Saas Breakthrough

Meet Adam Goyette, VP of Marketing at Help Scout, which provides 10,000+ businesses like Reddit and AngelList with customer email and live chat with a personal touch. Previously, Adam lead all growth marketing initiatives globally at G2 and Deloitte, as VP of Demand Generation.In this episode, you'll hear about what it's like to join a company as a VP of Marketing in the middle of a pandemic. Then you'll learn about brand and messaging changes during a changing market, how to work in marketing sprints, how to drive marketing efficiency, and all about the recent launch of the documentary video series "Against The Grain".And finally, what it's like to think forward in 2020 for marketing and brand. Enjoy!Notes:- 02:50 A Well-Designed And Easy-To-Use Help Desk- 04:30 Switching Jobs During A Pandemic And Focusing On Gaining Efficiencies- 10:00 Customer Support Challenges During This Unique Period For Businesses- 14:10 Building A Strong Brand And Content Is The Better Long Term Play- 15:45 A Strong Brand Is Key For

- 03:00 Helping SaaS As An Experienced Full-Service Inbound Agency- 10:55 Clients Moving Towards Owned Media In A More Holistic Approach- 13:50 Identifying The Right Opportunities By Looking At The Data- 15:55 The Right Toolset From A Data Visualization Reporting Perspective- 17:05 Understand The Conversion Rate And Fix The Sieve To Stop Losing Sales And Customers- 19:45 Marketers Are Getting Savvier About SEO- 21:15 Understanding Your Topics And Then Understanding User Intent- 23:15 Experimenting With Content Lenght, Structure and Format- 25:40 The Blink Test For Your Website And Conversion Experiences- 30:00 SaaS Need To Become More Sophisticated About Marketing Automation- 33:00 Sales Teams, Lead Scoring Models And Lead Volume- 35:00 Reducing Churn By Investing In Analytics To Understand User Segments- 36:15 Investing More In Customer Success Solutions  - 38:40 Companies Are More Open To Diversifying Their Approaches To Bringing In New Business- 40:45 Lightning Questions 

- 03:20 Helping Shape The Future Of Marketing And Sales  - 05:05 Moving Into An Integrated Campaigns Approach- 06:20 Joining A Hypergrowth Company Starting To Scale The Marketing Team- 08:10 It All Starts With The Who- 09:40 Shifting Into Value-Based Marketing And Selling Value- 10:50 Going Really Deep Into Persona Research- 12:15 Always Be Building Up Your Branded Community- 13:35 Time-To-Value Is A Really Important Metric- 14:25 Building A Voice Of The Customer Type Of Program- 17:10 Building Community With Events And Drift Insider- 19:20 Using Content For Community And Brand Building- 21:30 The Five Categories Of Cornerstone Content- 25:50 Prioritizing Cornerstone Content Creation- 27:35 Including The Community In The Content- 28:40 Leveraging Virtual Events- 33:07 Setting Goals And Choosing KPIs- 36:20 More Is Not Always Better- 38:40 Revenue Teams And The Growing Importance Of Your Website- 40:30 Lightning Questions

Notes:- 02:50 Providing Technology Solutions To The Senior Living Industry- 05:10 Messaging Challenges When Product-market Fit Is On A Case-By-Case Basis- 06:40 Using A Spear Fishing Strategy First Then Casting A Wider Net- 08:20 Launching Quickly A Tool To Change The Negativity Going Around About Senior Living- 11:10 Elevating The Customer's Voice By Position Customers As The Thought Leaders  - 12:20 Building A Culture With A Consistent Message To The Team On Where The Focus Is- 14:00 Moving Fast And Putting The Clients First- 16:15 Testing Things And Validating Hypothesis in B2B Facebook Advertising- 18:40 Move Quickly, Test Things To Validate It Then Automate- 20:00 Creating And Testing 30 Different Creatives- 21:50 Best Advice For Someone Starting With B2B Facebook Advertising- 23:20 Test, Test, Test As Much As You Can To Get Data Points- 24:35 Real Numbers Will Make You More Successful Than Vanity Metrics- 26:25 Doing Things Differently And Differentiate Yourself- 29:10 Moving Offline Rapport Building To

Meet Andy Lambert, Director of Growth and one of the founding team at ContentCal, a Social Media Marketing technology software, that has won several awards since its launch in January 2017.In this episode, you'll hear how the cofounding team built ContentCal from their content agency and how early product-market-fit conversations were critical.You'll hear about the lessons Andy learned the hard way from scaling paid traffic way too quickly and what that meant for their business, and the power of referral marketing and word of mouth for startups.And finally, Andy takes you behind-the-scenes of creating educational funnels using automated webinars to create highly qualified leads.This is an exceptional episode. Enjoy!Notes:- 02:50 Creating The Perfect Content Marketing Workflow- 06:00 Focusing On A Minimum Viable Audience- 08:40 The Feeling When You Got Product Market Fit- 10:55 Expanding Without Custom Features Built For A Specific Audience- 14:35 Like Many Startups Within A Startup- 16:35 Finding The Right Me

