SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success

Send us Fan Mail When Stacey Epstein became the CMO of Freshworks a few years ago, their PLG motion was doing okay. But approaching marketing from her success with other enterprise SaaS startups, Epstein expanded the marketing and sales motion to include more traditional demand gen tactics—direct sales, events, Account-Based Marketing.  Now they can fully meet the buyer where they’re at—calling it...

Send us Fan Mail What are you trying to do in your forecasting process that you're not getting from your CRM? That’s the question Aviso set out to answer for its clients by leveraging advanced analytics. Their software helps sales teams optimize their strategies, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to improve their sales outcomes. At the recent Ascent Conference in San Francisco,...

Send us Fan Mail Chip House has had a long career in SaaS with companies such as ExactTarget, Salesforce, and SharpSpring.  Now as the CMO at Insightly , we caught up with Chip at the Ascent Conference in San Francisco and got him to share his experiences with all things B2B marketing, including: Product-market fit The role of customer success in marketing Leveraging AI, and  Solving the attributi...

Send us Fan Mail How many good sales emails have you gotten? Personally, I can count them on one hand. Most of us can sniff out a sales email in a split second--the headline is cheesy, it’s about them, and it’s completely irrelevant. Obviously, sellers haven’t done their homework. That’s the opportunity we discussed in my interview with Lavender AI’s Jen Allen-Knuth and Will Aitken at the Ascent C...

Send us Fan Mail People just don’t pick up the phone like they used to, and as a result, outbound call response rates are few and far between. A rep that makes 100 calls a day may only get a handful of connects. It’s such a grueling and inefficient process that many companies have abandoned the phone altogether. The problem is that sales ultimately is based on having valuable conversations. And if...

Send us Fan Mail Why can a person with an iPhone in their bedroom with no budget create videos that get millions of views, while B2B companies that hire professionals can’t seem to get a fraction of that engagement? That’s the problem Michael Hoffman set out to solve with his company Gather Voices . Traditional agency production processes are expensive, slow, and don't scale well, which hinde...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, fractional CMO Andrew Bolis shares how owning a pipeline number and being responsible for specific revenue-related targets not only helps sales and marketing teams work towards common goals, but also provides leverage in conversations with the CFO.  Other Key Insights from this episode include:  Bringing in the right fractional CMO for your situation. Working with...

Send us Fan Mail You’ve probably heard the criticisms of B2B marketing—it’s boring and lacks creativity. And besides, it’s way too expensive to produce ads like B2C companies. In this episode, Melissa Rosenthal, Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp shares her approach to creating remarkable content without breaking the bank.  Coming from B2C powerhouses like Buzzfeed and Cheddar, Rosenthal immediatel...

Send us Fan Mail Working at Google’s mapping team, Steve Benson thought that field salespeople needed a lot more functionality to adequately plan their routes. So, in 2012 founded Badger Maps and set out to build a tool where field sales teams could not only build routes, but also visualize their customers on a map on their mobile device that automatically connected with their CRM.  To ensure prod...

Send us Fan Mail When Susan Peich joined Monitaur AI as their head of marketing earlier this year, the power (and dangers) of AI was still mostly talk amongst data scientists. How quickly things change. With the rise of ChatGPT in recent months, AI's power (and danger) are now at the forefront causing companies to scramble to figure out how to handle its governance. That’s where Monitaur.ai c...

Send us Fan Mail If we’re being honest, there's a big difference between the imagined buyer's journey that marketers invent and what’s happening in reality. But then, we’ve always made those assumptions because it’s nearly impossible to track. Or is it? That’s what Molly St. Louis, Head of Marketing at DealTale talks about in this episode - applying AI to track the previously un-trackabl...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Matt Trifiro, CEO of Vapor.io, joins host Ken Lempit to discuss the insidious tyranny of artificial Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and how to fight back against their oppressive hold on SaaS marketing. Long gone are the days when early adopters of advertising platforms could easily dominate their market niche, as the law of diminishing returns has caught up wit...

Send us Fan Mail Despite building a great product and amassing close to 1000 customers, LiquidPlanner struggled to continue on the same growth trajectory.  Customers expected broader capabilities. Competitors had more money. And as access to capital tightened, the board decided to look for a partner. They found Tempo, a complimentary business that will help deliver better portfolio management capa...

