232: Create a Remarkable Effect with Ton Dobbe

06
Aug

Ton Dobbe, Founder of Value Inspiration, is driven by his passion for technology and a mission to help SaaS companies create a remarkable effect with predictable growth in their businesses.

We learn about Ton’s journey from his career in enterprise software and product marketing to founding Value Inspiration. He explains his framework for the Remarkable Effect, focusing on how SaaS companies can stand out, attract the right customers, and ensure sustainable growth. He shares insights on the three levers of his framework: the value lever, the viability lever, and the volume lever. He also discusses the importance of selling transformation over products and the power of standing for something significant in the market. 

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Create a Remarkable Effect with Ton Dobbe

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Ton Dobbe, the founder of Value Inspiration. He helps SaaS, software as a service, companies create predictable growth by orchestrating the Remarkable Effect in their businesses. And he’s also the author of the book of the same title, The Remarkable Effect. Ton, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Oh, yeah, it’s great to have you on the show, and you have written a very good book, The Remarkable Effect, and ever since I found it, I’ve been excited to have you on the podcast here. So, let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal Why and what are you doing to manifest it?

Oh, I mean, that is like, it’s almost like my whole life now, but in a nutshell, I’ve always been in the enterprise software space in product marketing, sort of in the intersection of product marketing and sales. And my eyes opened up when I saw the potential and the power of their positioning and how it helps you differentiate in the marketplace. So when I left the company, I used to work for unit four. What I saw is that this crazy number of these statistics, that 90% of startups fail, or 99% of startups fail, like depending a little bit on the research. But what was even more striking, that 75% of scale-ups fail as well. And they see they’re typically having product market fit. So it became my mission to help those companies, to help them stand out in the marketplace, because that’s typically what they struggle with. And I do that, talking about how I help. I seem to have a gift that I can pretty easily clarify what makes those companies remarkable, and then help them identify who are the companies and the people that are prepared to pay premium for that and why. And then turn that into a program and into a plan to help them start growing, like you said before, grow predictably. So that’s my Why.

Wow. So why are you passionate about SaaS businesses?

Technology. I mean, driven by technology, I’ve always been in the technology space. We used to call this company software companies. And these days, of course, software is more and more, if not all, offered as a service. That’s why it’s called software as a service. So in short, SaaS. I mean, people that have read my book, and they’ve come back to me and say, well, I’m not a SaaS company, but I got a lot from your book. And of course, there’s always the ground principles that you can apply in every type of vertical. But my credibility comes from this sector. It’s actually pretty knees down as well. That there are certain nuances that play, that only play for software companies. And, yeah, that’s what fascinates me.

Okay. Well, I know someone who is like that person that you mentioned, who comes to you and may not have a SaaS business, but is curious about what you do. But, let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about the remarkable effect. So what is the remarkable effect and how does one create the remarkable effect?

How I came up with the theme and the arc of the book was taking a distance a little bit. I mean, I wanted to write a book actually after about 70-80 episodes into my podcast. I’m running a podcast myself since 2018. And at some point, one of my guests came to me and said, you need to write a book about this. There’s so much value in the podcast. There’s so many lessons being shared. Do something with that. That became the idea. Now, I’ve been always in the product marketing space, like I said, and for me, what most inspired me after coming out of, in the last couple of years was, and what I always try to do with myself in my role is how do you stand out in the marketplace? What defines those software companies that we start talking about and then keep talking about? If you put it into a nutshell, that is about being remarkable, being worth making a remark about that is of course popularized by people like Seth Godin. And it’s always fascinated me as well. So my book became not about how do you run a software business, because there have been hundreds of books around this, but typically around what are the 10 traits that define those software companies that we start talking about, keep talking about, and what is a methodology that you can actually, how can you make it practical to actually get there yourself?

Love it, love it, that’s great. So that is a great framework. Now, I understand that actually above those 10 traits, there are three levers. So the first kind of low-hanging fruit is to pull on those levers, and then the 10 traits are below it. So what are those three levers that you can pull if you’re in a SaaS business, a software service business, to make your business remarkable?

Yeah, exactly. In my book, I’m talking about the value lever. That’s the first one. The second one I’m talking about in my book is the viability lever, and the third one is the volume lever.

