Here’s the #1 Reason Why Your Marketing Won’t Generate Enough Revenue

Dear Friend,

Want to know the #1 obstacle that’s preventing you from making that sale? It’s not rocket science. In fact – it’s VERY simple: You’re not targeting the right audience!

Unqualified or flaky prospects are just not going buy. No matter how good your offer is. So…

What do you have to do to make more - and faster - sales?

I’m Wes Azzaidani, and I have found a unique way to use proven SaaS (“Software as a Service”) fundamentals to attract hungry buyers in healthcare, manufacturing, information security, telecommunications, and many more industries. I have used my method successfully for both product development and marketing at enterprises like Boeing and Ookla. I’m confident I can do the same for you with your marketing.

Recently, a founder and I were discussing his current marketing. After a long, rational discussion, his face got red, and he pounded his fist on the table. “My marketing isn’t doing a damn thing. Where are the results?

If you look at a B2B (“Business to Business”) sales cycle, getting in the door at the C-level is the hardest part.

But once you do, your sales team can take over, and your revenue will rise accordingly.

You Already Use a System to Develop Products

Now You Need a Reliable, Predictable System for Your Marketing

It sounds brutal, but the best way to get to the best product  is by survival of the fittest.

Testing & incremental improvement. That’s how evolution works. That’s how the best companies work. 

A software puts out a piece of buggy MVP software and then makes small —but constant—improvements based on customer feedback. This style of product development is called Agile.

My method gives you a consistent system that churns out winners without taking huge risks.

This approach of continuous improvement allows your marketing to not only survive in times of change but actually LEAD change. Niche leaders naturally attract more sales.

The Sad SaaS Marketing Equation: WHY MOST SAAS MARKETING FAILS

Founders spend tons of money on a dizzying number of lead-generation tactics. These range from social media prospecting, search engine ads, cold calling, and even hanging around conferences hoping to get drinks with potential clients. Similar to any kind of product development, these marketing tactics will FAIL if you don’t have a repeatable and constantly improving process.

Too many founders and SaaS CEOs get talked into what I call . . .

The Sad SaaS Marketing Equation:

Marketing robots target ideal customers and fail. Their canned messaging has little value for the buyers you need to attract. Don’t rely on a robot with limited algorithms. Otherwise, investors won’t be impressed or interested in what you have to sell. The beauty of the Agile Advertising system is that it gives you a reliable & proven process.

Are You Making These Sales Mistakes?

Let me tell you the story of one such leader: Matt.
Matt wanted to escape the workplace doldrums—the coworkers that drove him nuts and the title hungry managers.

Matt went out on his own. He raised capital and built a team he hoped would be the start of a profitable SaaS empire.

But so far, it hasn’t worked.

One thing he’s found particularly frustrating is the quality of his leads. He can’t seem to get them live on the phone, to respond to an email, or to click a link.

Matt can’t help but lose his cool. He blurts out, “If these people are so put off with my offer, all it takes is a simple ‘not interested’. No is as good as a yes. I don’t want to be spinning my wheels for weeks and months over flaky prospects.”

He feels his sales representatives are hunters shooting in the dark and wants his marketing team to help.

The problem is that Matt’s marketing team lacks competence. All they do is push out LinkedIn posts and send out a biweekly newsletter.

There are just a handful of inbound leads.

AND THESE LEADS ARE COMPLETE JUNK!

They’re not Matt’s target customer. He needs marketing to do a better job of getting his name out there. But they’re talking about doing podcasts!

It stresses Matt out. He asks himself, “If people aren’t willing to attend a 30-minute meeting, what makes you think they’re going to sit there and listen to an hour-long podcast?!”

Like too many SaaS leaders, Matt is hamstrung by a muddled marketing strategy made up of canned messaging.

Every time they send out that newsletter, the company’s database of qualified prospects. . .

Shrinks...
Shrinks...
and Shrinks...
Because all they do is click that unsubscribe button.

Matt feels he is at his wit’s end. “Just how many fires am I going to have to put out myself? I’ve worked with four or five different marketers, and they just don’t get it. As for canned AI-generated content—it just makes me sound like everybody else.”

Matt is searching for advertising that can quickly pivot. His marketing team needs to be in daily contact with his target market, just like his sales team.

