Field Guide
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Customer Discovery

Messaging

Why buy you? A storytelling framework for startup founder

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The third part of crafting your story for customers is demonstrating that your company is uniquely qualified to be the best solution for your customer’s problem. Learn how with examples, a worksheet, and more.

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Customer Discovery

Messaging

Why buy now?: A storytelling framework for startup founders

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Why Buy Now? is the second question in the Unusual Customer Story Framework and is specific to where a customer is heading — their specific priorities, hair-on-fire issues, and alternatives.

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Customer Discovery

Messaging

Why buy anything?: A storytelling framework for startup founders

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“Why Buy Anything?” is the first question to answer in customer storytelling and can be thought of as a two-part formula for defining the “Big Problem”: start with why plus align on a shared view of impact.

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Going to Market

GTM

The Modern GTM User/Buyer journey

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Creating specific steps for two distinct personas — the USER and BUYER — is one of the most important fundamental changes in the Modern GTM vs. the old GTM for enterprise startups.

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Customer Discovery

Customer discovery

How do you segment markets and find early adopters?

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Segment your target markets into Innovators, Early Adopters, and Early Market and address sequentially. Drive adoption and build a sales motion. Avoid getting mixed signals on your product direction and wasting time and capital.

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Going to Market

GTM

Nurture a self-serve USER/BUYER journey

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As you scale, the GTM team is responsible for every aspect of the USER/BUYER journey. Sales, Education, Marketing, Community and Product must work together. It's critical that the team meet once a week to assess your GTM efforts.

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Going to Market

Marketing

Leads! How do B2B startups generate leads?

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Ready to increase sales of your software? Get advice from a SaaS industry expert about setting sales goals, setting up your GTM funnel, tech stack, and more.

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Going to Market

Sales

How to pick the right GTM motion to reach $100M ARR

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Get all the details of the three most common go-to-market (GTM) motions — bottom-up, middle-out, and top-down — and show how they will impact the path to $100M ARR.

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Going to Market

Sales

Starting the sales process for a B2B product

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Determine if a lead has the potential to become a customer (i.e. do they fit your ICP?) so that you can create a compelling value proposition and drive the sale

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Customer Discovery

Outreach

How to identify prospective design partners

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In this video module, we use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Evaboot, ZoomInfo, and Outreach to identify prospective design partners -- early customers who can help you achieve product-market fit.

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Going to Market

Sales

Product testing process for enterprise startups

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Learn how to structure your product testing process and establish a clear plan to sign and close customers.

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Customer Discovery

Outreach

How to do customer outreach for B2B startups

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Segment your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and build an outreach sequence structure to get feedback before you build, find your design partners, and secure those critical first customers.

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Going to Market

GTM

Organizing Modern GTM teams

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Building a startup with the Modern GTM requires creating an organization that has a variety of skills and a high degree of teamwork.

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Customer Discovery

Outreach

Customer outreach playbook for B2B startups

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This guide details the customer outreach process for Seed Stage enterprise software companies. Includes turnkey tips for landing meetings, slide deck suggestions, and email templates from serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, Omnition, and more.

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Going to Market

GTM

Modern GTM planner

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Need help with the math of taking your SaaS product to market? This Modern GTM Planner includes a spreadsheet template that helps you calculate the costs of marketing, sales, and demand gen to meet your revenue goals.

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Going to Market

Sales

Math of sales: Calculating sales outreach for B2B businesses

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Learn how to calculate the amount of outreach you should conduct on a regular basis to reach $1M ARR. Includes a simple calculator based on industry averages for enterprise B2B companies doing cold outreach.

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Going to Market

GTM

Understanding the Modern GTM for early-stage founders

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The optimal GTM for an enterprise startup is vastly different than it was a decade ago. Founders must now embrace that the correct GTM begins at product strategy and demands that a founder function as an expert conductor of several major functions.

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Customer Discovery

Customer discovery

What is an ideal customer profile?

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Defining your ICP can help you better identify customer needs, clarify priorities for your team, and pursue opportunities for expansion down the line

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Customer Discovery

Messaging

How to craft a compelling startup story for B2B customers

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This customer storytelling framework leverages Command of the Message and Challenger Selling.

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Customer Discovery

Customer discovery

Finding the right design partners: tools and best practices for outreach and initial meetings

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What should you ask ideal target users of an enterprise product? These suggested questions focus on the innovator's perspective on the market, how they currently operate, their ideal workflow, feedback on your product, the competition, and more.

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Going to Market

Marketing

GTM funnel stages, metrics, and goals for B2B startups

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Once you have an understanding of your USER / BUYER journey, it’s time to develop your strategy for getting your product into the mix of solutions your USER is considering to solve their problem.

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Going to Market

Marketing

From B2B trial to aha! land

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A SaaS marketing expert shares insights on ushering users to later funnel stages, the minimum viable sales collateral library, user product education emails, and more.

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Going to Market

GTM

Drive adoption of your B2B product with tutorials

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Use tutorials to drive awareness of your product. A tutorial must illustrate how your software takes something that is awful about your user's workflow and transforms it into something that works the way it should.

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Customer Discovery

Messaging

How to create a presentation for customers

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A former SaaS marketing and sales leader from Okta, Citrix, and Microsoft shares the seven critical slides for a B2B customer presentation.

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Customer Discovery

Open source

Developing open-source software customers

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Learn how to develop customers in open-source software projects, with insights from leaders of Sysdig, Heptio, Styra, and more.

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Going to Market

Sales

Fixing B2B Seed-Stage Sales

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Increase your chance of getting to $1M in revenue by breaking down the complexity of sales into practical ideas through scalable and repeatable practices.

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Going to Market

Sales

Discovery 101 for enterprise startups

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Learn about the discovery process where you ask questions to uncover critical information about your Ideal Customer Profile and User/Buyer Persona

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Customer Discovery

Messaging

How to define your GTM strategy at the early stage

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You don’t have a working beta of your product. You need to validate your value proposition with market feedback to create your first product road map. Here is where you need to engage with Innovators and no other market segment.

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Going to Market

Sales

Qualify deals to discover real sales opportunities

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Learn the importance of creating two separate sales funnels: 1. a sales forecast funnel and 2. a sales outreach funnel.

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Customer Discovery

Customer discovery

Customer validation: Going from idea to sellable product

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This article provides a step-by-step guide for how founders can validate their idea and kickstart the validation process with early customers and design partners.

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Going to Market

Marketing

Build awareness with B2B target users

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The ultimate guide to building awareness for enterprise software, including marketing tips, social media strategy, and conducting user interviews.

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Going to Market

Marketing

Converting targets into trial/freemium users

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A SaaS expert shares best practices for getting target users to progress to the next stage of the GTM funnel, including recommended SaaS feature tiers and a GTM tech stack.

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Going to Market

Sales

Closing after product testing for B2B startups

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Learn how to control and close a deal by improving the quality and efficiency of your product testing process.

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Going to Market

Sales

Build a B2B sales motion with design partners

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Once an enterprise startup has innovators for product/value hypothesis, it’s time to engage with design partners. Design partners help founders refine the product and the sales process.

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Going to Market

Sales

4 boxes of discovery with prospects for a B2B product

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To qualify design partners as prospective customers for a B2B product, you must learn about more than just the company’s current and desired future states. This article provides the strategy, success metrics, and more.

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Customer Discovery

Case Study

Jyoti Bansal's successful customer acquisition strategy for AppDynamics

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Jyoti Bansal — AppDynamics founder & Unusual Ventures Co-Founder — undertook a systematic process that helped him find initial customer prospects. His learnings helped him build one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley history.

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