Asia Orangio - How to acquire your first 100 customers

How to get your ﬁrst 100
customers

We’re covering the strategic process
I could give you tactics, but not all of those are going to work for
everyone.
★ It works for both B2B and B2C
★ It’s applicable for both SaaS, software, and non-software
companies
★ It works for services companies
★ It works for various business models and sizes
★ It works for companies targeting enterprise and for companies
targeting SMBs to mid-market
@asiaorangio demandmaven.io

Step 1:
Know Your Customer

Customer Research: The sexiest.
1. Market research
2. Competitive research - website
analysis, product analysis, customer
analysis
3. Prospect research - speciﬁcally
people who haven’t purchased (yet)
4. User research - speciﬁcally people
who have purchased or signed up

But why research?

This is how we become more
“strategic”

Here’s what to ask your customers
If there was a roll safe to creating and deﬁning your marketing
strategy or your product, JTBD would be the cheat code.
Ask your customers questions about:
★ What led them to look for the product
★ Where they looked; how they found you
★ How much time they spend in other channels
★ Favorite sources of information / content
★ What they compared you to
★ Why those other solutions didn’t work
★ What would have prevented them from signing up
★ …. And so much more...

Your mission: target customers you
know so well, you could complete
their sentences.

Step 2:
Identify the Gaps

So here’s the thing.
Y’all are (mostly) marketers.

Conversion: Free Trial Signup, Demo
Request, Purchase, etc.
Le Funnel
BOFU
MOFU
TOFU Widest audience, widest reach, and content
and campaigns are also wide
More educated about the problem, more
educated about the solution
Most educated about your solution to the
problem.

Le Funnel

Le Funnel
MOFU
More educated about the problem, more
educated about the solution

Identify the gaps
What is currently blocking your prospects from signing up and
becoming a paying customer? These are the “success gaps.” They
include objections, competitive differentiators, and other tools for
decision-making.
★ What pages on the website will you need?
★ What lead magnet(s) should you offer?
★ What information would someone need to make a decision?
★ What emails do you need to send?
★ What value will you need to provide ASAP?
★ What questions do your prospects have?
★ How will you measure performance?
★ Are you currently meeting benchmarks?

There’s tons of frameworks to use
My personal favorites for mapping the customer journey:
1. TOFU → MOFU → BOFU — keeps it simple
2. Awareness → Nurture → Conversion
3. Levels of Awareness
a. Unaware
b. Problem Aware
c. Solution Aware
d. Product Aware
e. Most Aware
4. Triggers → Struggle Moments → Discovery Habits →
Consideration Sets → Desired Outcomes → Realized Outcomes

Use what makes sense to you, and
your team.

Focus on ﬁlling the gaps and
removing friction.

Step 3:
Target the Pain

What was your prospect doing
right before they {insert CTA here}?

Then imagine they sign up for 5-10
of these solutions.

We just covered 6-7 channels — all
of which pretty BOFU.

Bottom of the funnel =
people who want to
solve a pain now

Start with people who have the
pain ﬁrst.

Exceptions to the rule:

Exceptions to the rule
There’s always exceptions. Here’s when you might need to focus
instead on TOFU, or building an outbound sales function:
★ Clearly deﬁned target market
★ Higher ACV or LTV
★ Prospects don’t search for solutions

Step 4:
Deﬁne the Strategy

A strategy isn’t just a “plan.”

A strategy isn’t just a “plan.”
It’s how you’re going to win.

Your Growth Strategy
We can ﬁnally start to put the pieces into
place into your growth strategy:
1. You know who you want to target
2. You know why you want to target them
3. You have a rough idea of where you
want to target them (i.e. what channels
to use)
4. You understand how you want to do it
5. You’re capable of translating into real,
action items

The Yellow Cards:
You’ve got conflicting strategies. What you’ve defined
either competes with each other or pits teams against
each other.
Not enough resources to dedicate in any one
direction. If every person on the growth team is
focused on something different, you might not move in
any direction.
Nothing really adds up. You should definitely have
goals, but you should also acknowledge the current
funnel conversion rates.

The Red Cards:
You need revenue yesterday. If you truly need a quick
ﬁx, start doing a lot more selling and outbound
prospecting. Remember that sales is relatively binary.
Don’t have any clear action items. A good strategy
will clue you in to what you need to do, where you
need to invest, the people you’ll need, and what you
might want to pause for the future.
You couldn’t get any customers on the phone. Your
marketing strategy shouldn’t be based on theories.
They should be based on actual, real feedback from
your customers. If you can’t get anyone on the phone,
then you haven’t even started.

Let me tell you a strategic
horror story.

Step 5:
Execute & Iterate

There are no silver bullets in
marketing and growth.

“What’s the ‘right’ strategy?”

What’s the “right” strategy?

“What’s the one thing that’s going
to work?”

“I’ll only invest in it if it works.”

“I’ll only invest it if it works.”

“Lol what if we took a healthy
approach to marketing and
growth?”

“And what if we focused on
gathering data points and using
those to inform our strategy?”

“And what if we actually built
relationships with our customers
and cared about them?”

Iterate through experiments
When we say “iterate”, we really mean consistently putting effort
into 2-3 of the channels you’d like to try, and then learning from them.
Then, when those channels work, we try additional things.
Not everything will be scalable, and not everything will work. But
you’ll need to iterate as you get more data and create a feedback loop.

Consistent execution is the #1
reason why GTM strategies fail.

(Except now that you know that,
you can avoid it.)

If you can’t afford experiments,
focus on the basics.

“The Basics”
Some channels are inherently more scalable and predictable than
others. But if these don’t work, you’re looking at a longer acquisition
journey and slightly less scalable tactics.
★ Sales outbound prospecting — perfect for higher ACV or LTV
products (3+ months, higher overhead)
★ Organic search — perfect for lower ACV/LTV products (3-6+
months, but inﬁnitely scalable and cheapest CAC)
○ Content marketing, SEO
★ Paid search — best when you have a clear LTV/ACV to work with,
but can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing
★ Paid acquisition — same as above; includes Facebook Ads,
Twitter, etc.

A Quick Recap
1. Know your customer
2. Identify the gaps
3. Target the pain
4. Deﬁne the strategy
5. Execute (and iterate)

BONUS: Early-stage playbooks
★ Clearly GTM strategy
★ Build a series of “launches”
★ Focus on building an audience — people who can both become
customers and refer customers
○ Includes combining content marketing with email marketing,
demand generation, product marketing, and so much more
○ Depends on market, customers, competition

Thank You!
@asiaorangio
asia@demandmaven.io
demandmaven.io

Asia Orangio - How to acquire your first 100 customers

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