The 19th of November, 2022, saw SaaS founders in Pune gathered for a unique meetup where they interacted and discussed the nuances of scaling B2B startups globally. 

The event was hosted and organized by Headstart and GTMDialogues. 

Headstart is one of the largest and oldest ecosystem enablers in the country, present in over 30+ cities in India, with three global chapters. Their Startup Saturday event is an initiative to help individuals new to entrepreneurship and the SaaS ecosystem grow and scale their businesses globally. 

GTM Dialogues is a focused community of folks from the SaaS ecosystem who share their experiences of building GTM strategies for global markets. 

The event saw two speakers – Harishankar Kannan and Shreyas Nair – both founders who successfully scaled globally, bringing their experience and knowledge to the event to help others in their quest to enter new markets.

Harishankar Kanna is the CEO of Scalefusion, a mobile device and endpoint management solution for 360-degree device fleet monitoring and security. In his address, he spoke about how his business has been able to add 1000s of customers globally and shared insights on how he was able to crack deals as a bootstrapped company to grow into a sizeable business.

Shreyas Nair is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Scale It Right, a company that provides hyper-focused demand generation as a service. He shared his insights into what it’s like working with the North American market and broke down the basic fundamentals a founder needs to set up and scale their business in the Americas.

Here’s everything these two interesting gentlemen shared at the event.

Harishankar’s insights

Having run a bootstrapped startup for the last 9 years, Hari used the event to share his learnings, experiences, and insights. He broke his presentation down into 6 dominant themes.

1. Customer acquisition strategy

For a solid customer acquisition strategy to work, Hari stressed that it was important to know how you get customers to buy your product. He highlighted three key factors to focus on. 

First up is being extremely clear with who your customers are, understanding the market, the competition, and where you fit in. Are you targeting SMBs? Are you looking at Mid-sized enterprises? Or are you targeting the larger, more established businesses?

Once Hari settled on the global market as his area of focus, he went on to identify whether he needed inbound or outbound sales efforts to begin with.

Lastly, he mentioned that you need to remember that the same strategies won’t work for different geographies, be it inbound or outbound sales. The strategies that work in North America may not work in countries like India, Japan, or the UK.

Gaining this level of clarity on his customers was crucial. Coming from a bootstrapped company, it had to be a tight ship on the budget, and this clarity helped Hari cleverly invest his money only where necessary – hiring the right people, finding the right tools, and setting the proper budget to get started.

2. Inbound sales is as good as marketing

Hari also said inbound sales is a good option as it is cost-effective and easier to scale. 

It’s almost as good as marketing efforts because, in an ideal setup, the marketing team and sales force should work in a loop. Marketing generates the leads to flow to the sales team, and sales works on converting them into customers. 

It is essential for you to coach your sales team to analyze and create a system that can define region-wise predictability. 

A simple trick that worked for Hari and his team was to always track the month-on-month efforts, but measure goals on a quarterly basis. When they found a strategy that worked, they put their heads in and doubled down on that. 

Do that, and you get a good idea of region-wise predictability. 

3. Customer support is critical

Scalefusion’s first level of customer support is free for all and is only a paid service when additional support is needed, such as when clients require a full-time account executive.

This was crucial for Hari for one reason. His market is called the Enterprise Mobility Market or the Mobile Device Management Market, wherein the deals are always annual. When you have client relationships that last that long, the ownership is on you to provide valuable customer service.

Hari went on to say that “retention is always cheaper than acquiring a new customer”.

MRRs are a volatile game, where if something goes wrong, the client can drop you and move on. With ARRs, companies have the chance to develop deeper customer relationships and improve their experience with time.

4. Pick the right outbound sales strategies

From Hari’s experience, what works best is picking a specific geography and understanding how sales happen in that particular region. 

He demonstrated this by showing how Scalefusion is sold via partners like MSPs (Managed Service Providers) and Telecom in North America, whereas in Europe and Japan, face-to-face works better where clients know that there are local partners who can support them.

The key here is to pick two geographical regions and fully concentrate your efforts on discovering the region’s predictability.

