As I workout I have taken a liking lately to listen to the SAAS Podcast on Spotify by Omer Khan.
Basically all of the episodes are Omer sitting down for about an hour with various founders of SAAS companies that "made it". One of the recent ones I listened to was this one with Amos Schwartzfarb: 233: Sell More Faster: A Playbook For SaaS Startups - With Amos Schwartzfarb
Now I didn't know anything about Amos going into it but come to hear an impressive track record and that he has shifted these days to basically running an accelerator of sorts for various SAAS companies out in Texas. But one thing he said I hadn't really heard quite exactly in this way and wanted to share the idea for discussion (paraphrasing here):
The very first thing you need to do is identify the "who/what/why" you are aiming to sell to. But not just generically - in fact Amos recommends so specifically that it becomes something like: "we sell to companies in the healthcare space, they are typically hospitals between 1000-5000 people, they are always private hospitals. They always use one of these three legacy softwares. There is a director of IT who has been with the company for under 5 years, and that person is typically in this age range... etc. " for just the "who" part.
He mentioned that you should feel uncomfortable after doing this exercise with how reduced your target market has become. But he said when you've done this properly it should be so narrow that you get a "yes" to the sales pitch 100% of the time, and he stressed not 99%, 100%. Only after that point you can start to expand the target.
Basically all of the episodes are Omer sitting down for about an hour with various founders of SAAS companies that "made it". One of the recent ones I listened to was this one with Amos Schwartzfarb: 233: Sell More Faster: A Playbook For SaaS Startups - With Amos Schwartzfarb
Now I didn't know anything about Amos going into it but come to hear an impressive track record and that he has shifted these days to basically running an accelerator of sorts for various SAAS companies out in Texas. But one thing he said I hadn't really heard quite exactly in this way and wanted to share the idea for discussion (paraphrasing here):
The very first thing you need to do is identify the "who/what/why" you are aiming to sell to. But not just generically - in fact Amos recommends so specifically that it becomes something like: "we sell to companies in the healthcare space, they are typically hospitals between 1000-5000 people, they are always private hospitals. They always use one of these three legacy softwares. There is a director of IT who has been with the company for under 5 years, and that person is typically in this age range... etc. " for just the "who" part.
He mentioned that you should feel uncomfortable after doing this exercise with how reduced your target market has become. But he said when you've done this properly it should be so narrow that you get a "yes" to the sales pitch 100% of the time, and he stressed not 99%, 100%. Only after that point you can start to expand the target.
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