A good co-founder is hard to find. But what if you could hire one on an hourly basis? That’s what Jason Shapiro, CEO and founder of 82i talks about in this episode. 82i is a strategic growth services firm that serves as “a co-founder for hire” to help with growth functions such as raising capital and hiring so founders can keep their eye on what truly matters--revenue. Key takeaways: The dynamic nature of investability and the importance of building on a solid business foundation while remaining...
Jul 28, 2023•32 min•Season 2Ep. 30
In this episode, guest host Jason Myers interviews Alex George, the head of marketing at Hint Health --a platform that is redefining healthcare by providing back-end software for the direct primary care market. Alex shares insights into Hint Health's go-to-market strategy and how they enable the growth of the direct pay model in the healthcare industry. The company adopted a HubSpot-like model for educating its client practices resulting in 90 percent of client acquisition being inbound. Key Tak...
Jul 21, 2023•26 min
In this episode, Allyson Havener, VP of Marketing from TrustRadius is back to talk about their yearly report on the B2B buyer-seller disconnect with some serious updates. Last year, the report focused on the self-serve economy—they want product information readily available without talking to sales and then they would validate customer proof points. All of that still holds, and the good news for vendors is that companies are still spending on technology. The bad news is that with the changes in ...
Jul 14, 2023•31 min
Why are some SaaS companies raising significant funds while others struggle to find their first customers or determine what to build? We caught up with Sanjit Singh Dang, the Chairman and Co-founder of U First Capital , at the Ascent conference and he shares his insights as a VC evaluating startups—most notably how VCs now require more proof points on the customer side and ask the crucial question of "why now?" to evaluate product market fit with startup opportunities. He also discusses effectiv...
Jul 07, 2023•19 min•Season 2Ep. 27
We talk a lot with our customers about the 97%. The people who have problems you solve, but don’t know there’s a solution and certainly don’t know about you. That’s what we talked about with Olgo Noha, CMO of SplitMetrics at the recent Ascent Conference in San Francisco. Split Metrics is in a relatively new market with little competition—but there is little solution-awareness. Therefore, their strategy has focused on education. And when you have a complex product that requires education—customer...
Jul 07, 2023•18 min•Season 2Ep. 26
Does anyone really understand their health benefits? Most of us have experienced going to HR with a benefits question, only to be redirected to a call center just to sit on hold and maybe get answers. Guy Benjamin, CEO and co-founder of Healthee , developed a way to simplify this age-old problem with a platform that lets employees easily navigate their health and wellness benefits, and even helps choose the best plan for them. In just two years, Healthee has managed to raise $26 million dollars....
Jun 30, 2023•21 min
When Stacey Epstein became the CMO of Freshworks a few years ago, their PLG motion was doing okay. But approaching marketing from her success with other enterprise SaaS startups, Epstein expanded the marketing and sales motion to include more traditional demand gen tactics—direct sales, events, Account-Based Marketing. Now they can fully meet the buyer where they’re at—calling it Buyer Led Growth. In this episode recorded live at the Ascent Conference in San Francisco, Epstein shares her experti...
Jun 30, 2023•23 min
What are you trying to do in your forecasting process that you're not getting from your CRM? That’s the question Aviso set out to answer for its clients by leveraging advanced analytics. Their software helps sales teams optimize their strategies, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to improve their sales outcomes. At the recent Ascent Conference in San Francisco, we sat down to talk with their chief marketing officer Amit Pande who shared how they found their product-market fit durin...
Jun 23, 2023•20 min•Season 2Ep. 23
Chip House has had a long career in SaaS with companies such as ExactTarget, Salesforce, and SharpSpring. Now as the CMO at Insightly , we caught up with Chip at the Ascent Conference in San Francisco and got him to share his experiences with all things B2B marketing, including: Product-market fit The role of customer success in marketing Leveraging AI, and Solving the attribution problem. Other resources to check out: Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yea...
Jun 16, 2023•21 min•Season 2Ep. 22
How many good sales emails have you gotten? Personally, I can count them on one hand. Most of us can sniff out a sales email in a split second--the headline is cheesy, it’s about them, and it’s completely irrelevant. Obviously, sellers haven’t done their homework. That’s the opportunity we discussed in my interview with Lavender AI’s Jen Allen-Knuth and Will Aitken at the Ascent Conference in San Francisco. Their tool helps sellers write better emails—or as Aitken says, “stop them from writing s...
