SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success

Send us Fan Mail If you want to make good on the promises you made to investors and grow the company the single most important thing the C-suite needs to get right is hiring. That’s why we spoke with Michael Bertoni, CEO of PhillyTech.co —a hiring agency dedicated to SaaS.  Most startups have no idea how to hire people and build high-performing teams. They think they can do themselves and find out...

Send us Fan Mail At the 2019 Ascent Conference in New York, Aptiv.io ’s CEO Guy Mounier recalls their informal poll about how well their demand generation programs were working. Two-thirds of respondents said, “we’re fine” or “we’re good.” Fast forward to the same conference in November 2022 and almost everyone was struggling to cut through the noise to generate qualified leads. Even those with go...

Send us Fan Mail With market uncertainty, and the average CMO tenure at 40 months (2020), conducting an executive level job search at some point is inevitable. While most trade off past relationships, Justin Schmidt, VP of Marketing at Compt.io suggests that “something really magical” happens by putting on the candidate hat and interviewing again as somebody off the street. By taking interview opp...

Send us Fan Mail At the kickoff of their recent user conference, Dave Becker, CEO of CampusESP told the story of the person he first approached with his company idea for a SaaS that enables parent involvement in higher education. She told him that “parent involvement is a fad, and I don’t think you have a company here.” Nine years later, the company has gone from fad, to nice-to-have, to need-to h...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve had the experience working with a large company, day one consists of paperwork--lots of it--and it contributes to a poor first impression.  Simply increasing the percentage of people that accept offers and actually start work would have a massive bottom-line impact.  And it’s not just day one. Research shows that what happens in the first 90 days of an employee’s tenure...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve found it harder to engage buyers today, our interview with Vinay Bhagat , Founder & CEO of TrustRadius is a must listen. For the last five years, TrustRadius has published a report based on surveying 2000 technology buyers and hundreds of vendors to understand how buyer behavior is changing. Today’s buyer has an overarching desire to control their journey and it isn’...

Send us Fan Mail Working as a CFO for tech companies in Australia, Jason Atkins saw a need to automate the very manual and frustrating process involved in equity raises–compounded by a global workforce.  While doing volunteer work in the Gold Coast tech scene, he met his soon-to-be cofounder Kim Hanson and together established a SaaS called Cake Equity with a goal to make equity easier to handle f...

Send us Fan Mail When you take a marketing leadership position for a startup where the opportunity is wide open, what do you prioritize? That’s the situation Matt Dilworth faced back in February (2022) when he joined Anduin, a fintech SaaS startup that streamlines private market transactions.  Having followed CEO Eliot Hodges whom he’d worked with previously at Blend. Dilworth found that partner m...

Send us Fan Mail It seems like lead generation has become the Red-Headed stepchild of modern marketing. But it’s certainly not going away—especially since most SaaS companies have built their sales and marketing infrastructures around it. It does need to evolve though, and that was the gist of our discussion with Cristina Daroca, Senior Director of demand marketing at Riverbed Technology. Leads ar...

Send us Fan Mail Like sales, marketers have a hard time with a product or service they don’t believe in.  When Amber Bogie was searching for the right marketing opportunity, she was less concerned about the product and more concerned about joining a mission driven company.  So, she developed a quadrant: What does the company offer as a product?  What is the company culture and how does that fit in...

Send us Fan Mail Aligning with Sales is job one for David Gabriel, head of marketing for the fast-growing startup eVolve MEP. “Sales has the hard job. They’re in the trenches and we want to do everything we can (as marketers) to make their jobs easier.” That doesn’t mean that they aren’t looking at the long-term picture—they do many things that keep them in touch with their customers. For example,...

Send us Fan Mail Most companies do “checklist marketing” by default: We need to be on every social channel. We should have a newsletter for every customer segment. We need to go to all these conferences. Fractional CMO Yasmin Morrison challenges her clients to think about marketing more like an investment portfolio and every quarter, you make bets.  If it doesn’t pay dividends, get out. Double dow...

Send us Fan Mail Having been with Refine Labs, MJ Peters knew how to sniff out the opportunity to work with a company that gets marketing.  Now four months into her new gig as the VP of Marketing for CoLab Software, MJ talks about building a demand gen first marketing model where marketing is measuring only Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and Sales Accepted Opportunities (SAOs) as opposed to anything...