He launched his business when COVID first started—it skyrocketed because of its digital nature—but it took eight months to put out a webinar explaining how his company could actually help customers out.

He gets pitched often because he attends a lot of conferences. He goes to places like the NextGen cloud conference and walks the floor, talks to different vendors, and sits in their presentations.

A sales rep from a marketing company, RoboDopia, reaches out to him. It’s not just any marketing company—it’s a managed service provider (MSP).

The RoboDopia sales rep paints a beautiful picture: “Engagement. Innovation. We’ve been there, done that. We know how to market your business; we’re on top of the latest trends. You’ll get a dedicated account rep. We have automation built in to post things for you on your behalf, blah blah blah.”

Unfortunately for Matt, things didn’t go as expected.
You see, the business model of firms like RoboDopia is to capture people’s information (e.g., mining LinkedIn databases) and send it to Matt’s team as leads.

Much of this data is processed through AI to match what entrepreneurs (like Matt) are looking for.

But, to Matt’s disappointment, these MSPs do little to qualify the leads they send to him.

After around three months, RoboDopia brought in one lead who was a tire-kicker. A month after that, they sent him a prospect who was already in talks with one of his competitors. When Matt complained about it, a pit bull of a RoboDopia executive responded: “That was a qualified lead. I could have closed that sale.”

Matt got one good lead in six months. RoboDopia’s solution was to try to upsell him to a more expensive plan.

The service did provide Matt with plenty of blog posts and newsletters. They also made an effort to not push out the same content they were giving to other clients.

But the content was, vanilla, lacking in personality and devoid of real selling power. As a result, it didn’t spur any desire or even interest in people who would be Matt’s best prospects if they knew the value he could provide them. So it wasn’t moving the needle on sales to justify the cost, that’s for sure.

Matt finally decided to pull the plug on the relationship when he lost his RoboDopia account manager and had to go through a series of flaky, unresponsive salespeople.
Here’s where Matt felt cornered and nauseated in equal measure: when he canceled at the end of his agreement, giving appropriate notice,

RoboDopia terminated all services prior to the contract end.

He could only laugh when they tried to get him to sign an agreement not to tell anyone why he left.

So much money, so little return.

After a series of expensive lessons like this, Matt now realizes he can’t buy certainty by imitating his competitors.

There’s an operational maturity around marketing that Matt has not yet found. He’s always taken investing in the software side of his business with an extreme seriousness. It’s starting to dawn on him that it’s time to do the same for his marketing.

Matt needs a marketer who can not only show him a better way but also do the work and lighten the load on his shoulders.

A MARKETER WHO CAN FILL A FAT PIPELINE - NO ROBOTS REQUIRED

As I mentioned before, I used this system with great success at Boeing IT. I’ve also used it for a major SaaS company in the 5G space and a number of smaller entrepreneurial clients. What I have developed is a unique, highly effective marketing method that uses the principles of Agile, which many companies (quite possible yours) use themselves as a framework for product development. I’ve applied the same principles to marketing. And those principles work! My methodology is biased toward direct marketing. This means the focus is on boosting response as opposed to branding. Although my system is comprehensive, it’s flexible enough to take into account the unique nature of your business and target market. These pillars of Agile Advertising provide the basis for all the marketing I would do for you.

The 3 Pillars of Agile Advertising for SaaS Leaders

1. Save Time & Money with Standards & Stability

The problem business leaders have with marketing isn’t that it’s hard to understand but that there is so much “noise” out there. It’s hard to hear the music. Anyone can go to the internet and figure out how to do a campaign, but few lack the methodological rigor, professional distance, and “in-the trenches” experience to figure out:

You can’t find answers to these questions on the internet.

Relying on a soulless, off-the-shelf AI platform to do this work is risky.

That’s why you need someone who is both a specialized consultant AND copywriter who can help you:

  1. Cut waste from your lead-gen methodology, which in turn . . .
  2. Creates stability in your marketing workflows, which . . .
  3. Allows you to create standards to repeat these processes for your people, technology, and tools.

In the software development context, I use this principle to help engineers remove the root problems that cause bugs and shorten release cycles.

