Peep Laja

Wynter

There have never been as many brands as there are today. To win in these saturated markets, you must speed up your target customer feedback loops. 

Can you list your target customer’s top 3 priorities and pain points? 
What about the top channels they use to learn more about the types of solutions you sell?

If you don’t, your go-to-market plan is flawed.

Wynter can tell you almost anything you want to know about your ICPs and what they think about you. 

• B2B message testing
• Target customer surveys
• On-demand ICP interviews and sales meetings
• B2B user testing

Verified B2B audiences, target by title and industry. Everything is self-serve and on-demand. 
Answers delivered in 12-48 hrs.

Chairman of the Board

CXL is the world leader helping determined marketers become the top 1% in the world. 

We identify the best marketing practitioners in the world and get them to teach what they know. Our courses are in-depth, follow performance-focused training methods, and get you the results you seek.

Speero

Speero, formerly known as CXL agency, is a consultancy I founded in 2011. I was the active CEO until 2016, and have been a board member since.

Founder and Principal of this conversion optimization agency. Back then known as CXL, later rebranded to Speero.

Principal

Traindom

I founded a SaaS startup for building and selling online courses. It was ahead of it's time. Didn't work out in the end. Lots of lessons learned that help me turn my next venture - CXL - into a major success.

Head of Marketing, co-founder

Panama Internet Marketing

Consulting company focused on digital marketing - high-converting websites, PPC and SEO services. Digital strategy, consulting and execution. I did a lot of lead generation and conversion optimization work for real estate, travel and hospitality industry for companies in Central America.

Digital Marketing Consultant, founder

Real24.ae

I was heading marketing and sales for an online real estate portal in the United Arab Emirates. 

I was responsible for the directing setting and vision building of the company. My responsibilities included business development, strategic and operational management of sales and marketing (both, B2B and B2C), managing the sales team, brand management, product development. I was the spokesperson for the company.

Head of Sales and Marketing

AIESEC UAE

•	Main responsibilities: overall organization country operations management, client partnership management & selling, service product development, staff training and coaching
•	Main experience and knowledge gained: strategic management, project management, sales & negotiation skills, persuasion and communication skills, working in a multi-cultural environment, creating synergy between different entities, coaching and mentoring.

Vice President Sales and Marketing

•	Main responsibilities: managing relationships with partner companies, raising new partnerships, coordinating national sales teams, networking and representing the organization in external events, managing PR for the organization, strategic country operations development, coaching and mentoring.
•	Main experience and knowledge gained: selling and negotiating, developing sustainable partnerships, networking, managing different sales teams, project management, strategic management, public relations, and product development.

Vice President External & Public Relations

Playtech

•	Main responsibilities: managing corporate accounts, servicing international clients, giving assistance to use our products.
•	Main experience and knowledge gained: Handling large corporate accounts, fast and efficient communication, problem solving and crisis management, overall understanding of global business, working together with many entities to complete tasks.

Customer Success

Millen MG

•	Main responsibilities: managing IT projects, working together with clients on completing the tasks, web development, and database design. 
•	Experience and knowledge gained: project management, web programming, system analysis and client relationship management.

Web Developer

CEO @ Wynter. 3x Founder. Insights over assumptions. Host of How to Win podcast.

Most of your future revenues are gonna come from future customers. 

If you knew *exactly* what your target customers

think about your category (and your company in particular),
what their top priorities and very big problems are,
what unsaturated channels they use to learn about solutions, 

this is what'd happen to your business:

- you'd nail your messaging, speaking exactly to their pain points
- your conversion rates would go up because your pitch resonates better,
- your CAC would go down as you'd use the right channels with the right message,
- you'd create more meaningful content that moves the dial,
- you'd be more deliberate and accurate in providing more value at every touch point,
- you'd know how to price your products to maximize willingness to pay,
- you'd know how to differentiate,
- you'd know where your go-to-market strategy is off, and could fix it. 
 
The beautiful thing?

You can know all of this with Wynter in under 48 hours.

How often does your website home page messaging change?

I don't mean tweaking a single word, but considerable changes: tweaking the value prop, removing and/or adding sections, rewriting the copy.