If you look at it a little bit from a distance, the first one is really about the foundation of the business, the value. Share on X

It’s like, what is the unique value that you deliver and for whom? And there’s a couple of things you can do in a different way. The second part is about, okay, now that you’ve defined this, how do you then start to strengthen it so that at some point, this is typical for software companies and that’s why my fascination with software is so big. New technology is always coming up with a lot of excitement. Look at what’s currently happening with generative AI and everything that’s possible with that. And Gartner came up with a couple of those models whereby they say, okay, hey, it goes up and then it goes down into the trough of dissolution and then it starts to gain value. Typically we have software products, you see that it has a life scale. So if you develop a product today and it gains momentum at some point in time, you can guarantee that in five years time, it will start to flatten because the market is changing, your customers are changing, the technology is changing, your own company is changing and so on. So what fascinates me is, okay, how can you keep that growth, not flattening, but keeping it up? So what can you do with the existing products to do that? But also when at that point in time, do you need to create a new S curve, as they call it? And the last part is about once you’ve got that in place, how do you create momentum around it? So your flywheel. And by taking it all together, the remarkable effect is at the end. You know, the moment you find something, you create something that people find worth making a remark about, a lot of these things will start to go by themselves. And your customers will become your biggest fans, which is one trait. They will buy more, more often. They bring their peers, which is good for revenue. And the moment you can start prioritizing and measuring your success by the impact you help your customers create, value will come your way in volumes you can’t even forecast for. And this is also one of my hobby horses, because I hate those companies that only go in and build a software company because they want a big exit. Now, I’m always laughing at those and say, wait a minute, you want a big exit? But then, okay, tell me how, how is that going to happen?

Yeah, it’s goes back to the Why, why would people want your product? I mean, the exit is just a byproduct of creating a great company that then everyone wants to own a piece of. And then you can exit because there are buyers out there. So that’s very interesting. So the three levers, so value lever is really, it’s your ideal customer and your unique differentiation, maybe the first one, unique differentiation, ideal customer. And then the second level, the viability lever, this is all about innovation, isn’t it? So the S-curve is the innovation curve. So how do you keep yourself relevant, essentially, as a product and how do you renew yourself over time?

Resilience in the business. So it’s not only about keeping yourself relevant, but also what circumstances do you need to create in order to stay relevant? Because what I’ve seen a lot in software companies is that at some point they grow, then it starts to flatten, and they don’t realize it or they have complacency inside and say, well, actually, it’s not because of us. It’s because of the market and next quarter, it will be better and it won’t. And in the meantime, things are just slowing down. And then they have to start taking cost measures so that they’re cutting to keep costs in line with revenue, which is taking away all the opportunity to start that new S-curve. So the resilience is also a very important thing. How can you stay at a point where you make sure decisions to change at the point where you’re at the strength of your biggest strength of your business?

Yeah, you write about this in your book that the time to invest in new product development is not when your previous product started to tail off, but that it is going strong is when you invest.

Agility, yeah.

Which is obviously easier said than done because the temptation to take profits is probably very, very high. So okay, so value lever is differentiation and targeting. The viability lever is about renewal and innovation and how do you stay at the peak. And some companies, they just do it by acquisition. They can’t do it anymore themselves or they don’t trust themselves and they just acquire. And then the volume lever is about creating this virality, this network effect or viral effect.

So for some it’s virality, for some, it’s creating the momentum with the right type of customers. And there’s a couple of principles for that. So if I go back, for example, to the value lever, there’s three traits that sit underneath there. I think the most important one for companies to start on is number one, the remarkable software companies acknowledge that they cannot please everyone. That’s where a lot of companies go wrong. So it’s really, they think, okay, I want to solve this problem and I’m looking for a problem that has an enormous big market. And then I’m going to capture market share there. In hindsight, a lot of these companies have come back and said, okay, we were too wise. It didn’t take off. We had too many competitors.

