⁣As growth consultants in the B2B software space, we’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes to scale a high-growth company. To start, we realize how difficult and all-consuming it can be. Content on best practices and how-to’s is always a nice-to-have, but if you are responsible for growth at a B2B software company you don’t have time to find and read long white papers.
That’s why we are going to start sharing what we’ve learned about driving fast, efficient growth through a series of short, easily digestible reads. Although our company name calls out marketing specifically, our content will cover everything that has an effect on successful growth.
Ready or Not, Here Comes Growth
For most of the PE-backed software companies we work with, something went incredibly right – strong product, ripe market, good timing, unmet need. To grow successfully post-investment will require a fundamentally different approach (in other words, what got the company from A to B is not the same path that will get them from B to C). Almost all the executives and leadership teams we work with recognize this and, as a result, are highly focused on building a go-forward growth strategy, in addition to the long list of other post-transaction to-do’s like developing a budget, preparing for the first board briefing, hiring for key positions, etc. but often forget to ask a key question – is the organization ready for transformational growth? And we’re not referring to things like strategy, processes, talent, technology, etc here. This needs to be about the organization’s culture and mindset.
TL;DR
The post-close excitement and motivation is really only tangible for the few people who were involved in the months of diligence and negotiations leading up to a transaction or deal. For everyone else in the company, it’s all brand new and largely unfamiliar. One of the most important jobs of a leader is to convey this excitement and optimism about the company’s future to the rest of the organization by sharing a growth vision which includes:
Clear articulation of what future success looks like
Well-defined growth goals and targets
Identification of key growth levers
Our next Mosaic Minute will elaborate on how to develop a compelling growth vision and gain buy-in at all levels of the organization.

⁣As growth consultants in the B2B software space, we’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes to scale a high-growth company, so we are sharing what we’ve learned about driving fast, efficient growth through a series of short, easily digestible reads.
Mosaic Minute 12/13/2021
Unlike a general company-level vision which is usually just aspirational, something that resonates with both internal and external stakeholders, a company’s growth vision is highly actionable and achievable. Intended for internal use, the growth vision articulates what success looks like 3-5 years from now, how it will be achieved, and the specific, measurable KPIs that will be used to measure it.
Not convinced your organization needs a growth vision? Try this exercise at your next executive meeting and you might be surprised. Give the team 3 minutes to write down what success for your organization looks like in 3 years and what needs to happen between now and then to realize this success. It is likely that the responses you receive will be quite diverse, presenting several viable paths to success.
This should not be surprising; in fact, it is actually quite exciting to be in a place where there are multiple ways to achieve growth, whether it is via market expansion, product development, acquisitions, increased marketing, etc. The problem occurs when leaders, eager to demonstrate progress and early indicators of success, try to pursue all these paths at once, fueling internal chaos and conflict. To get ahead of going down this unproductive path, carve out the time to establish a growth vision.
Step 1: To kick off the process, conduct an honest internal assessment, gathering input from other executives and key stakeholders. This exercise should be intense and difficult; it should reveal what is working and what is not. It should underscore unique internal assets and strengths while surfacing organizational weaknesses and competitive vulnerabilities. As old school as it is, we’ve found the most effective way to manage this process is through a good old SWOT analysis.
Step 2: Use insights gained from the assessment to define a vision that allows the organization to reach its growth goals and meet investor expectations in the most efficient way. What needs to happen next and/or hold true over the next 3 years to make the vision a reality?
Step 3: Gain the buy-in of your executive team. Surface any tensions or doubt in the vision and WORK THROUGH THEM. Then, empower your executives to effectively galvanize their own teams around the growth vision.
TL;DR
Not all growth is created equal. The best kind of growth for recently funded, growth-oriented companies is efficient growth – maximum impact in the shortest time requiring the least amount of investment. The path to efficient growth may deviate from long-held organizational beliefs and executive biases on how future success will be reached. That’s okay. Working through this will enable you to build an even more powerful growth vision – it will serve as a North Star for the organization, a way to objectively make decisions around resource allocation and prioritization, and a ‘limiter’ to ensure the company remains on the same success path.
#growth #b2bsaas #saasmarketing

