A Checklist for Startups Coming Out of Stealth Mode

 By David Ronald

One of our clients, a tech startup, recently asked for a list of marketing assets to develop as it prepares to come out of stealth mode.

In this blog post I’m going to share the list that we provided in the hope that you may find it useful.

Foundations

 Here are some of the foundational activities that you will need to complete upfront:

• ICPs & personas & industries—identifies target audiences, by company type and role, in each of the company’s target industries.
• Value proposition—quantifies the company’s value, ideally by industry.
• Positioning & messaging—positioning statement, and messaging framework (by buyer persona).
• Pricing strategy—articulates how the company’s product is priced, including add-ons as applicable. This is for internal audiences only.
• Promotional strategy—describes campaigns and events that we will use to generate leads in target industries, with expected results (including key performance indicators) and budget breakdown.
• Developer marketing strategy—if developers are a target audience, a unique plan will be required for this audience.

Completion of these activities will accelerate the creation of the marketing assets described below and significantly enhance their impact.

Marketing Activities

Here are some of the most important marketing assets that you can consider developing prior to coming out of stealth mode.

Brand Identity

• Branding guidelines—ensures a consistent visual identity across all platforms.
• Tagline—a memorable phrase that encapsulates the brand's value proposition.
• Brand narrative—craft a compelling narrative that communicates the company’s mission, vision, and values.
• At-A-Glance summary—one-pager that summarizes the company (includes corporate description, customer testimonials, and links to more information).
• Corporate video—a video that evangelizes what you do, and why you do it better than alternatives.

You can also consider developing a corporate brochure that communicates your vision, and your strategic narrative, and provides valuable corporate information, including the pedigree of your executives.

Website

• Website—pages describing customer benefits, your differentiation, the product architecture, along with contact information, and so.
• Resource center—content to educate potential customers and build authority (seen next section).
• Blog—used to generate awareness of both your company and your product. Aim to have 2-3 blog posts already in place prior to your launch.
• Technical documentation—provide in-depth descriptions of how to install and use your product.
• Search engine optimization—ensure architecture and web copy are optimized for search engines with relevant keywords,

Remember to optimize your website both desktop and mobile, with clear messaging and user-friendly navigation.

Product Information

• White Paper—explains the company’s vision for your industry and how your product is going to transform it. This may prove to be your #1 lead magnet.
• Buyer’s guide—explains the criteria that buyers should use when selecting a product. This should be vendor neutral.
• Benchmark report—shares test results (ideally by a reputable third-party) that demonstrate why your company’s product is superior to alternatives.
• Architecture paper—provides a technical explanation of why your product is a better choice than alternatives.
• Product datasheet—brief document that provides a technical overview of your company’s product.
• Solution brief(s)—one or more documents that explain the use cases of your company’s product.  
• Case Studies—success stories from early customers or beta customers.

You can also consider creating one or more videos that explain how customers can use your product to achieve the business outcomes they need.

Sales Enablement

• Pitch deck—compelling presentation that communicates why the company is the better choice. This should be built around your strategic narrative.
• FAQs—a comprehensive list of common objections and questions and answers to assist your sales team. 
• Email templates—emails that your sales team can use in their outreach.
• Call scripts—dialogue for sales representatives to engage with leads in their phone calls.

You may also want to develop a sales playbook with guidance on objection handling and use cases.

Public Relations

• Press release—an official announcement highlighting key aspects of the company’s launch, the pedigree of your founding team, and how your product addresses the limitations of current products. You can also consider including funding information.
• Analysts/media outreach list—a curated list of journalists, influencers, and bloggers for outreach.
• Embargoed briefings—offer exclusive information to select media before the public launch.
• Media kit—includes the press release, backgrounders, executive bios, and high-quality images/videos. 
  

You can also consider surveying industry executives about limitations of current products and producing a report subsequently that provides the results. This can could be the basis of second press release (or be used to supplement your fist press release).

Digital Marketing

• PPC campaign—targeted ads on Google and Bing.
• Social media campaigns—engaging content scheduled to drive targeted engagement.
• Email marketing campaigns—drip campaigns to nurture leads before and after your launch.

Additionally, you may want to kick start your content marketing that leverages blog posts, whitepapers, and other content to establish thought leadership.

Event Marketing

• Launch event—a kick-off event, such as a webinar. This can be the focus of sales outreach leading up to your launch and can also be a good marketing asset subsequently.  

You can consider building a 12-month calendar of events that you intend to participate in, spanning conferences, executive events, tradeshows, and so on.

