The Yaag Project

David Cancel: How to build a product company with a difference

In this episode, David Cancel (DC), the founder and CEO of Drift, joins us on the show to discuss what it takes to build a product company that makes a difference. He talks about: -->When should a founder zoom in on the granular aspects and when to zoom out --> Who were the first 10 hires at Drift (what roles)? --> The balance between category design and product market fit --> When to think about scaling? --> Why did they transition their core story from 'Conversational Marketing'...

Using NLP and sentiment analysis for improving product relevance to customers

In this episode, Tom Griffiths, CRO at TalkAItive, joins us to share his insights on how to leverage NLP and sentiment analysis in improving the relevance of your product with your customers and target audience. He talks about: --> What is sentiment analysis and how it works? --> How do we use AI to analyze the context of something and more importantly to understand the momentum behind conversations? --> Does collecting feedback using a bot really help? Does it motivate people to really...

Andreas Jonsson: Leveraging LinkedIn analytics to improve engagement

In this episode, Andreas Jonsson, the co-founder & CEO of the LinkedIn analytics platform - Shield app, joins us to share his insights on using LinkedIn analytics effectively to improve engagement. He talks about: --> How often should one check their LinkedIn analytics on Shield app? --> How to understand what kind of posts are working for you, and the topics that make sense to your audience --> Will Shield app get prescriptive? Will they go beyond LinkedIn analytics? --> Do they...

Peep Laja: Getting real on positioning and value proposition

In this episode, Peep Laja, the founder and CEO of Wynter and CXL joins Yaag to discuss -- How to get very real and practical with positioning, product messaging and value proposition, minus all the bells and whistles, and the fluff. Peep shares his experience on: --> How do you fight sameness and differentiate your product or service? --> Correlation between the number of companies in an industry and the sameness among the products and messaging --> Is positioning more towards the cust...

How to get better at copywriting: with Cole Schafer

In this episode, the copywriting master & the founder of Honey Copy, Cole Schafer, joins us on the show to share actionable tips and tricks to get better at copywriting. He talks about: --> How should you approach writing headlines --> Building trust with the reader using words --> Practicing the Hemingway method --> Finding the right tone of voice, and a lot more. (P.S.: A big thank you to Christopher Lochhead for introducing us to the work of Cole Schafer)

Fernando Angulo: State of content marketing in 2021

In this episode, Fernando Angulo, the Head of Communications at Semrush, gives us a detailed perspective of the state of content marketing in 2021. It is based on the factual findings collected from interviewing 1500 marketers across different countries and analyzing over 170,000 job posts. He shares his insights on: --> Top 3 hard skills and soft skills that a content marketer needs in 2021 --> Anatomy of content that really works --> Correlation between the metrics and different eleme...

Jeremy Epstein: Using OKRs to drive better marketing outcomes

In this episode, Jeremy Epstein, the CMO at Gtmhub takes us through his practical and immersive experience on "How to effectively use OKRs to drive better marketing outcomes?” He dives into: --> What makes OKRs so interesting? --> How is it different from other strategy execution methodologies like BSC? --> How the adoption of OKR begins at a company - the right stage for you to adopt OKRs --> How many objectives is too much? Why OKRs fail at some organizations, and a lot more... Aft...

Jason Barnard: Masterclass on Google Knowledge Panels

In this episode, Jason Barnard, whom you might know as the BrandSERP guy, takes us through a real masterclass on one of the very important tools that helps you in building online trust and reputation, i.e., "Knowledge Panels”. Listen in, to go deep into: --> What are knowledge panels? --> How to get into it? Can it be built or can it only be claimed? --> What is it's monetary impact on business or brand? --> Can you use knowledge panels to position yourself against your competition, ...

Guy Kawasaki: What being a product evangelist means

In this episode, the legendary Guy Kawasaki, who was the Chief Evangelist at Apple and is currently the Chief Evangelist at Canva, joins us to share his insights on product evangelism. He talks about: --> How evangelism is different from traditional marketing and sales --> The key skills and goals of an evangelist --> Why it makes sense to target middle management than the traditional way of targeting decision makers --> Assumptions vs. planting many seeds, and a lot more...

