SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success

Send us Fan Mail Coming from sales positions where she’s carried quotas, Brandee Sanders knows what having skin in the game for marketers looks like.     And it’s not tracking MQLs or developing a strong tech stack.    It does look like examining the data to find repeatable opportunities for sales pipeline.    In other words, do we truly know how and why closed/won opportunities entered our orbit...

Send us Fan Mail Strategic initiatives often get de-railed when CEOs delegate them instead of taking ownership. This lack of clarity can lead to confusion and lack of focus throughout the organization. That’s the problem Ulf Arnetz is solving through his Swedish-based company Howwe , a SaaS enterprise platform for CEOs to orchestrate and operationalize strategy implementation at every level of the...

Send us Fan Mail Probably best known for helping Gong grow from $200K to $200M in five years, Chris Orlob talks about following his passion for helping people learn valuable sales skills through his new company pclub.io . (That’s short for President’s Club for non-salesy folks). But sales training wasn’t the original focus. Originally, they started out to build a company called QuotaSignal that so...

Send us Fan Mail The attribution problem has long been a challenge for marketers—probably first articulated by John Wannamaker when he said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” It seemed like marketing tech had solved it (for a minute)—until buyers went and changed their behavior. So how do we map the customer journey today? That’s where...

Send us Fan Mail Seemingly not too long ago, searches for new products and services overwhelmingly started at Google. And it made sense to optimize for keywords, so you’d appear organically on page one. But things have changed—just a bit. And no one is more qualified to talk about those changes than our guest Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro and formerly the founder of Moz. As Fishkin notes, today i...

Send us Fan Mail Sales and marketing alignment was never a problem for Acrolinx , as evidenced by Christopher P. Willis’ title: Chief Marketing & Pipeline Officer. Acrolinx is an AI-powered content marketing engine that integrates with content tools to provide real-time advice on brand, tone, clarity, compliance, and consistency.  In this episode, Chris talks about the value of tracking engage...

Send us Fan Mail Even in a very healthy business, you must keep looking for innovation. That’s the gist of this episode’s message with Dan Miles, Chief Operating Officer of TVEyes. TVEyes is a search engine for impactful video and audio measured by audience and level of information and newsworthiness. Historically, that was primarily broadcast TV and radio, but over the last few years as audiences...

Send us Fan Mail We all know that personalization, context, and relevance are necessary to get a cold email opened. But that takes a lot of time and energy to customize each communication, and when only 3% of your target audience is in-market at any given time. And that’s where Buzzboard comes in. The company has developed a platform that utilizes AI and proprietary data to create personalized con...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we talked to Fred Rockwell, owner of the upcoming Ascent Conference in New York (Oct 30) about the advantages of attending events in-person, how they’ve changed in a post-covid world, and why he structures his events to create more bottom of the funnel opportunities through private invites.  The SaaS Backwards Podcast is also excited to be the official podcast spo...

Send us Fan Mail Effective messaging is paramount for SaaS companies to attract and convert the right types of customers. And according to this week’s guest Anthony Pierri, Partner with Fletch PMM , most are getting it wrong.  They try to speak to too many audiences at once. They use vague and broad statements that don’t resonate with anyone. They use wishy washy language.  Today’s marketers have...

Send us Fan Mail Criminals have developed efficient business models that make it cost-effective to attack even small enterprises. No company is too small, and the need for awareness and understanding of the evolving threat landscape, particularly with generative AI is at an all-time high. But simply training staff not to click on this or not to write down their password on post-its isn’t going to...

Send us Fan Mail As a Chiropractor, Brian Capra never intended to become a software developer—but it seems like something bigger was a play. Because the healthcare system, particularly insurance companies, have historically been biased against chiropractic care, chiropractors must be more entrepreneurial. They must understand marketing, building relationships, sales, and managing a business to suc...

Send us Fan Mail The B2B world is different today, and (unfortunately) there’s no one formula that works across the board. It’s not outbound versus inbound. It’s not advertising versus content. Every organization has a unique formula that will consistently drive meaningful conversations with targeted prospects. Therefore, you'll never see a productive organization where there's a lot of...

