这是一份读书笔记，我会阶段性更新其中的内容。
很惭愧，在2017年就已经买回家的一本书，最近才有机会开始细细研读。SaaS行业的两位前辈 - Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin，给创业者和投资人提供了一套完整且细致的作战方案。书中内容既有思想高度，同时兼顾方法的具体落地性，是创投领域难得一见的高质量系统性读物。
核心内容摘录（建议从文末第一章开始往前读）：
第六章：Nets - Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing (or content marketing) is the most popular kid in school. It works, and it works for every company—unlike, say, outbound prospecting. The idea is creating marketing that customers love or learn from, inspiring them to want more from you, eventually buying your stuff.
It's more important to do social only when it makes sense. Don't just jump on the bandwagon because everyone else is doing it.
第五章：Seeds - Customer Success
All the great work you do to help others succeed, while building relationships and networks, is “planting seeds”—whether they're with employees, partners, investors, or customers.
It's getting what you want by helping them get what they want.
Customer Success is not about increasing customer satisfaction, but creating revenue growth.
Customer Success is a mindset. The future standard for all executive teams will include a head of Customer Success who's on the same level as the heads of Sales, Marketing, and Demand Generation.
Target Churn Metrics in SaaS:
- Customer churn (or “logo churn”) of 15% or less per year, or just over 1% per month, based on the number of customers who leave.
- Revenue churn of 0% or less per year, based on the revenue that leaves and offset by revenue from the customers who buy more.
- One Customer Success Manager per $2 million in revenue, to help you gauge the size of the team you'll need.
Six Keys to Customer Success:
Rule 1: Customer Success Is Your Core Growth Driver
Rule 2: Customer Success Is 5x More Important Than Sales
Rule 3: Start Early, Hire Early
Rule 4: Visit Customers in Person
Rule 5: Customer Success Needs Financial Responsibility and Metrics
Rule 6: Evolve Customer Success Goals and Metrics as You Grow
SaaS companies experience these phases:
- Traction (0-1 million $): What do customers want, and what do they do with our product?
- Adoption (1-5 million): Why and how should customers include our product in their daily business?
- Retention ( 5- 20 million): Why do customers need to keep on using our product after the honeymoon?
- Expansion (20-100 million): Why should customers expand to more seats, more features?
- Optimization (100 million–plus): Automation and improvements driven by data.
第四章：Your Pitch
A sexy, fancy, or grandiose message that doesn't click with people is useless.
业内标杆 - 杜蕾斯
Going narrower simplifies everything. It helps companies figure out how to make it easier for prospects to tune into why they mattered.
With an elevator pitch, you're not trying to sell people on buying something or get them incredibly excited and jump up and down. You're only giving them a quick sense of whether they want to find out more or not.
你有30秒钟的时间去赢得对方的好感
A tight elevator pitch can tell someone quickly whether they are a prospect or not. You're not trying to engage everyone, just the people to whom you're relevant. Here are a few tips.
- Avoid jargon.
- Keep it sample.
- Simple is better than accurate.
- It's always frustrating: You'll never be 100% satisfied. so stick to "good enough".
No doubt you can find a million formats and templates for elevator pitches on the Internet. Here's one sample format that's worked for us: Start by saying, “You know how some people have [problem]? Well, we [solution and/or benefit]. For example, [one sentence case study].”
Geoff Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm) has another template you can also try:
- For [target customers]
- Who are dissatisfied with [the current offerings in the market],
- My idea/product is a [new idea or product category]
- That provides [key problem/solution features].
- Unlike [the competing product],
- My idea/product is [describe key feature(s)].
When most people introduce themselves, they dump too much information, too fast, on the listener. Their minds need to orient first, before you can throw more “directions” at them.
Do this by adding a simple pause whenever you're speaking in person, on the phone, or in video. Pause after your first sentence, or after about 10 words. Try it out on some strangers—not coworkers—to refine your use of the pause. Give them a second to orient mentally, then keep going.
When they're first meeting you, they don't care about what you do or what stuff you sell—whether you're SaaS, services, an auction site, mobile, whatever. They only care about what you do for them.
People like to buy “things.” Their minds are asking, “What do I get for my investment?” Details Make the Difference.
Focus on those customers with a burning need you can solve—not on the ones that think you're “cool” or who should or could need you.
要做到雪中送炭，而不是锦上添花。
第三章：How to Nail It
It's better to pick a focused market that's “too small,” but where you can find and win deals, than it is to stick to defining your target market so broadly that you get lost in it. Why is this?
- It's easier to make the pond smaller than make the fish bigger: it's easier to retarget, refocus, and reframe yourself than to change your products and offerings.
- To grow past word-of-mouth marketing, you have to stand out. It's easier to stand out and win deals in a smaller pond.
- When you share too many things that you excel at (too many ponds), it's more likely to confuse prospects than impress them.
Big fish in small pond.
Specialize in a specific pain you solve, but don't get so narrow that you can't find anyone that has it.
To find or be found, to close deals, to avoid commoditization—you must be different or unique.
Work through the Niche Matrix:
-
Make a List of your top 5 to 10 customers and/or types/categories of projects by size of deal or impressiveness of results. The best predictor of future success, or at least the best place to begin, is with the history of where you've been most successful.