We should have realized we cannot please everyone, which is fine. Share on X

And find the area where we, like I said in my intro, find those customers that are, for what we do and where we are exceeding expectations, what makes us remarkable, those companies that are prepared to pay premium for that. Because those are potentially your biggest fans. And that is about niching down and niching down almost to the point where it’s feeling uncomfortable. That’s trait number one. Trait number two, once you define that, create something that’s not only valuable, but also desirable. I mean, I’m talking in my book about a pretty simple technique to identify that. It’s a triangle. It talks about three basic questions that you need to answer to get an idea about what it is going to be about. On a scale of one to 10, how valuable is the problem you solve? On a scale of 1 to 10, how critical is the problem you solve? On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your ability to exceed expectations? And what you want is that all these, the answers for that, are all high numbers. So a scale of 1 to 10, like the 8, 9, or 10. Because when you put them together in a formula, valuable multiplied by critical, multiplied by exceeding expectations, it becomes a number, hopefully above 500. And that’s a good, I mean, once you find a couple of those, it’s a very good source for, first of all, figuring out what you’re going to develop. If you already developed it and you do an analysis on that, there’s a lot of truth in there in terms of how you can create a position in the markets that will help you stand out.

Yeah, I like that. And you mentioned in your book, The Crossing the Chasm book, which talks about this idea that if you want to sell your product, not just the raving kind of adventuring visionary buyers, but to the mainstream, then you really have to show some references, which are relatable references, meaning mainstream references. And it’s going to be very, very hard unless you find an issue where you are super relevant, you build your beachhead, and then you transition from there. So that’s fascinating. So these are the levers. So having fixed your fundamentals, you’re pulling on the value lever, you found your critical customers. Let’s say, obviously, you have to renew your product, so let’s leave the viability lever on one side. What ways can you pull on the volume lever? So if you have the right product in the right customer niche, where you score over 500 on the three traits that you explained, how do you then create this virality for your product? Is there a formula there as well?

Well, it starts with actually trait number nine, which is sell the idea, not the product. Sell the holiday, not the flight. And the moment you sell the idea, this is typically about the transformation that people are going to go through with your product. A lot of companies out there, I mean, I see possibly 20, 25 different websites of software companies every week.

I'm always amazed how little they sell the idea and how often how much they sell the product. Share on X

Because everybody seems to be obsessed with that, but customers don’t buy your product. They buy the outcome of that. They buy that transformation. And with that, you can bring in all the ingredients. And that is where trait number 10 comes also in surprise and hit the right nerve. A lot of time, and particularly in the B2B software space, some companies think, okay, we have to be super factual. We have to talk about big numbers because that is B2B. But we forget that even the biggest bean counters, the CFOs that run big companies, they’re people as well. They have worries, they have frustrations, they have seen all the things go wrong. And if you can credibly explain them, okay, this is the future we have for you and this is how we do it and it’s a different way, so you start blending in a couple of the traits, you will surprise them. And that will be something where they’re going to say, hey, maybe it’s not for me right now, but I know someone that needs this, or it is for me and I need to kind of jump on this and it creates urgency. So all of these things really help, bringing in what the transformation is about, bringing in the emotions about what is today, the frustrations, the anxiety, the fears, possibly also the hopes and the aspirations and blend that together. Doing that well can actually create movements. I actually had someone on my podcast last week that is literally creating a movement which is also about taking a stand. A lot of companies out there want to be part of an enormous large market but are not prepared to take a stand.

Stand for something, stand against something because they feel they're missing out on something. Share on X

But what if you miss those leads. Do you want to have a thousand leads and score 50 or do you want to have a hundred leads and score 80? It’s up to you. And if you bring all these ingredients together, your business will run so much more effective. Sales cycles will shorten because suddenly there’s urgency. They see that you’re the only logical choice against all their peers, of all the alternatives they’re looking at. You’ll start to win more. You start to win without giving discount. All of those goodies come in and having the right customers that become your fans. They also buy your products because they like it as it is. Well, I see a lot of companies sell, trying to kind of force something on top of someone. You know, you have to buy this and people buy it and then realize, yeah, well, it’s 80% there, 20% not. And those companies will always start to hassle people in implementation time. It will start to hassle people in customer success. They’re not getting the early returns on it. It’ll start to hassle R&D with things that they ask for that no one else wants. It’s just bringing you to a vicious cycle that will just bring your company down.

