a-ha moment is your biggest measure for how quickly your customers can enter into a conversation with you, get into your product, and get to some form of a-ha moment or like, “Oh my God, there might be something here. “I wanna dig more into this. “I wanna continue the trial. “I wanna buy the software,” or, “I wanna have a deeper conversation, “a more strategic conversation.” They need to (snaps) get to some sort of an a-ha moment, and you need to codify in your product strategy.

The most important thing to codify is how many clicks, or how quickly can you get your customer in your product to the a-ha moment? And you need to invest as much as possible on how many clicks that takes, and bring the number of clicks down into that a-ha moment. So let me just pause here for a second, okay? I’ve covered the first step and the second step. The first part of your one-page strategy is your market strategy. Who are you selling to? What problem are you solving, what macro trend they have. The second part is what is your product strategy in that? What is the result, and how do you get ’em to the a-ha moment as quickly as possible? So let me just pause here for a second.

Just think about, for a second, how often you keep all these little things in your head, your Head of Product keeps it in their head, your Head of Sales keeps it in their head, your Head of Marketing keeps it in their head. And how powerful it would be if you force yourself to sit down and create a one-page strategy doc, where you write down your thesis, or write down your current working model. And then you tether yourself to it, you look at it all the time, and as you learn more and you tweak your model in your head, you look at what’s different and you improve on it.

Because you’re tethering yourself to a strategy, you can keep looking at it, keep iterating on it. You can have this discipline on how you grow the company based on the customer conversations and findings you’re having. I want you to go to number three. Number three is the go-to market strategy. So you’ve got your market strategy on this side, and you’ve got your product strategy on this side. And what really comes in between is your go-to market strategy. So as you start to identify your ideal customers, as you start to enter the conversation with them and talk about this macro trend, this big change, and as you start to talk about your solution, you need to get ’em into your product. You need to get them into sales conversations.

So the third most important thing is once you deeply understand your market strategy and deeply understand your product strategy, you now actually have your one unstoppable funnel that takes those people and enters them into your product. And answering how you’re going to do that is super super important. And here’s why. So often I come across founders where they’ve gone deep in product. They’ve built out a ton of features, a ton of different use cases, and on the other side they have five different types of ICPs, and I say, okay cool. So you have this. How do you take all these different kinds of people and get ’em into all these different use cases, and which one’s the most profitable? Which one’s gonna drive the most growth? Which one’s gonna get you to one to $ million of ARR (snaps) quickly?

They never have an answer, and when you go to the website, you start to see all the critical components that you should have, like the blog, cool hero image, the team thing, solutions, multiple features, all the different ICPs that you’re trying to go after. You’re starting to get the picture where you’re all over the place. When you are early, when you are starting to figure out how to actually get that product/market fit, get that traction, you need to have one golden funnel. You need to have one unstoppable funnel.

UnStoppable Funnel

In order to do that, you actually have to limit yourself down, niche down to one ICP. You need to niche down to one product strategy that gets to one solution and one a-ha moment as quickly as possible. And you need to have one funnel that takes those people and has conversations with them and gets them to their a-ha moment. And this is the biggest mistake I see so many early stage founders make. They go after too many use cases, too many ICPs, with too many marketing and sales funnels, and nothing grows. You end up being the worst place to be in, my biggest fear to be in. You end up being neither here nor there, which is why the third piece to your strategy is to actually answer, what is your one unstoppable funnel? Who is the one ICP you’re targeting, and what is the one funnel, the series of steps that they’re gonna go through, the journey that they’re gonna go through, the experience that they’re gonna go through, to get to their a-ha moment in your product? And that’s what you’re gonna answer in the third piece in your one-page strategy.

What is your one funnel? What is the one ICP you’re going after? What is the one a-ha moment you’re gonna align them to, and how are you going to get them there as quickly as possible? Let me ask you a question. What’s gonna get you faster to a million in ARR, or three million in ARR, or million in ARR? Supporting multiple ICPs with multiple funnels into multiple a-ha moments? Or one ICP, one funnel, one a-ha moment, and just doubling down on that and making that scale as quickly as possible?

In summary, now you know why it’s so important to actually have a one-page strategy document. You can tether yourself to it. You can force yourself to make certain decisions, and you can keep iterating on it. You can get everyone involved on the team aligned around it.

The key things that you need to have in your strategy document is number one, the market strategy, number two, your product strategy on how quickly you get ’em to the a-ha moment, and number three, your one unstoppable funnel. Now you know what goes into your one-page strategy document. But you may not know how to actually define all of these things.

This is why I created my “Unstoppable Startup Strategy Guide.” You can follow the link below. It’s completely free. It goes through some simple questions that you can answer to craft your one-page strategy. I guide you through the whole thing, based on my experience and others that have helped me craft that guide on how to actually craft that unstoppable strategy. And as a bonus, you’ll also get access to information on how to create your unstoppable sales funnel, which is the one thing you need to accelerate your growth.

Credits : Content based on a talk by Tawheed Kader, CEO of ToutApp and Ex Strategy at Marketo