Don't do marketing until your team knows

- the top 3 big problems of your ICPs
- what are the symptoms the target customer is feeling because of those pains
- what's the value of solving those problems
- what triggers them to seek out solutions like yours
- the channels ICPs use to learn more about your category of tools
- who in the company owns the budget for it
- what the buying process is generally like. 

Invest 1% of your go-to-market budget into knowing this, to make the other 99% go much farther.

If you're in B2B, you can find out the answers in 48 hrs using Wynter.

I surveyed B2B SaaS CMOs and VP marketing folks on their go-to-market challenges.

Here's what I learned. 

What part of their GTM is underachieving (the most): messaging, value propositions, and differentiated messaging.

Sample quotes:
"We operate in a professional services space which is rather commoditized. It's difficult to craft messaging that communicates what differentiates us from lower-priced options." 

"Sharpening competitive differentiation, and turning that into a 'why it matters' to our customers enough to be consequential in their decision making cycles." 

"Our value prop and messaging isn't very differentiated. There are many vendors that sound like us according to prospects." 

#2 Understanding and targeting the ideal customer profile (ICP)

"We have built a niche product in an otherwise commoditized, competitive space. But, we have struggled to identify a profile/ICP that rationalizes or identifies a target that would care about our niche approach." 
"Clearly defining and gaining enough insights on our ICP - and then marketing team working in alignment with product & sales teams." 

#3 Lack of alignment and internal understanding

"To align all the departments and the company to the same strategy, and have a consistent communication." 
"Getting consistency across all team members/sales people and having them actively work in conjunction with our stated differentiators." 

TOP SYMPTOMS THEY ARE EXPERIENCING DUE TO KEY CHALLENGES

#1 Ineffective marketing and sales efforts

"Low conversion rate on opportunities generated by marketing." 
"It is hard for prospects to understand what we do, which can negatively impact every stage of the funnel and customer journey." 

#2 Difficulty in articulating value and differentiation

"Getting 'at bats' on deals from customers in our ICP and holding the line on our premium price point." 
"What we think is a material differentiation against our competitors isn't always seen as a priority to our prospect, or existing customers."

#3 Challenges with customer understanding and targeting

"Wasted ad spend, wasted campaign spend. We are producing pipeline but we could be more efficient." 
"It makes it very difficult to articulate a value proposition and messaging that compels prospects to learn more and ultimately buy." 

TOP CORRELATIONS AND CONTRASTS 

1. Customer understanding and targeting: 

Challenges with understanding and targeting the ICP are linked to difficulties in articulating value and differentiation. Makes sense.

2. Alignment and understanding: 

There is a clear correlation between the challenges of internal alignment and ineffective marketing and sales efforts. Need better internal communication.

3. Differentiation and messaging: 

Respondents who struggle with differentiation and messaging also report problems with articulating value and differentiation.

Which... makes sense. If you're not actually different, can't do differentiated messaging either.

The overwhelming majority of business books are written for large organizations. 

- Hire the very best people (every book)
- Pay way above the market (from "No rules rules")
- Managers should spend most of their time in 1:1s and coaching (from "Radical candor")

All good advice. But unrealistic for most bootstrapped startups and SMBs. 

The reality is that:

- You can only hire the best people you can afford 
- You can pay what you can pay, it is impossible to compete with the Googles and Netflixes of the world
- Every manager is mostly an individual contributor

... and so on.

The bootstrapped startup book would have to teach entrepreneurs how to deal with these and other realities of not enough time, money and people.

For instance - "hire the best". When today's top AI engineers get paid $1M sign-on bonuses, there is just no way for small businesses to compete on salaries. 

As a small company, you're like the bottom of the league sports club... like Detroit Pistons in the NBA last seasons.  

The top talent wouldn't wanna play for the Pistons because they want to win trophies. As soon as a top-tier team comes shopping, they'll happily upgrade. You can't match their pay, you can't match their prestige. 

So you need to scout for unproven talent. 

I've done this many times where I found a future superstar early, while I could still afford them. Before they moved on to Hubspot or Shopify or whatever. 

The same goes for all the other things. The famous business book wisdom often just doesn't match the realities on the ground, and different advice is needed. 

Change how you talk about something, and it can change how people think about you.