Send us Fan Mail There’s nothing like an economic slow-down to thin the herd. Companies take longer to buy, consolidate resources, and rethink their go-to-market strategy. So why are companies doubling down on yesterday’s strategies? Normally the host of SaaS Backwards, Ken Lempit, President of Austin Lawrence , sits in the guest seat this week to answer questions about how SaaS leaders need to ap...

Send us Fan Mail When a company starts out, verticalization may not be the best thing. In fact, today’s guest Corey Quinn, fractional CMO and GTM strategist prefers to work with companies who went broad first, since there’s value in exploring different verticals and learning the nuances in the different markets. But at a certain point, verticalization becomes necessary to scale. It reduces complex...

Send us Fan Mail It’s never been harder for marketers generate an audience where you can have impact than it is today. The media landscape has exploded and the number of choices we have as marketers has never been more varied. In many ways, we’re now paying for the sins automating a process of building trust and relationships. In this episode, Anthony Kennada, Co-Founder and CEO of Audience Plus t...

Send us Fan Mail As martech SaaS founder, Steve McDonald acknowledges the tendency to believe that their product is so exceptional that customers will naturally flock to it. But then reality sets in and you realize that maybe Shoeless Joe Jackson wasn’t whispering in your ear after all. There’s a lot of risk for customers to invest in something new, and content marketing is the obvious way to buil...

Send us Fan Mail When joining MadKudu as a Marketing VP, Shannon Curran knew they were so much more than a predictive lead scoring platform. She wanted to shift the conversation from product-led growth (PLG) to a focus on hybrid funnels and revenue generation. And because it would be a huge challenge to cut through the noise in the MarTech/RevTech space, they engaged an external consultant to cond...

Send us Fan Mail Outbound selling is here to stay—but to make it work, efficiency is key. Of course, the task at hand isn’t lost on Salesintel.io CEO Manoj Ramnani, who’s tools are designed to do just that. Salesintel.io is a go-to-market intelligence platform that helps marketing, sales, and revenue operations teams research prospective accounts and find contact information. Ramnani is most excit...

Send us Fan Mail A good co-founder is hard to find. But what if you could hire one on an hourly basis? That’s what Jason Shapiro, CEO and founder of 82i talks about in this episode. 82i is a strategic growth services firm that serves as “a co-founder for hire” to help with growth functions such as raising capital and hiring so founders can keep their eye on what truly matters--revenue. Key takeawa...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, guest host Jason Myers interviews Alex George, the head of marketing at Hint Health --a platform that is redefining healthcare by providing back-end software for the direct primary care market. Alex shares insights into Hint Health's go-to-market strategy and how they enable the growth of the direct pay model in the healthcare industry. The company adopted a...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Allyson Havener, VP of Marketing from TrustRadius is back to talk about their yearly report on the B2B buyer-seller disconnect with some serious updates. Last year, the report focused on the self-serve economy—they want product information readily available without talking to sales and then they would validate customer proof points.  All of that still holds, and t...

Send us Fan Mail We talk a lot with our customers about the 97%. The people who have problems you solve, but don’t know there’s a solution and certainly don’t know about you. That’s what we talked about with Olgo Noha, CMO of SplitMetrics at the recent Ascent Conference in San Francisco. Split Metrics is in a relatively new market with little competition—but there is little solution-awareness. The...

Send us Fan Mail Why are some SaaS companies raising significant funds while others struggle to find their first customers or determine what to build? We caught up with Sanjit Singh Dang, the Chairman and Co-founder of U First Capital , at the Ascent conference and he shares his insights as a VC evaluating startups—most notably how VCs now require more proof points on the customer side and ask the...

Send us Fan Mail Does anyone really understand their health benefits?  Most of us have experienced going to HR with a benefits question, only to be redirected to a call center just to sit on hold and maybe get answers. Guy Benjamin, CEO and co-founder of Healthee , developed a way to simplify this age-old problem with a platform that lets employees easily navigate their health and wellness benefit...