Peep Laja, our very own Estonian B2B powerhouse, is a former champion of experimentation and optimization turned business builder. He is the founder of CXL, Speero, and Wynter. Peep runs his own podcast called How to Win which covers successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies, their strategies, tactics and challenges. Based on his extensive research, Peep has come up with a list of 15 winning strategies implemented by successful companies across the global field. He covers his finding’s in his latest podcast episode, which you can dig into here. Meanwhile, take a minute to absorb the basics:
1. A common pre-requisite is pre-existing demand. Successful B2B companies tap into what people already want and look for.
2. Listening to the customer. It's obvious but deserves a mention - winners are paying attention to customer needs, and adapting accordingly. Customer feedback as a superpower.
3. They started with feature-based differentiation, but then moved away from it as a key competitive advantage. Most spotted an opening in the market that they tackled via features or capabilities, but eventually moved over to other key strategies.
4. They're focused on a specific audience. If you're building for a very specific audience and solving a very specific problem, it's going to be very hard for anyone else to do that exact same thing.
5. They stay ahead of the competition with innovation by consistently investing in it. Being objectively better through innovation.
6. They're all in with content marketing across a variety of mediums. They use the content as a brand moat, as well as to build mental availability.
7. Educating the customer about what they do. For many companies, most future customers are using nothing right now. Non-consumption is a huge market opportunity, it’s what disruptive innovation is all about.
8. Create a community around the problem and/or identity of the target audience. Community is a helluva moat.
9. Process. This is especially important for professional services firms. What works at 15 headcount doesn't work at 50. Investing in process, ops, better internal data, staff training and culture moves agencies far.
10. Category creation. They focus on thinking long-term and are innovating beyond their existing category to fend off the growing competition. Many change what they've always been doing and how they've been framing it to accomplish that.
11. A very competitive free plan (free and as good as the competition's paid offering). The free product can be a moat. Even if you don't win the market, you're going to mess the market up enough for our competitors.
12. Piggyback on growing ecosystems. Attach yourself to growing platforms like Shopify and Wix. It’s also tied to the strategy of choosing your customers.
13. Culture. They're consciously creating a culture of excellence.
14. Moats. Winners invest in strong moats like network effects, brand, partner ecosystem (e.g. Shopify) or cornered resource (Contentstack).
15. They focus on the long-term. Winners are not transactional, but build relationships, reputation, goodwill. True win-wins over dark patterns.
Find out more by following Peep on LinkedIn.