We saw this happen with Facebook. It was crazy under-priced a decade ago. Today, it's really hard to make it work.
Even things like cold outbound, they get less and less effective over time. So we want to make sure that we have testing in place, not just to try and improve the results, but in some cases just to try and maintain our results. Hi, I'm Dan Martel and this is the SaaS Growth Show by SaaS Academy and this is part of the summer lead gen campaign.
I'm super excited to share this. Next training with you is with Coach Marcel, who's one of our top coaches. He's coach hundreds of our founders specifically on lead gen and marketing.
And in this training that was previously only available to private clients, he's going to unpack these scaling maturity model high tempo testing and exactly what you could be doing to fix your top of funnel scaling challenges. Be sure to grab a pen. Let's get into it.
So before we talk about this, I'd love to hear in the chat when it comes to scaling your top of funnel marketing, when it comes to scaling the amount of leads, the amount of demos, the amount of results that you're getting through your funnel, what's your biggest challenge? I'd love to hear in the chat what you are struggling with so I can make sure I do my best to address that today. Some wrap it up.
And you think that's a good idea, just like the the award shows. So knowing where to focus, figuring out what channels to focus on, knowing which channel to start. Yeah, all interesting challenges determining the right channels, knowing when to add a new channel.
Awesome. Doubling down on the best channels. So how do you identify the best channels?
How do you know where to double down, invest those additional dollars, the best channels to automate work? That's an interesting one. I like that.
Leonardo Awesome. So awesome. Good challenges, awesome things we're going to touch on today.
And there's also some other trainings that I've done in the past that I can reference that will help you go deeper into some of those questions as well. So Megan, stay tuned for that so we can drop those in the chat. The first thing I want to walk you through is what I call the channel maturity model.
So this is kind of how I think about how to mature a channel, how to get it locked in. So that you can actually create predictable growth in that channel. Because what we see so often as coaches here at SaaS Academy is we have a client come in and they're saying, yeah, we, you know, we're struggling to grow our marketing, we've hit, we've stalled out.
Results are starting maybe even to go backwards, like we're getting fewer leads than we used to. We're getting less traffic, fewer demos, and we really just don't know what's going on. And often when we dig into while we look at their numbers and it's like, well, here's, here's a spike.
What were you doing when things were going well? They go, Oh, we're doing this thing. And it's like, Well, what happened while we started adding another channel, another channel?
We started trying these other things. And what happened was their channel, the first channel that they were using that was working for them, it was not mature enough to actually be left alone. It wasn't mature enough to actually continue to grow, continue to maintain results.
So when they took their eye off the ball, the result starts trailing off and they start going backwards. So how we want to think about making sure that we're ready to actually move on to another channel and make sure that the channel that we develop continues to grow, continues to produce results. We want to go all the way through the channel maturity model, model team.
One of these days I'm going to build this the Dan Martel framework naming generator, and it's going to be great. You guys are going to be able to use it. So the first thing that we want to make sure we have for any channel is the funnel.
So there's lots of trainings that I've done that talk through. Building out your funnel. The buyer journey audit is probably the best one.
If you want to get an understanding of how I think about what a funnel is. But the simple way to think about this is if you've ever gone bowling with somebody who's really bad at bowling like me or some young kids, you know about those bumper guards that come up that prevent you from getting gutter balls. That's what your funnel is designed to do.
It's infrastructure, it's content, it's remarketing, it's emails that you put in place so that when you get traffic to your website, you maximize the chance that that person is going to get nurtured all the way down to a buying decision. Ideally start a trial or get on a demo with you. So those are the rails that you put up on your website into the buyer's journey.
So when you invest in the top of the funnel, you increase the throughput of that investments. Do you want to make sure you've got your funnel, which essentially just the right content at the awareness level, the consideration level and the decision level, so that people are able to have a meaningful interaction regardless of where they are in their readiness to buy. So if you want to go deeper on that, check out the training that Megan has dropped into the chat.
Make sure you've got your funnel. That's baseline number one. Now, the thing about a funnel that is really great is a lot of times if you start with one channel and you build a funnel out for that, when you go to build your second channel, a lot of the stuff that you built in your first funnel, you'll be able to transfer over.
So the speed of iteration should get better. The mistake a lot of people make here is they move on to a second channel too quickly without actually validating their funnel. So now we've doubled the complexity or if you add three channels, we've tripled the complexity of changing something about the funnel, because now instead of changing in one place, we've got to change it in three.
