SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success

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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. 

Because most deals start out too small, underpriced, and overserviced, the question is how to keep and grow those customers when it comes to renewal time? (Oh, by the way, the price is going up.)

In many ways, renewing isn’t just renewing. And upselling isn’t just upselling. It’s all reselling.

Therefore, challenging their status quo won’t help you—you are the status quo, and you want to leverage that. 

And there’s more commercial activities in that existing customer interaction and engagement that you need to be savvy about, such as:

• How to defend your position as the status quo bias
• Transitioning from the decider to the doer and setting up the business case
• The four must-win commercial moments of the client relationship
• The framework and content choreography for having the renewal conversation
• Documenting mutual investment so they view change as a loss and view the new vendor as “risky business.”

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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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 Vidyard, a video technology company that provides marketers and sales teams with custom video messaging and analytical tools. 

Lessard provides an action-packed 30 minutes of tangible advice…stuff you can do right now to have a greater impact such as creating a library of on-demand demo videos (and how to sell it to the hyper-competitive leadership crowd). 

And, rethinking the “Get a Demo” button that most of you have in the hero image. 

He challenges you to think about what customers want when they come to your website:

• They want to see what you do
• They want to see the products in action so they can really understand how it works. 
• They want to learn about your pricing. 
• They want to understand how you compare to others.

And then…they’ll want to talk to sales or do a live demo.

“It’s not about selling better, it’s about helping customers buy better,” he says.

Maximize those things, and you’ll be WAY ahead of the pack.

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. 

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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 quickly where the mines are buried. 

With a background in sales and lead generation, Bertoni has developed a method that is 100 steps deep. They’re hunting talent by hyper-targeting, and that specialization, combined with his prowess for lead generation, is what makes them so successful. 

In this episode, Bertoni shares some of the ingredients to his secret sauce including:

• Finding SaaS specialized help that understand how the business operates and the roles and responsibilities required
• Must focus on hypertargeting – much like Account Based Marketing (ABM)
• How to optimize the hiring process and provide the candidate a great experience
• Why the best candidates aren’t on the market, and how to attract them.

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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 good results were still getting pressure from boards and investors to produce more leads at a lower cost. 

Effective demand generation has become like Moore’s Law in reverse – you have to double down on marketing spend every year to maintain the same number of leads. 

To solve this conundrum, companies have gravitated towards AI platforms that identify buyer intent signals to prioritize account focus—a space Mounier calls “Revenue AI” where AI platforms can identify buyer intent signals for accounts potentially entering a buying window. 

Only a third of the survey respondents knew about the potential of these platforms though—and 90 percent of them said they couldn’t afford it--the value for the money and the complexity didn’t make sense to deploy. 

The game changer according to Mounier is to have a 360-degree approach to intent signals (versus the siloed approaches that exist today) and do it a quarter of the cost. 

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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 opportunities that he ultimately didn’t think he would be interested in, Schmidt found value in “the batting practice” - honing his interviewing skills, asking better questions, and “getting the jitters out” for the right opportunity.

Added to Compt’s leadership team in August, Schmidt passes along advice from his recent job search experience including:

• How he found the right opportunity (and the right CEO)
• Interviewing for the first time; exerting control of the content and narrative, and having the right mindset
• Getting proper help on resume writing, career coaching and questions to ask.
• Building a new team leveraging past experience, but not beholden to it.

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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 have with over 260 schools representing over four million parents using the platform. 

So, how do you pull off category creation? 

Certainly not with VC money, although, not for lack of trying.

“It’s a long journey of educating people on the problem, educating them on a solution, and then educating on your solution.”

In fact, Becker shares with fellow entrepreneurs that however long you think it’s going to take, double it. 

In this episode, Becker shares key learnings such as:

• How difficult it is to get those first few customers.
• How they used extensive market and customer research to build a foundation for client acquisition.
• Why they had to abandon branding and positioning that didn’t serve the value proposition.
• Why it’s important to find the right support network early.

In his bathroom at home is a hole in the door that Becker refuses to fix. “It’s a reminder of how hard this is, and it keeps me grounded.”

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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 plays a big role in retention.

It’s hard for the all-in-one HR software behemoths to be experts at every component an HR team must solve, but so is getting traction as a best-of-breed startup. 

That’s the situation CEO Mike Ehrle walked into a year ago at Click Boarding, a SaaS that’s an employee experience platform and provides modern compliant HR solutions to impact higher growth and retention rates.  

In this episode, Ehrle sheds some light on his experience with:

• Fixing internal issues and transforming to a collaborative culture
• Dealing with unforeseen issues he missed in his due diligence (like development staff located in Ukraine prior to Russia’s invasion)
• The need for product and business expertise to build key relationships in target accounts.

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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’t linear. They want to find information online without barriers, transparent pricing, use case validation, independent validation, and the ability to touch and feel the product through a trial or demo of some kind.

While some vendors are waking up to the fact that old sales and marketing playbooks are falling apart, they’re not sure what needs to change. 

In this episode, Bhagat details what’s working, including:

• Developing content that’s educational and informs the buyer while aligning with the company’s narrative
• Changing the sales and marketing mindset to help the buyer along their journey of discovery
• The role that analysts should play as independent, third-party devices
• How to imbed customer listening functions into marketing strategy
• The different levels of buyer intent data and what it means for engagement

And much more…

Get the report here: 2022 B2B Buying Disconnect: The Age of the Self-Serve Buyer

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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 for all stakeholders.

Together, they established a beachhead market in Australia by niching down into startups where the competition was scarce, but knew they had to identify larger markets to grow. 

Given the willingness to use software and technology, combined with a spirit of innovation, expanding in the US was an obvious choice.

We caught up with Atkins on his whirlwind US tour to talk about:

• The current fundraising environment
• Establishing a beachhead in Australia and thinking global-first
• Leveraging off of the success of Australian-based Atlassian and Canva. 
• How starting a services firm helped in the establishment of a SaaS
• And their overall sales journey – starting with founder-led, followed by marketing and sales-led and landing on product-led growth

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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 marketing was the biggest low-hanging fruit opportunity because the company already had established relationships that could be leveraged. 

Also, especially important since private equity, venture capital and hedge funds work largely by referral.

He was also a bit shocked by the direct referrals to come from public relations and attributes their success by being holistic and organic about the communities they wanted to penetrate. 

Dilworth has a lot of great advice for marketing leaders that find themselves with a growing startup in need of prioritization and direction including:

• Leveraging of current relationships to bolster referrals, 
• How to use public relations to communicate with existing networks and carry your messages to broader communities,
• And leveraging partner marketing to take some pressure off early sales and marketing teams so they can establish long-term initiatives that create customers. 

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