Everyone has heard of startups. Besides, there are as many startups in the world as there are ways to define them. So what is a startup? When are we no longer one? What do you call a startup that takes it to the next level? How do you scale to generate business?

As Chief Marketing Officer at Letsignit, I asked myself all these questions. Today, I have some first answers. I would like to illustrate how we have structured our growth. These growth issues, you may have already encountered them, or you will soon be asking yourself them.

From startup to scale-up

A startup is an organization that finds resonance in a market with its product or service. Once this step has been taken, it becomes a scale-up – or how to achieve a level of sustainable growth over time, structured in its operation, and, above all, constant profitability.

“It has been almost a year since Letsignit is no longer a startup”

In over 10 years, I have seen Letsignit transform from the inside out to reach its current levels of scalability. Without revealing all our strategic secrets, I allow myself to share with you the recipe for the success of the cycles we have gone through.

Step 1: Get the tools you need for your transformation.

To successfully launch a growth strategy, you need speed, efficiency, and profitability. It is therefore essential to be properly armed.

We are talking about two things here:

1. Your content
2. Your stack of tools

The right tools provide you with the intelligence and traceability necessary for rapid and constant growth. At Letsignit, we have set up a new CRM (Salesforce) to which we have plugged a marketing automation solution (Marketo). The combination of these two tools allows us to facilitate interactions with our prospects. Naturally, we have adapted the settings of these tools to our strategies and the evolution of our growth to gain flexibility.

“We are talking about marketing automation – or how to reach our audience with the right message at the right time.”

The right message also means feeding our audience with the right content. To do this, we have:

• Redefined all our personas
• Redesigned all our messages to evangelize our solution
• Clustered our content to adapt them to these personas

This tools + content duo brings us several benefits:

• Quality content for better notoriety (with Brainsonic)
• Contacts that are better nurtured and better fed with content (with Marketo)
• An increase in our contacts (in Salesforce).

These benefits are all the more important as the journey of a customer at Letsignit can sometimes be long and complex. Previously, 100% of our revenue was generated by 70% inbound marketing campaigns (bringing the prospect in). Over the past few months, we have implemented a new balance integrating outbound (go find the prospect).

We quickly understoodthe importance of effective alignment between the marketing and sales departments. Anthony Poyac, our VP Sales, spokevery well about it during his last forum.

Step 2: Bring a calibrated vision to your organization.

Earlier this year, our CEO Damien Neyret revealed the (real) behind the scenes of Letsignit in his article. He explained the importance of aligning the values of the company with the new strategic vision on the business side.

It is this same strategic vision that has facilitated collaboration between marketing and sales, which is sometimes complicated in business.

“Marketing teams are directly encouraged
to generate business opportunities”

On the Sales side, each salesperson knows precisely the user-journey of each prospect: what content they have seen, what messages they have reacted to, what interest they have shown in our solutions, etc.

Concretely, this is made possible by several mechanics:

• Our monthly team discussions to present our current campaigns,
• Our UTM strategy (URL tracking solution to know which funnel the prospect is using),
• Our CRM / tools connection to keep the most accurate information.

To sum up, salespeople need marketing to maximize their chances of converting their prospects, while marketing needs salespeople to support lead gen that is +100% in 3 years.

In parallel with the outbound, we have deployed an ABM (account-based marketing) strategy to work specifically with large companies. Our sales work in pairs to develop accounts. They have good contact mapping and valuable marketing insights.

Data is a central pillar of our new business approach based on the multiplication of our initiatives and our tools. We have therefore invested in a dashboard that gives us a clear and ultra-personalized view of what we do, what we generate and what we spend.

The multiplication of contact points makes it possible to achieve the best conditions to convert your prospect: this requires the automation of email sequences, the distribution of content in the media, display marketing and, above all, a very good customer knowledge.

So far, our growth strategy is in the best possible shape: the right tools, the right vision. But there is one last link to complete the chain – and it isessential.

Step 3: Surround yourself with the right people.

However, there is no miracle solution. Tools aren’t everything. The human being remains the centerpiece of a well-oiled organization.

On the job market, you will find expert profiles. Some know how to do everything, some are very specialized, some are too junior, and some areadvanced. In view of our strategy, it was fundamental for Letsignit to surround itself with senior profiles for each area of expertise.

For example, on the Sales side, our strategy has turned towards large companies. We have therefore recruited our VP of Sales (Anthony Poyac), who is very experienced in key account business development. Note that the power of our marketing effectiveness lies in our ability to incentivize our salespeople according to the pipe generated (it is therefore intrinsically linked to the marketing funnel).

Another example, on the Information Systems side, we recruited a Senior Lead Generation Manager, Wassim Achkar, responsible for marketing & sales alignment. This is made possible thanks to the management of our growth strategy and the deployment of our stack of tools necessary for growth for France and the USA.

Finally, we can count on historical collaborators like Amandine Fernandez who know the history of Letsignit by heart. This is rather important when it comes to using the right words on our expertise in editorial and technical content. It is with the right storytelling that Letsignit was able to find the right story to tell. The intrinsic value of our product has increased significantly thanks to this story.

We have therefore covered the three main pillars of Letsignit’s growth strategy: tools, people, and content.

The latest tips.

At Letsignit, it took 1 year to set up all the operations and observe the first results. And these results necessarily have a cost.

It is certain that each company has different budgetary capacities. Our long-term vision has allowed us to make these investments. So whatever your situation, consider the following tips:

• The overall strategy: think long-term
• The tools: do not pull costs down systematically
• The content: think about your audience, bring value and cluster your productions
• Humans: prefer specialists to Swiss Army knives

With these tips in mind, we were able to set up an attribution model to know the return on investment (ROI) of every dollar we spent.

As a CMO in a SaaS scale-up, one of my major challenges can be summed up in a single KPI: payback – when are the costs of marketing and sales acquisitions profitable for the client? To drive this information, I rely on the performance of each channel while keeping an eye on the MQL, SQL and SAL funnel.

My last piece of advice would be to not fall into the trap of perfectionism. “Dare” is one of our core values.

We have to know how to dare when we operate in a test & learn dimension. Knowing how to dare also means taking the risk of sometimes making mistakes. Not falling into perfectionism is resilience – accepting and understanding your mistakes to adjust our next initiatives and measure their impact, again and again.

Of course, all of this would not be possible without our sales attribution model. And having the luxury of piloting a growth strategy under these conditions, one could (almost) say that it is priceless.