Before Wynter was Wynter, it was called Copytesting. What it did was it enabled you to test your website copy. We talked about copy optimization.

Every problem is either a mouse problem or an elephant problem.

The problem is that for most organizations, optimizing copy is a mouse problem. 

It's the domain of copywriters (mostly people without power and budget) and lower level marketers. The VP does not care. The CEO does not spend her time thinking about it. It's very tactical.

However it's close cousin messaging is strategic. The VP himself participates in messaging workshops. The CEO cares and contributes. There's budget because it's a central piece of a company's go to market strategy.

By changing the frame of what you focus on you can move up the value chain.




Hiring proven talent takes a ton of money.

As a bootstrapped startup or SMB, you can't play that game. You need to get good at spotting underappreciated or overlooked talent. 

Get better at scouting and interviewing.

Over the years, I've hired many great people. Some of it was luck. 

Some things I've observed that work to find and recruit underappreciated and affordable talent:

- Academia. Folks in academia are smart but underpaid; often done with the politics in academia and ready to move on. 
- Personal brand. A lot of my hiring success has been because some folks want to work alongside me personally. This makes the talent come to me, and I am very grateful for it. Put yourself out there, founders. 
- Agency people. The fact is that most VC-backed tech company people are used to getting a certain pay level - which is undoable for most SMBs and bootstrapped startups. VC-backed companies get talent by paying more, it makes sense. However, folks working at agencies are usually much more affordable AND come with strong skills, having worked on a ton of different companies. Similarly to academia folks, often burnt out by too many clients and would love to work for just one company. 

What they say about talent being everything is so true. Mediocrity is an underappreciated killer. In most cases, "somebody" is not better than nobody.

Hiring a mediocre somebody will speed you up next week, but can make you lose years. 

Too many companies spend too little time on problem definition. Instead, they jump right into discussing solutions.

"our pipeline is down, need to get to X, what do we do?
"we could launch a campaign for BFCM"
"that could work, what's our offer?"
and so it goes.

The first suggested solution now gets most of the thinking time.

Defining problems is much harder than solving problems.

Which is often why companies are solving the wrong problems. Attacking symptoms and urgent flames over root causes.

But putting out flames does not put out the fire.

You cannot solve a problem you don't fully understand. Understanding means knowing exactly what to do.

Fast paced environments and the pressure to meet weekly goals makes us jump at quick conclusions, so we can take quick action.

Taking quick action towards something is creating the illusion that progress is being made but in reality the root cause remains unfixed.

The reason your pipeline is down might be because you have an undifferentiated product in a saturated category, dominated by huge companies, and you're going after the same customers as them.

Your go to market strategy might be off in critical places, but here you are, planning a BFCM campaign to address the symptoms.

Take time to get very clear on the problem. Run a dedicated meeting to discuss only problems and root causes (while not confusing symptoms and true problems).

Take the extra day or two to challenge your thinking, identify the gaps of "we don't know really", and bring target customer insights to where assumptions currently rule.

Get to the root cause problem before jumping to fixes.



Find an important, unsolved problems of your target buyer. 

If you can rank your customer's problems in the order of importance AND current satisfaction level, your go-to-market machine gets much more effective. 

In your ICP interviews and surveys, you can learn a lot about their pain points. You can then do further validation on how many of your ICPs feel that this is an issue, and most importantly -- they're not happy with how this is solved right now. 

Jobs-to-be-done framework gives us 2 questions to ask:

1. How important is [X] for you? 1 to 10p scale. 
2. What's your current satisfaction level for solving it? 1 to 10. 

If the problem is not important enough, they won't pay for it.
If they're already happy with the way they solve it, they likely won't switch.

But if it's important AND unsolved, you might have a chance. 

More than a decade ago, when I was ramping up my skill set to better service clients of my young agency Gravytrain, I found an incredible learning resource for marketers: a fast-becoming-well-known blog called "ConversionXL." I couldn't get enough of what the author, Peep Laja, and his team, were bringing to the world.

At that point, I'd been in digital marketing for 14-15 years, having run my first banner ads in 1998. The pace of change in the industry was at times frantic (search, social, mobile, app, etc.), and at other times, glacial. 

But at all times, whether as a publisher, advertiser or affiliate, digital marketing felt... loose. Random. Spray and pray. 