Send us Fan Mail Where most SaaS companies experience problems with the effectiveness of demand capture strategies, Paddle had the opposite problem—they weren’t focused on long-term customer creation.  In the beginning, that was fine because they “were so busy and productive "Hoovering" up the in-market demand.” Davies says that as a CMO, you always carry two time frames in your mind. On...

Send us Fan Mail Getting specific about your ICP is an old saw—but why then aren’t more companies marketing efficiently? Our guest, Annie Wissner, says the reason is because we’ve become too used to bull markets where you have wiggle room in marketing execution. “We're still in that digital wave where it's primarily about Google Search, but there's a lot of other methodologies that...

Send us Fan Mail Suuchi Ramesh, founder and CEO of Suuchi Inc had envisioned a need for one single source of truth in supply chain across suppliers, factories, brands, retailers, warehouses, and customers when they began operations in 2017. A bold vision, for sure. But the timing (pre-COVID) helped making the space ripe for disruption.   In the same way that you’d eat an elephant (one bite at a ti...

Send us Fan Mail We knew that Dan Johnston, CEO of WorkStep had a great story about how they’ve shifted the go-to-market strategy as they’ve expanded post series B--especially for B2B SaaS marketers that have had to make the case for patience. That’s in here, but the overall story is much bigger than that. Having started managing a third-party logistics warehouse that imported trampolines, Johnsto...

Send us Fan Mail The founding story of Fireflies.ai told by co-founder Krish Ramineni sounds like a post-college rock band that turned into software hack.  Instead of going to graduate school (working as a PM at Microsoft), Ramineni took his would-be co-founder up on an offer to “hang out” and “work on different things” in some free co-working space that a VC had given them in Boston. When they ha...

Send us Fan Mail Before you buy tech for Account Based Marketing (ABM), and even before you start picking target accounts, check out this episode with StrategicABM’s Chief Marketing Officer Declan Mulkeen. Their firm is 100% focused on ABM and Mulkeen talks about how the tech vendors have popularized the approach in recent years, but they didn’t create it. (it’s been around for over 20 years, and...

Send us Fan Mail Referrals are the lifeblood of every business. The cost of acquisition is the lowest, and they tend to close faster and at higher rates, making the sales process WAY easier.  So why do companies spend so much on paid channels where the cost per lead is going up and the quality is going down at such a rapid pace? Referrals have always been hard to scale—especially if you haven’t tr...

Send us Fan Mail Raising capital for your SaaS has one purpose—to amplify and scale the business. It cannot define the business model or product-market fit for you.  And once you raise capital, the whole dynamic changes. The pressures are different (you’re now on the clock to deliver return for investors) and so is the go-to-market strategy (the founder relationships won’t be enough to scale).   W...

Send us Fan Mail Most companies fail with ABM because of their ad hoc execution. They target accounts as a wish list and continue to do business as usual.  The truth is that successful ABM requires an organizational mindset shift, and that doesn’t happen by changing it all at one time.  “Marketing usually gets it,” says Jennifer Leaver, senior global ABM Manager at Bazaarvoice. “The tougher sale i...

Send us Fan Mail Healthcare is one of the most difficult industries to penetrate, even for established brands. They’re risk-averse, have strong defenses against being sold to, sales cycles are long and they significant data protection requirements. So how do you do gain traction as a financial management startup targeting hospitals and healthcare systems? In this episode of SaaS Backwards, Ben Bea...

Send us Fan Mail Business Development Representatives (BDRs) have typically been a sales function, as part of the compartmentalization of sales functions defined in Aaron Ross’ Predictable Revenue (2011). What worked well for a decade has met challenges today. They don’t want the phone calls or emails until they’re ready. In short, buyers have changed their research and buying process--what was pr...

Send us Fan Mail We’re at an inflection point as sales and marketing practitioners.  Some of us have heeded early warning signs as marketing and sales KPIs become harder to achieve, and others are just starting to pay attention. Or rather, they’re being forced to—because buyers are taking more control and our outdated methods of prospecting are off putting. They don’t want your phone calls pressur...