The traditional spray-and-pray approach takes a lot of time and drains resources and efforts. For outbound sales to work, you need to be patient and focused with your efforts. In time, you’ll also learn when to drop it if need be.

5. Things to pay attention to with outbound sales

There were two things that Hari wanted the crowd to understand when it came to outbound sales.

First, Do NOT take your most successful inbound salesperson and push them to do outbound. Because of how different each sales method is, your inbound sales rep is likely to lose direction and become demotivated & purposeless in the process.

Second, hire the right mix of talent with incredible closing skills. They need to be hungry and ready to get their hands dirty. They also need to have the critical willingness to unlearn and relearn company culture. If they cannot adapt quickly, they are not the right fit.

6. Nuances of product teams

Hari listed 5 clear commandments for what it takes to be a great product team:

• Product teams should not work in silos. To be the most effective team in the market, they need to work with customer-facing teams and customers themselves. It has to be an agile workforce that is open to changes and can adapt swiftly to anything that comes up.

• Product teams should build what the customer pays for. You need to set your product team to correlate their ideas with customer expectations. There is no need for heavily-engineered solutions because all customers want is something that can solve their problems. Anything simple that does that will work just as well.

• Saas reports, such as Gartner reports and the like, inform you of certain features that need to be part of your product to be successful. Don’t take them literally. Instead, use those reports as a compass.

• Perfect playbooks are a myth. Playbooks are a great guide, and like Gartner reports, take in every bit of information but do what makes sense for your business alone.

• The CEO needs to be the hungriest on the team. As a tech-based or engineering-based CEO, you have to make an effort to learn finance, sales, and marketing. It will help strategize better with a perspective of the whole business.

Shreyas’ insights

“I am a salesman at heart”  were Shreyas Nair’s opening words. He credited his knowledge of Saas markets to working with enterprising founders who prioritized building a sales and marketing engine from scratch before anything else. 

He saw founders constantly asking themselves, “How can I translate the vision into execution frameworks through sales and marketing, and let it flow back into the engine?”

Working with founders primarily from the US, he learned numerous valuable lessons that he shared at the event.

His aim was to show founders (regardless of whether they were running well-funded organizations or bootstrapped companies) that they can execute effective sales campaigns on limited resources to reach their targets.

In his presentation, he outlines a 9-step process to creating the ultimate sales engine that delivers results.

1. The aim is to build a predictable scaling engine

Shreyas believes that as a CEO, a founder’s entire effort should lead them to creating a predictable scaling engine that works for the business. If you do that consistently, in about 6 months you’ll have complete visibility of where you want to be.

He rightfully stated that “it’s not important for a team to know how much money is in the bank. It’s important for them to know how much they need to bring into the bank.”

Shreyas then went on to say that sales is one of the most important aspects of scaling, but if it’s not supported by a strong brand and a demand-gen engine that works, it’s worthless. 

2. Why do you exist?

When entering the North American market, remember that there are 100 other companies thinking or doing everything you want to do, albeit at different maturity levels. 

If you truly understand the problem that needs solving and why you have the best product to solve it, tell yourself the same every day so it’s ingrained into the strategic thought process.

Have a conversation with prospects, customers, and the team from every division. All of them should be in sync, with a nuanced idea of what the problem is. 

Shreyas noted that North America is a tough market because if the value is not evident, they simply won’t care what you can do for them.

3. TAM is for investors, AAM is for you

The total addressable market is for investors to understand what kind of multiples are possible in a particular market. Founders, however, should be looking at the actual addressable market.

Shreyas used the analogy of a pie chart for reference, wherein 95% is the total addressable market, i.e., they have a problem and they’re using something to solve it. The remaining 5% is what founders should aim for because this group truly understands the problem and needs a perfect solution.

The only issue is that this is a flooded market, where the main competition is. Chalk out your ideal customer and document what this 5% is. Grab this portion, give them confidence and trust, and take it to a point where when they look back, they know they made the right choice with you.

The AAM is for the founder to build a rooted understanding of the market. Regardless of where the business is scaling, make sure the documentation understands the problem statement and digs deeper into it. 

A hyper-personalized, rich list that is created is what becomes the targetted list out of your audience.