Real case study: Building your marketing strategy, with Allison Macleod

In today’s episode, Allison Macleod, the EVP of Global Marketing at Flywire takes us through a real case study on how she built and executed the marketing strategy at Flywire -- a payments company with 12 offices around the world, catering to multiple countries, each with different financial systems. She talks about: --> How she went about building the strategy and prioritizations --> What were her key channels before COVID-19? Where did the event budgets redirected to? --> How did they...

David (Ledge) Ledgerwood: Why transitioning from founder-led growth to sales-led often fails?

David (Ledge) Ledgerwood joins the show to share some amazing insights on the mistakes and reasons why transitioning from founder-led growth to sales-led often fails. Further, he throws light on: --> The difference between how a founder sells and how a VP of Sales goes about it --> Why sales is not among the functions that's easy to scale --> The right time to get a sales leader on-board --> Things to be mindful about while transitioning from founder-led to sales-led --> Using pod...

What makes a company acquisition worthy: with Akeel Jabber

In this episode, Akeel Jabber, the technology investor at HoriZen Capital who specializes in acquiring and growing SaaS companies joins us to share his expertise on: --> What kind of companies should actively look out for raising investments or getting acquired? --> Is revenue the only yardstick? --> The impact of funding rounds on the acquisition discussions --> Getting your investment pitch right --> What happens in cases where you invest into a company and it fails to deliver o...

Leveraging collaborative commerce to grow your business : Cristi Movila

Cristi Movila, Growth Leader for Eastern Europe, for VTEX (the category leader in collaborative commerce) joins Yaag and Manish to share deep insights into: --->How collaborative commerce really works ---> What is headless commerce and how does composable commerce work? ---> How VTEX applies these three concepts within their organization and how they collaborate with their ecosystem ---> Selling in your own ecommerce platform vs. selling on a marketplace, and more.

Casey Graham: How culture contributes to building a strong marketing organization

In this episode, Casey Graham, the CEO of Gravy, joins Yaag and Manish to discuss how culture building can be a strong pillar to building an amazing marketing organization. He shares his insights on: -->What he looks for in people while recruiting and how people quickly fit into the culture --> Revenue Flywheel partnership --> The kind of leadership he is building within Gravy and why people are successful even when they are swapped to completely different roles every few months --> ...

Improving conversion using CRO and evolutionary psychology: Tim Ash

Have you ever thought of combining CRO and evolutionary psychology to improve the conversion on your website and landing pages? Tim Ash, the author of Unleash your Primal Brain joined Yaag and Manish to share: ---> How many of our decisions are easily predictable and how we are not the rational geniuses with free-will that we like to imagine. ---> The reason free trials always work (beyond the rational understanding of 'we get to experience the product') ---> How storytelling impacts tr...

Unlimited graphic design and bootstrapping the business model : Johnathan Grzybowski

It's very rare in the world of B2B marketing and sales, to think of graphic design as a key contributor to business. Johnathan Gryzbowksi, the co-founder of Penji, the guy who created the concept of unlimited graphic design, joins Yaag and Manish to share: ---> how graphic design is not limited to being the aesthetic face of businesses— the deeper, business-critical importance does it carries ---> learnings from their bootstrapping of the business model ---> recognizing the racial discr...

Jon Miller: On ABM, levels of account orchestration and more...

Jon Miller, the founder of Marketo, who later founded Engagio (which is now part of Demandbase) joined Yaag and Manish to share his insights on the different approaches to ABM ranging from hyper-targeting to marketing automation and engagement building. He even shares 5 levels of account orchestration and how something as simple as a standup between the AE, SDR and the marketing team can go a long way in optimizing your ABM for desired results.

Christopher Lochhead: Right and wrong reasons for running a B2B marketing podcast

Some interesting tidbits of Christopher Lochhead shared with Yaag and Manish about marketing podcasts: If you are a B2B business and you don't have a podcast - you are insane :) Missionaries and mercenaries - you need to know which one are you! Brands don't define a category, category design makes a brand Is category creation a go-to-market strategy which gets redefined later by analysts and other players in the industry down the lane? And if you love this episode, we recommend you to also check...