Metrics

Last, bit not least, begin tracking and reporting your key performance indicators. 

Establishing a cadence for tracking the performance of your launch across various channels (such as website, social, email, etc.), will assist you in identifying those marketing activities that provide the best return on your investment.

Thanks for reading.

I’m sure we left items off the list—drop us a comment and let us know what you would have included.

Guidance on Identifying Your Best Sales Opportunities

By David Ronald

It can be challenging for a startup to gain traction.

There’s limited data to draw from and no established track record. 

Without historical customer behavior or feedback to analyze, it’s difficult for leadership to pinpoint what truly resonates with your target audience. 

Consequently, time, effort, and money can be wasted on the wrong sales opportunities.  

For example, a few years ago I worked for a startup that had initial success within the healthcare industry—for the next couple of quarters our focus was on landing a second healthcare company. Without success. A little later, after we landed a large bank, we pivoted to focus on that industry. 

Although understandable, it felt a little like being in a pinball machine to those of us in the marketing team.  

In this blog post I’m going to offer guidance on how to proactively uncover the best opportunities for your business.

Define Your Customer Profiles

One of the most critical steps in identifying sales opportunities is developing a deep understanding of who your ideal customers are and what their specific needs are. 

Defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) will provide clarity and focus as you search for opportunities. What type of business is most likely to benefit from your product or service—is it, for example, a regional manufacturing company with annual revenues between $50M and $250M, or a multinational enterprise with billions in revenue? 

Beyond the business itself, it’s important to identify the buying personas within those organizations—who are the individuals that stand to gain the most from what you offer. 

Consider leveraging data from your sales, marketing, and customer service platforms. These systems provide valuable insights into demographic, behavioral, and psychographic characteristics, helping you create detailed customer profiles. 

Analyze Your Sales Funnel

Another critical action to identify and capitalize on sales opportunities is to closely monitor your sales funnel and analyze how leads progress through each stage. 

A well-defined sales funnel provides valuable insights into how prospects move from awareness to consideration and eventually to decision-making. By measuring key metrics such as conversion rates, lead sources, lead quality, and the length of your sales cycle, you can pinpoint areas where prospects are getting stuck or falling off. 

For instance, are leads abandoning the funnel during the initial engagement phase? Or are opportunities stalling during negotiations? Understanding these dynamics helps you identify the specific stages where prospects are disengaging, allowing you to address potential issues. 

This analysis not only helps you optimize your sales process but also allows you to focus your resources on the most promising leads, ensuring that time and effort are spent on opportunities with the highest likelihood of conversion.

Leverage Your Existing Customers

Your customers, if you’ve reached a stage where you have some, represent one of the most valuable sources of data and sales opportunities for your business. By carefully analyzing their interactions with your product or service, you can uncover significant opportunities for growth. 

Start by examining data from their purchase history—what products or services have they bought in the past, and how frequently do they make purchases? This information can help you identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities by suggesting complementary products or higher-value options that align with their preferences and past buying behavior. 

Additionally, consider asking for feedback through surveys or customer interviews to gain deeper insights into their needs, pain points, and areas for improvement. This feedback is an invaluable resource for refining your offering and finding new ways to serve your customers. 

Beyond sales opportunities, it’s also crucial to leverage customer loyalty and retention data.Tracking metrics like customer satisfaction, retention rates, and churn rates allows you to predict future behaviors and uncover unmet needs that could evolve into new sales opportunities.

Explore New Markets

Data can also be a powerful tool for discovering new sales opportunities by expanding your reach into untapped or emerging markets. By analyzing various data points from sources such as your competitors, industry trends, and evolving customer preferences, you can uncover valuable insights that highlight potential gaps, underserved niches, or new growth areas.

For example, tracking competitor activity can reveal segments or regions where demand is growing but your competitors' offerings may be lacking, presenting a prime opportunity for your product or service to fill that void. 

Similarly, industry trends and shifts in customer behavior—such as changes in technology, regulations, or consumer needs—can signal where new sales opportunities are emerging. 

Test Your Hypotheses

Last, but not least, it’s crucial to validate your assumptions and hypotheses about your sales opportunities to ensure that your strategies are rooted in reality and not just speculation. The use of data is essential here, as it allows you to test various aspects of your sales approach and fine-tune your tactics based on empirical evidence. 

For instance, you can conduct experiments, run surveys, and analyze your performance data to test different variables such as pricing strategies, packaging options, messaging, or even your product's positioning in the market. These tests help you understand which combinations of factors resonate most with your target audience and which ones may need adjustment. 

