Saas Breakthrough

Meet Carolyn Mumby the CEO of Eledecks which helps HR managers get their life back by decentralizing HR and enabling managers across the business. Carolyn founded it in 2004 and pivoted in 2016 to a SaaS model for customers to contract with via subscriptions. On this episode, you'll hear how Eledecks had to find a distribution channel when first starting out and how they did that by finding value added resellers or VARs and how they can be an insanely powerful marketing channel to lean on early. You'll learn how webinars and micro funnels will scale the referral process up and how you can implement them as well, how social proof may change the way businesses connect online and also about Carolyn and Eledecks' biggest marketing win after 14 years of running an online company. Carolyn is a regular listener of the SaaS breakthrough show and we discuss her favorite episode and what she has been implementing from it. It's an amazing, amazing episode. Show Notes: 02:33 Starting a Lifetime Ago 04:01 Helpline Pains

Meet Jake Braly, the VP of Marketing at Highspot. Jake is responsible for market development and global growth. Highspot is a sales enablement solution loved by sales reps. Previously, Jake led product marketing and go-to-market strategy for Apptio’s top grossing products through to its successful IPO. In this episode, you'll learn why understanding market awareness is essential for the perfect product-market fit. Jake also tells us how to use your own product to showcase results and get great product innovation ideas. You'll hear how a combination of Account Based Marketing and direct mail has produced amazing results for Highspot. We go into detail about how they create powerful call to actions with those direct mail campaigns. Finally, you'll find out how marketing is evolving for Highspot in a competitive and changing marketplace, and what's their focus for the rest of the year. Enjoy! Show Notes 02:44 A Sales Enablement Solution that Sales Reps Love 04:03 Awareness and Rapid Maturing Market 06:06 Built

Meet Chris Davis, the Director of Education at ActiveCampaign. Chris is responsible for creating and organizing content that helps business owners use marketing automation properly. In this episode he breaks down the amazing journey that ActiveCampaign has gone through to become a leader in email marketing. You'll hear what Chris did to set up and launch an extremely effective education department from scratch, and the secrets he discovered while building it. We talk about the internal vs external education methods, and why as a SaaS company you need to double down on both. And you'll learn the winning formula that ActiveCampaign has used in a very, very competitive market to push growth forward and do it quickly. Chris is an extraordinary speaker and educator and you'll learn a lot just listening to him. Enjoy! Show Notes: 02:40 How It All Started 05:00 Funding and Intentional Growth 06:19 Building an Educational Department 08:02 The Education Effort is Twofold: Internal and External 10:41 Building Internal

Meet Kasey Byrne, a software-engineer-turned-marketer, currently leading marketing at Postman - the only complete API development environment and an invaluable tool for every developer working with APIs. In this episode, you'll learn how Postman started their journey and their insane organic acquisition. We also talk about the birth of the paid program out of that organic growth and the challenge it has brought to marketing. We discuss how Postman considers education to be the most powerful channel for revenue growth, and what the future of education inside of SaaS actually looks like. You'll hear about education from a different standpoint, in the case of a tougher market, when acquisition isn't really where you put all your effort. Instead you look at revenue expansion, growing lifetime value and increasing product usage. Kasey also talks about the biggest changes coming to marketing that you need to know. It's a really, really powerful episode. Enjoy! Show Notes 02:04 Creating a Tool to Solve Your Own Pai

Meet Bob Sparkins (Jenkins), Manager of Marketing Education at Leadpages and the author of "Take Action, Revise Later". Leadpages is a well-known tool that empowers its users with lead generation and sales software to quickly promote their products and services. In this episode you'll hear about the journey of Leadpages from a bootstrapped business to a funded company. Bob told us how and why they went through that funding route. He uncovered how content marketing and dedication to webinars has brought Leadpages to seven figure ARR. They continue to grow every year with almost the same webinar strategy. We also cover how education is an integral part of marketing and exactly how Bob does it and why he does it that way. You'll hear about the lessons learned from Bob's 1000+ live webinars ran at Leadpages, and how to find, engage and keep affiliates happy, which has ultimately become one of their biggest traffic sources. We talk about a lot of incredible strategies in this episode! Podcast notes: 03