In this episode, you'll hear how Rippling is becoming the Salesforce of HR operations and the lessons that Matt learned and brought from Zenefits to Rippling.You'll learn about creating messaging for a wide product that works for any business and Matt's strategy to do that, the process behind their creative campaigns, and how to come up with something truly unique for a new marketing experiment.And finally, you'll hear about the core cultural DNA you need your company to have to push yourself to experiment faster and fail more often. An incredible episode, enjoy!Notes:- 03:00 First Way For Businesses To Manage And Automate Everything That Touches The Employee- 06:00 Lessons Learned At Previous Fast-Growing SaaS- 07:55 The Mistake Of Having A Growth-at-all-cost Attitude- 10:15 A Stack Ranking System To Decide Where To Put Your Focus- 13:00 Finding The Message That Works When You Have A Product That Is Everything To Everyone- 18:10 Using The Language Each Audience Uses- 18:55 The Process To Come Up With Creativ

Meet Gregory Elfrink, Director of Marketing at Empire Flippers, the largest curated marketplace for buying and selling online businesses.In this episode, you'll hear about the journey that Gregory went through from Alaska to living in Vietnam working with Empire Flippers and their expansion from working with digital nomad businesses to SaaS and bigger businesses.You'll learn about the marketing tactics and strategies that Gregory has used to stand out from the crowd with content marketing and event marketing.And you'll also learn the key things to sell your SaaS company for a killer evaluation, including the pretty bad move some SaaS owners do when they start thinking about selling. Gregory doesn't pull any punches here.And finally, he gives us a forecast for 2020 on buying and selling SaaS businesses within this new world that we're all living in now. Enjoy! Notes: - 03:40 The Largest Curated Marketplace For Buying And Selling Online Businesses- 08:30 Market-Fit As The Market Shifts Quite Dramatically- 11:00

Meet Shawn Winters, Strategic Acceleration Manager at GitLab, a leading collaboration tool for DevOps. Shawn is a SaaS and Technology Startup Sales & Business Development expert with experience at Seed, Series A, Series C, Series D, and Publicly Traded Organizations.In this episode, you'll learn about next-generation SDRs and what that actually means in 2020 and beyond, and the wins from the ABM process.You'll hear what it's like to be part of a hyper-scale company like GitLab, the lessons Shawn learned from joining a remote workplace and best practices to operate as a remote team in this new post-COVID-19 world. Finally, we'll go through some mental conditioning ideas for marketers to optimize their performance.Notes:- 03:00 A Complete DevOps Platform Delivered As A Single Application- 05:45 Leveraging LinkedIn To Really Hone In On Your Ideal Customers- 09:20 Joining In And Adapting To Working Fully Remotely- 12:40 The Concept Of A Next-Generation SDR- 15:45 Baselines And Empowering SDRs- 18:55 Hyper-Per

Meet Nathan Bliss, VP of Sales and Marketing at Kinsta, a premium managed Wordpress hosting provider for everyone, small or larger. He has +12 years of experience founding companies and leading teams and has worked at companies like PayPal and Flywheel.In this episode, you'll hear how Nathan joined Kinsta sales team and quickly made a transition to become the VP of both sales and marketing and his new marketing perspective coming from a career in sales and how that is helping him step into the role correctly.You'll learn about the multi-language culture that's embedded at Kinsta and how that has helped them scale into new geographical locations and what is the first step Nathan recommends to any SaaS marketer wanting to expand into other languages.And finally, you'll learn what to do if remote work is a new place for you as a team leader and what you need to be acutely aware of when messaging out during this crisis. Enjoy!Show Notes: 02:55 Born To Change The Status Quo And Create More Robust Solutions For Qua

Meet Remco De Vries, the Head Of Marketing at InSided, the only Customer Success Community Platform. Remco is a demand generation enthusiast. In this episode, you'll hear about the 10-years journey of InSided into customer success for SaaS. You'll learn why community is more important than ever for SaaS companies in 2020 and beyond and what it takes to build an effective and successful community. And you'll also learn about InSided wins from attending and sponsoring a recent event by Gainsight and the strategy his team created specifically for it. Enjoy! Notes: 02:30 Pivoting To Focus On Customer Success Teams In SaaS And Subscription-Based Companies 04:35 Joining To Set Up An Inbound Demand Strategy 05:50 Switching From Doing All Outbound To Doing It All Inbound 08:50 The Evolution And Journey Of The Online Customer Community 11:15 How To Build A Successful Community And Create Community Gold 13:20 Using Paid Incentives, Gamification And Other Initiatives 14:30 Mistakes To Avoid When Launching And Building