⁣We are going to start with the punchline upfront – most of your go-to-market teams are likely not focusing on the right buyer. To explain what I mean, let’s break your target market into 3 different groups.
Total Addressable Market (TAM): This is the largest of the 3 groups and also the number that gets most of the executives and investors excited. Basically, this captures the universe of potential customers. However, it is likely that your current product offering cannot effectively serve your entire addressable market. Here’s where the next group comes in.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): This is the part of your TAM for which your current product has strong product-market fit. As a result, your ICP represents the real, immediate potential your company has to drive growth. For B2B software, ICP is defined by firmographic criteria that is shared across your typical buyer. This criteria could be based on industry, geography, revenue, and other qualification criteria.
Active Buyer: An active buyer is someone within your ICP that has initiated the buying process. This means they are at least aware that your product or product category exists and show clear signs of starting down the purchase consideration and/or purchase intent path. It’s important to keep in mind that, at any given moment, it is likely that less than 3% of your ICP can be called an active buyer. In other words, trying to time engagement with a buyer as they become active is like trying to find a needle in a haystack – time-consuming, frustrating, and likely not productive.
It is essential that the go-to-market team is aligned around who falls into your ICP and what signals may indicate that an ICP lead may be moving into the active buying process. Don’t assume sales and marketing are on the same page here. In fact, 9 out of 10 times, in organizations that are just starting to ramp up an inbound motion, we see a sales team that is expecting all marketing-driven leads to be active buyers while the marketing team is working to capture qualified leads of any sort. This results in a disappointed sales team and a frustrated marketing team.
TL;DR
To avoid cross-functional tension and an unproductive situation, establish ongoing two-way communication across the go-to-market team. If you don’t already have a go-to-market team meeting on the calendar, add one. The purpose of these meetings is for the marketing team to provide an update on strategies and tactics and the sales team to offer feedback and insight into lead flow and quality. Keep in mind, as you start to increase top-of-the-funnel volume, it may be necessary to consistently revisit the organization’s definition of an MQL.

Brand authority is talked about as much as other market strategies and tactics, but it is absolutely critical for transformative growth. Watch for some tips on how to assess your brand's authoriy.

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Everyone understands the need for good reporting, but with so much excitement, so much to do, so much pressure to grow that comes post investment, it becomes easy to move reporting to the bottom of the priorities. Don’t do that. Take some time to develop meaningful reporting. What is meaningful reporting? It is reporting that is:
Accurate - The numbers in the reporting are consistent across reports and matches reality.
Accepted - Everyone on the team agrees on how the metrics are defined and that the reports accurately represent those metrics.
Visible - Every stakeholder should have access to the same reports without requiring someone to pull them or interpret them.
Backward and Forward Looking - Your reporting should let your company measure improvement over past performance and understand what the goals are for future performance.

In this video, I discuss the challenges around the fact that Salesforce can make it hard to develop full-funnel reporting because depending on the contact, it can either create a lead or contact (or both) which makes it hard to build reports.

Are you a B2B SaaS company trying to figure out how to get started with paid search? Check out these tips...

As you put together your marketing plan, it is critical to set your marketing goals upfront because:
1. It will help you understand if that tactic was successful
2. You understand its contribution to the overall goals
3. You can get to predictable growth
4. You can learn more from your efforts

We recently asked business leaders about the best business advice they have received and received hundreds of great answers. Here are some of my thoughts...

