Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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So my name is Girish. I've done a couple of SaaS companies. I was the co-founder and CEO of a company called RecruiterBox, which I exited in 2018. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Sprinter right now. We help other SaaS companies move up market by helping them with security compliances. Right. So, you know,
How many here are actually in the journey from moving from an SMB-ish kind of a space to an upmarket space? All right, fair number. I usually try to preface this by asking, should you really move upmarket? It's a good question to ask. Moving upmarket comes with all of its good things. You have better LTVs, lower churn. You have all the nice things like your products, probably more defensible.
You take your destiny in your own hands. And it helps you increase your time. It gives you a little bit more headroom if you're primarily in the SMB space, which is noisy, et cetera. However... Moving upmarket when you're a largely SMB business is fraught with its own problems. It can kill your business if you do it in a manner that's not right.
It can completely distract your entire team in a manner that you neither have your SMB business anymore nor do you have your upmarket business. Or you might be able to do it in a manner where you're not really taking it seriously.
So I've seen a lot of companies fall into one of the two brackets where you never quite make the move or you make the move in a manner that actually potentially doesn't do this in a manner that it kind of kills your business in a manner.
Over the next few minutes, I'm going to talk about some specific things that you should do in that sequence that will actually help you make this move more deliberately in a manner that actually makes sense. And you know what's happening at every stage of the steps. And that's the way I've seen this happen, both with my previous company and as a part of Sprinto.
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Chapter 2: What are the challenges of moving from SMB to upmarket?
Some of you might have already read this. And if you haven't done that, you should really get to read the book. And it gives you a specific set of steps about what you need to do as you're trying to get to a different market than what you're already at. And the important bit over here is where you start from. The point that you start from is competitiveness. Alternatives.
What that means is, what is it that your customers, your upmarket customers are already doing today? What are you competing with? Are you competing with a spec sheet? Are you competing with another competitor? Are you competing with an intern maybe for the problem that you're solving?
Chapter 3: Why is it important to know if you should move upmarket?
And you start from there and then you sort of drill it down to, you know, knowing what are the key attributes of your product that will help them meet and fix those problems. Then you come down to the values that you want to talk about and so on and so forth. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about this. April does a much better job of talking about this. There's a whole book on this.
I highly, highly recommend it. But this process, this rigor of going through these steps will really, really help you nail down what exactly you are selling and to whom you're selling them to. I highly recommend that.
Having done that, when you know the rough section of the market that you're selling to, roughly what is it that you're going to do, I would recommend going through this thing called the value proposition canvas. Again, there's a ton of literature on this already online. You can Google this, get a lot of information about this.
The point that I'd like to emphasize over here is that this is a long, exhaustive exercise. It's about sitting down and writing all the features, all the pain points, all the pain relievers, all the gain creators that you have for your customers, and this becomes like a long spreadsheet that typically you do inside of your company.
Again, exhausting, academic-looking exercise, but very, very crucial that you do this. I think the most important point that I want to say here is that everything that I talked about, nailing your ICP, talking to your customers, getting down to your value prop canvas, this seems like a lot of work, and it almost looks academic, but this is not the stuff that you outsource to your
VP sales or your product manager. This is stuff that you as a founder need to nail down. This is stuff that you need to figure out yourself. And the mistake to do when you're trying to move up market is to believe that everything that's true in your SMB segment is going to be hold true over here. You need to look at this as a net new thing, and you need to start fresh.
And then you need to do this as seriously and as rigorously as it requires. So that's the first step. You need to know where you're going, else you're going to fall short of gas somewhere on the way, and you don't want to be there. Right. Having figured out where you're going, now you need to make sure that you can prep your car so that you reach where you're going.
And you need to translate that into actual items that you can execute. So far, this is an exercise that is extremely founder-centric. Maybe one or two people in your company are doing a lot of these conversations. Now you need to translate it to actual things that will help you actually penetrate that market and get into the market.
The most important thing to realize and the difference that happens as you're moving from an SMB segment to an upmarket segment is that as you move more upmarket, you're talking to people that are more risk averse.
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Chapter 4: What are the first steps to take when moving upmarket?
And you need to be able to speak their language as you move up market. This is crucial. Otherwise, you seem like you're a fish out of water. This doesn't make sense to them. The last thing that I'd say is that you need to put all of these things together into a package that's coherent, that's cohesive.
And that means putting together these things about, think deeply about how exactly do you reach your customer? What is it that they need in order to actually make sense of this whole thing as a package? That means stuff like case studies. They need sales collateral.
You need to arm your salespeople with the ammunition that they need to be able to put these things together and make a consistent story to your customers.
That usually means I've typically seen the specific way to make this work is to separate out your sales team that goes off market versus the sales team that actually serves SMB because that allows you to learn and iterate and train them differently because otherwise there's a lot of stuff that doesn't translate quite well.
So the simplest thing that you can do is to separate the two teams, and you need to make sure that this is working the way you expect it to be. Right. The part three that I'm going to talk about is this is a place where until now, you as a founder were closely involved. You were doing everything that's required. You were extremely hands-on on how you're doing these things.
Now comes the part where if this works, and if you're lucky, this is getting your early customers, then you need to convert this into an engine that doesn't depend on you. This needs to run by itself where you can watch over it, but it doesn't necessarily depend on you. It doesn't require you to be there for its day-to-day operations.
The first thing that I talk about, I think Dan Martell is here, either in the room or somewhere here, and he talked about doing a triple review. And I think it's a great idea. What that fundamentally says is that every once a week, you're picking up a sales call, and you have your head of product, your head of marketing, your head of sales analyze that call.
You need to be looking at this together. And you're looking at ways of improving what's really happening in that call, what are the gaps, the three things that went well, three things that could have gone better. And this really allows everybody to come to common language about what needs to happen to be able to do these things.
So you got it right, but you need to keep iterating this engine in a manner that it keeps getting right. Because your market could change. Your customers could change. There are things that could change. And you need to make sure that this is running as an engine outside of you. The leaders in your organization need to be able to participate. and make this work.
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