SaaS Growth Stalled? A 3-Month Plan to Get Momentum Back

0:00Let me tell you a story that I see all the time. [snorts] I bet at least 60%, probably more, have felt this in the last year. You're passionate, right? You're working towards your goal, but the growth needle just isn't moving. It's a classic story. If you haven't felt it yet, get ready. You're going to You start to wonder if all the effort that you're putting in is going to come to anything at all. You get this existential panic. you think maybe I should just go do something easy like selling services or like you know get a job or whatever. Um and almost every single uh SAS founder ends up here at

0:38some point. Sorry when I say get a job you already have jobs [laughter] full-time. Uh but what do you do? Well uh here we go. The default answer in this situation is always I'll just get more leads, right? I'll just get more people coming on my website and signing up, right? Like, great answer.

1:00So, you start looking at expensive ads. You start looking at, you know, SEO. You start looking at anything to get people in the door. You start looking and thinking, hey, maybe uh I should think about AI a little bit more or whatever, right? It's such a such a common thing. Everybody is in that boat right now, by the way. But what if the answer is actually like 10 times as simple as you think it is? but it's just hard to

1:24admit. That's my take. And over the next 25 minutes, I'm going to share a simple three-part framework that I use with my clients uh to turn their growth around by focusing on the value that they already have. I call it the turnaround flywheel. Um which is, you know, my want given that I'm a consultant, I can do whatever. uh uh and we'll come back to it in a moment but first I just want to give you some credentials here because yes I I am a consultant these days but I was not always I've been around tiny seed and micro now for a while both as a a mentor

2:01on the tiny seed program and also um a coach in SAS institute last time I was here in Malta I was a head of growth at powered by search if you don't know powered by search it's the probably one of the world's biggest SAS marketing agencies uh works with companies $10 to hund00 million ARR basically helping them find new growth opportunities. So that was like big SAS. Um after that I went back inhouse to work on growth at Podia much smaller. Uh and during that period we launched an entirely new email marketing tool for creators. So I've been head of growth. I've been in-house I'm a consultant now. But before that I

2:43was a founder. and two seconds. This little clock has just fallen down. I [clears throat] don't want to lose track of your time. [snorts] Uh I was a founder, so I built a software company and I experienced the exact same things that you experience now. It was hard. It was grinding and sometimes it just felt like it didn't work. And I just want to kind of give you that because it's so easy for someone to say you should do this, right? You hear it all the time. But the reality is I've been there, you know, I got the skies to prove it. And um and also I got the perspective of uh kind of

3:22not working and also working in SAS growth, you know. So be the the the the thing I want to start off with here is that there are two key insights and if you remembered nothing if you remembered nothing else from this it would be remember these two things. Idea number one is that good growth in any SAS company is the result of small incremental improvements across your life cycle. You are every now and again going to luck onto some amazing growth lever but the reality is growing a company is about dayto-day grinding it

3:59out with small things. Uh don't buy into the lie that it's not. Number two is that everybody wants to acquire more customers, but they rarely want to max the value [clears throat] of what they already have. It's not as sexy for sure, but it's so much more effective. And to illustrate that, let me tell you about two businesses. And before I do this, I know some of you are

4:23like really mathrained. I am not. Uh, and if I've made ma if I've made math mistakes here on these slides, we don't do public math as Mr. Shan says, right? Um, business A is the acquisition addict. Let me tell you the story here. I can see you all intently scrutinizing these now. Uh, they start with, um, they start with a basically a a kind of good traffic. They have about a starting MR

4:51of 10K. Just totally made up here. They [snorts] spend on ads and they increase traffic by 10% monthly every month. These guys are amazing, right? if you can just do that every month, you'll be fine. I don't think that's the reality because in the end, they only add 3K of extra new MR. Now, some of you are thinking, great. If I added 3K of extra new MR,

5:14I'd be I'd be pretty happy with that. And that's that's great, but like scale this up 10 times and you're suddenly you're suddenly running into some challenges. Business B, the identical company, magically, they've got the same product, they've got the same starting traffic, they've got the same MR, and they take a different path. These guys decide to first focus on increasing conversion rather than increasing the traffic. Then they increase Apo, then they increase traffic and they actually end up with a little