So something to consider when you're thinking about how to start adding channels, make sure that your funnel is validated, that it's working, that you're confident in it before you start really adding complexity at the top of the funnel by adding more channels. The next thing we want to do is make sure we have a scorecard so we can actually measure if the funnel is working. If this channel is working, we understand our unit economics, etc.
So some great trainings around scorecard. Of course, our position scorecard, we have the payback period training and we also have the napkin funnel economics training I just did a couple weeks ago. So all some good trainings that you can look into on how to design a scorecard and how to think about customer acquisition cost payback time on a specific channel.
So once you have your scorecard in place, once you know what's going on, what the conversions through that funnel are, what your costs are for this channel, the next thing you want to do is make sure that you document a process so that you can hire people to continue doing the things that are working. And you can continue now that you have the scorecard monitoring, if they're doing a good job, if they're executing well, and if their investments or the investments in those people are continuing to pay off. And then once you've got the funnel, the scorecard, the process, which also, you know, in brackets, includes the people that are able to just continue executing the playbook for that channel.
The last piece here is testing. We want to install a testing protocol on this channel so that in perpetuity, forever and ever and ever, that team is running tests on ways to improve the results in that channel because the reality is almost every single channel is going to get more expensive over time. It's going to get more competitive, more difficult over time.
This is definitely true about things like paid ads because that's the natural tendency. As more people come in, start buying ads on a platform, typically the inventory starts to go down, the cost start to go up. We saw this happen with Facebook.
It was crazy underpriced a decade ago today. It's really hard to make it work even things like cold outbound, they get less and less effective over time. So we want to make sure that we have testing in place, not just to try and improve the results, but in some cases just to try and maintain our results.
We need to be innovating just to keep our unit costs at a place where they make sense. So testing is kind of the final step. So we're going to dig a little bit deeper into this.
But before I move forward, any questions about this, any insights, anything that stood out to you so far about the channel maturity model? Let me know in the chat while I have a quick drink. No awesome.
No feedback. I'll just assume that means that I am amazing. And you guys love this great insights.
All right. That's that's what I assumed. Thank you for thank you for confirming that.
How to score each channel. Martin That's a great question. I would point you to the choosing, your next top of funnel channel or the Napkin Funnel Economics trainings for more detail on that.
But essentially, first touch attribution is the simple answer to that. You need to know where somebody found you so that you can understand what your actual customer acquisition cost. Payback time is by channel.
There's a lot of debate over first and last touch attribution. I believe the first that first touch attribution is the best practice way to do this. Last touch doesn't, I believe, do a good job of actually telling you what's working in your marketing channel.
It assumes that everybody is just like some action away from conversion. It assumes that everybody's always in a buying state, and it's a question of experimenting with what's going to get them to buy when the reality is the way I think about marketing, especially in B2B and B2C, second last touch attribution might be more relevant, but in B2B, I think the best practices thinking about where they engage with you first and separating your funnel out of that. So the touch points that they have along the way are far less relevant than where you actually found them and what the cost of bringing them all the way through that processes.
So let's talk really quick about the what I'm calling here. The scale system, the channel scaling system, I guess channel scaling. I just need to give these things a name, but really just thinking about what needs to be true for you to truly scale a channel.
So the first is you need to have a process, right? So you need to know what do we how do we actually do the things that we do in this channel that get us results? They get us clients that make things work.
We need to have the testing in place and we need to have the scorecard in place. Now, if we don't have a scorecard, but we have process and testing, then we're just going to be flying blind, right? We're not going to be able to accurately measure what's making an impact, what tests are actually moving things forward.
And we're not going to be able to really hold our team accountable to getting results in that channel. So that's not good. If we have a scorecard and we have a process, but we don't have testing, we're going to flatline.
And more often than not, over time, our results will actually get worse in that channel. Our costs will continue to go up because we won't be finding the small one 2% improvements every week or two to continue keeping our costs below what our competitors might be getting. And if we have a scorecard in testing but we have no process, then we can't scale, right?
We can't get a team to come in and do this in a way that is actually robust, in a way that if somebody quits, if somebody gets hit by a bus, if somebody gets sick, we can actually just keep that channel moving because we have the process, the documentation and the systems to pull somebody in, get them up to speed and continue getting results in that channel. But if we do all three of those things, well, then we are going to get predictable growth. Predictable growth.
So I want to give everyone another quick primer on high tempo testing just to have an understanding of what this actually looks like. This is a training inside of SaaS Academy so you can go and spend much more time digging into high tempo testing. And if you really want to go all the way into it, you can pick up this book right here.
