Good for you. It takes a lot of guts to admit you’re screwing up badly, burning cash faster than you’re taking it in (or able to raise it), and that you boarded the hype bus heading straight for the edge of the cliff before making sure the brakes and steering wheel worked! (So much so that the doctor wasn’t really expecting you to admit it. That’s why, this time around, his dead company walking series was targetted at buyers to help them avoid companies who won’t do what it takes to survive the coming market crash in our space.)

Fortunately, the fact that you admit it now, before the market situation gets really bad, means that you likely still have time to get treated, recover, and make a comeback before you bleed to death. So what do you do?

In short, you

1. start by admitting to every mistake you are making and do something about it, even if it means ousting part (or all) of the founding team (assuming they don’t still have a majority control, in which case you jump to the next ship while there are still ships sailing to jump to) then
2. continue by looking for cost-effective opportunities for improvement and pursue them and finally
3. never, ever, ever forget the timeless basics.

Today, we’ll start with describing what you do when you identify, and admit to, the first mistake we chronicled in our two part introduction to our “dead company walking” (Part 1 and Part 2) series (where we helped your potential customers identify problems that signify you are a SaaS supplier they should be walking away from).

1) Too Many Assumptions, Too Few Verifications

Double Down on Market Research – Know Your Competition

You’re not selling in a blue ocean. You’re selling in a very crowded ocean, and if you did your market research (or even glanced at the Mega Map, you’d know it! Depending on your core offering, you have at least 50 competitors, and even if you focus in on an industry niche or market size, at least a dozen, if not two. And there’s only so many customers to go around, which means there’s only room for a handful of companies with your specific focus to be smashingly successful.

So learn who they are, what they do, and, most importantly what they don’t do that they should do, and then do that, because, at the end of the day, you need to sell on core and differentiated value.

Double Down on Market Research – Know Your Target Customer’s Pain Points

Your customers don’t want cool. They don’t want custom Aston Martin’s that need to be tuned by a high price mechanic every month to keep running and can’t be driven on anything but the smoothest of roads. They want Ford tough F150s that only need maintenance every six months and can withstand the rugged terrain they work in.

They want a platform that helps them do the job they have to do everyday, the 80%, not the frilly 20% and nothing else. Learn their pain, and, most importantly, after the core pain is solved, focus on their frustrations that your competitors aren’t. That’s the core and differentiated value that will make you super successful, not whatever technology is currently hyped to be in Vogue. After all, like real fashion, tech fashion changes (and in some cases goes out of style) every few years, and doesn’t necessarily solve any problems in the first place (like Gen-AI).

Get Help! You’ll Only Identify So Much On Your Own.

Especially if you’re new to the space and started your company because you were a purchaser forced to use tool X that didn’t do function Y at your last job. You know one tool well, the two competitors who were finalists in the RFX okay, and that’s it … especially since your lack of understanding of Procurement (marketing) terminology led you to believe that the first few results of a Google search and the Gartner/Forrester maps chronicled every vendor you need to know. Which, as one glance at the Mega Map should convey, is not even close.

Plus, you knew your company’s processes, and, if you were involved in an association and actually went to meetings and roundtables, maybe a couple others. But now you have to serve industries and quench the thirst of multiple types of buyers. You need the help of someone who has seen the rise and fall of companies in this space from 1.0 through the current 3.0+ offerings and knows the products, the players, and the pain well if you want to quickly zero in on what the core and the differentiation actually is for your company.

Stay tuned for Part 2!