Let's be honest: nobody wants to eat a cake without flour. No matter how much we want to believe it tastes just the same.

Hi friend! 👋 

Hope you're doing okay. ❤️ Everyone's busy at work with the fall season kicking in, but hopefully you can also make time for learning and developing your skills at work. 

Here are some articles we'd love to share with you this month. 👇

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Positioning – A key ingredient in growth

When it comes to growth marketing, a key ingredient is often overlooked: positioning. Growth marketing without considering positioning is like making a cake without flour. Sometimes that's what you want to do, but the same recipe will not work if you take a crucial ingredient out. And let's be honest, nobody wants to eat a cake without flour. No matter how much we want to believe it tastes just the same.

Growth marketing that doesn't consider positioning is neither marketing nor growth and nope, not a strategy either. It's not a growth recipe you want to follow.

This article by April Dunford on Lennysnewsletter is true to its title: 'The ultimate guide to positioning".

Our key takeaways:

• Finding the right place in the market, your niche if you will, is crucial for the business.
• Positioning is about setting the context and giving potential buyers a frame of reference that guides their expectations.
• Wrong positioning can lead to your customers having expectations that you can't meet. Which in turn leads to unhappy customers. Which leads to churning customers, and so on. 
• Positioning looks at five aspects: competitive landscape, differentiating features, value for customers, ideal customers, and, lastly, the market category.

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Retention and aha moment

Way too often, growth marketing is positioned to be responsible for lead generation and nothing else. However, growth marketing (or any marketing for that matter) is about the entire funnel from awareness to referral. Churn is a silent growth killer, and the best way to fight it is by retention.

Pair this with an underrated marketing strategy: email marketing, and you get retention emails. Email is a great way to engage your customers, offer them helpful content, and guide them towards your product's aha moment. 

In any case, here's a thorough guide from Profitwell to retention emails which, coupled with understanding your product's aha moment (from Intercom), can help you lay the groundwork for a successful retention strategy.

If you only read one sentence in these articles, which one should it be? So glad you asked:

To keep customers in immediate danger of churning, reach out and make sure you do all you can to help them get the most from your product. (Source: Profitwell, How to build a retention email plan to reduce churn).

However, "aha" moments can happen before you even sign up for a product, or sometimes after you have been using them for quite a while. (Source: Intercom, Understanding your aha moments and putting them to work).

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Where are you going?

Not all those who wander are lost (we leave it up to you to decide if that's a Lana Del Rey or Tolkien quote). If you ever do find yourself lost in terms of prioritizing activities and the bigger picture, all you have to do is look at the proverbial sky and find the north star.

In the B2B SaaS business, the North Star metric is the ultimate metric that your entire organization can stand behind.

It's the guiding star and a leading metric that indicates that your customers are getting value out of the product.

A typical example from the B2C world is often Netflix. Netflix north star metric is likely the number of hours streamed on the platform.

Why do we care?

Sounds just like some fancy-schmancy term some agency came up with to sound smart. Maybe, but terminology aside, defining your north star metric can help you with the following:

• Outline your KPIs and what you want to track by starting from this one metric.
• Focus your effort on what creates value for your customers.
• Unite your teams around common goals.
• Break down an often abstract strategy into a measurable metric.

If you are ready to start defining your north star, look no further. This is an excellent guide on how to accomplish it. It's with scale-ups in mind, but this guide applies to any business looking to optimize their ways of working.

Our biggest aha moment of the article?

Of course, in the end, everyone cares about revenue, but there are some excellent reasons to avoid making revenue growth your singular North Star Metric. Instead of concentrating exclusively on revenue as your north star, what's another metric that is a leading indicator of revenue, one that is operationally easy to track and optimize? 

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What's happening at Advance B2B?

At Advance B2B, we are exploring topics around hidden ingredients for B2B SaaS growth. This blog post talks about the importance of brand and why it belongs on the CEO agenda.

Our podcast

On the latest episode of the Growth Hub, we have Caroline Guo, Head of Growth at HashiCorp. Listen as she tells us How To 2X Pipeline & User Acquisition in 1.5 Years.

Growing from just 250 employees in mid-2018 to 1400 employees in 2021, they’re a growth success story. Learn from their experiences as Caroline discusses: 

• How HashiCorp has grown its growth team
• How to build effective go to market models
• How Caroline and her team built out HashiCorp’s entire SaaS business segment
• How her team operates across the entire funnel from acquisition & activation to monetization & retention
• The main factors that enabled their growth team to double pipeline and user acquisition
• The importance of diversity within hiring, your team, and the workplace

Our next webinar

On September 7, 2021 at 12 pm UTC we will discuss how to grow your SaaS business with a solid sales and marketing tech stack. Join us if you can. 🔥

And remember, you can always send us your greetings, ideas, and thoughts by replying to this email. We’d love to hear from you! 💌

Until the next time! 👋