Nick Mehta started Gainsight (customer success SaaS) in 2012 and spent $3m building their MVP.
Their first dollar of revenue came in 2013 and have since scaled to over $50m in revenue.
How?
This posts explains…
Robert Collier was born in America in the late 19th century, was a priest and authored several religious and mystical books…
He was also an incredibly effective copywriter, selling everything from clothes to household goods through mail order during the cash strapped period of the second world war.
And what was Robert’s core principle?
“Always enter the conversation already occurring in the prospect’s mind.”
How do we do this?
By knowing them intimately…
Through their network, Gainsight managed to secure Marketo as an early customer for their customer success SaaS.
At the time Marketo were at just a couple of hundred people (now 1,400) and they loved Gainsight.
More specifically, the person that ran their customer success function loved Gainsight:
So they hired him:
What better way is there to enter into the conversation happening in someone’s head than to actually be them?
By this point you’re probably wondering “ok that’s great, but we don’t have $3m to build an MVP and we can’t hire Marketo’s VP of customer success”.
Valid, but the point still remains… how can you get to know your customers intimately enough to enter the conversation that is already happening in their head?
It could be:
- Hanging out in the same places online or in the real world as your ideal customer
- Hiring a lower level employee that has experience working under your ideal customer
- Going for lunch with an ideal customer each week
These tasks fit into the important but not urgent box and are arguably the most important things you should be doing as a #saasmarketer.
What did we learn?
As the late great Robert Collier would say: “Study your customer. Find out what interests them. Then study your proposition to see how it can be made to tie in with that interest.”