How Best Buyer Persona's MAP Framework Helps B2B SaaS Companies Break Out of Growth Stalls (Talk by CEO Adrienne Barnes)

Opening: Why Adrienne Barnes Works with Founders

Adrienne Barnes

00:00So before we begin, I kinda wanna 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 kinda 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? Cool. CROs? Yay. Okay. So now I got a

00:26good 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

00:55of 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, that encourages me. That's why I am here. That's why I love working with founders. My name is Adrienne Barnes, and I partner with executives and founders to give them

Introducing the MAP Framework and Growth Stalls

Adrienne Barnes

01:21clarity and confidence in their market through customer and competitive intelligence. So today we're gonna talk about the MAP framework, growth stalls, and a case study of how one company found revenue in markets. So kind of how this overarching. What is the growth stall and 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, buyer personas, understanding

01:52understanding 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 growth stalls themselves. What is a growth stall? Why does it happen? And

Research Behind Growth Stalls: Stall Points Book

Adrienne Barnes

02:15so what I found was this book called Stall Points by Matthew Olson and Derek van Bever, 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

02:43research, 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 b to b SaaS companies. That after explosive rate, but for b to b SaaS companies, it's not 13.6. We're talking 10 x growth, 25 x growth. I've

What Happens Inside a Company During Explosive Growth

Adrienne Barnes

03:12talked to a founder who, it sounds ridiculous, but said a 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 10 x growth? Have you been inside a company like that? I have. You you all know, it's a shit show inside that company that year. Right? You're trying to hire at scale. You're trying to meet customer demand. You're building

03:35out features. You've got whale company or whale clients and customers who are 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, the CRO, everybody comes

04:01looking around and it's like, wait a second. Our churn is high now. Our revenue slowed down. 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

04:27what's gonna 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 customer 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

Product Market Fit Is a Lie: The Flywheel Alternative

Adrienne Barnes

04:56this 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 for founders. It does not exist. It was a term coined by investors and it makes amazing sense if you're an investor. So Andy Rachleff coined it. Marc Andreessen coined it depending upon what article you look at. But basically, the quote was,

05:27I want to invest in a product that no matter what's going on internally, the market's gonna want it externally. That makes sense. Because like we said, it's a shit 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 gonna get their

05:53money 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 gotta do is find product market fit. As if it's a map that you climb on top of the hill, 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,

06:20recurring 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 $0, or if you have hundreds of thousands of customers and are at a 100,000,000 ARR. It changes at scale. Right? How many customers you have, how many competitors you have, that changes, but the process itself stays

Five Core Business Areas of the Product Market Flywheel

Adrienne Barnes

06:50the 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 10,000,000

07:19more 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 gonna 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

Pricing, Strategy, and Positioning in the Flywheel

Adrienne Barnes

07:44cases 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 a stat from Persona Kay 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, oh, pricing's easy. We

08:14got it nailed. We got it figured out. If you talk pricing to any founder, it's like, yeah. I don't know. We're kinda 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 kinda nail down and get a little bit more specific. Strategy is what I would call

08:38gameplay. Like, really, what is the way that you're reaching your broader audience? Are you enterprise sales? Are you product led growth? Are you, like, personal onboarding? Is it a true SaaS 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

09:05love 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 gonna change your competition, and your positioning, and your customers. Everything else is impacted. So I think the flywheel does a better job

09:34of 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 LTVs 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 in 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

10:02CEO, you know, you 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

The MAP Framework Explained

Adrienne Barnes

10:26is 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 wanna know is how do you make money? And I know that sounds a little crazy because some people are like, oh, you know, and they start telling about their product. But what we found with b to b SaaS is there's about

10:47five ways SaaS 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, time. One of those things. So when we figure out what exactly it is that we are selling, then we're able to sorry, 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.

Audit and Analysis: Deep Customer and Competitor Research

Adrienne Barnes

11:17How is it that we make money? We need to laser focus in. And then while your team is doing that, it says twelve, 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 wanna make sure that we understand not just the ICP of

11:42like their job title, but we wanna know the job to be done. We don't wanna know why they hired you. We want to know what their buying triggers were. We wanna 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

12:07base. 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

12:34me and my team, found market opportunities that led to revenue for WebPageTest. So WebPageTest was recently acquired by Catchpoint, and Catchpoint was a very large platform with lots of enterprise level software. They had a lot of products inside. WebPageTest 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.

13:03And so when Catchpoint acquired WebPageTest, they came to me and they're like, Adrienne, 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

Discovering Two Distinct User Segments at WebPageTest

Adrienne Barnes

13:27the Catchpoint. So I was like, sure. So we did our jobs-to-be-done interviews. We did interviews, 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

13:57using 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 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

14:29a 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 website in and then I get like a score and I get a

Research Findings and Product Recommendations

Adrienne Barnes

14:52few 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

15:17want all the information. It's actually overwhelming them, so you could limit their data and actually make them happy. So the

WebPageTest Launches First Paid Product Tier

Adrienne Barnes

15:28test 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 WebPageTest, 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

15:55nuanced 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, Cause 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

16:26really 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% 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 like it's

16:55their 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.