SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success

Send us Fan Mail The role of thought leadership is changing in content marketing, especially for SaaS companies.  In this special episode hosted by Jason Myers, our usual host Ken Lempit, President and Chief Strategist of Austin Lawrence, takes the guest seat to dive deep into the evolving landscape of content marketing and thought leadership for SaaS companies.  Ken and Jason discuss the shift to...

Send us Fan Mail In SaaS companies, there’s a need for sales and marketing teams to work together closely toward common goals and understand each other’s perspectives. Amy Osmond Cook, co-founder and CMO at Fullcast recognizes this need. Fullcast’s platform ensures all teams can access the same data to establish seamless communication and strategic alignment, eliminating revenue pain points and im...

Send us Fan Mail Building a strong foundation is essential for long-term business success, especially when faced with unexpected challenges.  We spoke with Dave Dittenber, Co-Founder and CEO of BYOD , who faced the ultimate challenge with the unexpected passing of his Co-Founder, Frank Luijckx. He recounts the loss and emphasizes how Frank’s forward-thinking and meticulous planning had a lasting p...

Send us Fan Mail Building a business with the intention of a future sale requires meticulous planning and organization from the outset.  In this episode, Payment Brokers Founder and CEO Jeremy Lessaris, a serial founder with multiple successful exits, emphasizes the importance of the early organization of books, records, contracts, and agreements as a critical factor in boosting valuation and stre...

Send us Fan Mail Enterprise search has been around for quite some time, and it often conjures images of outdated intranet searches within the confines of an organization's internal networks. So how do you shift the focus from “old school” methods to a more dynamic, AI-powered approach that connects various applications, enabling intelligent query responses and contextually relevant summaries?...

Send us Fan Mail With a startling low average tenure of 18 months, today’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is struggling.  The pressure primarily stems from the need to drive growth in a capital-efficient manner. This includes rapidly accelerating revenue growth while managing and optimizing the cost of sales and marketing operations, often within a constrained budget or shifting economic conditions. ...

Send us Fan Mail We all know video is important to grow exposure, but creating enough is still challenging. The tools are complex, production is expensive, and it can be overwhelming just to come up with ideas. In this episode, Aug X Labs founder Jeremy Toeman talks about his personal frustration with the complex tools just to make basic videos that can be used on websites and in social media post...

Send us Fan Mail If you went to the doctor for a sore throat and she said, “Last time I had one, this is what helped me get better” versus “I looked at the clinical trial evidence for 5000 people with your symptoms in your age range, geographics, and background,” which of those solutions is more viable? That’s how Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze views the world of A/B testing.  Spiralyze crawls and...

Send us Fan Mail Feedback is not just a tool for improving products, but a strategic asset that can drive growth, innovation, and competitive advantage. In this episode, Satya Ganni, CEO of Beamer and Userflow , explains the importance of feedback in reducing churn in product-led SaaS companies.  Feedback provides valuable insights into customer needs, preferences, and pain points, which makes it...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we delved into the transformative power of algorithms in business with Jason Radisson, CEO & founder of Movo , a platform that provides real-time scheduling flexibility and improved workforce management for large companies with frontline workers. Jason recounted his time at Harrah's Entertainment, where they used data to optimize customer interactions and...

Send us Fan Mail As a startup with shaky product market fit, prospective customers often want to associate you with a mature category so they can determine where it might fit in their tech stack—or not. But for Warmly , the existing categories represented only a small subset of their capabilities—albeit cheaper than the mature tools. And they couldn’t just settle for being known as "Drift but...

Send us Fan Mail As a seasoned sales expert and popular sales podcaster, Brian Burns has more than a few opinions about how companies are selling to the enterprise today. Most notably, because reps haven’t been taught the difference, they try to make up for the lack of pipeline by increasing outreach activity. That may have worked in 2011 when the Predictable Revenue Model gained prominence (and o...