Send us Fan Mail For marketers, breaking through the trust gap is getting harder. Prospective buyers won’t believe it without some third-party validation. So, how can you break through that trust gap in a new and innovative way? That’s the problem Jeff Ernst set out to solve as the founder of SlapFive , a customer marketing solution that makes it simple to engage and mobilize customers to drive gr...

Send us Fan Mail Having spent a decade growing a retail mortgage origination business, Jason Doshi noticed that the movement of funds surrounding the real estate transaction was still very antiquated. A few years later, he built Payments.io, a SaaS digital platform that allows title companies and real estate brokerages to send and receive digital money transfers, saving everyone money and time whi...

Send us Fan Mail Starting his career as a research scientist, Harsha Rajasimha became interested in addressing the issue of clinical trial recruitment after realizing that many promising drugs were not making it to market due to recruitment delays. To better understand the problem, he conducted interviews with 3,000 stakeholders of clinical trials, including patients, physicians, and pharmaceutica...

Send us Fan Mail There’s a tendency for entrepreneurs to believe that the motivations for starting a company is the fame and fortune. But as Aseem Chandra, co-founder and CEO of Immersa explains, “That's the absolute wrong reason. You get into a startup because you love the problem, and you can't wait to see what that solution's going to turn out to be, and you're willing to gi...

Send us Fan Mail While working for a large manufacturer in the film and broadcast industry and visiting over 200 Film and TV studios, David Kaszycki spotted a big problem. Engineers had to stay up to date with updates, critical security patches, general maintenance and accessing manuals and documents for over 10,000 different pieces of technology. With his partner, Kaszycki started Beam Dynamics t...

Send us Fan Mail Is it possible to get to minimum viable product (MVP) in 100 days or less? Our guest this week, Michael Lazor, CEO of SPSoft says it is with the right development partner and the necessary preparation.  Easier said than done.  SPSoft is a software developer specializing in healthcare and telehealth and in this episode, Lazor talks through his methodologies for: Choosing the right...

Send us Fan Mail Why do 90 percent of acquisitions fail for the buyer? According to Ari Kahn, President and CEO of Bridgeline , a big reason is because they’re not leveraging the customer base to create greater lifetime value (LTV), so they don’t adequately recover the original customer acquisition costs (CAC).  Bridgline Digital has acquired its way to a suite of SaaS solutions that bridge the ga...

Send us Fan Mail Like most SaaS companies, Brandon Metcalf, CEO & Founder of Place struggled with the outbound sales model. Out of necessity, they started looking at why companies weren’t buying their products. They found that over half bought nothing.  In other words, no decision.  So they decided to flip the script and educate prospective buyers on what could happen instead of finding the pe...

Send us Fan Mail There’s a lot of hype with Product-Led Growth (PLG) with the promise of low-cost customer acquisition and streamlined expansion. But as Peter Zawistowicz, Pace’s head of marketing says that when you introduce a PLG motion into an organization with an existing direct sales motion, you get an interesting set of problems. Most notably, sellers in a PLG motion are almost always left i...

Send us Fan Mail It’s estimated that 40 percent of all warehouse worker movement is wasteful. A simple example is a worker having to walk through and assemble 12 items that need to be shipped to a customer. What’s the optimal order of items to minimize the steps That’s the problem Yosh Eisbart, CEO of Fullfilld is tackling with their warehouse management orchestration platform. Their system paints...

Send us Fan Mail As fans of the Challenger Sale methodology, we know that getting prospects to move off their status quo to make a change is paramount to winning a new deal. But as Tim Riesterer Chief Visionary for B2B Decision Labs (and self-professed “research nerd”) talks about in his new book The Expansion Sale , growth for a vast majority of companies comes in retention and expansion.  Becaus...

Send us Fan Mail Today’s B2B tech buyer has a much greater expectation and appreciation for self-service—they don’t want to have to jump through hoops or talk to a sales rep to find out what the business does.  But what to do about it?  It’s a difficult shift for traditional marketers and sellers—to be more buyer-centric--which is why we talked with Tyler Lessard, vice president of marketing at Vi...