5:46bit more money. But a couple of thousand of difference in MR, like does that feel like the basis of a talk? Like I don't know if it does. But let me tell you this. It's nice to expect that in three months you can absolutely do wonders for your business. And I I believe that you can, but it's not the wonder that you want,

6:11which is, you know, 10xing revenue. Business A is absolutely addicted. They're addicted to traffic and business B is doing something more longlasting. I hope that what you're saying to me is that I want to be the one without the addiction to acquisition. Uh because just like any addiction, right, addiction, all addictions are fun at the start. Uh you know, you're having a good time no matter what you're doing right at the start, but after a while it starts to become tragic, dangerous, your life gets messed up. And look, don't do

6:51drugs. That's why I prefer what business B does. I'm assuming that in this room you have gone, hey, I'd like to be business B. I'd like to grow something more sustainable. I'd like to see that great stuff over time. And you're in luck because that's what this talk is about. I've had to do this with a bunch of

7:15companies at all different stages. And over the next 25 minutes here, I'm going to be as practical as I can and help you see how you can do this in your business. And yeah, this is a three-month road map. And you are going to see some change if you do these things. And over time, that three months, you know, you know what compounding is like. It's going to grow and grow and grow. And business A is going to be still stuck paying the same

7:41amount of money for ads every month. So, a common scenario that I see is that once you get to even a few thousand dollars of MR, you've probably got some pretty good traffic in any given month coming to your website. The challenge though is that not all of those people are ready to convert and use your product yet. Now, in the example that I just shared, business A's solution would be to just pump more

8:10money into the top of the funnel, right? They go, "Let's spend five times as much on ads [snorts] and they hope that the the conversion holds in like a linear path and then they end up with more customers at the end and it, you know, hopefully it all works out fine. But it's deeply inefficient because once you turn off the ads, game over. You've suddenly got no channel to acquire new customers and you have no way to actually make money

8:35from those customers really. I propose that what you should actually do is focus on conversion on your website. Focus on converting more people that you're already getting, right? If they're coming, they're coming from somewhere, but you're probably missing a huge number of them. Not all of them are ready to buy. And that's why again,

8:56deeply unsexy, but most good growth is. I recommend you should have a lead magnet. But a do you know what I mean by a lead magnet? I think I'm pretty sure in this room we do. a lead magnet. Basically a resource or a tool that helps you to get an email address from somebody. And here's an example. I've used this one before at MicroCom. I use it all the time. It's from a client project that I had um way back in uh

9:20when I was at Power by Search. Basically, these guys had a tool for financial advisor that their big goal is to get more assets under management money. Basically, they want to manage more money. And the big thing that they're trying to do is scale by growing their assets under management. And so this company that we worked with had this lead magnet. It was seven critical mistakes to avoid when scaling your assets under management. You can think of this as like a framework for yourself. You don't need to do the exact

9:50same thing here. But the thing that most people do that is wrong is to directly once somebody fills out that form directly send them to a PDF or to send them a to a page that just goes nice one uh that's going to arrive in your inbox. That's a big mistake because these people are saying to you when they give you their email address, they land on your website, give you their email address and say basically that's a problem that I know that I want to solve and hey, you're building a SAS. So you should send them to a page which

10:23illustrates how you solve that problem. So a thank you page. Basically, the concept here is when somebody fills out the form again, instead of just sending them that PDF, you send it to them via email, right? But send them to this page where you actually help them to work out what to do to take the next step. And that next step is simply, hey, you're looking for a simpler way to scale your assets under management. That guide's going to arrive in 5 minutes in your inbox. But by the way, here's a video showing how you could scale your assets under management. It's five minutes long. Just

11:00watch this and you'll see that we can help you right now. This tool did that thing. These guys absolutely crushed with this uh lead magnet. Um and they they acquired uh like this was a salesled company. So they acquired many more good fit sales. [snorts] I want to just tell you that this is not a one-off. Um, I've done this same thing with so many companies now and it literally always works. I've never had

11:29an instance where this does not work. Um, like this one is a chart from a client I worked with on a project like this. You see that big leap? That's when we changed this from just being a lead magnet where they literally had a page. It was a wellperforming page, but they had a page on their website where you could put in your your your thing. Um, I don't want to give too many details, but it was like a it was like a thing where you could generate something and they just had that and they weren't collecting email addresses at all. So, it was one of the most trafficked pages

