“I just want to buy another SaaS tool.” 

Said no tech buyer ever. Of course, your best friends may buy your SaaS tool to boost your morale, even when they don’t need it. But random B2B prospects always seeking 10x value for each penny spent?

Nah! 

Most, if not all, will only buy your software if they’re convinced it’ll solve their specific problem and yield ROI. The crucial point here is that it’s no longer enough that your product can solve problems. If a prospect doesn’t think it’ll solve it in their desired way, they’ll likely go with a competitor who does. How else could you explain buyers shortlisting as many as five tech vendors when evaluating B2B software to purchase?

Adam Schoenfeld is the CEO & Co-founder of Keyplay, a targeted accounts’ building software. Adam probably knew this reality from his experience, growing and selling his 1st startup, Siftrock, to Drift. So before launching Keyplay, he started what’s helping him win over undecided tech decision-makers more easily. To give you a clue, before launching publicly, he was already above $100k in ARR.  

Through extensive research, I’ll peel the layers of what Adam is doing and why it works in this guide. My goal is to help SaaS Founders and B2B Marketers growing a startup win over undecided tech decision-makers, by peeking into how Adam did it.

Let’s start by understanding...

Today’s Decision-Makers’ Path to Buying Software

You’ve probably seen this chart: 

The reality and logic behind this data-backed illustration by Gartner is obvious: Prospects’ path to buying B2B software isn’t linear. It involves a myriad of touchpoints, making the sales cycle much longer even as competition stiffens. Several studies point to this. 

Take HockeyStack’s B2B SaaS LinkedIn Ads in Jan 2024. Per their report, the average sales cycle from Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) to Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQO) is 69 days. Databox’s study in early 2024 corroborated this, pegging the average B2B sales cycle at 69 days, too. 

Adam’s experience supports these findings. 

He once reported taking over three months —more than 90 days— to close a $18k deal. According to him, it involved as many as 68 back-and-forth emails: 

The point here is that however you slice and dice the data from the sources linked above, one thing holds. It takes anywhere from two to six months for B2B prospects to go from problem-aware to software buyers. If that’s the case, how do you get shortlisted and stay top of their minds until they buy?

The answer to that question is exactly what Adam Schoenfeld did. He got prospects who hadn’t even decided to buy his software to trust him and what he was building. By earning their trust, they shortlisted and bought Keyplay when they were ready —even before it launched publicly. 

Keyplay’s Replicable Playbook

This playbook is easy to follow.

Use content to pull in prospects and build an audience community of like minds run by you. Deliver value and encourage participation for continuous insights into the specific problems target ICPs (ideal customer profiles) want to solve. Use ongoing content resources to address relevant, identified problems in the unique ways your product would solve them. 

Before I unwrap and detail how to follow each step, it’s important you know this playbook’s guiding principle. Adam Schoenfeld revealed it when asked to advise other tech founders in his interview for Growth Unhinged: 

“[I] carried the PLG mindset of giving more value upfront (instead of forcing folks down a funnel) over to our content by sharing most of the insights from our indexes and newsletter on social. By formatting the long-form content for the [social] feed, you can significantly boost your reach because it’s more accessible, so more people take the time to consume and share it.”

1. Pulling In B2B Prospects

In under 18 months, Adam pulled in over 14,000 people, mostly his startup’s potential customers, into his newsletter community, PeerSignal. I’m talking about one of the most difficult titles to attract and convince sharing their info in B2B SaaS: GTM (go-to-market) leaders.  

His not-so-secret sauce? 

“We knew who we wanted to serve before we knew the problem they needed us to solve. So we started with the research we felt was missing in B2B SaaS. We created this process: (1) Publish free data-rich resources for GTM leaders. (2) Participate in the community. (3) Listen carefully.”

You may, and should, know your ICPs. Still, it’s a fool’s errand to assume the specifics of the problem your product should solve for them. Better to hear it from them directly. Which is why pulling them into an audience community you control has become a non-negotiable. Adam reliably does this through the data-rich resources he shares via email and social.

His success proves building an audience of prospective customers through data-rich resources or by sharing your story works. But the trick, and hardest part, is coming up with worthy research topics or storytelling ideas. Selecting outstanding research topics or captivating storytelling ideas is absolutely essential. They determine to a large extent if the eventual resource will be interesting enough to attract prospects into your audience. 

Great topics/ideas are often hidden in plain sight. 

You need careful research and thoughtful observation to unravel them. Sadly, wearing many hats, founders often don’t have the time for such. Which is where a Storytelling Studio like ours can help. 

Take the sample doc below. 

Through careful research and thoughtful observation, we unraveled a potent research topic and storytelling ideas for a busy founder: 

How do we come up with ideas? 

When working with B2B SaaS startups, we hold regular brainstorming sessions and facilitate internal, ongoing ideas’ collection. We then sort those ideas based on business value, using a scale of 0-3.

We often prioritize ideas with a business value of 2-3:

2. Encourage Participation 

Adam publishes and distributes data-rich resources through his newsletter community, PeerSignal. Other times, he’s sharing compelling stories across social media. Through both efforts, he’s attracting people, including his prospects, to sign up and join his audience community for more content. 

