The Growth and Influence Podcast

Ankit Dhorajiya started his consulting company not with a vendor focus, but a focus on customers and problems. How's that working out? Several years in, he's never had a customer leave... And he's worked with some big customers, including the Indian government, where he helped deliver clean drinking water to 112,000,000 people. Don't miss this episode where Ankit shares the philoso...

Grant McLarnon sold a software company to Microsoft and a services company to KPMG. Today, he is the CRO of a Microsoft channel partner undergoing the shift from services to software. Oh - and that company is publicly traded. Grant has unique and rare experiences and insights that are incredibly valuable to anyone operating in a large tech ecosystem like Microsoft. Don't miss this one.

Tony DiSanza shares insights on how AI is creating significant changes in the business world, particularly within large tech ecosystems. What growth channels have the best returns on effort? How is this going to change in a world where AI is cannibalizing consulting fees? Tony emphasizes the importance of adapting to AI disruption and the need for strategic approaches to business growth. Discover...

Channel partners are behind on AI, and it's going to hurt their businesses. Here's one example: this company used AI to increase their RFP win rate from ~5% to ~25%... While responding to far more of them. The process for doing so is just one of the high value topics of conversation in this episode. Josh Santiago is a rare animal - a Chief Strategy Officer at a channel consulting firm. The insight...

Chris Carter lost an SAP partner company and was ready to call it quits. After having to lay off his entire staff... And watch what he had worked so hard to build go up in smoke when one customer made a bad decision... He didn't know if the business was for him. But he came back - mostly because SAP leadership wanted him back in their partner channel. Today, he leads one of SAP's premier consultin...

The worst mistake you can make with nurture emails is to not write them. But for those who do write nurture emails, there's a fatal mistake most people make... And it goes hand in hand with the reason conversions are low across the entire marketing funnel. If you write nurture emails (or you don't, but you know you should), don't miss this episode.

Almost every B2B business knows one-to-one sales. Few have unlocked the power of one-to-many sales. In this episode, I break down the details of a webinar I wrote with Adam Robinson, the founder of Retention.com and RB2B. This webinar sold ~ $30,000 in self-serve annual SaaS subscription the first two times Adam presented it, and sold 15% of the room every time he presented it. Listen to learn mor...

You want your reader to take action when they read your email. But how do you get someone to spend the time and energy doing something... When the only tool you have is a block of text they're going to read? The answer is in psychology. If you want to influence someone, you must understand what already influences them. Then, you craft language that aligns with the way they see the world. That lang...

It's common knowledge that B2B prospects won't talk to you or your sales team until they're 70 - 75% or more through their decision-making process. Meanwhile, B2B SaaS companies are spending 75 - 107% of new logo ARR on marketing, with most of it going to top of funnel lead generation. See the problem? There's an enormous gap between the money we dump into lead generation, and the step where we ac...

Do your prospects feel like victims when you market to them? Is that what you want them to feel? This episode explores the meaning behind the word "solution", and what happens when we market our products as if it is going to solve a problem (which they almost never do - they are only a tool the prospect can use to solve the problem). Listen for some angles on this that you may not have considered...

This is a work in public episode. I started Profit Automation in Feb 2023 without having a complete vision for what I was building. I had been fired from my job in tech sales, and I knew I wanted to work in an environment where I had more control over my own destiny again... And that's about all I knew. In this episode, I share revenue details, what I've learned, and my own mindset, attitude, and...

My 15-year old son thinks he may want to be a pilot... But he doesn't want to talk to my friend who just went through the process and crash landed a plane. He's just going to "get online and sign up." What has technology done to our muscles of resourcefulness and creation? It's paved the way to make many of our tasks more effortless, but it has also made us less capable of achieving anything that...

In a world where your prospect won’t talk to you until they’re 70% done with their buying journey, and 77% of prospects won’t engage until after their own research... What we’re doing today in B2B SaaS is borderline insane. Bland, banal content created by a content team whose job is not to convert, but to produce volumes of content. The smartest marketers are creating ONE TO MANY selling opportuni...

If there was a lead channel for your SaaS business where leads would: 1. Close 80% more often 2. Be more profitable and have MUCH lower CAC 3. Churn less often (probably) Would you want to use it? Of course you would! That channel is referrals. Jay Abraham, one of the most successful living marketers, identified 125 ways to get referrals, and says that using 3-4 of them consistently will change a...

B2B marketing, especially in the tech and SaaS industry, is shifting toward B2C. If you're a marketer, you've heard it you whole career - B2C marketers are better at getting attention, placing products, and generating sales. But B2B was a different beast, and comparisons seemed academic and pointless. Technology and social media have finally reached a tipping point where B2B buyers are inf...

Today's episode is about personal branding - specifically mine. Over the last 18 months, I've been working on my brand to make it reflect the impact I really want to make outside of my personal life. I've learned that you can know who you are, but be bad at sharing that with others. This episode is a public definition of my brand. If you think that's weird, maybe it is - but I'...

Want to see the video version of this podcast? See it here: https://youtu.be/Ta_TdcBGng0 I'm making a predication that a marketing and growth tactic that only a very small number of companies are doing right now... Will quickly become a massive trend in how SaaS companies market to and acquire customers. If you're not paying attention to this, you should be.

For visuals, find this episode on YouTube also: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSYui1FCDhSGFlZbVMi6CtQ It's all about awareness. Most marketers are familiar with the awareness scale, especially as it applies to B2C marketing. It's essential to marketing to B2B prospects also. But is there an aggregate awareness level in your market as a whole that you should be aware of? And what does th...

The fundamental rules that SaaS marketing has followed to drive leads into the sales pipeline (SLG)... Or persuade free users to upgrade to paid subscriptions (PLG)... No longer work anymore. For over a decade, SaaS has enjoyed an environment where the rules other industries had follow didn't apply here. But as almost-free capital has disappeared and scrutiny on profitability and unit economic...

In the last episode, I did a teardown of the emails a company called Mouseflow sends to users who sign up for a free account of their product. In this episode, I'm going to walk through three emails I wrote to demonstrate the principles I talked about during the teardown.

In this episode, I do a teardown of a new user email flow from a real company. Mouseflow is a SaaS company who runs a PLG motion. That stands for "Product-Led Growth," and it means the company uses a free trial or a free subscription level as a primary way of attracting users. The communications, usually and mostly by email, that new users get, are a critical piece of the company's e...

Pipeline is the problem for almost every SaaS marketing org right now in 2024. Most SaaS CMOs or Marketing/Demand Gen leaders have a lead database but aren't seeing nearly enough leads turn into meaningful pipeline. If this is you, you might be going back to the well with the idea of increasing the volume or quality of leads coming into the top of the funnel. Or, you might be hammering away at...

A recent New York Times article attempted to cast the personal development coaching industry as a predatory, shark-infested place that just wants to rob people of their life savings. In this episode, I share my take on: The insinuations made by the NYT article The possibility of bad actors in the coaching industry Whether the industry should be regulated Follow Andrew's Socials: ⁠LinkedIn⁠ | ⁠...

I recently spent 6 days straight, 14+ hours each day, at an event called Date with Destiny, run by Tony Robbins. I was studying my notes this morning (which literally fill half a large journal, every page full)... And I came across the topic for today's episode. It's the "cycle of meaning" - how we create meaning and, ultimately, how we create the conditions we experience in our...

Once an industry full of bold and creative innovators, the tech/SaaS industry has become characterized by its copy and paste business models and its obligatory social values. This brand of conformity to industry mores has a terrible impact on any company's ability to create a powerful emotional response with its audience and build a long-term business that extends beyond the comfortable confin...