Tracking Growth by Shawn Ellis, one of my all time favorite books on SaaS and growth and basically it describes the testing process. So this is the framework that your team should be running. Once they have the process, the scorecard, the funnel and place they're accountable for this channel.
Now they should be running tests on how to improve it, and you can actually hire a role specifically to help with this call the growth marketer. And their job is to come in and facilitate this high tempo testing process. And, you know, one of those people can be bouncing around all the different channel teams and facilitating this process, facilitating high tempo testing.
So essentially the way that this works, it's very simple. It starts with ideation. So you're generating ideas on what can we be doing to improve the in this case, the North Star metric.
But this can this can come down a level if we're talking channel specific, right? If we're talking channel specific, it's probably just customer acquisition costs most of the time. What's our payback time on this channel?
So we want to come up with ideas on how to improve that. Often what this requires you to do is have a look at the funnel and really kind of understand what's the bottleneck here. Maybe we're not converting our leads to trials, maybe our trials aren't activating, right?
So there's going to be a bit of a holistic approach to this. You're generally going to have a cross-functional team having these discussions. It might involve engineering, it might involve, you know, different levels of the organization to drive this stuff forward and then you're going to have a prioritization process prioritize.
Then you're going to run tests. You know, generally we're trying to keep these test to a two week cycle time. So you're breaking these down into things that can be test in a short period of time.
It's not always possible, but we try to do things that can have quick turnaround and then we're going to measure and document the results, lock in what works, document what doesn't. So we don't waste time retesting the same things and we repeat that loop. And this all comes down to velocity, right?
If we can run a test a week, we get 52 chances per year to improve our results in a channel. If we do it every two weeks, we get 26, we do it every month we get 12th. So the faster your cycle time on high tempo testing, the more velocity you have, the more chances you have of improving your results.
And when it comes to prioritization, the way we think about this is the Rice framework. So that's talking about reach, impact, confidence and effort. And the formula for ranking an idea is we take reach times, impact times, confidence and we divide by efforts and that gives us our rice score.
So this optimizes for what kind of reach is this test going to have in our funnel? So of course, something at the top of the funnel is going to have a lot more reach than something at the bottom of the funnel. You know, something at the top of the funnel, you're getting, you know, a very high percentage of the people that come into the funnel at the bottom of the funnel, it's a much smaller percentage impact is about what level of impact do we believe this is going to have on our results?
Then we have confidence. What level of confidence do we have that this is actually going to have that impact? So a lot of times this comes down to how novel is this idea.
Have we read ten blog posts from other SaaS companies that have done this? It's fairly well documented. The process is fairly clear.
Or is this something that we've never really seen anyone try before? It's going to be, you know, a big risk, but that determines our level of confidence. And then effort, of course, is how much time is it going to take us to do this?
Do we need to build a whole new feature and deploy it in the product in order to test this thing? Or is this just a question of changing some copy on a landing page? Right.
Levels of effort are going to vary dramatically. So that is how we rank our ideas so that we can choose the things that are likely to give us the best lift in the shortest period of time. We're balancing those things out, so that is really the high level strategy on how to run test channels.
But I know some of you are looking for tactics. Oh, let's have a look at the chat. There's some stuff in here.
Can you give examples of what tests might look like? Yeah, I totally will. What skills to use for each of those factors.
Yeah, good question, Ryan. So typically you're giving these a score of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 just kind of depends on how you want to run it in your organization. I think in growth hackers, they recommend a score of 1 to 10 for each of these things.
Do you only test one thing at a time on a channel? Yeah, so. Jonathan, that's a really good question.
It depends on how your marketing system is set up and how much of your funnel is shared. So of course, if you have a bunch of different channels running, but they all share a very similar set of funnel infrastructure, then it might be problematic to run a bunch of concurrent tests if they're going to be affecting one another. So you can't actually get accurate results.
So in that case, you might want to be running high tempo testing cross-functionally across your entire marketing team, right? So you get your whole marketing team together and you run this process as one unit. However, if you have, for example, a paid ads team and they've got kind of their whole own funnel and they're not really overlapping much with, you know, your partner channel team over here, then you could have them running these processes in parallel.
It's really just a question of asking like, are we going to be changing a bunch of different variables in a test? If the answer's yes, then that's not really helping us get a clear answer on whether or not that test was effective, because there's other variables that are changing underneath that. So you want to try and isolate these things too, as often as possible, a single variable that's being changed in your funnel so that you can actually get an understanding of that if that worked or not.