But it’s not enough to pull in people and potential buyers. If you stop there, you’ll likely not gain the credibility to earn the trust of undecided tech decision-makers. Adam knew this.

So what did he do?

“Many SaaS vendors act like tourists selling a quick fix. We wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to be citizens of our community. We spend time and money creating content and participating in discussions”

The internet enables the much-needed, two-way conversation between founders and buyers required to deliver mutual value. Crafting desirable content, whether data-rich resources, relevant stories, or both, is one part of the equation. These help you attract and grow a community of people —including potential customers— you need to have conversations with. Most startups, as Adam rightly noted, stop here. 

You shouldn’t. 

Becoming a citizen of that community by encouraging participation, as Adam does, is where founders can unlock the most leverage. Most founders wave this aside with the excuse of being too busy. But you can’t be too busy for the people whose business you’d eventually need to remain in business. 

First, you must encourage participation, so everyone in your audience community responds to every resource or story you share. Adam Schoenfeld does this so well. Every PeerSignal newsletter sharing a data-rich resource or story ends with him encouraging participation. He invites you to reply directly via email to the newsletter or to leave your thoughts on LinkedIn:

This has profound benefits. 

Firstly, thoughts and replies left by people in your community, especially your ICPs, give you real insight into their needs. Which you can use to shape your product and roadmap accordingly. Additionally, those replies become a more reliable way to find new research topics and storytelling ideas. And when you use these to create more research and stories, you can resonate with and pull more of your ICPs into your audience. 

These are in addition to more awareness, increased reach, and most importantly, referrals from people in your audience community. Again, Adam Schoenfeld and his team at Keyplay enjoy all that: 

“By powering PeerSignal, Keyplay gains awareness. Very few people in our PeerSignal community will ever buy Keyplay, but our relationship has already helped Keyplay gain reach and referrals. Our eight pre-launch customers came without a single outbound call or investor referral. We didn’t even have a website for Keyplay. 100% were curious community members who engaged.”

Win Over Tech Buyers for Your Startup

You can do it in three steps:

1. Craft content that attracts people and your ICPs
2. Pull them into an audience community you own
3. Encourage participation to ignite conversation starters

Competition in B2B SaaS is at cutthroat levels. And there’s no slowing down in sight, as new products are entering the scene daily. As if that wasn’t bad enough, today’s average B2B buyer is reluctant about purchasing yet another software. These scary realities can be a roadblock or an opportunity to grow your B2B SaaS tech startup. It all depends on your approach. 

You can either try to sell the tech product you’ve built or sell your ideas, story, and the problem(s) your product solves. Both approaches can work, no doubt. But if using Adam Schoenfeld’s example as a yardstick resonates with you, the latter can be more impactful.

This approach works because people, including your potential buyers, are naturally drawn to rare insights, unique ideas, and stories. This offers a rare chance to use these to attract potential customers to your community and convince them well before they are ready to make a purchase. 

But let me be clear. 

There’s no magic wand with this approach. Creating and maintaining a content program to attract B2B prospects takes time and expertise. However, you (and your startup) will gain two important things with this approach: mental availability and word of mouth. A study by Wynter on the modern B2B buyer journey supports this. They found that to be shortlisted by B2B tech buyers, you need mental availability and word of mouth: 

Adam’s not-so-secret source to achieving both?

Crafting Content Decision-Makers Actually Want to Read

I became a Keyplay user because of the many, relevant research done by PeerSignal and stories Adam shares on LinkedIn. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have written this post if I didn’t read and was intrigued by them. I’m not alone. 

Imagine if no one saw a need to read the data-rich resources and stories Adam Schoenfeld published. Do you think they would’ve signed up and joined his audience community for more, as I did? 

You bet. 

Imagine if prospects in Adam’s audience didn’t read 3–5 content pieces subtly making a case for using his product to solve their problems. Do you think Adam would have earned their trust enough to shortlist and buy his product, as I'll do? You bet. 

Adam is attracting potential clients and growing his startup successfully. And he’s doing both by crafting and distributing content decision-makers actually want to read. It’s why he doubled down on this in the early stages. 

Most startups would’ve gone the traditional route of hiring a B2B demand generation marketer after hitting $100k in ARR. Not Adam. Seeing what approach worked better at winning undecided tech buyers over, he took a different path. He hired a Content Director to craft more content prospects actually want to read and keep growing his audience community. 

In his words:  

“Our goal for [the PeerSignal audience community] is to become the go-to resource for 100K+ B2B sales and marketing professionals to study modern GTM and get inspired to improve their craft. Instead of hiring a traditional demand gen marketer, we brought on Camille as Director of Content and Community to double down on PeerSignal. She’s had an immediate impact and will be writing the playbook for a media brand inside a SaaS company.”

Here at VEC Studio, crafting captivating content B2B buyers are genuinely eager to read is our jam. Whether it’s data-rich resources or compelling stories, we know how to deliver pieces that hit the mark. We do it through our unique, Product-Led Storytelling approach. This involves using stories target buyers can resonate with to craft content that shows (and not just tells) how your product solves their problems.

And it’s why startups hire VEC Studio: 

Check out our process here.