SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success

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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 he proves it.)

But today, most companies are getting into trouble by purchasing the tech first and launching ABM programs second. 

That’s only one of the myriad of reasons that companies are experiencing poor results according to Mulkeen, who advises that "you should do ABM without technology and get it working first. And then you can worry about what tech you need later." 

In fact, the only tech you need is a pen and paper. Write a strategy, think about the business outcomes, start small, test and measure. 

If you’ve been struggling with ABM, wonder if it’s the right strategy, or don’t understand how it fits with other marketing and sales initiatives in the first place, the answers are waiting for you here in this action-packed 30 minutes of straight talk about ABM. 

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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 trained your people to ask.

Referral Factory founder Kirsty Sherman believes she’s figured out a solution, even for B2B SaaS companies, where the referral process can be embedded into the platform by providing incentives for users to easily refer their connections. 

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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). 

 With several successful fundraises and exits under his belt, Jeff Solomon, CEO of Markup Hero talks about how he’s bootstrapped companies to a certain monthly recurring revenue rate that made it much easier to attract the right capital.

 Having started his current venture (Markup Hero) as a side project, he’s now able to decide whether or not to keep it as a lifestyle business or raise capital for a bigger exit.

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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 is with sales. There’s a lot of change management involved.”

Leaver’s approach to ABM adoption was to start small with “sales friendly’s” (Two salespeople out of 200) where she piloted an ABM program and focused on engagement metrics into their target accounts such as click-through rates, impressions, and web traffic. 

Later, she was able to measure pipeline in terms of full funnel metrics, they increased pipeline generation by 129%, increased opportunities by 57%, and deal velocity increased by 122%.

With triple digit number increases across the board, full adoption after that wasn’t hard.

If you’re thinking about adopting an ABM program or would like your ABM to reach its full potential, this episode is a must listen. 

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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 Beadle-Ryby talks about how they’ve met this challenge by: 

• Building the company around subject matter experts with deep industry roots to earn immediate credibility and early customers
• Leveraging VC connections who have connections in the space
• Ensuring that they have all of the necessary certifications to protect data
• Investing in long-term demand through thought leadership; positioning Akasa as thought leaders in AI applications for healthcare
• Aligning his company's employees, customers and prospects around a larger mission to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare in the U.S.

Ben also talks about ways they built the company to increase the odds of being successful, including how they built the founding team and product concept. He introduces the idea of "founder dating," that helped them work on team dynamics and recruitment, as well as doing a lot of up-front work to "pressure test" their initial product ideas.

There's a lot of takeaways here in just 30 minutes... enjoy!

Resources for SaaS Execs

Recently closed a funding round and need to ramp growth?
Check out our comprehensive "scale-a-saas" guide:

Think your website could generate more leads?
Get our inbound lead generation self-assessment

Want to be a guest on SaaS Backwards?
Click to meet with Ken Lempit to talk about an episode.

SaaS Backwards is a free service to the SaaS community.

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

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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 predictable five years ago is…

Well, not so much.

Because prospecting is actually marketing, some innovative organizations have moved them under marketing and changed the incentives to focus on engagement over number of meetings booked.

That’s a tough pill to swallow for many B2B companies that have built their sales (and marketing) infrastructures around the Predictable Revenue Model.

As Vice President of Marketing at Intellum, Robyn Hazelton has led the charge to move their BDRs under marketing, develop a closer relationship with sales, and align all their sales, marketing, and customer success motions around the buyer.

In this episode, she talks about how they made the move to marketing, the organizational challenges, and how to use the data to drive better decisions.

The results speak for themselves—dramatically shorter sales cycles and four times higher revenue over the previous year.

It’s an illuminating interview and will help you evaluate whether or not your current sales and marketing process could be modified for greater efficiency.

Resources for SaaS Execs

Recently closed a funding round and need to ramp growth?
Check out our comprehensive "scale-a-saas" guide:

Think your website could generate more leads?
Get our inbound lead generation self-assessment

Want to be a guest on SaaS Backwards?
Click to meet with Ken Lempit to talk about an episode.

SaaS Backwards is a free service to the SaaS community.

---

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

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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 pressuring them to take a demo. They’re ignoring your emails. And worse, when you are a motivated buyer, you first have to go through the SDR gauntlet of BANT questions, only to be handed off to someone down the road that can actually answer your questions. 

We have to do something different, but what? 

Nelson Gilliat, author of The Death of the SDR and Birth of Buyer Centric Revenue, thinks he has some answers.

He also makes some bold assertions about the future of the Predictable Revenue Model that turned B2B sales into an assembly line of specialization, and talks about how some innovative organizations are already experimenting with different models that are in-line with their buyers to great success. 

Gilliat also questions the whole model of quotas and commissions (that predates the Predictable Revenue Model) with some interesting arguments about how it not only incentives the wrong behavior, but also how it short changes people in their professions. 

