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In this week's newsletter: Why Every b2b SaaS CEO Should Be Doing Due Diligence.
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Weekly Briefing No. 173
by Edwin Abl

Hey — It's Ed. Welcome to my weekly briefing. 

Quick Reminder: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my weekly newsletter. It's not a link dump of "hey, here's what I'm listening to and reading." It's 7+ articles, with summaries, notes, views, and commentary, spanning topics on leadership, B2B SaaS marketing, SaaS GTM, sales, well-being, or other interesting finds from around the web. Occasionally, I send long-form articles on leadership, marketing, and personal growth.

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==> In this week's briefing: 

  • How to plan more effectively 
  • The hardest lessons for start-ups to learn 
  • How to test regret minimisation
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IDEAS FROM ME  📈

1. I’m reading: Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition by Cindy Barnes, Helen Blake and David Pinder. PS: If you are struggling with a clear value proposition and need help with yours, drop me an email to discuss. 

2. We all love to plan—both in life and business. Ultimately, long-term plans are prone to failure. It’s rare everything works out as you thought it would. Perhaps, it’s better not to have such prescriptive or unrealistic plans in the first place. In an ever-changeable world, it’s more important to look at alternative thinking too long-term planning. 

Before I enumerate alternatives to a long-term plan, first, let me tell you shouldn’t do:

  • Plan more carefully
  • Add a larger margin of error

Here are the alternatives to long-term planning. It’s borrowed from product/ software development. The best ideas are often stolen from the non-obvious ways of doing things. 

3. How to invest time. 

HINT: Move away from “To-do lists” into “Leverage lists.” 

Why To-do lists are broken

 

4. I have always held this belief (when brand building for SaaS), you need to consider the concept of “building a like-able brand”. This is the heart of the story. You can see how I wrote about that in 2018 here

Seth Godin’s The likeable brand (or person) take is more simplistic; he calls out, “It’s simple: Like your customers, and they’re more likely to like you back.” An interesting angle to think about when you think about how to build engagement with your customers or audience. 

5. Everyone wants to “build a community”. I’m sure every content strategy plan I have viewed comes with that caveat. How often is it successful? I’d never say aside from a few leading SaaS brands. The reasoning for failure is down to many factors. Still, the most prevalent is that “A community is about serving a need and supporting people in a specific context.” Companies get this wrong. 

It causes Communities to be too noisy. Reflect on why it won’t work before executing this strategic idea. 

6. The hardest lessons for startups to learn.

As a startup, the ability to focus is your best advantage against a big incumbent. Any one of your bigger competitors will have many more resources (both money and people) than you do. Your competitive edge is the ability to tackle a narrower market or use case and grow your business from that thin wedge.
 

 

WELL-BEING  🧠 

7. I finished reading Life Force By Tony Robbins. Some people like him. Others don’t.

However, it’s a compelling read on the future of health, well-being and fulfilment. The last section covers “the mind” with a powerful end statement on how it’s essential to commit to living “in a beautiful state”. If we all did this, we might worry less about trivial things to focus on what’s important. 

"By consciously and committing to live in a beautiful state, you can enjoy so much more of life and give more to your family and others. It simply means to find the beauty, find something to be grateful for, something to appreciate and then solve your problems. Regardless of what happens, your life will have meaning because you’ll find the beauty and make it all you want to be."

 
 

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One more thing...Thanks for reading.

Enjoy your day. And if you like this newsletter and want to support it, forward it to a friend 🤝, tweet me 👏, or if you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here.

Thanks, 
Ed 

 

 🤔 Here's one short tip on improving marketing execution — Why Every b2b SaaS CEO Should Be Doing Due Diligence.

Over the last two years, I've worked on 15+ due diligence projects on SaaS companies. The "audit" or "DD" process is on behalf of venture capital firms' pre-investment. 

The truth is, 90% of them were calling out similar issues. 

Here's the breakdown: 

• Team Capabilities 
• Value proposition, positioning, audience building and go-to-market 
• Too little structure (playbooks) or too much structure 
• Mis-aligned go-to-market plan 
• Brand building 
• Marketing channels, i.e. no details 

Due Diligence tends to happen when you are seeking the next round of investment (i.e. I operate between £2m - £15m ARR). But now, intelligent CEOs are looking at audits pre-investment before moving into the discussions on funding. 

Why is it essential every SaaS CEO should be doing due Diligence? 

Here's why: 

• Understand current gaps and blockers 
• Validate your strategy is working and accurate 
• Create clarity around value proposition and positioning 
• Stop spending on the wrong things 
• Speed up the growth plan 
• Confident in solving problems in the business to your board  
• You can't do everything or know everything. But it's helpful being told *exactly* what you need to do 

Often this process can save you six-nine months. 

Like magic, you'll wake up the following day (post-DD) with *absolute* clarity on how to solve challenges and the roadmap in your current phase to sustainable growth. 
 

 

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CAN WE WORK TOGETHER?

This newsletter is my passion project. I hope it helps you gain deeper insight and equips you to learn at the pace needed to keep up. Many readers have asked about how we can work together. In case you’re interested, I do three things.

(1) DUE DILIGENCE FOR INVESTORS & CEOs: A bespoke framework and capability model ‘DEMAND KARMA’ that delivers DD services to investors and VC/PE firms.

(2) ADVISORY: Retained advisory at funded scale-ups. A simple monthly fee. It’s like getting a subscription to your own Chief Marketing Officer. Helping CEOs build a scalable marketing machine.

(3) MENTORING: Designed for people looking to get to the next level — Director, VP and new CxO. My sweet spot is helping to mentor developing VPs / "Head of"  / aspiring leaders to step into the CxO role.

If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit. 

Click here to schedule a call.
 
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Edwin Abl · 32 Lavender Sweep · London, London SW11 1HA · United Kingdom