12:01on their website. They weren't getting anything from it. So, we basically rebuilt this so that it would be that same flow. Submit your email, get your results in your email uh inbox, but go to the thank you page instead. And now they have 981 additional people in just a few months who they can market to over time. Like that's in that's incredible. Uh that's incredible potential. Imagine if you had 981 people and you converted a percentage of those at your existing APO. You'd be a you'd be a lot better off, right? That's the goal. And a different example is one that I worked on for another client where in five

12:40months we were able to attribute 9K of additional revenue just to this one lead magnet that we did. The kicker here is that the lead magnet was just lying around. It wasn't even live on the website. It was a thing that somebody had made previously. It was a PDF. Um I thought it was stupid at the time uh when somebody suggested let's use this one. But we put it live cuz we had it and we put the same playbook in place and there you go. All of a sudden, not just leads, but also actual attributable revenue came through the website in a way that we just wouldn't have got

13:11before. And wait, speaking of lead magnets, uh, come on, pull out your phones, everyone, because this one is this one is me, obviously. I want your email addresses, but this [snorts] is genuinely useful because it's a different example, a different kind of thing you can buy. Most lead magnets are just like uh seven seven critical financial planning mistakes or a checklist. This one's like

13:37helpful to you. Uh I hope if not see me later. All right. So that was capturing demand. That's month one. If you only did that in month one, next 30 days, could you get a lead magnet live on your website? Could you have a thank you page? I bet you could. Two principles here. You don't need a

13:57complicated report or a white paper. Just give somebody a piece of information that's appropriate to the sa uh the stage of awareness that they're at and tell them how to take action on that. So that's number one. Number two is always send hand raisers, people who fill out your form to a thank you page. Don't send them to the PDF in the browser window because you have no idea

14:20what they're doing once they get there. And I tell you what, think about the last time you got sent to a PDF in a browser window. How intently you paid attention. You didn't, right? It's no, it's no surprise. So that's month one. Month two is nurture and monetize. Okay, so now we've got a lot of people who are

14:38giving us their email address hopefully. What do we do with the people who don't convert immediately? And what about all the people who bought from us already and they're slipping away? And what about all the people who only use some of the project product features and are so missing other packages that they could be buying or expansion stuff? Like if you think about those three groups in your own business right now, just like on the top of your head, I bet that you could see how much potential MR is just sitting in what you

15:08already have, not monetized. But company [clears throat] B, babe, they're going to crush it. Now, in the first six months of this year, just to illustrate this, okay, I drove hundreds of thousands of dollars for SAS companies, some in-house, some clients, through life cycle email alone, like not not not including one-off broadcast, not including anything, just

15:33life cycle email. All right. Um, I want to share how I did it and how you can do it. Uh Jane is sitting in the front row here like squealing with joy because she runs a life cycle marketing company, you know, too. All right. Okay. So, having said it's not about broadcast, let me give you this thing. Email newsletters are not again not sexy, but they're back in style. They're working. Uh and here is a little framework that I use uh with my clients um and have done for other companies as

16:03well. Uh, I recommend, and this is going to be uncomfortable, I recommend sending three emails a week to your uh to your non-C customers. Um, [clears throat] uh, the reason I recommend this is because you're getting in front of them all the time. Email is the one channel where you can literally always get in front of a customer with the message

16:24that you want or a potential customer. As long as you've got their email address over and over again, you're not relying on an algorithm. You're just in their inbox and it's busy in there. But even if you get your subject line and your business's name in there, eventually that someone's going to open one of those things. So, I use these three kinds of emails. Monday motivation. Basically, Monday morning,

16:43first thing, everyone hates their job. Uh they're trying to have a come week where they're going to be happy. Give them something helpful about your industry and how you solve their problem that they can use to think about, hey, should I be using this uh should I be using this product? Maybe. Simple. There's a question that you can ask yourself. Answer it in an email. Just text only. You're away. Follow it up on Wednesday with a Wednesday workflow. I hate these names. I made them up because they're easy to remember. I hate the alliteration. It makes me feel sad when I say it. Wednesday workflow. Basically,