Ultimately, this approach helps you stay agile and responsive to market changes, giving you a competitive edge in a constantly evolving business landscape.

Signs of a Strong Opportunity

Signs will typically emerge that can indicate that a sales opportunity is promising. These can include:

• Active Engagement—Active prospects consistently interact with your business, signaling genuine interest and intent. This could include frequent communication via email, calls, or meetings, regular visits to your website, and positive responses to outreach efforts such as marketing campaigns or sales pitches.

• Clear Need—A strong indicator of a valuable sales opportunity is when the prospect clearly articulates a problem or challenge that your product or service can solve. Whether it’s a pain point related to efficiency, cost reduction, or innovation, understanding their specific needs allows you to position your solution as the ideal fit.

• Defined Budget—A prospect with a clearly allocated budget for addressing their needs is more likely to make a purchasing decision. When a budget is defined, it indicates that the organization has both the intent and the means to invest in a solution.

• Positive Decision-Making Timeline—A realistic and defined decision-making timeline is another key factor in qualifying sales opportunities. When prospects indicate a willingness to make a purchasing decision within a reasonable timeframe, it suggests urgency and alignment with their goals.

Qualified sales opportunities exhibit active engagement, a clear need, a defined budget, and a positive decision-making timeline.

Summary

Although startups can struggle to gain traction due to the lack of historical data and established customer feedback, by using a combination of customer insights, sales metrics, and experimentation they can optimize their approach and focus on the most promising sales opportunities. 

This data-driven approach not only helps minimize risks but also enables startups to adapt more quickly and make informed decisions that align with their evolving market needs. 

Thanks for reading. 

Was there something that you would have added to this post? 

Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.

20 Questions to Ask Customers During Your Research

By David Ronald

Market research is essential.

By understanding the needs and frustrations of their customers a business can avoid costly missteps in product development, marketing campaigns, and customer experience efforts.

Additionally, customer research helps you identify trends and shifts in buyer behavior, enabling you to proactively adjust your strategy and maintain a competitive edge.

By gathering insights into customer needs, preferences, and pain points, you can ensure you offerings truly resonate with their intended audiences, leading to higher satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, a stronger brand.

So, with that in mind, here are 20 questions that you can ask during your customer research:

1. What challenges or problems are you currently facing in your industry or daily work?

2. How do you currently address those challenges or problems? Are there any workarounds or solutions you've implemented?

3. Can you describe your typical workflow or process in detail? What are the pain points or bottlenecks you encounter?

4. Who is involved in the decision-making process when it comes to purchasing products or solutions in your organization?

5. What are the main goals and objectives of your department or organization, and how do you measure success?

6. Have you tried any products or solutions similar to ours in the past? What was your experience with them?

7. What features or capabilities do you value most in a product or solution like ours?

8. What would make your life easier or your work more efficient when it comes to the tasks related to our product?

9. Are there any specific concerns or reservations you have about trying a new product or solution in your workflow?

10. How do you typically discover and evaluate new products or solutions in your industry?

11. What sources of information do you trust when researching and making decisions about products or services?

12. Can you share any recent positive or negative experiences with other products or services in your industry?

13. What is your budget or pricing range for a product like ours? How do you typically justify the cost to your organization?

14. Are there any specific industries, competitors, or products you consider to be our biggest competition?

15. What do you think sets our product apart from the competition, if anything?

16. How do you prefer to learn about new products or solutions – through webinars, whitepapers, in-person events, or other means?

17. Can you describe your communication preferences, including the channels and formats you prefer for receiving product information or updates?

18. What might prevent you from adopting a new product, even if it seems like a good fit for your needs?

19. Can you share any success stories or testimonials related to your use of similar products in the past?

20. What would make you a "raving fan" of our product, and what could we do to earn your loyalty?

Thanks for reading.

What questions would you add to this list?

Leave us a comment and let us know.

Will Product-Led Growth Work for Your Business?

By David Ronald

Everyone is talking about product-led growth these days.

The number of public companies adopting a product-led growth (PLG) motion has skyrocketed since 2012, according to recent research.

According to Bain, companies that prioritize PLG are almost 3x as likely to have gained market share in recent years when compared to their non-PLG competitors.

So, what is product-led growth?

Unlike traditional companies which rely on a sales team to guide a buyer through a selling process, PLG enables buyers a way to experience a product and even purchase it with no, or minimal, involvement by a sales team.

Although this sounds very appealing, PLG is not for everyone.

