B2B Revenue Rebels

To become a category leader in 2024, investing all of your go-to-market (GTM) resources into sales and marketing won’t cut it. Getting to unicorn status requires a GTM motion where customer retention is at the forefront of the strategy, otherwise you’ll never truly capture the market share needed to scale to a 9-figure evaluation.

Today’s guest has led Customer Success teams at heavy hitting startups like DropBox, Slack and Miro, before which he managed accounts for 2.5 years at Oracle. During his time at Dropbox, his market segment grew from $20 Million to over $100 Million ARR in 2 years - and he’s sharing this story on Revenue Rebels.

Josh Neal is a Customer Success Leader with two decades of direct brand and SaaS technology experience. He’s led teams at some of the most recognizable rocket ships of this generation, and currently he’s an advisor right here at Warmly.

He’s a huge proponent of Scaled Digital Customer Success, which is a method of leveraging technology to enhance the customer experience and deliver on business targets while increasing customer satisfaction. This exact methodology helped Dropbox scale their mid-market sector to new revenue records.

Finding the magic method to improve your adoption and retention rates starts with testing and iteration. Josh attributes the success of Dropbox’s customer success motion to a granular approach that kept breaking down user data and analyzing all possible usage methods and patterns. This required a ton of experimentation and meant that embracing failure became the norm.

Tune into the full episode to learn how to scale like a unicorn!

KEY INSIGHTS:
01:12 Josh’s background
02:05 What is scaled digital customer success?
02:52 When to implement scaled digital customer success?
04:39 How DropBox scaled through customer success
06:36 How to use data to improve your customer success motion
09:03 The magic method behind improving adoption and retention
11:40 Increasing adoption and retention through scaled digital customer success
13:43 What made DropBox such a great product? 
15:19 How DropBox successfully retained customers through experimentation
18:48 Scaling a customer success motion via headcount and technology
20:21 The winning principles of a customer success manager

Connect with Josh - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jneal10/

Connect with Alan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-j-zhao/

Want to convert your website visitors instantly? Try Warmly for free - https://warmly.ai/

The path to becoming a marketing professional isn’t linear. In 2024, a lot more people strive to become marketers than there are roles available, which is also why starting a marketing agency is the hottest business trend on social media.

Today’s guest is a prime example of someone who did it right - he combined multiple relevant skills and passions to build a marketing career that has led him to receive awards such as "20 Under 40" honoree, Tech Marketer of the Year, and Executive of the Year.

Kenneth’s path to marketing started with young aspirations of becoming a musician. He then pivoted to working behind the scenes in the music industry, found a passion in psychology, and then ultimately landed in sales, where he combined his newfound experience with a passion for writing to become the companies first marketer. 

Building out a partner channel is not a guaranteed success, but when it works - it works great. Kenneth shares a story about how one of their competitors was acquired by Twilio, which they later shut down. This enabled a deeper partnership with Twilio and allowed Text Request to swallow up their competitors' established book of business, increasing pipeline by 150% that year.

Tune into the full episode to learn how to become a rockstar marketer through strategic partnerships!

Connect with Kenneth - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-burke-1641b676/

Connect with Alan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-j-zhao/

Want to convert your website visitors instantly? Try Warmly for free - https://warmly.ai/

• (00:00) - Getting into marketing

When someone has a track record of being part of the revenue leadership structure at fast growing, name brand companies such as Stripe, PayPal, American Express and Sendoso, two things are certain:

-They know how to build an A+ team
-You should listen to them if you’re looking to do the same 

This episode welcomes Dana Warren, Venture Partner at Canaan - an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in visionaries with transformative ideas. 

Dana has over 15 years of experience running revenue teams and she’s joining Revenue Rebels to talk about what it means to build a team of A+ players.

Building an A+ team boils down to only having A+ players. When defining an A+ player, Dana describes someone who’s always pursuing excellence in all matters of their craft and never backs down from finding the right answer. She also considers diversity a key factor in high performing teams, as different backgrounds mean a larger set of skills available across the board.

A common mistake that leaders make when dealing with a high performing team is adopting a “set it and forget it” mindset. Dana’s approach to avoiding this pitfall is to consistently provide coaching, as even top performers can have a false understanding of various parts of the process and helping them round out their game is how you turn them into A+ players.

Tune into the full episode to learn how to build an A+ player revenue team!

Connect with Dana - https://www.linkedin.com/in/danamwarren/

Connect with Alan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-j-zhao/

Want to convert your website visitors instantly? Try Warmly for free - https://warmly.ai/

Ryan Yackel is the CMO of Databand.ai, the industry’s first proactive data observability platform that spots data errors, triages them, and alerts the right people so that it can be fixed immediately.

Ryan started his career in sales engineering, then product marketing, then running all of marketing. And he’s had a unique perspective of working at companies with highly technical products.

I get asked this question all the time: how do you market to developers?

In this episode we’re going to cover this exact topic.

Learn how Ryan navigated the developer ecosystem to generate 100,000+ youtube views, 1,000+ downloads of their ebook, and 10x their yearly marketing budget in qualified pipeline.

Paul Ross is the CMO of Affinity, the relationship intelligence CRM that has grown rapidly in the last 4 years. Affinity's target audience is primarily the PE and VC community, which Paul mentions has a healthy amount of FOMO (fear of missing out) when it comes to getting an edge against competitors. In this episode we talk about how Paul uses that FOMO to his advantage, as well as cut $300,000 in LinkedIn ad spend a month and re-allocate that towards content and community initiatives that 1) solve customer problems and 2) harnesses customer relationships. After the first month of cutting paid ads, pipeline remained flat. And then it started to grow. In 2023, Affinity delivered a million dollars more qualified pipeline on a 25% less budget allocation. 

Joran Hofman is the founder of Reditus, a B2B SaaS affiliate marketing platform. Prior to that he was the Head of Customer Success at Leadfeeder where he got tired of referring tools after his demos. So he decided to make a website of all the tools he refers people. The website had 30,000 visitors a month but Joran had trouble earning money from affiliate B2B SaaS companies he referred. So he decided to build a tool that solved his own problem.

Today we're going to talk about why you need to build an affiliate program, when to build one, and what are the actionable 1-2-3 steps you can do today to set one up.

Golan Raz is the cofounder and COO of Deeto.ai, the next generation customer advocacy platform. I haven't really seen anything like it. Golan is a 4th time founder who witnessed the pain of how difficult companies have made it to leverage customers to promote the company's brand and product. It shouldn't be so difficult. Getting a customer testimonial should be as easy as uploading on Instagram. 

Today we'll be talking about just how important customer advocacy is when paid marketing channels are becoming increasingly competitive, as well as easy, actionable steps to implement your own program.

Adir Ben-Yehuda was the first sales hire and VP of Revenue at Walnut, the industry's leading interactive demo platform. He grew the company's revenue from 0 to double digit millions in ARR. But it's not his first time doing it. He's figured out his own repeatable sales optimization process and how to build a narrative around the product and category.

Today we’re going to talk about that growth story and the lessons they learned along the way, like what VPs of sales should do in their first 90 days, the process Adir used when narrowing focus on the right ICP and messaging towards that ICP, how to handle the age old sales objection “not right now,” and how to build systems to get ahead of the next stage of growth.