Meet Dan Murphy leads the demand generation team at Drift – one of the top SaaS companies in the industry right now. Dan has worked at several SaaS companies from early stage to growth and is passionate about building strong lead generation machines for startups. In this episode we get an inside look at what it's like to run marketing in a rocketship SaaS as Dan gives an insane explanation of what things are like inside Drift. We talk about the cultural items that make Drift so successful, not just externally, but internally as a company. We discuss how product marketing has shifted into the perfect fit for demand generation, and go over the exact step by step playbook that Drift uses to successfully release and innovate product launches. They've done 12 of them over the past 12 months and it's absolutely incredible. We also talk about the biggest lessons Dan has learned from running these product launches in 2018. This is an incredible episode and you're absolutely going to love it. 02:33 Marketing Done Thr

Meet Paralee Walls - a guest lecturer for the Digital Creative Institute, General Assembly, a contributor to Forbes, CMI, and Kapost's own Marketeer. In this podcast episode you'll hear all about what Kapost is doing in marketing, including how they are using The Pillar Model to create a content powerhouse. We talk about why content operations are essential for big companies like IBM, GE, Fedex, as well as yours. You'll learn how to tell bad content from good content, how to use leading indicators and some powerful syndication strategies that Kapost is leveraging every single month. You're going to love this episode! Notes: 03:29 The Entire Management of The Content Operations 07:19 Building Up a Fairly New Marketing Team 10:19 Doing a Content Audit 13:17 Telling Bad Content From Good Content and Fixing It 16:06 The Pillar Model: Make Your Content Matter More by Doing Less 18:18 The Reverse Pillar 19:11 Using Leading Indicators 23:23 Content Syndication: Influencers and Employees Networks 27:10 Content CTAs

Meet Theresa O'Neil - the leader of Showpad’s global marketing team, responsible for increasing awareness, generating leads, and supporting all channels to grow revenue. She has delivered marketing, sales and business development strategy for companies such as PowerReviews and IBM. In this episode we dive into more advanced marketing channels than those applicable to early stage startups. You'll learn why Showpad has chosen to go global at this time, the lessons learned so far, and why combining marketing and sales to align KPIs is the most powerful growth hack you can ever do. We also go into essential marketing ideas and concepts that you need to know for SaaS. It's definitely a very deep episode. Notes: 02:20 Empowering to Sell The Way Buyers Want to Buy 04:28 Getting All That Data Back 06:39 Messaging, Attribution, Analysis and Alignment 07:23 Data Challenges 08:22 Defining The Marketing Qualified Lead 09:20 Challenges of Global Companies 11:39 Innovative Selling Experiences 12:58 When and If To Become A

Meet Amit Bivas - the head of marketing at Optimove. Amit is a seasoned marketing executive with a vast experience in planning, developing and executing B2B and B2C marketing strategies from the ground up. His sharp skills, creativity, and a keen eye for detail, alongside with a strong background in data analytics and statistics, position Amit as a unique combination of the art and science of marketing. In this episode we talk about Optimove and how they built the platform that has both the left and right brain for software. We go into details, like how to market a highly technological innovative product to a new market and how content marketing can be a powerful initiative, especially early on. You'll find out how Optimove doubled down on content in a completely new way. It's absolutely incredible to hear Amit tell this story. And finally, we'll talk about the marketing skill that Amit feels every marketer needs to know today, in order to be effective. I hope you enjoy this episode. Notes 02:22 Smart Campai

Welcome to this special SaaS Breakthrough episode with our host, David Abrams, covering the Top 10 Insights from our first 25 episodes. What a milestone! We've learned from great companies like LucidChart (who has 16MM users), Chartmogul, Hotjar, AppCues, Olark, Buffer (gaining 1.5M unique views on the blog), Gainsight, PicMonkey (with over 450,000 subscribers and 3.5 Billion images edited, JotForm, Groove, and a ton of other amazing companies. We started this podcast with the desire to find great companies and learn from the marketing teams in the trenches. We wanted the down and dirty tactics that are working today. Not to just get a 1,000 foot view of a company, but learn what it takes to actually MARKET to users, find the right prospects, what it was like to find product-market fit, and then how they made a lead generation system to bring in customers month after month. What you continually hear in these episodes, is that SaaS marketing is not an easy feat to do. It's about understanding your customer, i