Meet Agata Krzysztofik, Head of Marketing of Piktochart which is on a mission to empower people to tell great visual stories that stick. Agata is a startup mentor and a marketing leader with 10 plus years of experience in developing and executing growth strategies at companies like Google, Groove, and SIM scale. In this episode, you'll hear about Piktochart's mission around visual storytelling and what that actually means for marketers. You'll learn the step-by-step process to create storytelling through video and how SaaS companies can tell more engaging stories. You'll also learn how to implement the OKR framework, advertising platform secrets for video, and finally, what you can learn from Piktochart's mistakes in 2019 and why failures are so important for your growth. Enjoy! Show Notes: 03:15 Helping People Communicate Their Stories With The Help Of Visual Formats 07:00 Building A Tool Where People Can Actually Do Graphic Design On Their Own 10:40 The Short And Long Term Demand Spikes Caused By The COVID

Meet Garrett Mehrgutt, the co-founder and CEO of Directive, a next-gen software performance marketing agency. In 2019, Directive ranked in the top 500 in the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies in the U.S. In this episode, you'll hear how Directive was born and found its footing in SaaS. You'll learn how you probably need to reset your traffic expectations, the approach for SEO that creates positive ROI, why vanity metrics can destroy your pipeline, and different approaches for scaling SEO. And finally, you'll learn about SEM ideas for 2020 and beyond. There are lots of hidden nuggets in this episode, including a little tactical tidbit to drastically lower your CPA and skyrocket your results. Enjoy! Notes: 03:25 The Journey To A High-Touch Model Working With SaaS 09:50 How SaaS Should Approach SEO To Have Positive ROI 12:30 Using Really Strong Product Positioning And Messaging 13:55 Looking At Opportunity Cost Not Lead Cost 15:30 The Right And Wrong Approach To Scaling SEO 19:10 Reset Traffic Expectations Ba

Meet Juuso Lyytikkä, Head of Growth at Funnel, where they help thousands of businesses to be more data-driven and thus delivering higher returns. He leads the marketing and operations teams and built a highly scalable lead generation engine by melding best in class B2B and B2C methodologies and focusing on empathy. In this episode, you'll hear about the creation of Funnel.io from an advertising agency, how they moved upmarket from e-commerce and SMB based on new product requirements and signals from their market. You'll learn the major pitfalls to avoid in advertising for SaaS today and how you actually make advertising work. And then look at LinkedIn advertising, targeting, and requirements for successful campaigns. And finally, you'll hear about where Juuso thinks the SaaS landscape will end up, especially for advertisers in 2020 and beyond. Enjoy! Notes: 02:20 Helping Marketing Be More Data-Driven And Actually Understand How They're Doing 04:00 Becoming The First Marketing Hire Full Time 06:00 Getting Sig

Meet Len Markidan, CMO at Podia, a platform for creators to sell online courses, membership sites, and digital downloads. Previously, Len was Head of Marketing for 5 years at Groove and his work has been featured in Forbes and Entrepreneur. In this episode, Len returns for a Take 2 episode and you'll learn what's been happening at Podia since Len was on the podcast on episode #45 and how they're taking on the new landscape of marketing during the COVID-19 epidemic. You'll hear about the growing and evolving content economy, how Len and Podia are leading with empathy and education in the marketplace and the key performing indicators for education success. Finally, you'll also learn about the challenges and opportunities Len is seeing for SaaS marketers and where your focus should be for 2020 and beyond. Enjoy! Notes: 03:00 What's Been Happening At Podia Since The Last Interview 03:55 Challenges And Opportunities From Being In A Vertical That Is Exploding Right Now 05:33 Keeping The Lines Of Communication With

In this episode, you'll hear about the challenges of a new categorical SaaS disrupting a prebuilt industry. You'll learn about piggybacking on search versus defining new languages, how content marketing has been critical for success for Threekit and how their outbound mixed with content has been in an essential step for new growth. And finally looking forward, you'll hear how Hillary sees the changing landscape in SaaS after COVID-19, what she's expecting to play out and how they're working to make sure that they're ahead of the curve. Enjoy and celebrate with us as this is our episode #100! Show Notes: 03:20 Helping Provide The Most Immersive Helpful Online Visual Product Experience 04:55 Coming In To Create And Solidify Brand Positioning And All Things Website 06:05 Emerging Categories And Languaging 11:05 The Number One Challenge When Disrupting A Whole Market 13:15 How To Approach Search Marketing When You're Early In A Category 16:25 The Benefits For Companies Of A Better Visual Experience In This Visua

