Steve Garrison , VP of Marketing at Stellar Cyber , shares the exponential value that customer insight brings to marketing. Garrison is a proponent of field-focused marketing as a strategy. This calls for tailoring your product messaging after your customers’ needs. Garrison promotes working very closely with the sales teams to gain an upper hand. Being able to witness and understand the customer profile, their apprehensions about the product, and what their business problems are, helps create t...
Apr 14, 2022•25 min•Ep. 144
Prateek Chakravarty , CEO at Zinier , provides a fresh perspective for SaaS startups in this episode. His vision focuses on designing software for field workers. This sector is often overlooked when it comes to software. It includes workers in essential industries like trades, blue-collar roles, and others that power our society. Chakravarty experienced the business problems as a field worker when working on isolated oil rigs for months on end. Challenges included having to submit status reports...
Apr 11, 2022•25 min•Ep. 143
Eric Futoran , Co-Founder and CEO of Embrace , joins host Noah to talk about his startup journey and mission. Not having enough data to improve his mobile games was at the core of that mission. Embrace provides unified data on every metric that can improve the user experience on mobile applications. Futoran thinks that mobile will continue to be a disruptor. People need to be connected. Mobile applications, for gaming and social media, provide that connection at your fingertips. Futoran believes...
Mar 30, 2022•42 min•Ep. 142
Alexander Hagerup , Co-Founder & CEO at Vic.ai , is using artificial intelligence to enhance a function that every business uses. His company’s platform helps finance and accounting professionals by providing them with autonomous help. Hagerup had his epiphany when he saw several common trends in accounting. Anywhere in the world, no matter what accounting system is used, it’s governed by rules or templates and humans. With the industry revolving around these rules, it was ripe for applying ...
Mar 28, 2022•27 min•Ep. 141
Abby Salameh , Chief Marketing Officer at CAIS , shares with us her incredible career journey. She spearheads the marketing at a company that opens more financial instrument options to portfolio managers. Salameh shares how an opportunity can present itself when you ask. After an exhausting stint in corporate, Salameh thought it was time to retire. But when the pandemic hit and then eased off, she found herself in need of a challenge. Seeing the value of innovation at CAIS, she reached out and p...
Mar 23, 2022•25 min•Ep. 140
Joe Hipsky , Co-Founder/CSO of IRALOGIX , joins the show to talk about pushing innovation to traditional industries, like those that deal with individual retirement accounts, or IRAs. The IRA industry has evolved slowly in terms of technology, very similar to banking and finance. The conservative approach is essential to take because of the impact on people’s retirement savings. The downside is that this has made innovation extremely inefficient. This affects customers as the markups are passed ...
Mar 18, 2022•24 min•Ep. 139
David M. Wright , Founder & CEO at Disruptive Innovations , shares his insights on digital transformation and strategy. His firm helps enterprises, especially non-technical ones, navigate through this stage. ‘Digital transformation’ has been thrown around a lot. Its meaning is often misinterpreted. Wright defines it as supporting your business strategy with an IT solution; a strategy that supports key business functions like interdepartmental collaboration, reaching your customers, or enhanc...
Mar 14, 2022•37 min•Ep. 138
Aimei Wei , Founder and CTO of Stellar Cyber , talks about the importance of cybersecurity in today’s world. Cyberattacks were once viewed as an issue that plagued governments or megacorporations. As a response, they would hire expensive security experts, both to detect threats and establish responses. Today though, small businesses and startups have access to digital infrastructure through SaaS. While this has democratized digital transformation, it also has expanded the reach of hackers. Stell...
Mar 11, 2022•24 min•Ep. 137
Scott Britton , Co-Founder of Troops , talks about his startup and his approach to B2B software use. Instead of us conforming to the software, it should work for us. His startup brings this to fruition by working with collaboration and messaging applications. Applications like Slack or Teams are widely used, especially by sales professionals. On the other end of the spectrum, these professionals struggle with CRMs. Britton uses software to bring them together, saving time and creating valuable d...
Mar 02, 2022•38 min•Ep. 136
Norman Crowley , Founder of CoolPlanet and AVA shares some great insights on running an innovative company set on saving the planet. CoolPlanet aims to reduce carbon emissions by helping companies calculate and account for carbon expenses. Crowley’s approach is straightforward — his platform quantifies and translates carbon into expenses. With governments now putting a price on carbon, it is now in the best interests of businesses to cut this cost. The software connects cost with carbon and moti...