So some examples of tests that you might run. So let's just take cold outbound as a channel. That's a good idea.
You know, simple tests are changing, the headline of the email, changing the call to action in the email, changing the sending domain of the email, changing the cadence at which you send those emails. Right? These are all really simple ideas.
If we look at kind of down the bottom of the funnel, this could be changing the drip emails that you get after downloading a lead magnet. It could be changing the fields or the design of the landing page. When somebody goes to download a lead magnet and the way that you decide where you're going to run those tests is kind of by looking at your scorecard and understanding like, where does it look like the bottleneck is here?
We're getting tons of traffic to the landing page, but the conversion rate is 2%. That's not good. So we should start running some tests on that landing page until we start to lift that number to a place where it looks like it's better.
So that's those are some examples. Now, I want to go deeper on that. Jonathan.
I've got a bunch of resources here that will give you some inspiration on what kind of tests to run depending on the currents top of funnel strategy that you're running. So if you're running cold outbound, there's a great training called Predictable Outbound with Michael at Upwork. This is a ten minute tactic that he did, I believe it was in Toronto during one of our intensives.
So that's a great one. And then we have the predictable revenue talk with Aaron Ross, which is another awesome training where he talks about what it takes to build predictable cold outbound. So those are some ideas.
There's also a really good one that I didn't include here, but I will now just to make things a little bit more complicated for Meghan, thanks for bearing with me. And that is the interview with Greg Act Robots. And this is like this is a super slapped on training, but he talks about this idea of micro personalization, but doing it like micro batching.
So you have personalization with some level of scale. I think it's a really powerful idea for cold outbound. How do you still create leverage, still create automation, but write emails that feel like they were written by one person for one other person because the level of personalization is so high.
So I think some really powerful ideas in that training. You're doing ads of course we had the Facebook ads builder as a good baseline. Then we have how to write top of funnel ads, which is from the next copy Joanna Weibe series.
And then we have the 30 to 300 K in our training with the guys at training. Well, they also did another training called called Traffic Converter, which was a ten minute tactic where they talked about their paid ads strategy. So some good inspiration on tasks that you could run that you might grab from those trainings on earned media and partners.
We've got the strategic partner playbook, of course, which is the baseline. So if you haven't checked that out, definitely want to make sure you look at that. We have the free PR process with Adrian Simonovic, who is the author of Free PR and Accommodation with Cameron Herald, spoke at the Toronto Intensive a couple of years ago.
We have the four forces of authority and then we have the partner domination quadrant with our friends David over at Deal Machine. So those are some great resources. There.
We also have the referral multiplier with Leila Hormozi over at use Alan where she talked about how she constructed her partner program and really drove incredible results. I believe they got to over $1,000,000 in MRI in under 18 months running that single channel strategy. So pretty powerful stuff in there.
You're running Echo. There's the content funnel blueprints of course to think about how are we thinking about the content that we design around pain points and then we have the scale growth blueprint with Dev Basu. So some good ideas in there and then around process.
If you're at the point where you feel like you're getting good results but you want to start hiring people, documenting this, codifying it, the camcorder method is, in my opinion, one of the easiest ways to document process. You just record a video and you have somebody on your team turn that into an OPI document. We have the Business Playbook template that's a resource inside of SaaS GoToMeeting on how to organize those SOPs.
So your team can stay on task and get things done the right way. And we have the marketing team blueprint, which is how to think through designing your marketing team, who to hire, how to structure it. So those should be some helpful resources if your challenge is not so much ideas for how to improve the process, but more so locking in what you have so you can hire a team and then start facilitating the testing process and move on to another channel.
Hey, I really hope you enjoyed that training. This is all part of the lead gen summer campaign we've got going on where every week we're going to be launching a new strategies or framework that's previously been only being available to our clients. And next week I've got one of my favorite frameworks that I've created.
It's called the new lead sequence, specifically the 14 day sequence of emails you need to be sending to new leads to warm them up, to get them to buy, to fill up your calendar with qualified demos, and most importantly, five hot principles. And in there are two principles that you need to know what not to do. Some of you guys are doing something.
They're actually hurting your business, not helping your business. So check that out next week. But if Lead Gen is your number one bottleneck in your business right now, I want invite you to check out the lightning bolt lead gen stack.
It's one of the new programs we've just put together to help make lead gen a problem of the past. It's going to help you fill up your calendar with qualified leads today, so be sure to click the link. Check it out and I'll see you next week.