Send us Fan Mail Originally, the founders of Plytix set out to create an analytics platform for e-commerce that measured the performance of a product (instead of a website) so brands could see how end users interact with them, even when sold on a third-party website.  But even after positive early traction and investment, they were stalled—many of the brands didn’t have their product information a...

Send us Fan Mail Having moved from a miserable culture in investment banking to an incredibly positive one at tech startup ZipRecruiter, Jonathan Fields learned early in his career the profound impact culture has on an organization. So inspired, in fact, that he and his co-founders worked nights and weekends to create a platform that could make those elements scalable and easy for companies to ado...

Send us Fan Mail Are you making one or more of these mistakes in your messaging? Given the number of websites that we review regularly, chances are that you are—and that means leaving revenue on the table. In this episode, Ken and Jason from Austin Lawrence Group discuss the eight common mistakes that SaaS companies make with real-life examples. So if you’re a SaaS CEO or CMO revisiting messaging...

Send us Fan Mail Business development poses big challenges for today’s SaaS. It becomes twice as ineffective every year as people learn how to ignore you. And it’s such a grind that it’s hard to find good people who want to stick with the sales development rep (SDR) position over the long term. To get engagement on the phone today takes the right experience, technology, and triggers. That’s why we...

Send us Fan Mail We’ve all been frustrated by those pesky ads that pop up when trying to read an article. We understand that publishers are trying to capture more of that lost ad revenue, but the solution is not to create such a poor experience that it drives consumers away. And the rise of ad blockers is not the only problem for publishers. The decline of traditional tracking methods due to priva...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, SaaS Backwards host Ken Lempit switches places to the guest seat to discuss upcoming trends in SaaS marketing for the new year and what companies will have to do to be successful. Ken is the Chief Strategist of the Austin Lawrence Group, a growth marketing agency specializing in B2B SaaS, and has a 30-year track record in software marketing. The key areas discusse...

Send us Fan Mail Pricing is often the most overlooked “P” in the SaaS marketing mix. We see it in our marketing practice often. Companies may be averse to raising prices for fear of losing customers, focusing on other priorities like product development, or simply don’t understand the impact on the business. In this episode, we caught up with Pat Meegan, Senior Partner at Maple Street Advisors, wh...

Send us Fan Mail When going through a repetitive and time-consuming mortgage application process in 2017, Mang-Git Ng was surprised that the process wasn’t automated. He realized that there were many industries that still operated in the internet dark ages and that moving all these PDFs and paper documents to online forms could solve a major problem. But after he and his co-founder had built their...

Send us Fan Mail Because of the challenges in the current financing environment and the cautious approach of strategic buyers and private equity firms for SaaS companies, we invited Marty Magida on to discuss practical strategies to enhance company value and navigate the complexities of the M&A market. Magida is the managing director of Berkery, Noyes & Co an independent investment bank pr...

Send us Fan Mail You’ve probably never thought about what goes on behind the scenes when you return a product, but there’s a lot to it. In this episode of the SaaS Backwards podcast, Chuck Fuerst, CMO at ReverseLogix , gives a look behind the scenes at some of the challenges and opportunities in the returns management system category. And because it’s so complicated, their go-to-market strategy re...

Send us Fan Mail As a CEO, you probably don’t care much about how your accounting and bookkeeping is done. But you do want insights you can drive once your month is closed out. Burn rate and cash flow comes to mind. At the Ascent conference in New York, we caught up with Swapnil Shinde, CEO of Zeni , a SaaS that claims to have the world’s first finance operations platform for startups that include...

Send us Fan Mail You may have noticed that deals today take longer to close and scrutinized heavily. So, what do SaaS companies need to do? Spencer Dent, Founder of Clozd says to make sure you understand the how the decision-making process, people involved, and priorities have changed.  And since the CFO plays a bigger role, it’s less about ease of integration and more about the bottom line—and yo...

Send us Fan Mail For our 100th episode, we’re excited to interview Brent Adamson, the global head of research with Ecosystems , a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management that helps its users quantify and align with customers based on the value being delivered. Adamson is most known as the co-author of the books The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. And as marketers, bo...