Welcome to a special episode of the SaaS Breakthrough podcast. As 2020 reveals itself to be full of surprises, challenges, also new opportunities, we felt it would be helpful to collect the top marketing insights we heard so far from our amazing guests to help you with SaaS marketing in these uncertain times. We collected the best marketing advice for challenging times given by 19 incredible SaaS marketers that we’ve been lucky enough to host on the podcast. Hear from: Micah Rowland at Fountain Aazar Ali Shad at UserPilot Pulkit Agrawal at Chameleon Aaron Krall at SaaS Growth Hacks Ahin Thomas at Backblaze Andy Baldacci at Groove Sid Bharath Keith Messick at Dialpad Theresa O’Neil at Showpad Sophie Steffen at TravelPerk Jake Braly at Highspot Adam Ruhland at Hubstaff Tasks Pinja Virtanen at Advance B2B Kasey Bayne at Olark David Ly Khim at HubSpot Adrian Maynard at Refersion Bob Sparkins at Leadpages Hailey Friedman at Improvado Aashish Dhamdhere at Skilljar Enjoy!

Meet Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva, a cloud communications company. He has a track record of success working with brands like Major League Baseball, Pipedrive, Sales Hacker and Outreach.io. In this episode, you'll hear about the SEO strategy Gaetano used to grow Sales Hacker over 400% from start to finish. You'll learn about the two-step process to audit your existing SEO system, where the low hanging fruit is so you get started right with huge wins and the big pitfalls to avoid "painful SEO mistakes" that can cause you to go backward instead of forward with your SEO. You'll also learn about LinkedIn marketing strategies to drive engagement in your business and the painful lessons that Gaetano learned from Nextiva over the past year. This is an incredible episode that covers both the strategy and tactical steps that you can execute on right away. Lots of hidden lessons throughout. Enjoy! Notes: 02:50 Disrupting Business Communication For Businesses Of All Sizes 04:25 Jo

Meet Casey Hill, the Growth Manager at Bonjoro, a personalized video messaging company with the mission of making business communication more human and personalized. For the last decade, Casey has been focusing on helping SaaS companies rapidly scale and doing so through finding levers to create customer evangelism and brand advocacy. In this episode, you'll hear where Casey sees the future of personalized video going and what you need to know today. You'll learn how to use video at scale to personalize customer experiences with your SaaS, how Bonjoro team built a playbook from A to Z, onboarding tactics that leverage the beauty of video and how to increase trial conversion with personalization. Finally, you'll learn about the tangible testing approach that you can use to explode your sales. Enjoy! Notes: 03:00 A Video Tool That Integrates W/ Existing Tech And Goes Where The Business Owner Goes 05:20 Creating Triggers And Videos At Different Stages Of Your Customer Life Cycle 06:25 Finding Product Market Fit

Meet Anna Schena Walsh, the Director of Growth Marketing at Narrative Science, a SaaS that turns data into stories. Anna leads marketing initiatives including brand, content, digital, and demand generation and has previously led product marketing for both of Narrative Science's products. In this episode, you'll hear about AI-driven storytelling and the power of Narrative Science. You'll learn how to develop the mindset of internal storytelling, what it means to tell a story in a cross-departmental way, and how product marketing can break through the noise with better stories. And finally, you'll hear about the process that Anna used to write, launch and distribute her new co-authored book "Let your people be people" in just a few months. This is an episode full of stories. Enjoy! Notes: 02:50 The SaaS That Turns Data Into Stories 05:30 Joining The Team In Product Marketing And Moving Over To Growth 07:10 Finding Product Market Fit With A Certain Psychographic Profile: Innovators 09:40 You Don't R

Meet Jason Bay, the Chief Revenue Officer at Blissful Prospecting, where they help sales teams remove the mystery of what to say in their outbound calls and emails. In today's episode, you'll learn how Jason does not believe that prospecting is just a numbers game or that it has to suck. You'll hear about the outbound strategy that he created to become a sought after resource for SaaS teams and the critical cross-department strategies to streamline messaging and communication. Then you'll learn Jason's REPLY method and hear how he breaks down some examples of good and bad outbound campaigns to showcase how you can effectively write campaigns for response rates. And finally, you'll hear about the key KPI benchmarks you should always shoot for. This episode is a little bit longer because is FULL of examples and actionable information. Enjoy! Notes: 03:30 Growing Outbound Sales 07:15 The Three Buckets Of Outbound For SaaS 12:00 The Problems In Cross Department Communication In SaaS 16:00 Two Practical Ways to