Jun 16, 2023•27 min•Season 2Ep. 21
People just don’t pick up the phone like they used to, and as a result, outbound call response rates are few and far between. A rep that makes 100 calls a day may only get a handful of connects. It’s such a grueling and inefficient process that many companies have abandoned the phone altogether. The problem is that sales ultimately is based on having valuable conversations. And if you’re not having them, your pipeline will suffer. So, what if you could improve the connection rate and have more c...
Jun 09, 2023•21 min•Season 2Ep. 20
Why can a person with an iPhone in their bedroom with no budget create videos that get millions of views, while B2B companies that hire professionals can’t seem to get a fraction of that engagement? That’s the problem Michael Hoffman set out to solve with his company Gather Voices . Traditional agency production processes are expensive, slow, and don't scale well, which hinders B2B companies from creating video content for various channels like social media and websites. When you look at consume...
Jun 02, 2023•39 min•Season 2Ep. 19
In this episode, fractional CMO Andrew Bolis shares how owning a pipeline number and being responsible for specific revenue-related targets not only helps sales and marketing teams work towards common goals, but also provides leverage in conversations with the CFO. Other Key Insights from this episode include: Bringing in the right fractional CMO for your situation. Working with agencies to fill in skill gaps and drive faster results. Justifying marketing expenses with the C-suite. Other resourc...
May 26, 2023•25 min•Season 2Ep. 18
You’ve probably heard the criticisms of B2B marketing—it’s boring and lacks creativity. And besides, it’s way too expensive to produce ads like B2C companies. In this episode, Melissa Rosenthal, Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp shares her approach to creating remarkable content without breaking the bank. Coming from B2C powerhouses like Buzzfeed and Cheddar, Rosenthal immediately saw the blue-ocean opportunity in B2B to differentiate. So, she built an in-house creative agency at ClickUp by inve...
May 19, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 17
Working at Google’s mapping team, Steve Benson thought that field salespeople needed a lot more functionality to adequately plan their routes. So, in 2012 founded Badger Maps and set out to build a tool where field sales teams could not only build routes, but also visualize their customers on a map on their mobile device that automatically connected with their CRM. To ensure product/market fit, Benson personally talked to hundreds of field salespeople to ensure that this was a problem worth payi...
May 12, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 16
When Susan Peich joined Monitaur AI as their head of marketing earlier this year, the power (and dangers) of AI was still mostly talk amongst data scientists. How quickly things change. With the rise of ChatGPT in recent months, AI's power (and danger) are now at the forefront causing companies to scramble to figure out how to handle its governance. That’s where Monitaur.ai comes in. They help companies in highly regulated environments such as insurance, healthcare and financial to not only leve...
May 05, 2023•29 min•Season 2Ep. 15
If we’re being honest, there's a big difference between the imagined buyer's journey that marketers invent and what’s happening in reality. But then, we’ve always made those assumptions because it’s nearly impossible to track. Or is it? That’s what Molly St. Louis, Head of Marketing at DealTale talks about in this episode - applying AI to track the previously un-trackable journey. DealTale is a SaaS that leverages causal machine learning methods to track buyers while they’re still anonymous (by ...
Apr 28, 2023•30 min
In this episode, Matt Trifiro, CEO of Vapor.io, joins host Ken Lempit to discuss the insidious tyranny of artificial Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and how to fight back against their oppressive hold on SaaS marketing. Long gone are the days when early adopters of advertising platforms could easily dominate their market niche, as the law of diminishing returns has caught up with all forms of marketing, leaving SaaS marketers struggling to find innovative ways to attract and retain customers. ...
Apr 21, 2023•35 min•Season 2Ep. 13
Despite building a great product and amassing close to 1000 customers, LiquidPlanner struggled to continue on the same growth trajectory. Customers expected broader capabilities. Competitors had more money. And as access to capital tightened, the board decided to look for a partner. They found Tempo, a complimentary business that will help deliver better portfolio management capabilities as well as its connectivity to Atlassian’s Jira–something their customers are looking forward to. Even though...
