Are you making one or more of these mistakes in your messaging? Given the number of websites that we review regularly, chances are that you are—and that means leaving revenue on the table. In this episode, Ken and Jason from Austin Lawrence Group discuss the eight common mistakes that SaaS companies make with real-life examples. So if you’re a SaaS CEO or CMO revisiting messaging and content strategy this year, or you’re frustrated with the quality of leads coming through your website, this epis...
Feb 02, 2024•30 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Business development poses big challenges for today’s SaaS. It becomes twice as ineffective every year as people learn how to ignore you. And it’s such a grind that it’s hard to find good people who want to stick with the sales development rep (SDR) position over the long term. To get engagement on the phone today takes the right experience, technology, and triggers. That’s why we sat down with Gabriel Lullo, CEO of Alleyoop , an outsourced SDR service that specializes in lead generation and rel...
Jan 26, 2024•32 min•Season 3Ep. 9
We’ve all been frustrated by those pesky ads that pop up when trying to read an article. We understand that publishers are trying to capture more of that lost ad revenue, but the solution is not to create such a poor experience that it drives consumers away. And the rise of ad blockers is not the only problem for publishers. The decline of traditional tracking methods due to privacy regulations and browser changes, such as the death of the cookie, threatens the business model even more. Dan Rua,...
Jan 19, 2024•34 min•Season 3Ep. 8
In this episode, SaaS Backwards host Ken Lempit switches places to the guest seat to discuss upcoming trends in SaaS marketing for the new year and what companies will have to do to be successful. Ken is the Chief Strategist of the Austin Lawrence Group, a growth marketing agency specializing in B2B SaaS, and has a 30-year track record in software marketing. The key areas discussed include: As outbound prospecting gets harder, how will companies be successful? How will sales and marketing KPIs s...
Jan 12, 2024•28 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Pricing is often the most overlooked “P” in the SaaS marketing mix. We see it in our marketing practice often. Companies may be averse to raising prices for fear of losing customers, focusing on other priorities like product development, or simply don’t understand the impact on the business. In this episode, we caught up with Pat Meegan, Senior Partner at Maple Street Advisors, who talks about assessing the opportunity for pricing growth regularly by looking at four key indicators: Leadership do...
Jan 05, 2024•34 min•Season 3Ep. 6
When going through a repetitive and time-consuming mortgage application process in 2017, Mang-Git Ng was surprised that the process wasn’t automated. He realized that there were many industries that still operated in the internet dark ages and that moving all these PDFs and paper documents to online forms could solve a major problem. But after he and his co-founder had built their initial product, they struggled to gain traction, especially with limited sales and marketing experience. Through mu...
Dec 29, 2023•28 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Because of the challenges in the current financing environment and the cautious approach of strategic buyers and private equity firms for SaaS companies, we invited Marty Magida on to discuss practical strategies to enhance company value and navigate the complexities of the M&A market. Magida is the managing director of Berkery, Noyes & Co an independent investment bank providing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisory to middle-market leaders in the global information, software, ser...
Dec 22, 2023•31 min•Season 3Ep. 4
You’ve probably never thought about what goes on behind the scenes when you return a product, but there’s a lot to it. In this episode of the SaaS Backwards podcast, Chuck Fuerst, CMO at ReverseLogix , gives a look behind the scenes at some of the challenges and opportunities in the returns management system category. And because it’s so complicated, their go-to-market strategy requires problem agreement to be considered. And because companies enter different stages of problem awareness, the com...
Dec 15, 2023•32 min
You may have noticed that deals today take longer to close and scrutinized heavily. So, what do SaaS companies need to do? Spencer Dent, Founder of Clozd says to make sure you understand the how the decision-making process, people involved, and priorities have changed. And since the CFO plays a bigger role, it’s less about ease of integration and more about the bottom line—and you’d better be ready to prove it. Key takeaways: Are ROI calculators worth it anymore? With people caring more about po...
Dec 08, 2023•13 min•Season 3Ep. 2
As a CEO, you probably don’t care much about how your accounting and bookkeeping is done. But you do want insights you can drive once your month is closed out. Burn rate and cash flow comes to mind. At the Ascent conference in New York, we caught up with Swapnil Shinde, CEO of Zeni , a SaaS that claims to have the world’s first finance operations platform for startups that includes intelligent bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services. Key Takeaways: When it comes to defining ICP, the sharper th...