A marketing example of this was selling an enterprise-wide managed service solution to a major airline manufacturer. For two years, my clients tried to sell the managed service solution with meetings, sharing Gartner whitepapers and dry, cerebral PowerPoint presentations. Executives didn’t take action.

When it was my turn to step up and market the solution, you could have heard a pin drop in the boardroom. And within two weeks, even the most hesitant executives were on board.

Frequent email follow-up kept these managers engaged and on task. I was able to standardize this promotional process for that particular enterprise to great success.

When you set up standards and stability for your marketing, it’s an easy matter to:

  • Solve lead-generation blockages with scientific problem-solving methods used by Toyota, Intuit, and the best hospitals in the country.
  • Learn 3 ways to build genuinely differentiating content.
  • Build a sales pipeline with nothing but low-cost, easy-to-send email.
  • Create head-turning marketing content that will force busy and jaded executives to pay attention to you WITHOUT giving so much away for free. “Give, give, give, and don’t expect anything in return” sounds like good advice, but it hurts more than it helps.
  • Attract hungry buyers online without spending a dime on social media, Google Ads, or Facebook.

Doing just these things will put you heads and shoulders above the competition. But our goal isn’t merely being ahead but possessing an unfair advantage, so there’s more.

2. Stay Ahead of Your Competition

There is little benefit in having a detailed marketing process if it doesn’t pay for itself—in a way you can measure on a spreadsheet.

This is where strategy deployment comes in.

The main components are:

  1. Detect defects in your campaigns.
  2. Make defects visible in the organization.
  3. Respond immediately to address the problems.
  4. Eliminate the root causes through 4-Step Problem Solving.

In the marketing context, the best way to have a constant flow of strategy deployment is through frequent (ideally daily) promotions to your target market.

Every experienced SaaS founder knows that it will take months to warm up their target audience, create educational content for list building, handle awareness, and overcome objections. Where they fail is in the execution.

The four steps of strategy deployment will hold you up where others have stumbled.
Lucky for you, I’ve used these four steps in both product development and advertising long enough that they are intuitive to me.

One example of strategy deployment I’ve used in the SaaS context was for a DaaS (Data as a Service) company in the telecommunications niche. The problem was related to handling requests for new fields in our software. There was no clear process to research, define the logic, and implement throughout the pipeline.

Furthermore, the legacy logic was not consistent throughout different parts of the pipeline (i.e., one place might get updated but others did not).

The impact of this problem was grim: it took 11 months to reimplement, reprocess, and backfill data when issues were found.

This resulted in loss of trust from customers and end users.

I coached the development team through the simple but powerful 4-Step Problem Solving process to establish the root cause. Then, I guided the team through writing a standard operating procedure to capture the best and most efficient way to address problems like this in the future.

The 11 month gap was brought down to 2 months.

Same principle applied to marketing: I had a client who was a business coach and partner in a SaaS company serving the healthcare niche. At first, he thought he wanted to increase his book sales. But, while working through some root cause analysis with him, I found out that what he really wanted was to get more clients.

The problem? His email list was dormant. He hadn’t reached out to them in a very long time except through podcasts, social media posts, etc. He was being held hostage by ISP rules and filters. It had been falsely assumed that he didn’t have permission to email people who had already asked to subscribe.

So, I made a change that got over 2,000 contacts back into my client’s email newsletter list. These busy healthcare executives were now re-engaged and ready to buy from him. I did this with email marketing that was educational, entertaining, and had a clear call to action.

Know this: The strategy does not involve becoming distracted and seduced into chasing a hundred different shiny objects on social media. Every piece of tech should be forced to earn its place within the framework of the strategy deployment steps.

Do this right and you’ll discover:

  • Why automated AI drip campaigns will devolve your business into the Dark Ages.
  • Nothing turns a SaaS buyer off more than this in an email . . .
  • WHY YOU SHOULD “STRATEGICALLY SPAM” YOUR BUYERS’ LIST
  • Want to double sales through innovation? Why you must make small bets first.
  • Need to give value when doing content marketing, right? Wrong!
  • The solution to finally getting marketing and sales as two rails on the same tracks.

3. Profit from Irrational Customers

The relatively new science of behavioral economics teaches us that people are irrational and rely extensively on mental shortcuts when making decisions.