Apr 14, 2023•29 min
For marketers, breaking through the trust gap is getting harder. Prospective buyers won’t believe it without some third-party validation. So, how can you break through that trust gap in a new and innovative way? That’s the problem Jeff Ernst set out to solve as the founder of SlapFive , a customer marketing solution that makes it simple to engage and mobilize customers to drive growth. In over 2000 interviews with CMOs during his tenure at Forrester, Ernst notes that overwhelmingly, the number o...
Apr 06, 2023•36 min
Having spent a decade growing a retail mortgage origination business, Jason Doshi noticed that the movement of funds surrounding the real estate transaction was still very antiquated. A few years later, he built Payments.io, a SaaS digital platform that allows title companies and real estate brokerages to send and receive digital money transfers, saving everyone money and time while reducing the risk of fraud. Doshi recently raised $3 Million and he talks in this episode about their challenges a...
Mar 31, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Starting his career as a research scientist, Harsha Rajasimha became interested in addressing the issue of clinical trial recruitment after realizing that many promising drugs were not making it to market due to recruitment delays. To better understand the problem, he conducted interviews with 3,000 stakeholders of clinical trials, including patients, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies and found that 85% of those delays were because of recruitment issues. Rajasimha created Jeeva Informatic...
Mar 24, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 9
There’s a tendency for entrepreneurs to believe that the motivations for starting a company is the fame and fortune. But as Aseem Chandra, co-founder and CEO of Immersa explains, “That's the absolute wrong reason. You get into a startup because you love the problem, and you can't wait to see what that solution's going to turn out to be, and you're willing to give 10 years of your life to it.” Knowing that the two biggest reasons for startup failure (they run out of money and irreconcilable diffe...
Mar 17, 2023•32 min
While working for a large manufacturer in the film and broadcast industry and visiting over 200 Film and TV studios, David Kaszycki spotted a big problem. Engineers had to stay up to date with updates, critical security patches, general maintenance and accessing manuals and documents for over 10,000 different pieces of technology. With his partner, Kaszycki started Beam Dynamics to build a common interface platform that would bring all of it together. Engineers can upload or connect their invent...
Mar 02, 2023•35 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Is it possible to get to minimum viable product (MVP) in 100 days or less? Our guest this week, Michael Lazor, CEO of SPSoft says it is with the right development partner and the necessary preparation. Easier said than done. SPSoft is a software developer specializing in healthcare and telehealth and in this episode, Lazor talks through his methodologies for: Choosing the right development partner (lots of pitfalls to avoid) Combining internal and external development resources The research and ...
Feb 24, 2023•28 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Why do 90 percent of acquisitions fail for the buyer? According to Ari Kahn, President and CEO of Bridgeline , a big reason is because they’re not leveraging the customer base to create greater lifetime value (LTV), so they don’t adequately recover the original customer acquisition costs (CAC). Bridgline Digital has acquired its way to a suite of SaaS solutions that bridge the gaps between marketing, content, commerce, social and insights to grow online revenue for its customers. Kahn’s secret a...
Feb 17, 2023•32 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Like most SaaS companies, Brandon Metcalf, CEO & Founder of Place struggled with the outbound sales model. Out of necessity, they started looking at why companies weren’t buying their products. They found that over half bought nothing. In other words, no decision. So they decided to flip the script and educate prospective buyers on what could happen instead of finding the people whose arm they could twist a sales conversation. They put a lot of work into messaging, revamped their website to ...
Feb 10, 2023•32 min•Season 2Ep. 4
There’s a lot of hype with Product-Led Growth (PLG) with the promise of low-cost customer acquisition and streamlined expansion. But as Peter Zawistowicz, Pace’s head of marketing says that when you introduce a PLG motion into an organization with an existing direct sales motion, you get an interesting set of problems. Most notably, sellers in a PLG motion are almost always left in the dark while still trying to hit their numbers. Intercede too early and it could artificially inflate price point...
Feb 03, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 3
It’s estimated that 40 percent of all warehouse worker movement is wasteful. A simple example is a worker having to walk through and assemble 12 items that need to be shipped to a customer. What’s the optimal order of items to minimize the steps That’s the problem Yosh Eisbart, CEO of Fullfilld is tackling with their warehouse management orchestration platform. Their system paints a “digital twin” of the physical warehouse, digitizes it, and ingests all that data into the software. So instead of...
Jan 27, 2023•32 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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 ...
Jan 20, 2023•37 min•Season 2Ep. 1
