SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success

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As a CEO, you probably don’t care much about how your accounting and bookkeeping is done.

But you do want insights you can drive once your month is closed out. Burn rate and cash flow comes to mind.

At the Ascent conference in New York, we caught up with Swapnil Shinde, CEO of Zeni, a SaaS that claims to have the world’s first finance operations platform for startups that includes intelligent bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services.

Key Takeaways:

• When it comes to defining ICP, the sharper the knife, the faster it cuts
• Finding the right accounting software mix for startups
• The state of AI technology being used to drive accounting insights faster

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publishes a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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For our 100th episode, we’re excited to interview Brent Adamson, the global head of research with Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management that helps its users quantify and align with customers based on the value being delivered.

Adamson is most known as the co-author of the books The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. And as marketers, both books have been instrumental in shaping our view of content development as an agency and the role it plays in furthering the B2B sales process.

But with everyone trying to teach customers something new and lead with insights (whether they’ve read Challenger or not) the overall impact on customers is less likely to enlightenment, and more likely to overwhelm. 

So, instead of seeing your content and thinking, “Oh wow, I’ve got to do something different,” they’re thinking, “Oh no, here’s another thing I have to worry about.”

Adamson takes the role of content a step further in this episode, explaining that both the marketing and sales process today not must only build trust for the supplier, but also within the prospect's mind so that they can accomplish the implementation on their end. 

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Why B2B marketers should focus on creating a collaborative and value-based conversation with customers, rather than simply presenting ROI calculations, and generating content.
• Why it’s important to help customers feel confident in their decision-making process by providing context, connecting them to relevant content, and addressing their concerns about implementation.
• Empathy is a crucial skill for salespeople, as understanding how customers think about their business and helping them feel better about themselves can lead to successful sales outcomes.

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publishes a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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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 and what motivated them to take action to purchase?   

According to Sanders, the disconnect is that “Most marketers just roll over in the morning and say, ‘Hey, I have a great idea for a campaign.’ They won't look back and say, retrospectively, ‘Is this at a target audience that we know is an ICP? Is this going to be the type of content that even performs for us? Are we going to do a video when, like, 99.9% of closed/won came through a webinar or a podcast?’”   

As the new CMO of Revenue.io, Sanders immediately got entrenched in the data to find opportunities for repeatable processes that would fuel her roadmap to success.   

Key Takeaways from this episode:    

·  How to build a roadmap to ensure your success as a new CMO/marketing leader

·  Where AI is today in analyzing sales conversations and delivering real-time insights

·  How the role of the CMO is evolving to become more data-driven and revenue-focused  

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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 their organization.

The platform allows CEOs to prioritize goals, track progress and align teams towards achieving revenue and profit targets.

And like most, his entrepreneurial journey wasn’t a straight line.

Check out the full episode where Ulf teaches us the importance of solving specific problems, focusing on measurable results, starting from the bottom, embracing micro-delegation and more.

Key Takeaways:

·      Why success strategies rely on top-down micro-delegation where each level of the organization take ownership of their specific goals and initiatives

·      How the company transitioned from consulting to a SaaS with 96% of their revenue coming from licensed subscriptions.

·      A look into Sweden’s entrepreneurial ecosystem - a great place to start and grow software companies.

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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 sold a hiring value proposition, but since hiring took a nosedive in the current economic climate, had been developing an online sales training course that took off.

One of his biggest differentiators in his training is the focus on selling the CFO—and if you’ve paid attention to this year’s TrustRadius report on the buyer/seller disconnect, you know that they’re playing a bigger role in most enterprise purchases.

Other key Takeaways from this episode:

• Why every SaaS should re-evaluate their pricing model on a regular basis
• How to find the right buyers in an account, arm your champion, and write compelling business cases, and multi-thread.
• How they quickly grew their training through email, Linkedin and word-of-mouth.

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

---

Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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 today’s guest Steffen Hedebrandt, Co-Founder and CMO of DreamData.io comes in.

DreamData is a B2B revenue attribution platform based in Denmark that helps companies understand how they acquire new customers by extracting data from various silos such as CRM systems, marketing automation systems, and websites, and creating clean customer journey maps.

Key Takeaways:

• Focusing on customer success as a growth strategy.
• Expanding beyond Denmark to penetrate the US market.
• Understanding that the buyer doesn’t know they’re in a funnel. 

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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 if you ask Google a question, over half the time they’re going to give you a snippet with an answer. And as soon as generative AI for search gains prominence, that's going to be closer 80%.

And even though search isn’t dead, for most small cap SaaS businesses, spending too much money and effort on it is probably wasted.

So where can today’s SaaS find where its audience is hanging out?

That’s where SparkToro comes in and you can try it free on their homepage.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Why you shouldn’t be too heavily influenced by investors.
•  Why building and promoting tools might be a superior SEO strategy for SaaS.
• What the future of AI generated content might look like. 

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

---

Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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 engagement data and its usefulness for sales and introduces his Global Active Awareness Score (GAAS), a comprehensive methodology to measure awareness and attribution by tracking every touchpoint and interaction with the audience.

It assigns points to each touchpoint based on its importance and impact, such as website visits, media coverage, social media engagement, and more. The goal is to track the movement of the GAAS number from month to month, identifying areas where awareness is growing or declining. 

By analyzing the GAAS, the marketing team can make informed decisions about their strategies and initiatives, holding team members accountable for their contributions to the overall awareness score.

Key Takeaways:

• How to create alignment that ensures the creation, progression and future fueling of the pipeline.
• Why business development reps fall under marketing at Acrolinx and help track engagement over setting meetings.Insights into Chris’s messaging development process as they launch the next generation of their product. 

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

---

Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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 migrated to online platforms like podcasts and streaming video, TVEyes has innovated its software platform to capture all the data.

And AI is certainly playing a big role in that today.

But even though their business is focused on data mining, Miles and host Ken Lempit talk about how companies should pay more attention to the data that they’re collecting.

It might be worth something.

Key Takeaways 

• The importance of alignment around pricing and packaging, especially as it extends through the sales process.
• How to scale marketing and sales efforts strategically.
• Why you should constantly reevaluate pricing strategies to stay competitive.

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

---

Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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 content and conversation starters for sales organizations. This platform leverages a data set of 30 million businesses and 6,000 signals, allowing sales organizations to generate hyper-personalized content such as emails, cold call scripts, and social media messages.

In this episode, David Howard, Buzzboard’s VP of Marketing discusses how AI is helping sales reps minimize much of the research and strategizing work by analyzing prospects and generating a response.

Key Takeaways from this episode:

• How aligning marketing and product teams has yielded an increase in engagement from customers and prospects.
• How shifting to shorter, product-centric content has helped potential customers visualize the benefits of driving more free-trial signups.
• Why Hyper-personalization is the future of sales and how AI is helping do it at scale. 

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

---

Stalled pipeline? Lost deals? Diagnose your GTM gaps with a free, actionable checkup. 

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup