Best Buyer Persona Company Profile (2023)

so before we begin I kind of want to just take a minute to recognize why we're here or at least why I'm here so for most of you if you're Founders let me just kind of scroll the room raise your hand if you're a founder of a company like this was your idea and then are you like the CMO work inside of the company do we have any CMOS no CEOs Cole cros yay okay so now I got a good idea so if you're the founder you had an idea right and that idea persisted so consistently inside your mind that you had to build it like you were just compelled to put this thing together and then you built this thing your idea was at the right time for the right people and in the right way that those people wanted to give you money for your idea like that that blows my mind and then for some of you who have teams how many of you have teams employees okay so some of you so many people wanted to give you money for your idea that you had to go hire more people to get your idea out into the world and that just that inspires me and that encourages me that's why I am here that's why I love working with Founders my name is Adrian Barnes and I partner with Executives and Founders to give them Clarity and confidence in their Market through customer and competitive intelligence So today we're going to talk about the map framework growth stalls and a case study of how one company found uh Revenue in markets so kind of how this overarchings what is the growth Stone why are we even talking about it when we're talking about customer research and competitive intelligence when I started realizing why my clients came to me for customer and competitive intelligence by our personas understanding understanding the segments of their Market I came to realize that a lot of them mentioned our growth has stalled we don't know what's going on last year we did great last year our numbers were explosive this year not so much we don't know why so what's going on so then we do some research well once I realized that I started doing some research into gross stalls themselves what is a growth stall why does it happen and so what I found was this book called stall points by Matthew Olson and Derek van Beaver which was turned into a Harvard Business review article when growth stalls and so they did a massive amount of research and data they pulled literally every public company from all of the history of recorded public companies it says Fortune 100 Global 100 from 1955 to 2006. and they gathered all this data it took them four or five years to do this research and they found that the moment of a growth stall happened after an explosive year and so this chart what they pulled showed 13.6 growth an average growth rate and then the next year it's actually a negative growth rate I'm finding the same anecdotally and in my own research for B2B SAS companies that after explosive rate but for B2B SAS companies it's not 13.6 we're talking 10x growth 25x growth I've talked to a Founder who it sounds ridiculous but said 100 x growth in a year so really explosive growth companies but you know what happens have we ever had that kind of a year where you've had 10x growth have you been inside a company like that I have you you all know it's a show inside that company that year right you're trying to hire at scale you're trying to meet customer demand you're building out features you've got whale company or whale clients and customers who's making demands you are trying to keep up right like everything you're doing and it's in the best way right like this is what we all want we all want growth where we're trying to keep up and it's amazing but when that moment is over that year or two that cycle kind of ends and the growth slows down and the founder of the cro everybody kind of looking around and it's like wait a second our turn is high now our revenues slow down uh what what's happening okay let's go back and pull those same levers let's try to pull the same levers we pulled last year so ads worked really well put more into ads go put more into ads oh guess what content worked really well yank that content lever and it doesn't work because what got you to that explosive growth moment is not what's going to get you out and the reason is because your Market changed that year or two years you guys were just cranking it out and growing explosively your customers and demands changed the core customer competency changed what they expected of your company changed and your competitors changed and you were busy growing internally which you should have been that's exactly where your energy and your resources needed to be but at the same time externally the market changed so this is when people come to me and really looking at the larger picture and seeing side of a lot of companies I come to realize and don't throw anything but product Market fit is a lie four Founders it does not exist it was a term coined by investors and it makes amazing sense if you're an investor so Andy Ratcliffe coined it Mark Anderson coined it depending upon what article you look at but basically the quote was I want to invest in a product that no matter what's going on internally the Market's going to want it externally that makes sense because like we said it's a show internally right and they're saying I want to know that no matter what chaos no matter the competency of the founder the marketing whatever goes wrong that the product was made for the right people at the right time that the Market's demanding it because they're going to get their money back right like they want their money back but for Founders Founders come to me and they say we're looking for product Market fit all we got to do is find product Market fit as if it's a map that you climb on top of the hills stake your flag and like product Market fit we found it we're done no more right but that's not the case because your Market changed and the Very nature of us being software recurring Revenue companies means we need to think of product Market more as a flywheel there's not a fit and you're done it's an iterative process that changes at scale so this flywheel works if you have zero customers if you've made zero dollars or if you have hundreds of thousands of customers and are at 100 million ARR it changes its scale right how many customers you have how many competitors you have that changes but the process itself stays the same so these are the five core business areas that you need to have in alignment to get this flywheel in motion so I started with customers what we look at at growth insights is your customers and your competitors really who is your Market we've talked a lot about icps today and knowing your personas and understanding your buyers at a really nuanced level because being able to come in and say hey we serve marketers at 10 million more dollar companies so we know their job title we know the size of the company that they work for and maybe we know one of their pain points that doesn't quite cut it anymore it's not going to get you the the level of insights and the revenue opportunities that you could exist if you really knew them a lot better so to get the flywheel cranking start with your customers know your competitors and not just your competitors use cases or their pricing know how your customers see your competitors know how your customers are aligning you up when they look at the competitive landscape that's what's really important and then pricing I just recently heard a stat from Persona K and Patrick Campbell that the average founder spends four hours a year analyzing their pricing pricing is pretty important it's also really tricky I don't think anyone comes up to you and says Ah pricing's easy we got it nailed we got it figured out if you talk pricing to any founder it's like yeah I don't know we're kind of guessing so and so our competitor charges this they charge that our our big whale client agreed to pay X so that's where we're at it's hard but there's ways and formulas and kind of an approach you can take to kind of nail down and get a little bit more specific strategy is what I would call game play like really what is the way that you're reaching your broader audience are you Enterprise sales are you product blood growth are you like personal onboarding is it a true SAS model like really understand what your strengths are what your team's strengths are and then where does your product and Market align with that and the next is positioning where do you sit in the market how do you actually position yourself against the competitors now what I love about the idea of the flywheel is you can't change one thing without it impacting everything else when we talk about product Market fit and levers it communicates that you can just turn on one thing and you don't even have to worry about everything else but that's not true if you change your pricing you're going to change your competition and your positioning and your customers everything else is impacted so I think the flywheel does a better job of explaining exactly what needs to be done it is a motion that will continue and if you notice churn starts increasing if you notice your ltv's going down or that your Revenue top line revenue is slowing down go back to your product Market flywheel that's the piece that if it's truly an alignment momentum will be great growth will exceed if it's if things are starting to feel clunky and you feel it as the founder and the CEO you're going to start getting your quarter reports you know when things are happening come back to this come back to all five of the four comp or the five of the competencies in the development areas and see where does it need to get the momentum going back in your product Market flywheel so all of that to say that brings me to my map framework I needed a simple easy way to explain to clients what it is I do and how we approach our work so that's what the map framework is it's really vague for you guys but this is what it means when we start a client engagement first thing I want to know is how do you make money and I know that sounds a little crazy because some people like oh you know they start telling about their product but what we found with B2B SAS is there's about five ways SAS companies what they actually sell so this may not be an exhaustive list let me know if you sell something different but on average we're selling users seats Space Storage or time one of those things so when we figure out what exactly it is that we are selling then we're able to sorry I skipped that then we're able to really identify okay for six weeks internally your entire team is now focused on that money making metric how is it that we make money we need a laser focus in and then while your team is doing that it says 12 it's six and then for while your team is doing that my team is going off and doing the audit and Analysis and what that means is we're looking at your customers and your competitors we're getting that product Market flywheel Back In Motion we want to make sure that we understand not just the ICP of like their job title but we want to know the job to be done we don't want to know why they hired you we want to know what they're buying triggers were we want to know how they measure success in their own companies how what hierarchy do they sit in what are the relationships the roles the responsibilities that they have to do all of that information is really important and leads to new opportunities in your Market in your current customer base and then process and procedure just means we don't leave you with a deck full of research we help you execute we help you create plans we help you put it into actual motion so you're not just left with data you get something that's actionable and real so that's the product Market framework money making audit analysis and then the process and procedure that keeps the flywheel going so here's a little case study how growth insights that's me and my team uh found Market opportunities that led to revenue for web page tests so webpage test was recently acquired by catchpoint and catchpoint was a very large platform with lots of Enterprise level software they had a lot of pro products inside web page test was a website essentially that you would plug in there was a space to put your url you'd put your URL in there and it would give you really rich data and insights on how your website was performing and so when catchpoint acquired web page tests they came to me and they're like Adrian we've got thousands of users we know their email address but we don't know much about them they're all free users so can you go in tell us who they are give us their segments and like we need to do something catchpoint wanted to bring them into the catchpoint ecosystem and maybe use them as a way to leverage up right to sell up into the catch point so I was like sure so we did our job to be on interviews we did interview surveys social listening the full research program that we do we really wanted to make sure we had a nuanced look at who they were and we found that they had like solo Joe email addresses and really large retail email addresses like stores that we all know very popular lots of budget so it's like why are these two people using this one tool how is that possible and so we got on a phone call we started doing some research and we realized that really large retail operation guy was an individual contributor uh answering up to the CEO usually and he was using it or she was using it for reporting creating dashboards coming back and doing large like annual reports to how things were functioning overall and that was great but they were like yeah but I'm spending a lot of time you know taking screenshots and relaying the data turning all of this information back into my own charts like I'm calling pulling the apis I'm creating my own dashboards and I heard we heard that numerous times and so it's like oh that was interesting and then solo Joe we heard from and solo Joe was like yeah it's great I plug my uh website in and then I get like a score and I get a few recommendations but all that other stuff is so overwhelming like oh I don't even look at those other tabs I don't even know what that is we heard that a lot so that was interesting so we came back with this information and said look you've got one segment that has budget has a need and could is basically creating their own product that you could create for them that they would buy you have another segment that doesn't want all the information it's actually overwhelming them so you could limit their data and actually make them happy so the web page web web page web page test team went back and actually for the first time developed a product that was paid and then limited the data for some people so now when you go to web page test you say hey this is why I'm here this is who I am and then you plug in your website and so they have a Charged a paid for platform that now is generating revenue for catchpoint for the first time ever just because we knew the nuanced needs of their customers we understood the segments we found New Market opportunities and so not only is large retail reporting to the CEO person happy because now they're saving four or five hours a week the dashboards are made for them everything looks great but so is solo Joe because solo Joe isn't overwhelmed by all of the data we parsed it and we suited the product individually to the needs of their own customers and that's what's really important is when we say know your customers this is kind of what we're talking about so another thing to note that I didn't actually get to mention earlier is if you are currently in a growth stall which given this year is probably popular more popular than normal the research found that 86 percent of companies experience growth stalls so you're not alone don't feel like often I talk to Founders and it's lonely and we're feeling uh like it's their fault you're not alone but there's very clear Solutions right let's get that product Market flywheel let's erase the idea of product Market fit from our minds let's get that product Market flywheel back into motion and then that way you can find New Market opportunities you can know truly know your customers and then you can keep the product Market flywheel going regardless of what your scale is thank you [Applause]