A bunch of tactics strung together by us young'ins who knew how to use Facebook Flyers. Chasing growth hack after growth hack. Tricks, tactics, and only winning by out-executing, luck, or a combination of both.

Until ConversionXL.

For me, a career digital marketer with no formal marketing education, Peep and the CXL team introduced rigor. Hypothesis-driven testing. Controls. Statistical significance. Process-driven outcomes. The importance of data, and data cleanliness. Positioning, messaging, UVPs... and so much more. I wouldn't be half the digital marketer I am today without it.

I signed up for CXL's academy (now called CXL Institute) as an early annual member back in 2016... $2,500 USD out of my own pocket. And I couldn't get enough. I learned that me and my teams were capable of so much more than just tossing up whatever graphics into LinkedIn Ads or whatever copy on to landing pages and hoping it went well.  I took my "good enough" level of skills with tags, analytics, testing, messaging and so many tools, to "great". In some ways, "elite".

I learned so much from the hundreds of blog posts, videos (who remembers the Pe:p Show??), courses, CXL Live recordings... but I never met Peep, or any of the team. I never got to cross "work with these folks" off my career bucket list.

Today, that changes, as I'm incredibly excited to have joined Wynter as Head of Marketing.

If you haven't heard of Wynter -- the premier target market insights platform for B2B SaaS marketers -- I promise, you will soon enough. 

Thank you to Peep and the entire team for taking a chance on working with me... I can't express my gratitude enough. I'm excited to meet, learn from and work with you all. 2024 is going to be our year.

And to everyone who I chatted with, shared calls, who lent a shoulder, put heads together, and every other analogy while I've been recharging for the past few months: thank you. 

Thank you so much for being part of my network,  a colleague, and a friend.

The best way to figure out if a product will sell is to sell it. 

The best way to figure out if existing customers would also buy X is to sell it to them.

The best way to figure out customers' willingness to pay is to sell them at different price points. 

Target customer research will tell you how they think, what they think, their pain points and priorities, internal purchasing processes, their perceptions, and their point of view on your category. 

However qualitative research cannot accurately answer 'would you buy' type of questions. 

Selling is also research, and it's the best research method for questions about customer's future behavior.

1. Constraints make you more creative.
2. Competing on low cost is a great way to win if you truly have a structural advantage.

Gleb Budman bootstrapped Backblaze to IPO by following these 2 ideas.

Get the full story of how he did it in the How to Win podcast.

The best do a lot without even noticing it's a lot. 

When they come across something they think needs to be fixed, they just go ahead and do it. Without anyone asking them. 

"Oh when I was working on A, I noticed that B needs to be organized/cleaned up/refactored, so I took care of it". 

The mediocre on the other hand want kudos for every little move even if it's a part of their core job description, and complain about how much is on their plate.

You can go really far at most companies just by giving a shit, owning stuff that nobody seems to own, and proactively solving problems without your boss asking you to. 

Some people thrive in startup environments -- they're creative, can roll with the punches, invent things, come up with new shit on their own, imagine what it could be - quite independently.

Some are ideally suited for large organizations - where you have to fit into a way of doing things, where there are procedures and standards, good guidance on how things need to be, strong managerial support.

The problem is that too many job applicants have no clue which box they fit into.

Imagine you're given a goal to hit. 

A) no guidance, figure it out, and we need it by tomorrow 
B) here's a step-by-step playbook to follow to do this, just follow the steps and do not change the steps

Do you prefer A or B?

Most companies who start communities assume just launching a Slack or a Facebook group is enough. It's not. 

Most communities never take off. Ghost towns is the default. 

Those that do, often fall victim to their own success - they get too big, too anonymous, and in turn, lose relevancy. 

Over time they become more like Q&A sites rather than communities. A few questions here and there, a reply or two. Almost nobody actually knows each other. 

There's one shining exception - Pavilion. It's a true community.

I experienced it firsthand by going to one of their events as a non-member. The members were true believers and were gung-ho selling me on the benefits of joining. 

I asked their CEO Sam Jacobs how to grow communities. Watch the video for his great reply.

Get the full story of how Pavilion grew to $15M+ on the latest episode of the How to Win podcast.

Save the dates!

