Most new SaaS companies approach marketing and sales like this:

conduct market research
identify ideal customers
develop buyer personas
target ideal customers with content and ads that are personalized for personas
We took a different approach. Throughout 2016, we targeted many customer types—small businesses and enterprise corporations across a variety of industries and sectors.

During that time, we used our own platform, Ruler Analytics, to collect data on anonymous visitors to our website, visitors who became leads, and leads who became customers.

Toward the end of 2016, we integrated with several other tools to identify our most profitable customer segments.

Instead of starting with buyer personas, we defined our ideal customer after we saw exactly who that was. We used historical data to uncover what customer segments were most likely to buy our service—and most likely to have the highest LTVs.

Then we shifted all of our sales and marketing efforts to focus 100 percent on those segments.

The result: we doubled our 2016 revenue in the first six months of 2017.