So, if you operate on the assumption that you can always dump data on prospects and win them over with dry cost-benefit analyses, you’re not going to make it.

Instead, an Agile advertiser worth his salt looks at human psychology and all the cognitive biases that move people to make buying decisions.

Am I saying I can mind-read the thoughts of the president of a particular accounting firm you want to sell to?

Not at all.

But I am saying that there are certain principles of human behavior that we can use in our advertising to increase response. As I mention in my book, Business Baroque: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Cashing in on Creativity, an example of one principle would be loss aversion: buyers will work harder to avoid losing something than they will to gain it. They see things they already own as more important than what they’re being offered.

We see this often in the SaaS context where prospects care more about your current feature set than they do about your future-state roadmap.

Combine behavioral economics principles with Agile development principles, and you are all but guaranteed not to stumble into the landmines that kill other marketing campaigns.

The biggest benefit? You won’t be over-investing in solving the wrong problem. The rewards of such a strategy include:

  • Getting rid of flaky buyers
  • Being efficient and have prospects come to YOU! (Salespeople should be selling, NOT cold calling and appointment scheduling.)
    • You can’t transform how you do marketing without transforming how you do sales.
    • If you have a sales team that you want to “keep busy” by cold calling or cold emailing leads, then your marketing people will spend all their time collecting email addresses and phone numbers. Does that sound like an efficient use of resources to you?
    • But if you can set up your marketing to generate demand, your salespeople can spend their time talking to, qualifying, and closing customers who are already 80% sold.
  • Grabbing willing customers from other firms.
  • Understanding why social media engagement is a waste of time if your goal is to increase sales.
  • MAKING THE FAULTS OF YOUR PRODUCT WORK IN YOUR FAVOR. Brutal honesty is something that buyers crave but most marketers are allergic to. Transform that dirty laundry into a sales-boosting flag.
  • LEARNING WHY COPYING GREAT MARKETERS MAY BE CRIPPLING YOUR SALES. Every great advertisement is a product of a certain time, place, market, and brand, so it’s better to incrementally master the principles of strategic positioning and pivoting than to copy tactics.
  • Skipping the “hero’s journey.” Narratives are important in advertising, but shoe-horning a script of Star Wars in your sales copy can hurt you. Most marketers don’t understand the neuroscience behind plot vs. story—and it shows!

Here's the deal:

I can work with you on a monthly basis to help you solve your marketing problems (“Done-With-You” consultant) and write sales-boosting copy (“Done-For-You” copywriter) according to the system I just described.
At the Washington Fencing Academy. Fencing is all about small, rapid movements to get you that victory without getting hit . The beauty of agile marketing is small, rapid changes in your sales processes. Churn out winners without taking big risks.

“HOW LONG AM I GOING TO HAVE TO INVEST IN THIS BEFORE I SEE A RETURN?”

It depends entirely on the state of your business and marketing. To use a software development example, your development team can make changes to the product faster and with higher quality if the source code is clean. If the source code isn’t clean or if the architecture isn’t sound, things will take more time as they fix these foundational problems. Same principle applies to marketing: if your product solves a genuine problem for your target market, you have a lead-gen mechanism in place to get prospects on your list, and you have a list of prospects and buyers that you can sell to, then you’ll make sales more quickly. If your marketing processes are riddled with waste, however, I’ll have to work with you on process improvement to rehabilitate your marketing funnel. You’re still getting a financial return because removing wasteful processes automatically means a higher net profit. Consider this equation: Price (fixed) – Cost = Profit The more waste you remove, the more cost you reduce. This is the secret to profitability. With that said, you can’t expect to make music without fixing your broken flute first. But if such “boring” foundational work doesn’t appeal to you, then please look elsewhere.

What’s the Catch?

But we need to know if you and I are a good fit. So I’m giving you the option of buying one hour of my time for $300 to get my advice on your marketing and business.

In the process of getting to know each other, I’ll invite you to give me your toughest marketing problem. I’ll then walk you through my Pipeline Problem-Solving process, and I’ll give you the first step to solving it.

If we both decide a more long-term relationship makes sense, I’ll knock off the $300 from the first month’s fee.

Too expensive? Then please save yourself the futile effort of haggling for a discount and go work with someone else.

Also, there are no refunds.