Spryng - a B2B SaaS marketing event by Wynter - will take place April 9-10 2024 in Austin, TX.

I believe the power of an event is all about who is in the room. We're designing the event accordingly. 

Tickets will go on sale shortly.

Nobody gets their copy right with the first draft. Nobody.

Even if you nailed the messaging, getting the copy right takes iterations. Target customer feedback loop is a must.

We just copy tested a marketing promo email we're planning to send out soon.

(Drinking our own champagne at Wynter)

If you rely on people's natural brilliance, it's hard to scale. Not everyone at your company is a genius.

Checklists and feedback loops need to be how things get done.

"Ship great copy every single time" is much cheaper and faster to solve through a playbook rather than hiring only the very best copywriters.

Let's say you're an average copywriter. You don't want your boss to see your copy is weak... or you look dumb. 

The goal for you is to make your work look good, and then you look good.

Answer: have a "good copy checklist" at hand, and validate before you show your work to your superiors.

A) Agree on how we measure it. In B2B, using B2B Message Layers framework is it. 

B) Before you publish/show to your boss, run a message test on it to see how it scores on the 4 layers:
- clarity (do they get it)
- relevance (do they understand its for them)
- value (do they want it)
- differentiation (is it clear why this over alternatives)

and learn what exactly has to improve. 

C) Fix it

--> good copy every single time

How do you get more budget for insights and research?

Rule number one: don't ask for more budget for research. Nobody cares.

What to do then? Here are my top notes from Hannah Shamji, Ismail Madni, and Alli Blum from a recent Wynter workshop on this topic.

There's no demand for research you can harvest. You need to *create* the demand.

1. Know what the HiPPOs are thinking about about.

What strategic issues is your CEO or VP thinking about every day? Those are the elephant problems. If you want research funding for mouse problems, you won't get it.

2. Show the executives where the gaps are.

What is it that we don't know? Get everyone to agree that we don't really know but should. The demand for research comes from realizing we have an important problem worth solving.

3. Tie insights to revenue. If we were to know this, what would be our hypothesis on the value of this?

4. Every time there's a win in the organization because research data points us towards something, document it. Be ready to pull up all the examples as firepower to make your case that this has worked before.

If you know your target customer's big, important pain points - everything else is much easier.

Your messaging will resonate. 

Your funnel will be more efficient. 

Your ABM approach will resonate more. 

Your cold outreach will get more replies.

Your customer acquisition costs will go down. 

You will convert customers at a much higher rate. 

Invest 1% of your go-to-market budget into target customer insights. It will make the other 99% go much farther.

How many cold emails do you need to send to book a sales meeting?

Way more than a single inbox would allow.

So everyone successful has multiple inboxes on dozens of domains going, running pretty sophisticated setups. For example, Gorgias is sending 1.5M cold emails per month. This is not the exception but how it's done.

Still, if you hang out in r/sales subreddit, it seems to be pretty common for BDRs to book like 5-8 meetings ... per month.

How many cold calls to book a demo?

You need to dial a pretty insane amount using auto-dialers or even parallel dialers (which cost $$$). And then, you need to get to a 5-7% connect rate and convert 5-7% of connects into meetings.

So it's not just a lot of emails and calls, but a lot of days.

Both still work, but it's getting harder every month. No doubt it's gonna get even harder as the BDR function is increasingly being taken over by AI.

At Wynter, we have a different take on how to make all of this easier.

We have a new product in beta: on-demand sales demos.

It's LIKE outbound sales, but instead of many weeks of cold emails/calls, you can book a demo with your target account with a few clicks. We set it up in a few days. Want 5 or 10 demos? Here you go.

How does it work? Wynter is a 2-sided marketplace. On the supply side of our marketplace, we have B2B professionals and leaders who are all someone's ICPs. From marketing leaders to engineering managers to CISOs .

They all have problems that maybe your company helps them solve.

We offer them an incentive to take the demo -- this is to make them pay attention. Then, we validate their interest in your product.

Overall they act like any outbound lead - not in market today necessarily, but if your thing solves their big problem, they can set aside budget for it in the next quarter or two.

Wanna try this? DM for the link or check the comments. 

Limited spots, we can only accommodate so many during the beta.

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