How to Test and Validate Your Ideal Customer Profile – In Just 7 Minutes with Collin Stewart

Resources/Links:

• Download your copy of “Market Fit Matrix Template”.https://predictablerevenue.com/matrix

Summary

Collin Stewart is the co-CEO of Predictable Revenue and Outbound Automation software. He oversees product strategy, works with Aaron Ross the other co-founder to lead their Revenue team and hosts the Predictable Revenue Podcast.

In this episode, Collin shares how he helps entrepreneurs and growing startup companies avoid pitfalls like nailing a niche, hiring and people issues, metrics and CRM adoption to get their outbound program off the ground and drive faster, more predictable revenue growth.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:26 – Collin’s ideal client: We typically work with growth startup companies, a million to 10 million, somewhere in that range.
• 01:36 – Problem he helps solve: Top of the funnel. A lot of the companies we deal with they don’t understand, they’ve got a bunch of their early growth from their network, from inbound, from people that know the founders. And so, we help them make the jump from where you need to go from customers are coming to you, too, you now need to go out and sell to those customers
• 02:34 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Collin: Plateaued growth. They’re beholden to one channel, whether it’s inbound partners, referrals, network, etc.
• 03:28 – Common mistakes people make when trying to solve that problem: companies asking their salespeople to prospect, close, and manage accounts.
• 05:24 – Collin’s Valuable Free Action(VFA):“Once you’ve made the commitment to building an outbound team, one of the things we see people scrub a lot is they don’t spend any time validating their target account list. And so basically, we’ve developed a methodology, I’m going to share in three minutes with you on how you can do that.”
• 05:50 – Collin’s Valuable Free Resource(VFR): Download your copy of “Market Fit Matrix Template”.https://predictablerevenue.com/matrix
• 08:12 – Q: “How to put the Market Fit Matrix into practice??” A: the answer to that is you make sure you’re running one experiment per row. So, if you look at the doc that we provided that’s 40 experiments. For each experiment, typically, we look at a sample size of 300 to 500 contacts. If you’re using email on LinkedIn, 50 to 100 contacts, and then your messaging should be fairly soft. It should be focused on, are you the best person on your team to ask about this. And then a strong follow up is, ‘Hey, would you mind letting me know if this isn’t relevant? I don’t really want to be a bother’. And maybe that’s the Canadian bit we added in at the end there but we found those sorts of to follow-ups to be, those, the CTA and follow up to be.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“People just rush to tactics, but you got to get the strategy right.” -@CollinYVR Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland: 0:09
Hello everyone, a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. My name is Tom Poland, joined today by Collin Stewart. Collin, good day, a very warm welcome. Where are you hanging out sir?

Collin Stewart: 0:19
I’m in Vancouver today.

Tom Poland: 0:20
Vancouver today. Okay. And where are you tomorrow, I guess that you travel a bit?

Collin Stewart: 0:26
Travel a little bit, we have an office here in Vancouver. We have an office in Cancun, and then my co-founders moving to in Bora in a couple of months.

Tom Poland: 0:32
Wow. Don’t you just love the whole remote business model thing?

Collin Stewart: 0:35
You betcha.

Tom Poland: 0:36
So much fun, so much flexibility. And no sort of nine to five commute and knows they’re getting stuck in rush hour traffic for 90 minutes. Folks, for those of you, don’t know Collin, he’s the co-CEO of Predictable Revenue, a highly successful business, you’re going to find a little bit more about. And also, co-CEO of Outbound Automation software, which sounds like something I want to know about. He oversees product strategy, works with Aaron Ross, the other co-founder to lead their Revenue team and hosts the Predictable Revenue Podcast. Collin, as I said, very warm welcome. Thanks for giving your time up.
The title today is, “How to Test and Validate Your Ideal Client Profile, which every marketer knows the bedrock, the foundation stone for all marketing. And we’re going to show you how to do that in just seven minutes. Collin, our time starts now.
Question number one is, who is your ideal client?

Collin Stewart: 1:26

We typically work with growth startup companies, a million to 10 million, somewhere in that range.

Tom Poland: 1:32
Perfect. And question number two is, what is the problem you solve?

Collin Stewart: 1:36

Top of the funnel. A lot of the companies we deal with they don’t understand, they’ve gotten a bunch of their early growth from their network, from inbound, from people that know the founders. And so, we help them make the jump from, you know, when you need to go from, customers are coming to you, to, you now need to go out and sell to those customers.

Tom Poland: 1:53
So, it’s really, it’s like, it’s time to go boom. You need more volume, you need to scale. We got to retain the quality; we’re going to get some numbers into those baby.

Collin Stewart: 2:02
Exactly. You make that, you have that realization that we’re not going to hit our growth numbers if we’re just relying on inbound, if we’re just relying on word of mouth. And so, to solve, yeah, we basically build-remote sales teams and we’ve got a bunch of other stuff to do to help companies figure out how to get the most under our teams.

Tom Poland: 2:19
Perfect. Thank you. So just under six minutes left, question number three, what would you say are the typical symptoms of the companies that are coming to you before they find your solution? What are they experiencing? What are the symptoms, plateaued growth in sales? What else are they experiencing?