While there are no refunds, you have my promise that I will do my utmost to give you a clear picture of the right direction to move in to solve your biggest marketing problem.

To put it bluntly, my services are not intended for everyone. Here are the kind of businesses I can help: 

My Agile Advertising Service Is For:

  • Funded Businesses. The right way is to validate your business model before trying to grow it, after all.
    • If you’re going to have to borrow from next month’s electric bill to pay me, please don’t.
    • Also, I should mention that sales-boosting marketing is a senior-level competency. If you’re a price-shopper who thinks you can get away with paying junior-level fees for a senior-level service, I cannot help you.
  • Entrepreneurs Who Are Flexible, Independent, & Driven to Succeed.
    • If you’re the type of person who is going to stand firm as the Titanic slowly goes down, down, down. . . we’re not a good fit.
    • If you’re capable of making a decision on your own without consulting a committee, your country club pals, or your therapist, then you might qualify.
    • If you’re the type of person who is always seeking a better way of doing things, then this service is for you.
  • Entrepreneurs Who Understand the Concept of Value Provided for Value Delivered.
    • If you have an “I’ll pay you to create a super profitable business for me with zero action on my end” attitude, we’re not a fit.
    • My services are unique, but I can’t do everything. I’m confident you’ll get a handsome return on your investment with my methods and expertise, but my skill set is rather specialized:
      1. Agile consulting & coaching in the context of a sales-centric marketing strategy.
      2. “Done-For-You” content creation with a specialization in emails, sales pages, and VSLs.
    • If you’re looking for a genie to manage Facebook advertisements, do graphic design, be an SEO expert, organize events on your behalf, record webinars, and make you coffee while they’re at it—you’ve come to the wrong place.

If you meet these 3 qualifications, we should definitely talk.

This is only for bold business leaders with a healthy respect for scientific advertising.

If audacious marketing scares you, then my system is going to feel like a blood-drenched horror film. The best thing for you to do is . . . RUN AWAY.

Savvy business people understand the need for empirical direct marketing.

They want the edge it gives them—and they want it now.

I should also mention that I don’t intend to do client work forever.

SO I’m only making this offer available for a short trial period.

I’m NOT going to put a specific date on this opportunity. It will end when I’ve decided to go into Phase 3 of my business. That may be today, or it may be in a month.

Know this: when I’m done offering this to the world, I’m DONE.

It’s time for you to choose if you want it or not. 

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P.S. Here is what software development executives and product managers have to say about my system:

How I Used Lean Problem Solving to Help an Esteemed Lean Consultant
"I learned of Wes’s copywriting work because of our shared professional interests in the Lean methodology. In working with Wes, I appreciate how he used the practices of experimental problem solving for a business challenge I was facing.

Wes worked with me to define the problem related to my email marketing list, and he worked with me in a very collaborative way, writing copy that I used to invite people to remain active on my list. His writing was effective and, again, the process and the approach that he used were much appreciated. Highly recommended."
Mark Graban
Author of Measures of Success. Management Consultant, Coach, Professional Speaker, Author, Podcaster, Senior Advisor to KaiNexus
Thank you for being a major inspiration
"Just wanted to message you to let you know I've finally started my path towards becoming a Scrum Master and thank you for being a major inspiration to me. Thank you for all the advice and friendship you gave me over our ~2 years together. I think back on it often. Those 2 years I had with you were my most important years I've had in my young career. I've been doing all these learning programs and taking test exams for Scrum Master certifications, often drawing back on how you handled many of the tough situations our team had. So it gave me a fortuitous chance to thank you and let you know that what you gave was much more than increasing our team's productivity--but also inspiration!"
Robert Taylor
Business Analyst at Tata Consultancy Services
How I Helped Boeing Fly to the Next Century
“I have had the privilege of working with Wes over the past two years. I lead a team of Identity and Access Management professionals who are responsible for a number of legacy applications. Part of my team has been engaged in developing a Common Access Management solution in support of our direct airline customers.

Wes has operated as the scrum master for this development team. The team is comprised of Boeing employees and contract labor located both locally in the U.S. and offshore. In this role, Wes works with many stakeholders to determine strategy and functionality to be completed in our planning increments. Wes is quite skilled at his trade and is willing to share his knowledge to help my team realize success.