17:18show somebody on Wednesday how they could use your product in the week to solve their problem. Like, here's an example question. What's one product feature that people misuse that uh or or constantly misuse? Right? Just answer these questions and come up with a bunch more on your own. Um I know Harvey has done this for himself. Uh uh Harvey over there. Um and again working uh and that's that's nice to see. And Thursday Thunderclap, that's the one I really really dislike. Uh [laughter] uh um basically on Thursday you're trying to celebrate what people are doing with your product. So give an example from a customer. You don't even

17:57have to name the customer. Just make it anonymous. Like just make it easy for yourself to send these emails. Say there's this one customer I'm thinking of who uses my product and the thing that they've achieved lately which you also want to achieve by the way reader uh is this. And like suddenly you've got

18:14this like pretty compelling strategy. Now if you multiply that by the number of times you know you know you think you're going to be having someone's email address which is a long time. Suddenly you've got a lot of you're building a lot of um kind of capital with these people. And I know some of you are thinking, "Hey, isn't that too

18:31many emails? What about unsubscribes?" Uh yeah, here's what I tell founders. You're building a business, not an email list. Okay, I want to give you some actual results that people have seen with this. So, I have one client who just saw a 60% average likelihood of achieving above baseline growth on days where they did

18:52send versus didn't send. Email works. Okay. A 9% bump in conversion from free to paid on days where we did send. Like, yes, please. Any channel other than this, you would be screaming, "Yeah, how can I get that? Send more email." Right. And a 2% increase in demo booking page views. That's ideal. Yeah, that can

19:14happen when you send more email. And then there's also life cycle stuff. So, we've got broadcast email, which is just oneoffs. And then life cycle, which is working for you while you sleep. Don't neglect your key life cycle sequences. There are always gaps. Thanks, Benedict. Tech guy. Um, there are always life cycle gaps. Many people think about onboarding and go, that's that's the that's it. I'm

19:43only going to do an onboarding sequence. I'm never going to touch it again. Again, my contention is you should be touching it again. Touch it all the time. Uh, sorry. It was too easy. Um, okay. Close these common life cycle gaps. Here's a couple. Customer focused onboarding, right? Most onboarding things are like, hey, here's what you can do with my product. But that's not helpful. Make it about the customer's problem. Tell these customers, hey, I

20:09get you better than anyone else. Right? make them feel like that and say, "Yeah, okay. Here's how you actually solve the problem that you're experiencing. [snorts] Then upgrade sequences." So, uh, again, everyone thinks about free to paid, but no one thinks about how the heck do I get people from my plus plan to my pro plan or my silver plan to my gold plan. You should be thinking about that, right? Anytime there is a an option to kind of get more money from somebody, you should be thinking, I need a life cycle sequence for that thing. I need a life cycle sequence for that

20:44moment. They drive a heap of revenue, by the way. And then the third one, this is a gimme. Okay, an annual upgrade sequence. I can't tell you how often I see companies not doing this when I look at their life cycle setup. Um, but sending somebody every, and here's a little hack, every 50 days. I recommend um sending them an annual upgrade reminder and saying, "Hey, you should upgrade to paid uh to an annual plan 50 days because in B2B you are more likely to fall on the cash flow like the budget um the budgetary thing. You're giving yourself more surface area for somebody falling at the right moment when they

21:25have cash to spend by shifting it rather than just doing every 30 days when you might have chosen the wrong day." Okay, so it's basically about increasing your surface area of luck. If you have questions about that after, let me know. And so that's nurture and monetize. This is simple stuff, guys. Hopefully. I like I hope I hope that's what you're coming away thinking like this. This seems like

21:45something I could do. Um what is it? Email more. Just email more. All right. If you did nothing, if you did it totally badly, if you were emailing more, you would be seeing better results. And then the second thing is that you're building a business, not an email list. Don't overthink it. Don't overthink the unsubscribes. Okay? People are going to

22:06unsubscribe. You unsubscribe. People are also going to buy, right? So if you can get more of those people, job done. So that was month two. Now, month three, we so month one, we worked on unmasking effectively more visitors and getting more of those people to sign up and give us their email addresses. Not even sign up to pay us or use our product, just give us an email address. Month two, we built systems to convert those people hopefully uh and to get more money from people who