4. Demand generation vs demand capture

Shreyas then noted that demand generation and demand capture were two very different things.

Using the same pie chart reference, he emphasized to never ignore the 95%. Even though they are not the AAM and might not buy a product, they can come to you for information when they need to solve a problem. 

This 95% is where one should invest in organic channels. Show up as a thought leader when they need to solve a problem, and you have demand generation.

Demand capture, on the other hand, is the strategy that is set up to target the top 5% with a hyper-personalized focus on sales, marketing, and every other channel being used.

5. North America is not a market, it’s a mindset

Here, Shreyas pointed out that North America is a great place for founders because of the level of clarity that is needed about the space and the product being built. What really matters is how the value is communicated to the customer.

He stressed that founders should look at North America for the mindset that they have, not as a market. Never under-pitch or undersell. Never look at building from India as a roadblock or barrier. 

Hire a great sales guy, someone who is confident, consultative, and solves the problem. Shreyas specifically suggested refraining from the thought process of ‘making a sale’. If a problem is truly being solved, the rest will take care of itself.

He then highlighted the importance of presentation. No matter what others say, how a founder presents themselves matters greatly.

Make sure the website is of top-notch quality. Make sure the emails are grammatically correct, with a great signature and a good LinkedIn profile. Make sure that every ounce of digital presence is trustworthy.

Investing in building a personal brand is a necessity. Especially in Saas, it’s about how fast the word spreads, and the only way to do that is to give customers a chance to talk about it.

6. Document everything, from start to finish

Shreyas had a unique take on strategy, where he looked at it as how one can translate and document everything that they know into execution frameworks for each of the pieces of the demand gen puzzle.

As a Saas product, the strategy needs to be a documented piece of evidence to show how well your business knows the space.

Strategy cannot be in the founder’s head. It has to be visible to everybody. How well a team documents it is the most important part of strategy.

7. Execute 3 months at a time, heads down

There are so many channels a founder can explore and make use of. The documented strategy for each of those channels is what execution will end up being.

Shreyas pointed out that regardless of what channel is used, always document every channel’s strategy. Make sure to refine how messaging is carried out for everyone involved. That messaging needs to flow into every channel that is touched. 

In the end, it all comes down to how well articulated the value is, and when that’s done, execution will fall into place.

8. Track every micro-activity for success

From Shreyas’ experience, he realized that meeting a founder who doesn’t know their numbers is a major red flag. 

Great founders know all the numbers. Which channel is contributing to traffic? Which is contributing to revenue? What is helping them close? How many conversations are they having? 

The founder needs to be on top of their numbers from day one, and the key is to look for consistency. How many pieces can a content writer write every month? How many campaigns can they set up every month?

Be consistent with the numbers, but make sure the AAM is getting what they’re looking for. That will define and show if everything a business does in their execution channels is working or not.  Shreyas also mentioned investing in an expert to create the best dashboard possible to track these numbers easily. If the outcomes aren’t measured, there’s no way of knowing what’s working.

9. Deliverables + Impact

Contrary to Hari’s opinion that playbooks are a myth, Shreyas stated that a playbook is an idea of what a business can consistently use to execute a goal. It is the foundation of repeatable, consistent tasks that need to be done every single day. If a business is doing the right thing, the graph will consistently go up. Erase the mindset of ‘let’s see how it goes’. Instead, do it right from day one. If an honest effort is being made, the insights will not lie. 

Shreyas ended his presentation on a crucial note, pointing out that if a founder starts thinking of strategy and execution in cadences, they will have predictability. How well someone can craft a playbook for themselves and document it is essentially what defines their success in a global scenario.

* * *

After the thoroughly insightful presentations, the event concluded with a short Q&A session where the two speakers provided authoritative advice to the crowd, after which the founders spent some time interacting with one another.  A huge thank you to Headstart and GTMDialogues for hosting this event, and Hari and Shreyas for taking the time to share their innovative ideas on scaling and growing their business globally.  A special thank you also to Scale It Right for covering the event. Scale It Right provides hyper-focused demand generation as a service, helping startups and companies set up their entire demand gen engine and GTM strategies from scratch.