In this blog post, I’ll provide some guidance on the pros and cos of adopting a PLG strategy. 

Key PLG Benefits

While not every business will benefit from a full-scale PLG strategy, there are still ways to be more product-led in your approach to growth that are beneficial to your bottom line. These include:

• Increased customer acquisition and retention—a successful PLG model is often determined by acquiring more customers at lesser costs.
• Better product-market fit—PLG products are purpose-built to meet customer needs, so they require minimal handholding to get started.
• Faster growth—thanks to fewer constraints from large sales teams (ie, no red tape) and resource-intensive lead generation, PLG companies tend to grow fast.
• Improved customer experience—products are designed for easy understanding and onboarding so that users can find value quickly.
• Greater understanding of users—PLG also allows SaaS businesses direct access to their users' behavioral patterns within their service, from which they can extrapolate to refine their product.
• Cost savings—PLG can help businesses reduce costs associated with traditional marketing and sales tactics.
• Higher lifetime value of customers—PLG reduces the need for expensive marketing campaigns and allows businesses to focus their resources on refining the product to meet customer needs.

PLG is especially beneficial for businesses looking to scale quickly and increase their user base.

Some Important Considerations

On the surface level, PLG may look like a simple model for customers to try before they buy.

If we take a deeper look, however, we can see that PLG is a completely new way of growing a SaaS business. Unlike sales-led companies where the whole goal is to take a buyer from Point A to Point B in a sales cycle, product-led companies flip the traditional sales model on its head.

Product-led companies make this possible by giving customers a way to experience the product for free, either through a freemium product or some kind of free trial.

Four key things to consider when considering a PLG motion are:

1. Acquisition—how long will it take for a buyer to reach their “a ha” epiphany, that moment when they understand the value that your product will deliver to them (eg, increasing productivity by x%, lowering costs by $y).
2. Engagement—how often will a buyer keep coming back to your product? Some people will sign up for a free trial out of curiosity than anything else and may use the product only once.
3. Payment—when should you ask a buyer pay? Sure, the obvious time to do so may be at the end of a free trial period, but what if they haven’t arrived at their “a ha” moment by that time.
4. Referrals—once a buyer decides to purchase your product how can you incentivize them to share the product with colleagues?

Your goal should be to build a product that addresses each of these considerations with an unequivocal positive response.

If the customer experiences a meaningful outcome while using the product, upgrading to a paid plan becomes a no-brainer.

Guidance on PLG Adoption

So, should you switch to a PLG model?

Well, although PLG offers powerful advantages for many companies, it’s not an ideal strategy for everyone.

One key reason is that not all products lend themselves to a self-service or user-driven experience. Complex, enterprise-level solutions often require significant customization, integration, or specialized onboarding processes that can’t be achieved without the assistance of a dedicated sales or implementation team.

I experienced this first-hand at a former company—due to the complexity of that product, we struggled to make PLG work for us.

Perhaps we would have been better building a simpler version of our product from scratch. PLG, however, requires a significant initial investment in product development and user experience to ensure that the product is intuitive, engaging, and capable of delivering immediate value.

Without a well-crafted user onboarding process or a product that offers a seamless, self-explanatory experience, potential users might drop off before fully understanding the product's benefits.

Moreover, the success of PLG relies heavily on data-driven decision-making and continuous iteration based on user feedback and behavior analytics. Companies that do not have the infrastructure, tools, or culture to analyze and adapt to user data may find it difficult to optimize their product and user journey effectively.

So, in conclusion, a purely product-led approach may not align with the capabilities or strategic goals of every business, making it crucial for organizations to evaluate whether their product, market, and resources support a PLG model before adopting it.

Summary

PLG can be a transformative strategy for companies looking to scale quickly, improve user experience, and reduce customer acquisition costs.

The benefits of a well-executed PLG strategy are undeniable, including increased customer retention, better product-market fit, and a more streamlined path to user acquisition.

It’s essential, however, for businesses to recognize that PLG is not a one-size-fits-all solution and that implementing it successfully requires significant investment in product development and a strong data-driven culture.

Ultimately, organizations should conduct thorough assessments to determine whether their products and target markets are well-suited for a PLG approach.

For those that can support a seamless user-driven experience and commit to continuous iteration, PLG can unlock substantial growth and user loyalty.

For companies with complex solutions or those lacking the necessary infrastructure, a hybrid or sales-led model might better serve their needs and strategic goals. 

Did we leave anything out? If so, leave us a comment.

Thanks for reading.