Merrily McGugan⁣, Senior Director of Global Brand and Communications at LogicMonitor provides a marketing master lesson in 8 minutes. Here are just a few of the takeaways that drive growth:


- Companies must establish collaboration between sales and marketing and agreed upon mutual goals and SLAs
- If you are looking for a career change in marketing, look for organizations that give marketing a real seat at the table
- Real, transformative growth requires that the entire company is rowing in the same direction and there is hyper-focus on keeping the momentum
- Is the statement, "Nothing beats experience" true? Or, is there something else to look for when trying to hire top performers?
- 2020 is the proof that you need to stay agile
- Startups need to start by solving a critical problem

Finally, Merrily beautifully articulates why businesses need to invest in video. If you needed an answer in whether to move forward with video, listen to her answer and you will be sold.

If you are looking for proven ways to grow your business through content and SEO, this interview is a must watch! In this interview, Anna Crowe of Head of Content and SEO at LeadFeeder walks us through her keys to SaaS growth. It takes a lot to impress us, but we were pretty blown away by her answers where she focuses on a wide range of topics including:
-Know your ICP
-Understand your prospects behaviors
-How Slack's insights to retention changed the way they market
-The need for trust to drive growth
-How video is a key to Google voice search
-Who SaaS companies need to hire
-and finally a couple of burrito references!

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Quickbooks Desktop Sync/Reconnect Web Connector Video

Jen LeMaire the Head of Growth for BisVue.com interviews Analise Lawson of Analise Lawson Photography in our Featured Video. Analise shares how video and PR have led to dramatic growth for her photography business in Colorado. She also shares her ideas for incorporating video into her future marketing efforts to drive growth even further.

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⁣What are Dynamic Search Ads?
From Google,
Dynamic Search Ads are the easiest way to find customers searching on Google for precisely what you offer. Ideal for advertisers with a well-developed website or a large inventory, Dynamic Search Ads use your website content to target your ads and can help fill in the gaps of your keyword based campaigns. Dynamic Search Ad headlines and landing pages are also generated using content from your website, which keeps your ads relevant and saves you time. All you need to do is add a creative description. Without Dynamic Search Ads, even well-managed Google Ads accounts with many keywords can miss relevant searches, experience delays getting ads written for new products, or get out of sync with what's actually available on advertisers’ websites.

How do you create a dynamic search ad?
From Google,
Instructions
How to create a new Search campaign with a Dynamic Ad Group in your Search campaign
Sign in to your Google Ads account.
From the page menu on the left, click Campaigns.
Click the plus button , then select New campaign.
Select one or more goals for your campaign. Or, click Create a campaign without a goal to continue without goals.
Optional: Under “Select the results you want to get from this campaign,” select the check box next to the actions you want customers to take after seeing your ad (for example, website visits, phone calls, or app downloads). Enter relevant details.
Select Search as your campaign type.
Select any results you want to get from the campaign.
Click Continue.
Name your campaign and enter the locations you want to target, languages you want to use, and your budget.
Under "Bidding," choose an automated bid strategy if you want Google to optimize your bids. We recommend the target CPA or enhanced CPC options.
Enter your bid limit (optional) and budget.
At the top of the screen under "General Settings," expand Show more settings, and then click Dynamic Search Ad.
Enter your website domain and select your website language.
Click Save and Continue to continue onto the next stage—creating a dynamic ad group and targets.
How to create a Dynamic ad group
For the Ad group type, select the Dynamic option (default).
Name your dynamic ad group.
Decide how you’d like to target your ads. If you’re unfamiliar with dynamic ad targets, we strongly recommend reading About targets for Dynamic Search Ads. We recommend starting with:
Landing pages from your standard ad groups category: All webpages that you’re currently running search ads against, across all of your accounts. This targeting option makes it easy to increase traffic on the webpages you’re already using as landing pages in existing ad groups and campaigns. We recommend this target for users that are new to Dynamic Search Ads.
Other categories: Sets of landing pages organized by theme. You decide which sets of pages to target, how to group similar pages, and the level of granularity. If your site is completely new to Dynamic Search Ads it may take up to 24 hours for categories to show.
URL_Equals
: You can target specific URLs. This is a simple way to target individual pages. However, it can limit your reach if you want to get incremental traffic.
If you’re not using automated bidding, adjust your bid based on the value of each specific target to your business. Bid adjustments can give you more control over when and where your ad is shown. You can set these adjustments to increase or decrease your dynamic ad target bids by a percentage. Learn About bid adjustments.
Click Save and continue.
How to create your ads
You can have more than one Dynamic Search Ad, which means you can collect data on which ad is most effective. Here’s how to add Dynamic Search Ads to a Dynamic ad group:
Click New ad.
Select Dynamic Search Ad.
Your Dynamic Search Ad headline, final URL, and display URL will be dynamically generated, so just enter your description text.
Click Save and Continue.