While it sounds like a pipe dream (only a handful of companies are experimenting with different models) Gilliat does pinpoint many of the root causes of problems with our modern sales process that we’ve had for years. 

There are also some baby step changes that you can make today that will move your organization in a better direction down the lin

Resources for SaaS Execs

Recently closed a funding round and need to ramp growth?
Check out our comprehensive "scale-a-saas" guide:

Think your website could generate more leads?
Get our inbound lead generation self-assessment

Want to be a guest on SaaS Backwards?
Click to meet with Ken Lempit to talk about an episode.

SaaS Backwards is a free service to the SaaS community.

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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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In this episode we explore the product-led growth go-to-market motion with Breezy Beaumont, head of growth and marketing at Correlated. It's a SaaS that helps product-led growth companies to find expansion, upsell, cross-sell, and other revenue opportunities based on how people are using their product.

If like us, you're trying to distance your marketing from the "fake" MQL, you might consider a product-led growth go-to-market strategy. It's no small change if your product cannot or does not already support free users and provide you with instrumentation and in-app promos to sell users an upgrade. But the benefits are huge. 

We all know and use one or more PLG applications daily (Slack, LinkedIn, DropBox, Calendly). But can we make it work where we work? If the product was made to support PLG, or can be made to do so, now what?

Among the really interesting subjects we explore are:

• How the pipeline is different for PLG. It's a continuous cycle not linear. And this has benefits beyond the upsell in terms of staying close to your customer.
• How your organization is different with PLG.  Sales, marketing and customer success are now much more integrated and collaborating throughout the customer life cycle.
• How sales can now be customer and product advocates vs driving people through what she calls a "manufactured" pipeline (love this, btw).
• And how the old model for predictable revenue has to give way to a more statistical and usage-based view of where and when revenues will be achieved.

It's a refreshing take on what we all do for a living. Take a listen and let me know what you think!

Resources for SaaS Execs

Recently closed a funding round and need to ramp growth?
Check out our comprehensive "scale-a-saas" guide:

Think your website could generate more leads?
Get our inbound lead generation self-assessment

Want to be a guest on SaaS Backwards?
Click to meet with Ken Lempit to talk about an episode.

SaaS Backwards is a free service to the SaaS community.

---

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

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

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Brian Trautschold is not your usual YCombinator alum, though he does credit his success in part to what he learned from the experience and the people he's met.

Talking about their recent funding round of $15.5 million, he and his cofounders built the company to be capital efficient, and this has enabled business model and outcome flexibility; they don't have to be the next unicorn to achieve their own ambitions for the company. And the risk of failing to achieve unicorn status and being absorbed at a low valuation by a competitor, which "sucks for everybody," is reduced.

We dive deep on business model, too, in particular about how integrations can help drive the business. Brian's take here is refreshing, too. He talks about customer needs set the prioritization of integrations rather than taking a look at the ecosystem and deciding to build integrations based on market penetration of the players. It's a really organic way to approach it, and the way he puts it is interesting, too.

This CEO conversation is notable for how open Brian is with his decision-making, especially with the hire of a marketing leader to help move the firm from founders doing too much to professionalizing the organization and enabling scale-up.

There's a lot to take away in this conversation, so I encourage a listen! And as always, there's a transcript on our blog if you'd prefer to read it.

Let me know what you think!

Resources for SaaS Execs

Recently closed a funding round and need to ramp growth?
Check out our comprehensive "scale-a-saas" guide:

Think your website could generate more leads?
Get our inbound lead generation self-assessment

Want to be a guest on SaaS Backwards?
Click to meet with Ken Lempit to talk about an episode.

SaaS Backwards is a free service to the SaaS community.

---

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

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup 

Send us Fan Mail

There are few marketing leaders with the perspective, experience and insights of Jay Gaines. He's also one of the more generous people I've met; he truly enjoys sharing his expertise to help other marketers. In this episode, Jay talks about:

• Covid and the resulting content tsunami - good content just isn't good enough anymore
• The value of context and empathy in marketing (you read that right)
• How to use a quarterly "lightning strike" to cut through the noise and drive revenue
• Making the case for creative - it's not all about the numbers (but you need to manage your KPIs)
• How to use direct mail in today's world (yes, USPS direct mail)
• When and how SaaS founders need to invest in product marketing
• Talking the language of CFOs, a skillset that's as valuable as it is under-appreciated
• And more

It would be hard to imagine anyone not learning something they can use from this episode.

Enjoy... and please let me know what you think! Thanks!

Resources for SaaS Execs

Recently closed a funding round and need to ramp growth?
Check out our comprehensive "scale-a-saas" guide:

Think your website could generate more leads?
Get our inbound lead generation self-assessment

Want to be a guest on SaaS Backwards?
Click to meet with Ken Lempit to talk about an episode.

SaaS Backwards is a free service to the SaaS community.
 

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

🔗 Get your free SaaS GTM Checkup