The 3 Pillars To Sell and Scale Your B2B SaaS Product

While the B2B SaaS landscape has evolved substantially during my 15+ years in the industry, where I led product marketing teams for Neolane (cross-channel campaign management solutions), a company with a $600 million exit, then at Adobe to lead various product evangelization efforts, one fundamental challenge remains unchanged for early-stage startups: how to build a product that sells and scales.

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Most founders and CEOs of early-stage SaaS startups know how to build products (i.e., engineering) with the aim to quickly turn them into revenue (i.e., sales). However, there's a gap between the two disciplines —they must identify a product the market wants, design a strategy to reach high-quality prospects and implement the right tactics to turn their vision into action.

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My conversations with these executives revealed that many struggle to connect the dots, which is the key to creating the right product and scaling the company. Product marketing is the missing link that helps B2B SaaS companies turn features into capabilities, capabilities into benefits, and benefits into revenue. Here's what product marketing entails, what it means for early-stage startups, and the three pillars to identify the right product, generate sales, retain customers, and scale.

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What is SaaS Product Marketing, and What Can It Do For Early-Stage Startups?

Product marketing includes all the tools and processes a company uses to bring products that customers want, buy, and use to market. It involves understanding the product’s target audience(s) and creating messaging to communicate its benefits to achieve the company's business objectives (e.g.,generate leads and drive sales).

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The discipline covers various aspects, including identifying and communicating a product's unique value proposition, implementing a customer acquisition strategy, and educating customers about their challenges to drive demand for the product.

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Product marketing aligns your offerings with the audience's needs and helps you allocate resources strategically to focus on the most effective marketing channels and tactics. The process also shows how users interact with your product to identify impactful use cases and inform the iterative process.

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The Three Pillars of Effective B2B SaaS Product Marketing:

Product marketing is a broad discipline — what works for big corporations doesn't necessarily work for early-stage companies. What should you focus on? Instead of spreading their resources too thin, I help my clients hone in on these three pillars to define their product use cases, get in front of their target market, and turn their strategies into action with the right tools.

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1. Product-Market Fit:

One big red flag for early-stage B2B startups I often see is when the founder or CEO claims they know exactly what their customers want. Unfortunately, their assumptions are often off the mark, causing them to spend money on developing features for use cases that don't address the target market's needs.

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As a rule of thumb, if you ask your customers whether they'd be bothered if you remove your products from their hands and over 40% say that would tremendously impact their businesses — you are likely on the right track and have reached product-market fit. 

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Getting customer feedback means you must first put the products into the hands of your customers. How do you do so quickly and cost-effectively?

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Developing a minimum viable product (MVP) is typically the best way to gauge the market's interest in your idea. Build the MVP, ship it to customers, find out how they use it, and see what you should modify. You may even launch a website to test the value proposition without building the product. If the idea sticks, build an MVP; if it fails to gain traction, you can move on quickly.

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Additionally, messaging and positioning are critical in helping customers understand how your product meets their needs. Your software may have the right features, yet you could be marketing the wrong use case.

I recall working with a CEO who launched a product targeting a specific use case. When we interviewed the company’s customers, we realized they wereusing the product differently and not necessarily on the use case we assumedthey would. Instead, they tweaked it for other purposes.

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B2B SaaS companies should craft their products’ marketing message based on customers' use cases to ensure the positioning resonates with the target market. If customers use your product for a different purpose, you may need to revisit your positioning and/or messaging.

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This iterative, hands-on approach to finding product-market fit validates ideas with customers before investing substantially in product development. The insights help companies allocate resources strategically to reduce costs and maximize revenue.

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2. Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy:

A GTM strategy is a detailed plan that outlines how you implement positioning, messaging, tactics, and channels to introduce a product to the market and reach the target customers through marketing, sales, and distribution activities. Many factors influence your GTM approach, and there's no one-size-fits-all strategy. 

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For most B2B SaaS startups, identifying the ideal customer profiles (ICPs) or buyer personas is essential for setting a solid foundation. However, it's a more nuanced exercise than addressing the end users' needs with tactical or technical content.

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The typical B2B buying group consists of six to ten decision-makers. At a minimum, you should start with two personas — the end user who interacts with your product and the decision-maker who approves the purchase (e.g., the CXO). While you may highlight tactical aspects for end users, you should focus on the high-level business benefits in your messaging for decision-makers.

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I often start with two key personas for most clients to help us stay focused and avoid getting overwhelmed. As we create use cases for these ICPs to refine the product and messaging, we often uncover additional personas and upsell opportunities.

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After creating your personas and defining who they are, their pain points, and their desired outcomes, you can refine your value proposition, identify sales and marketing channels, design your pricing strategy, and craft a customer support plan. 

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3. Marketing Operations:

Now you know the "what" (i.e., the product) and the"who" (i.e., the personas), you need the "how" to execute the GTM strategy and operationalize the workflows of generating demand, capturing leads, and building your pipeline.

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Marketing Operations (MarketingOps) encompasses all the technology, tools, and processes to support marketing functions in an organization. For early-stage B2B SaaS companies, I usually focus on high-stakes programs like demand and lead generation as they best support the founders' and CEO’s objectives. Lead generation includes implementing tools and processes to generate, nurture, and score leads, moving Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) into the sales process, and bridging the gap between marketing’s demand-gen efforts and sales’ opportunity funnel.

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I typically recommend HubSpot, a robust customer relationships management (CRM), as the foundation for meeting early-stage companies’ MarketingOps needs. It supports lead generation through inbound marketing to drive website traffic, capture leads, and build a funnel of opportunities. Yet, many early-stage companies overlook the benefits of implementing a CRM and investing in inbound marketing efforts. It’s understandable because the methodology focuses on generating organic traffic and building relationships with its audience, taking three to twelve months to yield results.

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However, the benefits can snowball to help these companies maximize their long-term marketing ROI. Unfortunately, when I speak to most early-stage and startup B2B SaaS companies, inbound marketing represents less than 10% of their efforts. Instead, they prefer to capture leads through outbound tactics.

So, how do you strike a balance between inbound and outbound marketing?

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Inbound marketing takes time, and many early-stage CEOs make the mistake of only focusing on outbound calling. Yet, you've got to start before you can benefit from the momentum. Typically, I advise my clients to begin with 10% of their budget in inbound. In a nutshell, I will likely recommend setting up your demand-gen engine to drive organic traffic, test the market, and double down your ad dollars on messaging that resonates. When you generate some return, you can assign marketing a pipeline budget to grow this process and scale the business.

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Putting it All Together:

B2B SaaS product marketing is a web of moving parts that must work together seamlessly to help you identify the optimal product positioning, craft messaging that appeals to your target audiences, and use the right tools and processes to put your content and offers in front of the right people. It's easy for founders and CEOs who already wear many hats to overlook the critical role product marketing plays in the success of their businesses (there are always more fires to put out instead of sitting down to contemplate your ICPs!)

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Yet, setting the stage for effective product marketing is essential for your company's long-term success  — it's the foundation for selling more products and scaling your business. You've got to start somewhere, and I'm here to help turn your vision into effective GTM motions.