22:39are actually already paying us. Right? Month three is about beginning to fill key content gaps that your buyers have questions about. Again, we're not reinventing the wheel here. We're just doing the flywheel. [snorts] Um, now content isn't sexy these days. Again, it's not like one of those things someone goes, "Yeah, I need that." You know, especially when we're all panicking about how AI is going to demolish all of our search traffic. I tell you what, everybody is panicking

23:11about that. So, here's some clarity for you. There are higher value lifts than doing content. I like I can't I can't be disingenuous about that. There are things that will get you more money immediately. For example, finding a high leverage pricing and packaging opportunity. Like maybe you can repric, maybe you can repackage some of your plans. Those are really high leverage because when they work, you're going to get a lot more money instantly. However, when they work is less often than

23:43content uh content changes, right? You can change your trajectory overnight with pricing and packaging, but you can change your trajectory over a long time, which again doesn't sound great, but it is because it's healthy. You're building this long-term system that's going to make you money all in the future rather than just once. There are two truly high lever pieces of content that you should be thinking about. The first one is competitive comparison content. Competitor comparison content. And the second one is howto focused content that puts across a differentiated opinion. And by the way, if you if you distill all of the advice about how to respond to AI

24:29and search, [snorts] I don't know if this is this must be in your kind of inboxes all the time and and and headspaces. The the advice will come down to simply have an opinion and say it a lot, right? That's that's great advice. So, let's talk about comparative content first. Here's a really helpful

24:46acronym for you. Help. [clears throat] Not really. uh helpful, deep, fair, and opinionated. This is what makes good competitor content. So, it's simple. Firstly, you need to be helpful. Don't freak out and think they're going to buy the competitor's product. Think I'm going to help them make a choice about which product to buy. The second thing is go deep. Don't just neg your comp uh don't just kind of kick sorry don't just do your kind of feature table where it's two sides and on one side it's all X's for your competitor and it's all ticks for you right we're

25:29the best guys in the world. Don't do it. Buyers know and they immediately lose trust and go and look at the competitor's website when you do that. Be fair. Don't nag competitors. Do you know what nagging is? Don't try and like make them feel bad about themselves so that you get what you want basically. Um, it's so common like to be disingenuous about someone's competitor your competitors on your page because you got their attention, right? Again, people know people are listening. People are talking. They're they're actually trying to find out the right advice. They're not just going to read what you say at face value. They're going to they're

26:07going to pick that up with their Spidey sense. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be opinionated. Tell people what you think genuinely. If you think, "Hey, we're better for this kind of person. The competitor is better for that kind of person," tell them that because it will buy you more customers in the long run. Specifically though, like how do you structure one of these pages to actually fit within that hood? Um, the first thing that you do, uh, is go, hey, let's

26:39throw the page layout out of the window. Like, I'm thinking about a competitive page. Let's throw it out the window. Make start with a text document. Don't start with like, I have to fit it within this page template. The first thing that you should do though is in your hero, don't be afraid to just use text, okay? Text on a button. And in that hero, summarize the core argument that you're about to make on your page. By the way, this is going to sound like I'm telling you how to write an essay in school. Um, because

27:09the same topic, the same info applies. It's about giving people a really well ststructured argument. Summarize that argument. State the main differences between your products and then give people a CTA. The next thing is to uh summarize the key differences. Again, I like to do this with a little box that literally reads like an info sheet that I would be given at a doctor uh if I went to get help for being sick. Um that's the only reason I would go to the doctor, by the way. Um uh yeah, so uh summarize the key

27:46differences. You could at this point uh do it like a truncated table of comparison, but make the table of comparison not every feature that you've got, but the ones that are actually the key differences between your product and theirs. So if they do something differently to to you, summarize that in this table. Okay. The next thing is that you can have n

28:08number of comparison sections. So in this one, you would basically put across long- form arguments about why each product does things differently and how they do them differently. So not just how, but why as well. Like are they for this competit this kind of market segment? Tell them why they've made the feature choices that they have and how that affects the person buying from you

28:34or thinking about buying from you. Don't be afraid to lose either. Like again, if you win every point in an argument, everybody knows you're being disingenuous. But if you say, "Oh, actually, you know what? Then we're a bit more expensive. We're a bit more expensive than them." You know, or like they do have a more generous free plan, say why that's the case. Know what like be confident about why you've made the choices that you have and know who you