Meet Andy Baldacci, the demand generation lead at Groove - the best help desk software for small businesses. With over 8,000 teams trusting Groove to help them manage online customer support, they are an amazing example of an industry leading SaaS. In this episode, Andy transparently shares where Groove is in their marketing after 3 years of growth. Groove actually pioneered the approach of SaaS transparency blogging, and with these stories their blog really took off. From the blog alone, their growth exploded using a combination of original content and with their founders' unique way to get influencers to share the content. You'll learn why Groove made the hard decision to end this technique. As well as how they are now strategically reviewing their new approach to content marketing and the lessons that they're taking from their first blog into the future. You'll hear about Groove's SEO strategy, how they are building separate content pillars and doing content marketing to attract their perfect target custo

meet Leeyen Rogers who is the VP of Marketing at JotForm, an online forms platform with over 3.6 million users worldwide. JotForm was named one of the "Best Privately-Owned Companies in America" by Entrepreneur Magazine. In this podcast episode you'll learn about the different strategies JotForm used to double their user base, and the exact launch process that has been a critical growth factor. You'll hear how Leeyen looks at product launching and product development from the marketing angle, the research process to go from broad audience to personalization and highly detailed segmentation. We also talk about how JotForm launched co-marketing opportunities with companies like Square to niche personalized audiences. Finally, we get into a genius acquisition process led by Leeyen. It includes partnering with companies like Adobe FormsCentral and bringing in a huge amount of new users by adding value to the marketplace. Lots of amazing lessons here, so I hope you enjoy today's episode. Show Notes: 02:

Meet Matt Emmons, the VP of Marketing at PicMonkey. Matt helps the marketing team to tell the story of PicMonkey, from business successes to new product launches. In this podcast episode we talk about the importance of in-depth knowledge of your customer persona, and what that truly means for marketing. We go into the fundamental 6 digital segments you must understand to truly comprehend user behavior, and it goes far beyond any typical user experience. We also learn how Matt creates actual emotional user experiences that contribute to business growth. With 450.000 subscribers and 3.4 billion images edited, PicMonkey has a ton of data to help create these amazing lessons, so take the time to listen to this episode. Maybe do it a few times even, because Matt goes through some cutting edge, very smart lessons that every SaaS company can learn from. Show Notes: 03:10 Helping People Grow By Design 06:14 Joining At the Turn Of Freemium Into SaaS 08:15 Customer Journey: Emotional Click By Click and Life Cycle Char

Meet Agata Krzysztofik, the Chief Marketing Officer at SimScale, a cloud-based engineering simulation platform that is revolutionizing the way engineers, designers, scientists, and students design products. Before joining this company, Agata spent 7 years at Google where she led the community and social media team, and project managed the launch of Google AdWords communities globally and in this podcast episode you'll hear about some of the amazing strategic stuff she brought from Google into SimScale and how she was able to take SimScale to a 1000% increase in customers in just under 3 years. We talk about how they found product market fit in a new market as they were bringing a really revolutionary technology that hadn't really been seen before and go deep into how they were able to launch a free plan to bolster huge SEO benefits, the webinar campaigns that they run and continue to run and how they're actually finding great partnerships and defining what a partnership is in their industry. You'll also learn

Meet Ahin Thomas, the VP of Marketing for Backblaze, an 11 year old player in the cloud storage space with the unique model of having both B2C and B2B and entrusted with 600 Petabytes of data from customers in more 160 countries. In this podcast episode, you'll hear what it's like to find positioning in a very crowded, competitive marketplace like cloud storage. You'll learn how company values can make or break your marketing and how they have to come from the top. You'll also learn how they make social work and what you need to do to get an actual ROI out of it, the KPIs that really makes sense for your marketing on a large scale all the way to the very nitty gritty campaigns, and how WWE can make you a better marketer! Show Notes: 02:05 600 Petabytes of Data 05:05 Scaling Up Challenges 07:20 What Systems Come First 08:47 Competing With Giants: Being Customer Focused 11:53 Helping Cut Through The Fog Of The Cloud 13:58 The ROI Of Transparency 15:44 Marketing Experiments: Social 18:58 Getting ROI From Social