-
The Matrix. Once you get a broad list together, rate or rank them across five aspects (Popular Pain, Tangible Results, Believable Solution, Identifiable Targets, Unique Genius). Don't overanalyze things (yet); we want you to narrow down to a few best options (two to five) to dig into next.
-
Choose. Now pick a primary opportunity to pursue. If you have more than one great one, you can pick a secondary opportunity to test and compare against the first.
-
Validate to see if you're ready to jump in.
-
Campaign to Learn Now and Grow Later. If you feel like you are ready to start targeting that niche, you should be clear enough by this point to start a lead generation program around it.
Speed of learning creates speed to growth.
A Barnacle gosling must dive over 400ft from its nest on a cliff top to reach it's parents down below. Taken from Life Story. 快速学习 = 快速进化，否则前方就是死路一条。
If you are planning to sell to an enterprise/businesses of any meaningful size: Don't forget the 20-Interview Rule. It is simple: Before you write a line of code, finalize your niche, or take some other kind of leap, interview 20 real potential customers. Not your friends. Not people you know. They have to be real potential buyers; that is, if you hope to sell to sales managers, you can't interview a rep. You have to interview a VP or a Director of Sales or Sales Operations. And you have to do 20 of them. I know it's hard to get to 20, but it's the right number.
When you're solving business problems, not consumer problems, research matters. They don't know how to solve it, or what you should build for them. But they do know how to express their problem. Acutely and thoughtfully. So even if the specific feedback on your product and idea is off point, the learnings on the true pain point you're solving will be perfectly on point.
第二章：Signs of Slogging
One clear sign that you're a nice-to-have: Everyone you show your product to say “cool!” but no one buys.
Make money by proving to customers that your product will help them make more money, spend less of it, reduce the risk of losing it, or stay compliant.
Nailing a Niche isn't just a problem for startups and small businesses. You don't solve it once. It becomes a recurring problem as you expand your lead generation programs, geographies, teams, and product portfolio. Your CMO, division, or individual salespeople may need to repeatedly nail down who is being targeted, who needs (not wants) you most, why should they buy, and for how much money and to make it about helping them, not just about you closing another deal.
When people felt that they didn't have enough money (revenue), they couldn't focus on anything else. It was money first, second, and third —then freedom or purpose after that. It's hard to think about much else when you're struggling to pay the bills.
Services businesses (especially custom development shops, consultants, design agencies, or anyone who does a lot of custom work), and “utility player” employees who are great at everything, have a special struggle with nailing this. Being great at many things so far has been your strength, because you could take on any challenge and deliver results. But your strength has now become your weakness.
You can't predict where your big opportunity or $100 million exit will come from. So pick One Thing and figure out how to win at that. Where can you be a big fish in a small pond? Get momentum winning in that small pond, then expand into the next bigger pond, and so on. If you learn how to win at One Thing, you'll know how to win at the Next Thing.
积跬步，至千里。
第一章："Niche" Doesn't Mean Small
When you're a startup getting to your first million, or launching a new product, lead generation program, or market—one of the indicators that you've Nailed A Niche is that you are able to find and sign up unaffiliated customers. Unaffiliated. Paying. Customers.
Ten customers may not pay the bills. But if you got them from scratch, you have the start of organic leadflow or of some leadgen process that you can replicate. That's really special, and something you can actually build on.
Hypergrowth doesn't come from selling many things to many markets, covering all your bases (really, dividing your energies). Hypergrowth comes from focusing on where you have the best chances of winning customers, making them successful, building a reputation of tangible results, and then growing from there.
Facebook began with Ivy League schools.
Amazon started with books.
If you focus on solving a single problem really well and can adapt as the market evolves, the sky's your limit.
There's a painful difference to evolve from selling to Early Adopters who trust you, to Mainstream Buyers who don't. Geoff Moore called this “crossing the chasm.” We call it bridging a Trust Gap.
感兴趣的朋友可以读读这本书，市场营销领域的经典著作
This difference between Early Adopters and Mainstream Buyers can be huge and easily underestimated. You may expect jumping the gap to be doable, like crossing a river from one side to the other. But it's more likely to be the Grand Canyon. Or if you're completely dependent on relationships, it's an Earth-to-Moon-sized gap.
Your message has to be simple for them to both understand and easily act on, or else they'll move on before ever giving it a chance. This is why short and sweet emails and videos tend to work better than long emails and videos as first touches with new people.
这句话让我想起早年在写博士毕业论文的时候，导师和我讲过这么一句话：
“如果你年逾七旬的奶奶听不懂你这几年没日没夜的在做什么，最后得出了什么新的发现，那你的论文就是一堆可回收垃圾，仅此而已。”
Reptiles think with their eyes, not their brains—and so do we! Dinosaur-brain thinking (the same thing, but dinosaurs are cooler than reptiles) isn't about thinking consciously and making logical decisions—it's about reacting.
Learning how to reframe your ideas to appeal to people's dinosaur brains makes sense when you consider the tiny window of attention you get. Even if it's frustratingly hard to do at first, or feels sales-y.
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