29:00provide value to and just say it. And then finally, I mean, I think I've said this the whole time I've been talking about this, but tell them who your product is perfect for. Okay, finish the page by describing the the ideal buyer for your content. And let's talk about pain content, uh, painoint focused content. Painpoint focused content, how-to, effectively, is super useful. It's simple blog content that's written to mostly help buyers who are already on your website. Okay, you're not trying to like get huge amounts of search volume. You're getting traffic anyway. Give people the information they need to choose from you. [snorts] Every piece of content, painoint

29:43content, should focus on the strategic narrative about how buyers get the most value from you. That tends to align with the highest conversion path. Here's an example from Podia. These are all some of the things that Sorry, Podia is where I work, just in case you forgot that. put uh these were some of the things

30:01that we uh we had in the in the product. You could do all these things. We spent a huge amount of time trying out different versions of analysis to work out what the best conversion path was, the one that would be most likely to result in paid paid conversions. We tried datadriven approaches, tried a regression analysis, uh a bit of testing. We did all this stuff. In the end, what did we do? We made a guess. We literally chose some things based on gut feeling which is obviously data informed in its own way and uh and also asking what's the fastest way that you could achieve value from this product and the

30:38thing that we came up with was this create a download then edit a landing page where you tell people about that download then create an email series where you send people when they've downloaded the thing and then build a product that you can upsell them So, other words, build a funnel, right? It's not it's not revolutionary. But if you do look at Podia's website, you can go to their blog later, you'll see how far we took this because we put that narrative in literally every single piece of painoint content. And by the

31:10way, you can take a picture of this. That is what pain point content is. Just fill in the blanks. All right. I'm going to just leave you for a second there. Okay. All right. Here's how it washes out. How to build an online course. How buyers guide to online course platforms. What platform should I use for my online course? Best online course platforms for teachers, musicians, coaches, fitness people. You know, simple. You can do this with your own stuff. And if you just filled that in, you'd probably be

31:39ahead. We put the strategic narrative into everything and it went like this. Hey, you want to do this thing? You want to build an online course, but is it just what you want to do? No. You want more revenue. You want to get money from your side hustle, right? So, you should do these things. And then we put 1 2 3 4 like that was the solution. It doesn't

32:01need to gain high volumes of traffic. All right? It's likely to be sales enablement stuff here. Your content should have a strong viewpoint. Key principle. This is how you cut through the AI sludge. Don't be afraid to be different. You might lose out short term. You will gain long term. The clients that I know who have spent years, sorry, uh years building opinionated content, those are the ones with the high search volume from AI search right now. Um the other people

32:31absolutely crushed. Optimize for quality of narrative over search volume. Just trust me on that. It's hard to see until you've done it. But if you become the narrative leader about your product and you and the pain that they that you solve for your customer, you will see the rewards of that. So that's the pyramid worship by ancient civilizations for its effectiveness for many thousands of millennia. Um I tried

32:56to put that on my forehead in my slides. Uh um but it was too hard. Um this is not complex. Okay, it just capture more of the people who come to your website's email addresses. Month one. Month two, nurture them with relevant content over and over again. Get in front of them until you feel like you're sick of being in front of them. Three, find ways to multiply the value of the content on your site to feed back into the quality of the leads you're capturing. Marketing people love to tell you marketing is complex. like like we've got some sort of magical knowledge. Uh and then you

33:33work you work with those people and you find out, flip, these guys have no idea what they're doing. The reality is I will tell you this, marketing is simple. It's those three things over and over again for a long period of time. The tactics change, but that is what people do when they actually grow. Don't buy into that lie that you need more traffic to grow your company. you probably are not doing, and I I mean this nicely, you're probably not doing a good enough

33:59job of converting what you already have. So, focus on that. It's 10 times the leverage. The best marketers I know will happily tell you that it's uncomplex like that. Get over that acquisition addiction. And it's a long path, but the road to recovery is good. And if you didn't get it before, please discover your growth fixes and sign up to my lead magnet and I'll sell your data. [clears throat] Uh, thank you very much. [applause]