Well, something I’d like to ask you more about is this idea of standing for something and standing against something. It just recalls to me the early time at the early stages for salesforce.com when they had this logo that no software. So that’s don’t think software on your computer, just be in the Cloud and use our application in the Cloud. Can you give other examples of stand for versus stand against where a company was standing against something and it made them successful?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think a very good example is a company that we all know, I guess, in the meantime, a company that sort of invented conversational marketing, you know, Drift. They were against forms. Then there was, of course, a company that’s now known to everybody as HubSpot. They invented inbound marketing and they stood against outbound marketing. Could their products help companies with outbound marketing? Sure. They decided to just explain what the new game is all about and started creating momentum around it. So there’s examples everywhere. If you just look good, you see examples of companies that are playing the old game, kind of going against the old game and then introducing a new game. And what it allows you to do at the end is really explain in a very human way, now what is the trend that’s going on in the market that everybody can recognize? And the second thing is, okay, how is that trend having a negative impact on a lot of companies? And you can play that in terms and kind of address the symptoms that, yeah, you’re right, customers will just say, hey, yeah, you’re right, this is actually true. And then you can start to say, okay, well, you’ve been in this, we’ve been investing in this for decades. And after a decade or two, the problem is still not solved because we are thinking about the problem in a different way. Here’s how we need to think about it. So there you go.

That’s fascinating. The inbound marketing, it kind of created its own category. It forced people to think about marketing in a different way.

And now it seems logical. It’s like we can’t do it without it anymore.

Yeah, it is.

It’s always been there.

Yeah, that’s right. But I think people were used to the old-fashioned way of pushing messages out to people and this whole idea of letting them find you was a novel idea and they helped visualize it and people got attracted to it. Is there a formula for creating this kind of articulation of standing for something that the customers would need. Is it something that intuitively emerges or is there a way to actually facilitate this?

No, I mean, I think it’s called Andy Raskin. He popularized the whole thing of narrative design. That’s really what it’s about. It’s five-step process that you go through. You answer that with honesty. And yeah, on a one page, you got a very compelling story. It always works.

Wow, okay.

Well, it always works. It works if you have something that’s, first of all, you prepare to stand out on. And if you ever developed a product that is of course has some novelty in it. And that’s, of course, that’s another trade as a remarkable software company has, trait number five, they create new value possibilities rather than incrementally pull others. Yeah. And that goes very well with trait number three, they aim to be different, not just better. And there’s so many companies out there that say they want to be different and here’s how we are different, but they’re not different. If you ask them a very basic question, how comparable are you? It’s like goes blank. I mean, and what is it? Is it actually hard for a customer to replace you? There’s also no answer to that very often. If it’s very hard to replace you, then you’re truly different.

Yeah, that’s right.

And it might be, of course, that it’s not always about a completely new category. It might very well be that you’re in an existing category, but for a certain type of customer with a certain type of characteristics and scenarios, you are the only one, because the others just didn’t bother to develop it like that.

Or maybe you manage to articulate your value in a different way, which will make you be seen as the dominant or the leader.

Well, that’s an interesting thing in itself. I mean, the typical thing that I uncover when I start working with companies in the software space, when they come to me with problems that they cannot keep the same growth level or the unpredictability of the revenue that is frustrating them, what I typically always find, after they’ve been in business for five, recently, I’ve had a company that’s been in business for 15 years, and they were competing in a pretty red ocean. Going through the process, we uncovered an area in their products that they’d never really thought about themselves. I was talking to their ideal customers, and I started to understand what these customers are really all about, what the specific scenarios they were using it for. We were definitely creating out a sort of a category that now they are seen as if they continue with that, they are seen as the only one because no one can compete against them in that specific scenario. And that’s a pretty lucrative markets that they’re tapping into right now. So, again, they have to say no to a couple of others.

So isn’t it also a kind of niching? It’s not a niching in terms of the target market, necessarily, you are focusing on maybe a single functionality of your product, which then can resonate with people much more than a complex product. So a lot of people love simplicity.

It’s not particularly like one particular part of the product. The product in itself is still very relevant. It’s just how is it applied? In what type of scenarios is it applied? We found an area where one is about, it’s about this and about that, sort of all the competitors are now, yeah, I have to back up. I have a similar situation with unit four. We came from the ERP industry. So we had an ERP for service companies and we were competing against the likes of Oracle and SAP and Microsoft. Their history was in product-centric industries. So manufacturing companies and wholesale companies. The solution that we had was for services. We never really thought about like what type of difference that could make. Yes, we didn’t have manufacturing companies, or at least not a lot. Once we started to figure out, I wonder at some point, an analyst told me that we had something really different, but we had a very funny way of talking about it. He said, get some help. That’s where I got some external help that opened my eyes. We started interviewing customers from around the world and we had 50% of our customers say, it’s so flexible, we hate it, but we still use it. And we have 50% saying it’s so flexible, we love it, we can do anything with it. And we started to figure out what it was all about. That became how we started to carve around our positioning. It was typically carved around companies that take change as their advantage. Once we started to hit those companies where this was the main, where they saw, yeah, you’re for me. After a while, big companies like SAP and Oracle, when they realized we were in, they qualified out. It’s that powerful. And we were in business for 25 years already.