Feb 23, 2022•44 min•Ep. 135
Matthew Fornaciari , Co-Founder and CTO at Gremlin Inc. , shares his startup journey along with nuggets of information he picked up along the way. Forni has built a company that proactively improves reliability through chaos engineering. Chaos engineering injects controlled chaos into an environment to test it. It looks at the four signals of uptime to keep it going: latency, error rate, availability, and saturation. It’s the practical, software version of failing fast and learning from mistakes...
Feb 21, 2022•23 min•Ep. 134
Amanda Rabideau , CEO and Founder, Arch Collective, Inc. shares insights on freelancing and using fractional executive positions to help startups. Rabideau shares how freelancing is now more relevant than ever. With acquiring great talent becoming increasingly difficult companies need to consider the contractor model. Hiring freelancers provide the flexibility to handle functions your business may not be ready to fully invest in. Startups, for instance, will need a CMO to strategize early on but...
Feb 17, 2022•44 min•Ep. 133
Daniel Cunningham , Founder and CEO at Leonardo247 , talks about his startup journey: Bringing a software platform to a traditional market. Leonardo247 simplifies property management and maintenance for multi-family residences. Cunningham talks about the challenges he’s had in using lean bootstrap methodology. It would have been much easier if he’d had a technical cofounder. He was able to overcome those challenges by starting with a smaller circle of customers before scaling up. Bootstrapping c...
Feb 14, 2022•35 min•Ep. 132
Jonathan Aizen , Founder and CEO of Amitree , joins the show to talk about entrepreneurship and user-researched product design. Aizen’s solution aims at enhancing an antiquated technology we have relied on for so long: electronic mail. He talks about the product cycle he took with Folio. In its current iteration, Folio intelligently goes into emails and helps identify project milestones, events, and sorts through attachments. This saves a ton of time for professionals, especially those in the he...
Feb 10, 2022•28 min•Ep. 131
Chris Mele , Managing Partner of Software Pricing Partners , shares his insight and expertise on monetization for software companies. Monetization is an entire discipline that includes pricing, packaging, and licensing. Mele shares how challenging it can be to think about monetization at the last moment before selling a product. Software companies need to develop the discipline of monetization as early as the product design. This allows the inclusion of features, customization, and an overall va...
Feb 09, 2022•49 min•Ep. 130
Prof. Joe O'Mahoney , Professor of Consulting at Cardiff University , shares his expertise in the consulting industry. O’Mahoney goes in-depth to talk about setting up consultancy firms in a sustainable manner. He has done research on how many great consultants have decided to start their own firm and fail at it. He’s observed that the reason for this is that, most of the time, great consultants don’t make great startup founders. He has noticed that these struggles often come from selling their ...
Feb 07, 2022•36 min•Ep. 129
Brandon Fluharty , VP of Strategic Account Solutions at LivePerson , shares a treasure of insight on the show. Fluharty talks about personal development revolving around mindset transformation. Fluharty has brought enormous success in B2B sales to LivePerson, bringing in 7-figure revenue. He admits that he once thought that being an introvert would be a disadvantage for him as a salesperson. Instead, with the right environment, aligning target accounts, a shift in mindset, and the ability to exe...
Feb 04, 2022•39 min•Ep. 128
Sonciary Pérez , Co-Founder of Quala.io , shares her startup journey on this show. Her startup journey is a mixture of building a product and solving problems in an area she is passionate about. Pérez talks about customer success for B2B SaaS companies. In a highly competitive environment, it all boils down to cost and features. Customer success is the lifeline that ensures the SaaS company is in touch with its customers. They use this opportunity to help them make the most of features to justif...
Feb 02, 2022•39 min•Ep. 127
David Kindlon , CEO and Co-Founder of Eppione , joins the show to talk about an extremely relevant topic in business today: human resource management. Several companies have adapted to the pandemic through a remote work setup. Once something only tech companies did, it has now become the rule rather than the exception. This trend has also opened up the resource pool for companies. They now hire workers who are fit for the role yet based in different countries. This gain comes with the complicati...
Jan 31, 2022•27 min•Ep. 126
Oliver Nutt , Vice President, Marketing and External Communications at General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), shares insights about the importance of branding, leading large organizations, and navigating change. Most of our guests here on Leaders of B2B are usually startup founders overseeing smaller teams. So hearing from a leader of a large organization is extremely insightful. Nutt talks about the importance of branding in enterprise organizations. This marketing responsibility is cr...