Dec 08, 2023•17 min•Season 3Ep. 1
For our 100th episode, we’re excited to interview Brent Adamson, the global head of research with Ecosystems , a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management that helps its users quantify and align with customers based on the value being delivered. Adamson is most known as the co-author of the books The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. And as marketers, both books have been instrumental in shaping our view of content development as an agency and the role it plays in furt...
Dec 01, 2023•37 min•Season 2Ep. 50
Coming from sales positions where she’s carried quotas, Brandee Sanders knows what having skin in the game for marketers looks like. And it’s not tracking MQLs or developing a strong tech stack. It does look like examining the data to find repeatable opportunities for sales pipeline. In other words, do we truly know how and why closed/won opportunities entered our orbit and what motivated them to take action to purchase? According to Sanders, the disconnect is that “Most marketers just roll over...
Nov 29, 2023•20 min•Season 2Ep. 49
Strategic initiatives often get de-railed when CEOs delegate them instead of taking ownership. This lack of clarity can lead to confusion and lack of focus throughout the organization. That’s the problem Ulf Arnetz is solving through his Swedish-based company Howwe , a SaaS enterprise platform for CEOs to orchestrate and operationalize strategy implementation at every level of their organization. The platform allows CEOs to prioritize goals, track progress and align teams towards achieving reven...
Nov 22, 2023•33 min•Season 2Ep. 48
Probably best known for helping Gong grow from $200K to $200M in five years, Chris Orlob talks about following his passion for helping people learn valuable sales skills through his new company pclub.io . (That’s short for President’s Club for non-salesy folks). But sales training wasn’t the original focus. Originally, they started out to build a company called QuotaSignal that sold a hiring value proposition, but since hiring took a nosedive in the current economic climate, had been developing ...
Nov 17, 2023•19 min•Season 2Ep. 47
The attribution problem has long been a challenge for marketers—probably first articulated by John Wannamaker when he said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” It seemed like marketing tech had solved it (for a minute)—until buyers went and changed their behavior. So how do we map the customer journey today? That’s where today’s guest Steffen Hedebrandt, Co-Founder and CMO of DreamData.io comes in. DreamData is a B2B revenue attribution plat...
Nov 15, 2023•17 min•Season 2Ep. 46
Seemingly not too long ago, searches for new products and services overwhelmingly started at Google. And it made sense to optimize for keywords, so you’d appear organically on page one. But things have changed—just a bit. And no one is more qualified to talk about those changes than our guest Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro and formerly the founder of Moz. As Fishkin notes, today if you ask Google a question, over half the time they’re going to give you a snippet with an answer. And as soon as ge...
Nov 09, 2023•22 min•Season 2Ep. 45
Sales and marketing alignment was never a problem for Acrolinx , as evidenced by Christopher P. Willis’ title: Chief Marketing & Pipeline Officer. Acrolinx is an AI-powered content marketing engine that integrates with content tools to provide real-time advice on brand, tone, clarity, compliance, and consistency. In this episode, Chris talks about the value of tracking engagement data and its usefulness for sales and introduces his Global Active Awareness Score (GAAS), a comprehensive method...
Nov 03, 2023•40 min•Season 2Ep. 44
Even in a very healthy business, you must keep looking for innovation. That’s the gist of this episode’s message with Dan Miles, Chief Operating Officer of TVEyes. TVEyes is a search engine for impactful video and audio measured by audience and level of information and newsworthiness. Historically, that was primarily broadcast TV and radio, but over the last few years as audiences migrated to online platforms like podcasts and streaming video, TVEyes has innovated its software platform to captur...
Oct 26, 2023•36 min•Season 2Ep. 43
We all know that personalization, context, and relevance are necessary to get a cold email opened. But that takes a lot of time and energy to customize each communication, and when only 3% of your target audience is in-market at any given time. And that’s where Buzzboard comes in. The company has developed a platform that utilizes AI and proprietary data to create personalized content and conversation starters for sales organizations. This platform leverages a data set of 30 million businesses a...
Oct 19, 2023•33 min•Season 2Ep. 42
In this episode, we talked to Fred Rockwell, owner of the upcoming Ascent Conference in New York (Oct 30) about the advantages of attending events in-person, how they’ve changed in a post-covid world, and why he structures his events to create more bottom of the funnel opportunities through private invites. The SaaS Backwards Podcast is also excited to be the official podcast sponsor of the Ascent Conference and will be recording episodes at the show. Key takeaways from this episode: The importa...