Yeah, they say that if you work hard for 75 years, you can become an overnight success. So maybe that was the example of it.

Exactly.

That is fascinating. So, talking about your book, The Remarkable Effect, so you wrote it, someone encouraged you based on the podcast that you have so much good information, how do you organize it? You have a book around it. So if I’m a SaaS entrepreneur, I stumble upon your book. What’s the best way for me to use your book?

Read it. And what I’ve heard, I mean, there’s a 10 traits and I’ve heard companies and people reading it from the beginning to the end. And I’ve heard companies say, okay, I actually read it chapter by chapter. The ones that speaks to me the most, because at the end you can also do them in a different order. It’s just a storyline that just won’t fit anymore because it’s a story in a story, like you’ve noticed. What I hear the most is that companies read it, they make a lot of notes. I’ve actually heard people coming back to me and say, I’m on page number 20 and I’ve got five pages of notes already. So they’re rewriting the book. Then they put it on their desk and they go back and forth to it on a day-to-day basis. Wait a minute, I’m dealing with this right now. How can I apply this lever, this lens to it? How can I apply this lens to it? Because these traits start to serve as a lens to solve a problem. In the book also, and that’s what you’ve seen, after every trade, there’s three questions to ask yourself, and you can see, okay, where are you on a scale of one to 10 on this trade? And sometimes it’s a four, and sometimes it’s a seven. That’s room for improvement to get to a 10.

So how do you help people implement these changes? Because it can be overwhelming. When I was reading, I had the exact same experience, that there were so many notes I took and I thought, wow, should I now try to implement this or should I put this aside, read the whole book and come back? And what if I don’t come back to it? So it was this kind of overwhelm effect. So I guess if someone hires you, maybe you can help pace them and help them implement it in a different way. So what’s the best way that you recommend people engage with the content?

Yeah, I mean, great question. And yeah, glad you asked. The last seven years, I’ve perfected that, particularly around the value foundation, as I call it. I’ve perfected a program that initially was, it’s sort of 13-step program. Initially I did it in 13 weeks. Some point, one of my customers said, yeah, I don’t have 10, I don’t have 13 weeks, a quarter. Can we do it in one month? I said, happy to do that. If you can bring the people together to get us through that in the right amount of time, if you’re prepared to do 13 workshops in a matter of three weeks, then the last week is for tuning because my goal is impact, it’s quality, and I don’t want to do something that is not remarkable, you know? I wrote the book. That is me become what I call my pressure cooker. And very recently, I realized same thing again, that not everybody has the financial power and the resources to work with me on a one-to-one basis. So now I’ve taken it to another level and make it made available as a group coaching program, whereby it’s available at a fraction of the cost. If I do the quick translation to US dollars, it’s 240, 250 a week. And that’s where you get access to me, you get access to the full program, and I guide you on that journey to get the pressure cooker format in place, the value foundation. And from there onwards, another program can start, stay as long as you want to kind of drive momentum and to drive resilience in the business. So it became a do program, whereby you’re on a similar journey with peers.

Awesome. So, Ton, for listeners, if you’d like to make your SaaS remarkable, then start with reading The Remarkable Effect from Ton Dobbe. And then if you need help, he’s got coaching programs. You can choose the pressure cooker if you want to put yourself in this pressure cooker for 13 weeks and go through the whole thing.

Four weeks.

Four weeks, that’s right, four weeks. Or you can just be part of a peer group and then Ton will guide you there. Excellent. So thank you, Ton, for coming to the podcast, sharing the remarkable effect and helping SaaS businesses. And those of you listening, make sure you follow us on YouTube and LinkedIn so that you don’t miss any of the episodes and any of the short videos of these frameworks, because we turn every framework into a short video that you can consume in under a minute as well. So thanks for coming and thanks for listening. 

 

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