Jan 27, 2022•40 min•Ep. 125
Esben Friis-Jensen , Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Userflow , joins Noah on the show to talk about the value of product-led growth to fuel your startup. He also talks about how he was able to improve his startup journey on the next round as a founder. Friis-Jensen shares how essential onboarding is for every SaaS company. It sets the tone and trend for customer retention by promoting use of any SaaS solution. Providing a self-service option reduces cost and is a great fit for B2B, where...
Jan 26, 2022•33 min•Ep. 124
Slater Victoroff , Founder and CTO of Indico , joins Noah to talk about his startup journey and the next level of AI. His company Indico Data works on unstructured data. They use analytics with AI to create tools that arm the users and subject matter experts. One of the values Victoroff learned early on and abides by through his journey is humility and self-realization. After being proven wrong on his outlook that deep learning has reached its peak, he pivoted and founded Indico. This value is i...
Jan 24, 2022•43 min•Ep. 123
Garrett Mehrguth , CEO of Directive , joins Ledge to share his expertise in marketing and his insights as a successful business leader. Directive Consulting has been providing customer generation for software companies for the last eight years. Mehrguth shares that account-based marketing isn’t the right way to go. Citing limited market potential and disjointed KPIs, the spend on impressions and MQL doesn’t translate into deals. He thinks the focus should be geared more towards sales qualified l...
Jan 17, 2022•47 min•Ep. 122
Eric Stockton , VP of Demand Generation at Constant Contact , shares his career journey that has led to his expertise in revenue generation. He also talks about the timeless tug-of-war between sales and marketing. It’s essential for any business leader to steer both toward revenue for the company. Marketing should be solid in determining the ideal customer profiles and driving meetings toward sales. It’s also essential that sales is given materials and support that relate and speak the target cu...
Jan 13, 2022•47 min•Ep. 121
Stephen King , Founder and CEO of GrowthForce , joins today’s podcast with some great insight for business leaders. Accounting is a key business function, providing data to help you manage your strategy. Smaller businesses and startups need to deal with the added cost of this function, which often comes even before they have the revenue to cover it. King explains that outsourcing this function is the solution to this conundrum. Outsourcing gives businesses the expertise at a fraction of the cost...
Jan 05, 2022•39 min•Ep. 120
Alexis Chiagouris , director of global marketing communications and brand at Ensono , shares insights in marketing specific to the IT space. As the IT industry has grown, so has the saturation of providers in the space. Creating brand awareness through a marketing communications plan is essential to success. Chiagouris talks about her take on content strategy. She disagrees with the approach to gate content in exchange for gathering people’s information or forcing them to opt-in. She sees so man...
Dec 20, 2021•40 min•Ep. 119
James Ontra , CEO of Shufflrr , shares how powerful the story of your business can be in closing deals. He argues that presentations, an integral part of any business, are often done inefficiently and ineffectively. Experiencing this business problem first-hand inspired Ontra to found Shufflrr, a presentation management solution. Ontra thinks presentations are powerful because they drive the sales conversation. If a sales meeting were a movie, the presentation would be the set and effects. A pro...
Dec 15, 2021•40 min•Ep. 118
This special episode of Leaders of B2B features Noah Tetzner. Noah will be the show’s new co-host along with Ledge and Jake . Noah works with Content Allies on the sourcing, engagement, and scheduling of guests for the company’s impressive roster of podcasts. He brings an impressive background in organizing and hosting podcasts. In 2018, he started a historical podcast called The History of Vikings which got 50,000 downloads per month. Noah chats with Ledge about the significance of podcasts in ...
Dec 09, 2021•13 min•Ep. 117
Asher Ismail , co-founder at Uncapped , discusses a very important topic for founders and business leaders: raising capital. Ismail shares how his experience with two prior startups made him realize a vital business problem. With bootstrapping or funding your own business, there are only two ways to raise capital: debt or equity. The former can be risky and expensive. The latter can dilute your ownership and leave founders at the short end after so many sacrifices. Ismail urges founders to think...
Dec 06, 2021•35 min•Ep. 116
Pieter Krynauw , CEO at ThruWave Inc. , shares valuable insight on innovation, as well as preparing yourself for a journey in entrepreneurship. Krynauw’s startup helps improve supply chain efficiency by enhancing millimeter wave technology with software. Krynauw talks more in-depth about automation. He sees automation as the execution of the concept of simplification. A company should have the capability to break down complex problems into repetitive tasks and real problem solving. The former ca...
Dec 01, 2021•38 min•Ep. 115