Meet John Bonini, the Director of Marketing at Databox, a software company making performance insights more accessible to everyone. In this podcast episode, we learn how they just broke the 1 million ARR mark and go deep into how they use things like content marketing, using specialized systems like polling of user generated content to create amazing articles that have created a wave of traffic to their website, referral marketing using partners, and how they've been able to bring a Hubspot style agency model into their business to really push their growth in a great way. We also talk about the focus that they had to do as a younger company and what it meant for the marketing department. The key lesson is how they learned to stayed focused, but also created innovation inside of marketing systems. You'll love the honesty and the openness about the bootstrap journey. 02:51 Access Deeper Performance Insights Quickly 04:03 The Initial Beachhead Market 05:31 Crossing the 1 Million ARR Mark 06:32 Week One, Day One

Meet Matt Stone, a marketing operations and demand generation veteran with experience in both transactional and enterprise sales cycles, currently with Gainsight, the leader in customer success software and #102 on the 2017 Inc. 5000. In this podcast episode we talk with Matt about Gainsight's amazing brand recognition, thought leadership, product evangelism, and how that was created to give the company so much traction. We also talk about how he runs the marketing operations' team and how he built a very, very powerful demand gen engine that brings in MQLs and easily translates them into SQLs, as well as what he sees happening in marketing in 2018. You are going to love this episode. Notes: 03:48 Customer Success Benchmark 04:45 The Periodic Table of Customer Success Elements 05:50 Growing Like Gang Busters 07:01 Coming In to Build a Traditional Demand Gen Engine 08:20 The Power Of Thought Leadership Across The Board 13:13 Speeding Up Demand Generation 18:31 Metrics Top And Down The Funnel 20:39 Converting

Meet Will Devlin, a 15-year veteran of the email marketing industry that leads marketing strategy and execution for MessageGears, an enterprise email marketing technology company that works with high-volume B2C brands. In this podcast episode, you'll learn how Will has helped build the brand into one of the premier software providers in the enterprise marketing space, serving companies like Expedia, Ebates, and Chick-fil-A. You'll find out how they found product market fit and what it actually looks like when it happens, why non-scalable activities are so great in the beginning and how they built great relationship using small dinners. You'll also hear about creating content for nurture cycles in enterprise and marketing in general, internal champions and the KPIs that they're using to define success in their business. This is another incredible episode. 02:46 Email Solutions For The Other End Of The Spectrum 04:44 Being The First Marketing Hire 06:00 The Light Bulb Moment Of Product Market Fit 08:50 First M

Meet Leilani Latimer who leads Global Marketing, Partnerships and Commercial Operations for Zephyr Health, the Insights-as-a-Service leader harnessing the power of global healthcare data to help Life Sciences companies engage the right physicians, accounts, and institutions. In this podcast episode you'll learn how how they found the pain points in a market that didn't have any database companies in SaaS. We talk about the pains of cold outreach to high touch sales and how Leilani went after her persona, understood the channels that they were at, how to approach them and how she went content and value first to really get big wins. As a self-proclaimed data nerd, Leilani talks about what KPIs are most important, most of them relate to engagement, something that it's a little bit of a shift that you hear from some other SaaS companies and the strategic advise she gives to her team regarding metrics. It's a really incredible episode with a ton of high level knowledge. 03:07 Zephyr's Secret Sauce 05:33 Joining T

Meet Bobby Stemper, the Director of Marketing of AdHawk, a digital advertising company that makes advertising easy with frictionless optimization in cross platform reporting. In this podcast episode you'll learn how the company has gone from a team of 2-Ex Google co-founders with a Google Spreadsheet to a 40-person company in 3 years, how Bobby focused on building marketing systems and leveraging marketing automation to do the job of many as a team of one, and his exact steps to really maximize his time and ability to take them from literally zero to over seven figures in ARR. We go deep into the strategies used early on for content marketing and creating and finding a unique voice and also about data, being really clear on the metrics that are important and understanding what the numbers are that help you drive forward with the right marketing experiments. It was a ton of fun talking with Bobby. He really gave a lot of great content. 04:24 Joining The Co-founders At An Accelerator 05:22 The MVP (Minimum Via