Oct 13, 2023•28 min•Season 2Ep. 41
Effective messaging is paramount for SaaS companies to attract and convert the right types of customers. And according to this week’s guest Anthony Pierri, Partner with Fletch PMM , most are getting it wrong. They try to speak to too many audiences at once. They use vague and broad statements that don’t resonate with anyone. They use wishy washy language. Today’s marketers have been influenced by big companies that prioritize branding and awareness, which won’t be an effective strategy for the c...
Oct 05, 2023•38 min•Season 2Ep. 40
Criminals have developed efficient business models that make it cost-effective to attack even small enterprises. No company is too small, and the need for awareness and understanding of the evolving threat landscape, particularly with generative AI is at an all-time high. But simply training staff not to click on this or not to write down their password on post-its isn’t going to be enough. Our guest, Dr. James Norrie, CEO of CyberconIQ , realized that the key to changing behavior is through per...
Sep 29, 2023•38 min•Season 2Ep. 39
As a Chiropractor, Brian Capra never intended to become a software developer—but it seems like something bigger was a play. Because the healthcare system, particularly insurance companies, have historically been biased against chiropractic care, chiropractors must be more entrepreneurial. They must understand marketing, building relationships, sales, and managing a business to succeed. And they often don’t understand the game that big insurance plays when it comes to delaying or denying payments...
Sep 22, 2023•36 min•Season 2Ep. 38
The B2B world is different today, and (unfortunately) there’s no one formula that works across the board. It’s not outbound versus inbound. It’s not advertising versus content. Every organization has a unique formula that will consistently drive meaningful conversations with targeted prospects. Therefore, you'll never see a productive organization where there's a lot of animosity between marketing and sales leadership. In this episode, Ben Page-Fort, who works with early and growth stage FinTech...
Sep 15, 2023•37 min•Season 2Ep. 37
There’s nothing like an economic slow-down to thin the herd. Companies take longer to buy, consolidate resources, and rethink their go-to-market strategy. So why are companies doubling down on yesterday’s strategies? Normally the host of SaaS Backwards, Ken Lempit, President of Austin Lawrence , sits in the guest seat this week to answer questions about how SaaS leaders need to approach marketing to engage today’s buyer. Key Takeaways from this episode: Demand generation involves both demand cap...
Sep 08, 2023•26 min•Season 2Ep. 36
When a company starts out, verticalization may not be the best thing. In fact, today’s guest Corey Quinn, fractional CMO and GTM strategist prefers to work with companies who went broad first, since there’s value in exploring different verticals and learning the nuances in the different markets. But at a certain point, verticalization becomes necessary to scale. It reduces complexity, improves marketing, and helps to differentiate from the competition. In this episode, host Ken Lempit and Quinn ...
Sep 01, 2023•30 min•Season 2Ep. 35
It’s never been harder for marketers generate an audience where you can have impact than it is today. The media landscape has exploded and the number of choices we have as marketers has never been more varied. In many ways, we’re now paying for the sins automating a process of building trust and relationships. In this episode, Anthony Kennada, Co-Founder and CEO of Audience Plus talks with Ken about how the marketing pendulum is swinging back from marketing automation, inbound, and maximizing SE...
Aug 25, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 34
As martech SaaS founder, Steve McDonald acknowledges the tendency to believe that their product is so exceptional that customers will naturally flock to it. But then reality sets in and you realize that maybe Shoeless Joe Jackson wasn’t whispering in your ear after all. There’s a lot of risk for customers to invest in something new, and content marketing is the obvious way to build trust. But with the volume of noise out there today, your development process must be strategic, methodical, and ef...
Aug 18, 2023•38 min•Season 2Ep. 33
When joining MadKudu as a Marketing VP, Shannon Curran knew they were so much more than a predictive lead scoring platform. She wanted to shift the conversation from product-led growth (PLG) to a focus on hybrid funnels and revenue generation. And because it would be a huge challenge to cut through the noise in the MarTech/RevTech space, they engaged an external consultant to conduct research and help with the positioning process. They explored the competitive landscape, market trends, and the c...
Aug 11, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 32
Outbound selling is here to stay—but to make it work, efficiency is key. Of course, the task at hand isn’t lost on Salesintel.io CEO Manoj Ramnani, who’s tools are designed to do just that. Salesintel.io is a go-to-market intelligence platform that helps marketing, sales, and revenue operations teams research prospective accounts and find contact information. Ramnani is most excited about “Predictive AI” where it has the potential to predict future intent based on historical data so that sales t...
Aug 04, 2023•27 min•Season 2Ep. 31