Collin Stewart: 2:34
Exactly, plateaued growth. They’re beholden to one channel, whether it’s inbound partners, referrals, network, etc. And they feel frustrated because they can’t, they haven’t been able to find a way to sort of reignite that growth. You know, maybe they jumped from zero to a couple million in revenue, and then it’s just sort of their, their revenue sort of, revenue growth is totally plateaued as you said.

Tom Poland: 2:56
And that creates all sorts of constraints on funding development, future growth, hiring, expansion.

Collin Stewart: 3:01
Yeah. Especially if you have investors.

Tom Poland: 3:03
Yeah. Definitely knocking at the door, thumping the kitchen table. All right, the boardroom table, I should say. So, five minutes left, question number four, you’re going to have a bunch of clients that come to you and before they discover Predictable Revenue, they’re going to try stuff and they’re going to make mistakes. And maybe they’re going to throw money on billboard advertising, I don’t know. But what are people telling you with a common mistake they made before they found your solution?

Collin Stewart: 3:28
Yeah, I mean, we see a large number of people that just, they sort of read Predictable Revenue, and they say, hey, this is, you know, we want to sprinkle some Predictable Revenue on the company. And if you haven’t read the book, it’s basically a methodology for specializing your sales roles. So instead of having one salesperson that does the prospecting, closing, and account management, then we split those into three different roles. And so, I think the biggest mistake that we see most commonly is companies asking their salespeople to prospect, close, and manage accounts. Because what happens is, essentially, you’re trying to stack, in the best-case scenario, you’re trying to stack million-dollar salespeople on top of each other, right?
In the first, if I’m a sales rep, and I’ve been a sales rep for a very long time, the first year or two of being a rep, you’re prospecting, right? Then you’re closing, right? Then you take, eventually, you start to get some traction, you turn all that prospecting into some customers, and then you turn those customers into long term accounts, and then you just work the accounts. And this is a typical, sort of, the life cycle of a salesperson. And so, if you want to add more millions, you need to add more salespeople, because eventually, say for a three-year cycle, after three years, now they’re just managing a million dollars’ worth of accounts. But you have nobody focused on bringing in net new accounts because the salespeople that are there, they don’t want to go back to prospecting.

Tom Poland: 4:45
And there’s very few salespeople that can do all of those roles, as well as each other role, you know, normally you would get someone who’s really good at the prospecting and someone’s ready to go to the closing and so on. And I’ve read the book, folks, it’s practical, it’s real. It’s born out of real-world issues and observations of what working what doesn’t work in an office real-world solution.
In other words, it’s not just like a lot of books where it’s just a brochure, you know, thick brochure for someone’s services, it’s really worth getting that book, Predictable Revenue. So, we’ve got just under three minutes left. So, what we’re after now is we’re after one valuable free action that an audience member can take, that’s not going to solve the whole problem, but it’s just going to take them a step in the right direction.

Collin Stewart: 5:24
So, once you’ve made the commitment to building an outbound team, one of the things we see people scrub a lot is they don’t spend any time validating their target account list. And so basically, we’ve developed a methodology, I’m going to share in three minutes with you on how you can do that.

Tom Poland: 5:40
Go bananas. So, question number six then, two minutes, 20 seconds left, what’s one valuable free resource that we can direct people to that’s going to help them more with this problem?

Collin Stewart: 5:50
So, we have a market fit matrix template that basically will help you, will provide a framework for testing your target market. Testing and validating your target market. Essentially, there’s three different hypotheses that you want to test, right? There’s your messaging, there’s your targeting, and there’s your need. And you need to come up with ways of testing and validating each of those. And so, by following the market fit matrix, you’re going to get a very quick version of how to actually get some data on who are the right customers.

Tom Poland: 6:19
And it’s nice and simple, folks, it’s a Google Sheet. So, what you want to do is you want to go to predictablerevenue.com/matrix, and don’t expect a big long sales page, because it’s really simple. Just get in there, pop first name, email address in there, and you’ll get access to that Google Sheet.
And you know, if I can chip in from my two balls worth as a marketer, this is, people just rush to tactics, and you got to get the strategy right. And as I said right at the start, the cornerstone strategy for the whole thing is figuring out who your ideal client is, and might I add also, how you’re going to reach them, and what is the message that they’re going to respond to. And that’s all covered off in the market fit matrix. Thanks for that, Collin. One minute left. Question number seven, what’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t?

Collin Stewart:7:02
Basically, how to put it into practice? And so, the answer to that is you make sure you’re running one experiment per row. So, if you look at the doc that we provided that’s 40 experiments. For each experiment, typically, we look at a sample size of 300 to 500 contacts. If you’re using email on LinkedIn, 50 to 100 contacts, and then your messaging should be fairly soft. It should be focused on, are you the best person on your team to ask about this.
And then a strong follow up is, ‘Hey, would you mind letting me know if this isn’t relevant? I don’t really want to be a bother.’ And maybe that’s the Canadian bit we added in at the end there but we found those sorts of to follow-ups to be, those, the CTA and follow up to be.

Tom Poland: 7:40
I think it’s a human bit.

Collin Stewart 7:42
Yeah.

Tom Poland: 7:43
Collin Stewart, thanks so much for your time.

Collin Stewart: 7:45
Thanks, Tom.

Tom Poland: 7:47
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.