Analyzing and building your RevOps: with Justin Gray

In this episode, Justin Gray, the CEO of LeadMD joins Yaag and Manish to discuss RevOps. Justin dives deep into sharing how to go about building your revenue operations, the responsibilities of a RevOps, and he even goes to share a framework. If you want to connect with Justin after listening to this episode, his twitter handle - @jgraymatter

Product-led vs sales-led vs founder-led vs marketing-led growth

There are several growth strategies such as sales-led growth, product-led growth, founder-led, marketing-led, etc. Which one makes more sense? What do each of those strategies even mean? And what's the best option for your business? In this episode, Yaag and Manish analyze and give their perspectives on all four of them.

Using data to improve customer lifetime value: Juliana Jackson

In this episode, Juliana Jackson, the Chief Evangelist at Omniconvert, joins Yaag and Manish to share her insights on how you can use data to improve your customer lifetime value. She talks about the different types of data already available within your tech ecosystem and how you can make use of it, using RFM segmentation to prioritize on high value customers, CAC:CLV ratio and more.

Mistakes impeding sales revenue growth: Doug Brown

In this episode, Doug Brown, the CEO of Business Success Factors, who has built 35 companies and has been into sales from the age of 3, and been the president of sales and training for companies of Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes joins us. He shares his experience on some of the biggest mistakes companies make which impedes their sales revenue growth, and factors that indicate if your company is on the growth path, challenges and factors to pay attention as you set yourself up for growth.

Max Altschuler: Building an online sales community and scaling it

In this episode, Max Altschuler, the founder and CEO of SalesHacker (which was acquired by Outreach in 2018), joined Yaag and Manish to share what goes into building an online sales community, the challenges one might face to grow the community, and most importantly what triggered him to stop doing in-person events and pivot to a 100% virtual community years before the pandemic broke out.

Getting your sales message to resonate with customers: with Steve Rankel

You believe a set of things to be your product's USP or value proposition, but ask yourself —how many times is it in sync with what your customer really believes to be valuable? Steve Rankel, one of the world's best, joins Yaag and Manish to show how anything that isn't derived out of a customer conversation, is nothing but an educated guess. This episode is one of the deepest dives into how to get your sales pitch right. An episode that will help you arrive at a method to arrive at a message or...

Go-to-market and getting the first 100 customers: with Jeroen Corthout

Using Quora efficiently for B2B marketing: Casey Hill

If you loved this podcast, you may also be interested in checking out Casey's course on how to monetize quora -- > https://quora-masterclass.myshopify.com/products/how-to-monetize-quora-course You can get in touch with him at casey@bonjoro.com if you have any questions!

Stephanie Cox: Product-led sales and marketing

Getting into product-led growth (PLG), from being a sales-driven organization is quite a decision and journey. Your sales people are going to lose a lot of control and your product in itself needs to evolve for the PLG journey. Stephanie Cox, the VP of Sales and Marketing at Lumavate, joins Yaag and Manish to discuss her experience and learnings from her PLG journey.

Leveraging the power of field marketing, with Nick Bennett

A lot of times we think of field marketing as an extended events team, but it's one team that pretty much interfaces with multiples functions such as sales, marketing, product, customer success, and customer support. Nick Bennett joins Yaag and Manish to share how companies can leverage the power of field marketing for growth, and breaks a lot of myths around it. Oh and don't miss Nick busting into a rap, on the spot.

Justin Welsh: Discussing the SMB SaaS playbook

The brilliant Justin Welsh joins Yaag and Manish, to discuss the SMB SaaS playbook. He shares about the issues he looks to solve for when takes up consulting for an SMB SaaS company, what he learnt from his failures, what he looks for in the founders he works with, the role of personal branding in sales, and lot more.

Don't be fooled by randomness in marketing

We marketers love talking about playbooks, ultimate guides, success stories, cheat sheets, best practices, and whatnot. But, you never hear marketers talk about is the role that luck or sheer randomness plays in our success—or failure. There is some amount f randomness in marketing for sure, and that's what Yaag and Manish dig into, in this episode.