Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,
Few entrepreneurs have built a personal brand like Neil Patel. He’s one of the foremost voices in SEO and content-led growth—a voice and brand he’s turned into a multimillion dollar company with agency services, various SaaS tools, and more. Speaking with SAAS NORTH ahead of his keynote address at the 2024 conference, Neil shared four growth tips for SaaS founders.
Key takeaways:
- See if you can give something away for free that customers are used to paying for; use this as a marketing channel.
- When hiring employees or third-party agencies, ensure the person has done the job before—they can have potential in other areas, but need direct competency in their role.
- Use M&A to create cross-sell opportunities and a larger, integrated platform you can use to target larger customers from day one.
Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW
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Growth is a unique game; campaigns that work for one company may not work for another, even if the organizations are similar.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t principles that all company leaders can take inspiration from. Neil Patel has a lot of experience in this arena, using his dogged focus on marketing to grow a multimillion dollar business across services, SaaS, and digital products.
Speaking with SAAS NORTH ahead of his 2024 keynote address, Neil shared four growth principles any founder can use.
1. Unexpected gifts make great marketing
A key part of growing any new startup is building trust with customers. One of Neil’s favourite methods to achieve that trust is giving something away for free. But not just anything—specifically, giving something away for free that people typically expect to pay for.
For example, let’s say you’re a new InsurTech selling health and life insurance policies in the B2B space. What could you give away? Neil’s response: payroll software.
“People are used to paying for payroll software,” said Neil. [So] give away free payroll software, sell them on health insurance. If you buy payroll software, you usually need health insurance as well; health insurance is the bigger market.”
When it comes to allocating this cost, Neil said to take it from your paid ads budget: “It’s cheaper to give away something for free in many cases than it is to spend the dollars on marketing.”
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2. Hire people who have done it before
This might be controversial in startup circles, but Neil doesn’t hire for potential.
That’s not to say he doesn’t like people with potential to grow further, but he only hires individuals for roles who have done those roles in the past.
“We look on LinkedIn to see who’s worked at one of our competitors, doing the exact same job that we’re looking for, and that they’ve done it successfully—they got promoted many times and stayed at that company for a while,” said Neil. “That usually means they’re good; they already did the job that we’re looking to get done, for our competition, so there’s a good chance they can do it again.”
Neil’s reasoning for this approach is that a seasoned professional can hit the ground running and teach others about their discipline. In the end, this reduces costs and error rate, all leading to growth.
“If someone has already done it before and they’ve done it really well, they’ll be able to run any time,” said Neil. “If you have to teach people or learn on the job, you’re going to make mistakes. As a business, time is money. The less mistakes you make, the faster you’re going to grow.”
3. Use M&A to fill customer gaps
Neil is known for his acquisitions, for instance SEO tool Ubersuggest. And while this was strategic for the company as a whole, Neil’s approach to M&A is more practical.
Step 1: Talk to current customers about the additional needs or problems they have. See if you can acquire a business that delivers on those needs or solves those problems, creating immediate cross-sell opportunities.
Step 2: Learn about the existing customers of the newly-acquired business and do the same process as step one, seeing if you can cross-sell those customers to your initial business’ offerings.
Step 3: Use the combined offerings to attract new, potentially larger customers.
Step 4: Repeat. Neil added that his company has a dedicated integrations team to help with any technology connectivity. On top of that, sales teams begin working together immediately, each teaching the other their style. With those two steps in mind, full integrations can take 1-2 years, said Neil, as he doesn’t want to jar any customers and give time for teams to fully collaborate.
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4. If working with agencies, double-check for competency
Working with lean teams against long hiring timelines, startups might turn to agencies and consultancies for support.
This can supercharge capacity, but Neil cautioned to check two levels of comptency first: make sure both the company and the employee on your file has expertise in your area.
Too often, said Neil, agencies will have a core competency but staff individuals with little to no experience in a specific niche. This might work for larger accounts with small armies behind them, but a startup needs individuals who have done the job before—an insight stemming from Neil’s hiring practices.
“You have to make sure the company has experience, and the employee on your account also has the experience,” said Neil. “I know that sounds a little silly, but you’ll be shocked [by] what people know or don’t know, especially when that organization has thousands of employees.”