EPISODE SUMMARY
“I coach founders to understand: here’s how you can set up your process such that it’s going to make sure your market knows that this is a problem and they know that your solution is THE one that’s going to be the answer to all of their needs.” – Matt Wolach
In this episode of the Niche, Please! Podcast, Xsellus founder and SaaS coach Matt Wolach shares two life-changing hacks anyone can implement today. First, knowing your ideal customer profile and the benefits your business can reap from it is crucial. Second, the importance of identifying the right platform where your market is.
Prior to becoming a SaaS coach, Matt has nearly 20 years of SaaS experience, including starting and scaling multiple SaaS companies. He also shares how his previous work experiences helped him delve into the field of SaaS. He addresses common misconceptions about SaaS and gives little nuggets of wisdom for software leaders out there that are just starting.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: Niche, Please!
Host: Skyler Irvine, Founder & CEO of RenzlerMedia and host of Niche, Please!
Guest: Matt Wolach, B2B SaaS sales coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
Know Your Ideal Customer Profile
As a B2B SaaS coach, Matt says he works with software companies that build a great product that solves a problem. However, these people have no idea how to take this product to the market and sell it.
The first piece of advice Matt shares is understanding your ideal customer profile or ICP. To make a sale, you have to know your buyer personas. You have to understand the people you are selling your product to.
“Because it’s so frustrating as a software founder when you come up with an idea, you know it’s going to take care of a situation that’s very painful, and yet nobody realizes it. They don’t understand what you are trying to do and how your product can help,” says Matt.
In many cases, people may not even understand that they have a problem. Make sure to target your market’s pain points. Let them know that this is a problem. Show them that the solution is your product, and it’s the one that’s going to answer all of their needs.
Know Where Your Market Is
To sell effectively, it’s important to figure out where your market is. Matt found LinkedIn to be the most effective platform for his SaaS coaching business since it’s a professional networking site. Most built SaaS companies and achieved of his clients are business people and software leaders. It could be Facebook or Twitter for others, depending on where your target audience is.
“LinkedIn works for me, but it may not work for everybody,” he tells Skyler. To find your market, you have to go back to your ICP and understand who the people you’re going after are. Once you understand them clearly, it makes it easier to identify where they congregate.
For instance, if you’re a realtor, Matt says real estate Facebook groups are a great place to start. Start to figure out the community, the lingo, how people interact with each other, and you have successfully identified where your market is.
Build Your Connections
After finding a niche that works, your next step is to build connections. Get more people from your market to be part of your community as you go. Share knowledge and educate your audience. It could be in the form of articles, videos, infographics, or simply short posts. Eventually, your market is going to love the value that you are putting out.
When posting educational content, another piece of advice from Matt is to focus on the problem and not on your product. Let your customers know what the main problem is. Talk about their pain points and bring up the challenge. Make sure they understand it and can identify with it.
Then talk about how to overcome that challenge and how your services or products can beat it. Speak from the point of wisdom and build trust from your connections.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Making the Big Jump: From a Corporate Executive to a Coach
To say that Matt has come a long way from being an employee to an entrepreneur is an understatement. He has witnessed struggles and wins with almost 20 years of experience in startups, including building and selling WebPT and Synlio.
“So software companies, they get started usually by technical people, people who built out a great product, they solved a problem. However, they have no idea how to sell it… And so they come to me so I can help them go to market.”
Ultimately, these experiences shaped Matt’s mission and led him to make the big jump: becoming a SaaS coach.
When he and his team were building SaaS companies and achieving success, people would come to him for advice. As a go-getter and a natural leader, Matt found it fulfilling to share the things he has learned along the way and helping people understand how they can overcome those challenges.
Matt tells Skyler, “And so I decided, hey, why don’t I just become a coach, help them do that, share what I’ve learned over the years, and make it easy for them to achieve all their goals and success?”
Coming out from his retirement, he founded and launched his coaching business, Xsellus. “For me, it’s very frustrating when I see people struggling who don’t know what to do,” he says. “I can make sure that they don’t have to go through those struggles. For me, that is so much fun.”
The top thing that ignites his passion for helping people is seeing the change and the progress. Matt says the people who come to him for help are more than just clients, but he treats them like family.
“When they put the trust of their entire life’s work into my hands, that tells me that they trust me, and so I want to make sure I reward that by taking as much care of them as I can.”
LinkedIn Success: Using the Right Platform to Your Advantage
Business owners, particularly startups, tend to make one mistake when building their presence online: attempting to excel on all or most social media platforms.
When choosing the right social media platform for your business, your audience is one of the main factors to consider. In Matt’s case as a coach, he found success on LinkedIn, with up to 85 percent of his business engagements rooting from the professional networking platform.
Since Matt’s clients are SaaS professionals and technical people looking to sell their services and products, he found that LinkedIn was the right platform for his business. “What I do is I just share value. I want to make sure that people who are struggling can get help, regardless of whether they’re working with me or not.”
Matt uses the platform to share knowledge with his audience by putting out articles, tips, and videos. Eventually, he gained a following from people who sought answers and advice. He tells Skyler, “I think that that is an excellent way to be able to generate a community, to be able to create a community of people who believe in you, who understand what you’re saying.”
This brilliant move worked for Matt and many of his clients who have seen similar results. People who look for solutions come to them for help, and eventually, these people grew into a following.
Aside from LinkedIn, Matt also shares that his clients also saw great results by building their brand on Twitter. It all boils down to finding the right platform for your business, especially where your audiences are, and then building your personal brand on that platform.
“It took me a long time to realize that you need to build your personal brand,” Matt shares.
“People want to connect with people much more than they do with a brand. It took me a long time to realize that. But now that I did, I have been able to put my own personal brand out there. And basically what I do is I just share value.”
TOP QUOTES
Matt Wolach
[03:15] “Seeing people who were struggling and frustrated, and then sharing with them some of the things that I’ve learned along the way and helping them understand how they can overcome those challenges, to me, was amazing.”
[04:17] “You have to understand your ideal customer profile, your ICP. You have to know your buyer personas and what we call your user personas.”
[05:22] “Make sure your market knows that this is a problem, and they know that your solution is the one that’s going to be the answer to all of their needs.”
[09:34] “People want to connect with people much more than they do with a brand.”
[11:13] “LinkedIn and Twitter are phenomenal ways to be able to build your brand, show the value that you can provide, and people will be drawn to you for it.”
[11:40] “Figure out where your market is, going back to our ICP and understanding who the people you’re going after are. Once you understand that clearly, it makes it easier to realize where they are.”
Skyler Irvine
[22:28] “Most people come up with their best ideas in the shower or while doing something else. And creating more moments for yourself is an insane productivity hack if you really break it down.”
For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com/.
