Desire

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

I’ve just read a LinkedIn post by a second-level connection (so quick disclaimer, I don’t know the author - Matthew Dodd). It opens with “I think the VP Sales job at Series A is the toughest role in B2B SaaS” and goes on to talk about a lot of the challenges and expectations, concluding that these founders are often expecting magicians.

It’s a good post, but I think in its dissection of those challenges, which include all of the things you would have seen if you’ve ever worked in a start-up; the immature product market fit, the lack of understanding of the ideal customer profile (ICP), and the pressure from investors (etc) there is something that is missing in this post.

The key thing that makes the job of sales and marketing in a startup impossible is the lack of demand.

Or for the purposes of this email newsletter, with the subject line chosen from a song title, Desire, as I select U2’s 1998 hit for my inspiration this week.

If a company does not know its ICP, is a bit loosey goosey on the product market fit to this ill-defined ICP, and is launching a product whose development and use case is, shall we say, “wet clay” - how on earth will they know the market size?

The level of desire for the product.

Yep, this is a super exciting product, and the founding team has found some early adopters that have proven a fit with that audience, but to scale this Series A thing to B, it needs to find a bigger, more mainstream audience of buyers.

This job falls to the newly hired VP of Sales, and sometimes those buyers just aren’t there.

Folks often use the terms “lead generation” and “demand generation” interchangeably, but if there is no demand in the market, no amount of lead generation effort will squeeze blood out of this stone.

Yes, it’s true, marketing can stimulate desire, but demand generation is a more challenging, slower, and more expensive marketing motion than just harvesting existing demand in a market or category through lead generation.

Coming into a business, as a new sales or marketing hire, the level of demand is a hard thing to know, but it’s the difference between strapping yourself to a rocket ship or a ticking time bomb.

You need some desire, otherwise, as the LinkedIn post shared, “the VP Sales job at Series A is the toughest role in B2B SaaS” (and that goes for marketing too!).

Aside from the original LinkedIn post, I’ve also included links to some other articles on this topic below - hope you find them useful.

Cheers!

Ian

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Ian Truscott | Managing Partner | Velocity B

What caught my eye on the topic and a bit more from me…

In the name of love! Oh, sorry, no, not that one….