Should I use Dynamic Search Ads?
Yes! From Instapage,

Pros
There are a lot of pros to using DSAs. Here are three big ones:
Close the gap in keyword coverage: DSAs allow advertisers to quickly close the gap in keyword coverage and product inventory. The tool can crawl your website, or crawl a page feed that lists all products. Not only will it help you close the gap in coverage, but DSAs can also show on keywords that would typically be flagged in Google Ads as having “Low Search Volume” which cannot show.
Ad creation is much easier: This is because the headlines are dynamically generated based on the actual product that is matched to the query in the system. While you still need to have a custom description line, the dynamic headline is most important as that will grab users’ attention and drive more clicks to your site.
Easy to set up: Dynamic Search Ads take a lot of work off your plate in terms of keyword and campaign creation, too. While you should already have a good structure in place, DSAs are an easy tactic to set up, and you can be running on a wide array of categories within 1 day with minimal work.
How do I optimize dynamic search ads?

Here are a few great tips from PPC Expo,

Add Negative Keywords
Make sure you include negative keywords in your ad groups. It’s quite likely that your website contains quite a few phrases that are attracting unqualified users. As such, you should avoid using these phrases in your ad campaigns. You can add these terms to your negative keyword list to filter out irrelevant clicks.
Keeping the Content Updated
Make sure you keep your website content updated to avoid ads showing up on any irrelevant or outdated result pages.
Behavior-Based Targeting:
You should also be targeting groups based on their user behavior. For one, Google recommends beginning by targeting your entire website to cover every relevant search query. By targeting ad groups based on user behavior, you’ll be able to increase the relevance in your audience targeting, which will lead to higher conversion rates.
Adding CTAs
Another must-have for your site is a series of powerful CTAs (calls to action), directly targeting the needs of your audience throughout your site. This will encourage users to take action. You can also input these CTAs into the Dynamic Search Ad headline, depending on your search query.
Bid Adjustments
DSA campaigns, like most others, work on a CPC or cost-per-click basis. This means advertisers must pay a small price every time a user decides to click on their ad. With DSA, you’ll be required to apply bids to the auto-target level. All you need to do is set bids for each auto-target, and then display the results based on your advertisement ranking.
Implementing Smart Bidding
Use Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) for automated bidding. This is because Google’s Smart Bidding has evolved to be extremely useful and efficient. For best practice, set your goal for whatever Google suggests, then evaluate it. Once you see that your goal is being met, adjust the bidding to target or reach a higher bid.
Categorized Targeting
DSA or dynamic Search Ad campaigns, as we know, work through auto-targets. These auto-targets live within ad groups, so make sure you properly structure your auto-targets so that they’re added to particular ad groups. You’ll have a much better control over your ads if your campaign comes with a segmented structure.

Who are dynamic search ads most helpful for?
While it may seem like dynamic search ads would be most helpful for small businesses and advertisers just getting started, in fact, dynamic search ads can be a great tactic for every advertiser. The automated nature of dynamic search ads helps you get much broader keyword coverage than you achieve manually or even through broad match keyword matches. Small businesses and advertisers just getting started have to be extremely careful to not waste funds using dynamic search ads.

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