About nine months ago, another one of my teams initiated a project to design and develop a password reset tool to replace an expensive aging solution. Wes gladly accepted the challenge to assist and mentor this team in using Agile methodologies. The knowledge Wes shared has been quite beneficial for the project team to make substantial progress toward delivery of a solution.

Wes is very professional and a great team player. He contributes to my project’s success and is more than willing to take on more responsibility. I would gladly work with Wes on future endeavors.”
Jimmy Floyd
Senior Manager, Boeing IS Access Management Technologies
Urgent Boeing Marketing Project Completed On Time & Under Budget
“Wes was brought in as a senior project manager to lead an urgent, short-term project with my team. Right away I could tell he was a pro. Wes quickly picked up where the outgoing PM had left off, making for a very seamless transition. He is proactive, hardworking, and knowledgeable. He is skilled at applying Agile concepts and tools. Perhaps most impressive is Wes’s ability to make the most of my time with the team, keeping conversation and objectives crisp and focused. We often ended sprint cadence meetings early due to his ability to drive us toward outcomes. In the end, we completed the project on time and under budget. I highly recommend Wes to any IT team in need of an experienced, energetic, and success-driven project manager.”
Joshua Schlager
Senior Manager, Enterprise Architecture at Boeing
Boosting Sales in a Competitive Niche
“I want to highly recommend Wes if you are in need of great copy and/or a sales page! I was doing my own copy around my sales page for a high-ticket service product and needed help!! I didn’t have a fully blown “sales page” that could explain this complex product as well as why someone should pay me a lot of money to buy the product, and that was when I reached out to Wes. As a result of working together, I now have an amazing sales page that is already converting new customers. Also, when I have worked with copywriters in the past, I’ve needed to make massive edits as they didn’t spend the time to research and actually understand what it was I was selling. With Wes, he did massive research, and even though the “copy” was about 20 pages long, I had very few edits. He also was super responsive and timely with the work!

I would highly recommend Wes for your work project!”
Andrew Hunzicker
Founder of The CFO College
Coaching a Boeing Team with Agile Mastery
“Wes leads as Scrum Master for an external IAM (Authorization) based application, to which I have the pleasure of serving as Product Owner. Wes has a mastery level of understanding of agile principles and it's application. Attention to quality, exceptional leadership skills, and a builder of relationships with customers is why I depend on Wes day in and day out. An underrated prowess for Wes is his ability to persuade stakeholders through written communication. This skill is an asset to the team as executive style summaries are needed to detail out the objectives and business impact of our production releases. If you are looking for someone who is solution oriented in their thinking and cares about the "TEAM's" success, then Wes is someone who I would strongly recommend.”
Shawn Ervin
Product Owner at the Boeing Company
Using Known Principles to Successfully Sell to the Most Skeptical Executives
“Wes is process-oriented and was instrumental in providing the team a baseline for quality expectations and direction for overall performance improvement. He is a strong advocate for Agile methods and a believer in practicing known principles that lead to expected outcomes. That said, Wes was always open to new ideas and adjustments for the benefit of team. He is comfortable working with management and executive stakeholders to meet common goals. Additionally, Wes contributed his talents in crafting presentations and content for business case value and promotion.”
Mark Himeda
CEO of Versiq LLC
Cutting Waste with Agile Principles
“ . . . Within a short time, Wes was able to turn around an excellent piece of work we were able to use for the video we were producing.”
Ramzi Nabulsi
Media Production Manager at Qasid Arabic Institute

Cutting Waste with Agile Principles

“RootMetrics had been implementing Scrum/Agile for more than two years. We’ve found that the processes and ceremonies are sufficient, though we know that there is more to gain.

With Wes coming onboard as scrum master, our teams are starting to see improvements. In the last three months, I appreciate Wes’s encouragement to solve the root cause instead of the symptoms. Documents like the 4SPS, Standard Work, and Quick & Easy are all tools introduced to identify and document the root cause.

I’ve moved on from RootMetrics, but based on my short time with Wes, I would recommend him as an Agile Scrum Master with the qualifications and communication skills to push teams to improve by investing time to solve the root cause when possible.”
Mohamad Sales
Senior Software Engineer at IHS Markit