Author: Keirra Woodard

TIMESTAMPS 

01:27 – People, process, and performance

06:42 – Keeping your team focused

12:00 – Communicating with your team

16:00 – Aligning the business in terms of product, sales, customer, and marketing

21:20 – Team Meetings

23:00 – Steps on focusing and aligning your team

33:04 – Why is it important to be aligned at the leadership level

38:50 – Hiring the right people

GUEST BACKGROUND 

Pius Chan has 20 years of SaaS experience in various roles, including CX and Sales, and has worked with Hootsuite, Galvanize, and Procurify before joining Lumen5.

MAIN INSIGHT 

Hiring the right people and focusing on the right process will improve your team's performance.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Hiring the wrong people can lead you in the wrong direction.
• Take time to hire the right roles you need.
• Focus on the right channel for your business.
• Performance comes when you have the right people and the right process.
• People buy your product because they understand the value of your product.
• Focusing on the mindset of your team will make sure to keep them aligned on the key channels.
• The target and KPIs represent the expectations for the team members.
• Understanding your colleague’s goals helps you fulfill your business goals.
• People respond to personalized messages and to what is impactful for them.

PRACTICAL STEPS

• Aligning with the leaders first helps a longer-term strategy as a company.
• Build a culture and strategy with your team to accomplish your goal.
• Look for what metrics are impactful for a specific channel and stick to it.

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

• Hiring the right people is about skills, personal will, and desire to make an impact and grow.
• Manage team member’s time so that they have time for both priority and non-priority tasks.
• Speak in your audience's language.

MORE FROM LUMEN5 

Lumen5 is a video maker built to supercharge your content strategy. Easily make videos for content marketing and thought leadership. Learn more at Lumen5.com

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Hello and welcome to Forward Launch Your SaaS, the show where we interview B2B SaaS founders and marketing executives about their campaigns and the biggest pieces of wisdom they have to share with other founders and marketers.

I'm excited to announce some upcoming changes to the show that I believe will make it even more valuable to our listeners. 

First, I want to expand the show to include some larger B2B SaaS companies in addition to startups. 

This change will benefit both startups and scaleups, as business leaders will be able to hear a mix of perspectives from newer and more established companies. Episodes specific to startups will be labeled as the “startup insights” series, while other episodes will be applicable to established companies.

Second, I care about the effects that businesses have on society and want to help companies grow while also making a positive impact on humanity and society. Many businesses prioritize profit over societal impacts, but I believe businesses can and should be a force for positive change. 

Considering the consequences to society at every stage of a company's growth can position companies for long-term success and outperform competitors that don't consider these issues. It also has other benefits like improving team performance, allowing proactive issue management, and making the company more resilient to problems that competitors will face. 

For example, companies that considered potential privacy concerns before investing in Google Ads won't be affected by Google's recent decision to eliminate third-party advertising, while competitors will have to scramble to adapt. Additionally, companies that consider these issues can attract a wider range of customers who are concerned about privacy.

That's why I'm adding in questions about social impact to our regular episodes and starting a new series called “Uplifting SaaS”. 

In these episodes, I'll be speaking with founders, CEOs, and agency owners who sell to or work with SaaS companies about growing a company in general and about their social mission. We'll primarily be exploring how they achieved or how they helped SaaS companies achieve a positive social impact.

I'll also be publishing new episodes three times a week, with the possibility of even more frequent releases. The traditional format will continue for a few more months, but starting in March or April, you'll see more social impact content and a wider variety of guests.

I hope these changes will make Forward Launch Your SaaS even more valuable to you!

TIMESTAMPS

03:00 – Why Kate’s Dad told her that she couldn’t work for other people anymore

08:56 – The Art Of The Start by Guy Kawasaki

11:20 – Her first angel investors

12:50 – Walmart project that helps them to reach 130% ROI

15:30 – The power of voice and copy

18:00 – How Lately can help you get more out of your content

24:00 – The mindset that helps them get 240% in monthly revenue

28:40 – Finding a pure place

31:00 – How opportunity and doors opened just by being herself

35:00 – Be careful who you listen to

GUEST BACKGROUND

Kate Bradley Chernis is the Founder & CEO of Lately – A.I that learns which words will get you the most engagement and turns your video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts containing those words. 

As a former rock 'n' roll dj, Kate served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales and marketing expertise. What she learned in radio about the neuroscience of music helps fuel Lately's artificial intelligence.

Prior to founding Lately, Kate also owned a marketing agency that got Walmart a 130% ROI YoY for three years.

MAIN INSIGHT

Trusting your gut and being yourself opens opportunities for the company and builds more trust in your team.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Everything is about emotion
2. Create and share the right mindset with your team
3. Investors bets on your guts and not on the product
4. Being yourself means being more confident and creative

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Create and identify the environment where you can be creative
2. Identify the uncomfortable situation and change it
3. Be yourself
4. Know when to listen and get feedback from other people

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Choose the right feedback and people to listen to
2. Trust your gut immediately
3. Trust your team that they will accept whatever you say that comes out of your mind

MORE FROM LATELY AI

Lately’s AI learns which words will get you the most engagement and repurposes video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts that contain those words. Learn more at lately.ai

TIMESTAMPS

(04:15) Instantaneous lead alert and lead responses

(09:58) Lead cost and cost of acquisition

(14:38) Have a script of ideas rather than a script of words

(18:48) Knowing more about your customers 

(20:54) Creating ads that hook people

(24:50) Competitors’ lead magnet systems

(27:00) Customizing the language depending on the industry 

(28:47) Why less is more

(32:00) Implementing the system successfully

GUEST BACKGROUND

Zeze is the Founder & CEO of Beam.city. It is the world's 1st unified advertising automation platform that uses A.I. & algorithms to help businesses automatically plan and optimize their ads on all top advertising channels with fantastic results in days or weeks. Not only is Zeze a trained rocket scientist, he's launched over 11,000 products and applied AI and eCommerce systems.

MAIN INSIGHT

Increase sales revenue by building a system for instant alerts and responses to incoming leads.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Building a system for instantaneously alerting your sales team when a lead shows up makes better sales revenue 
2. Another instantaneous touchpoint is to have a response through SMS
3. Less is more when it comes to messages

PRACTICAL STEPS

Tips for creating ads that will hook people:

1. Using emojis is important is social platforms (FB, IG, YT, etc)
2. You want people to opt-in
3. Media should have a very clear message on its first frame 

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Lead responses should be natural and not sound like they came straight from SOPs.

MORE FROM BEAM.CITY

Beam.city DNA is a powerful, yet easy-to-use growth coordination AI-SaaS platform. It helps you automate and coordinate marketing and sales workflows using ads, text, and social media to get incredible results. Shrink your costs and blast past your growth goals without tab-jumping, spreadsheets, or confusion by using predictive audiences, a goal-customized marketing mix, and an always-on proactive AI expert. Learn more at beam.city

TIMESTAMPS

(03:36) The 1-hour Rule

(08:01) The Scale-up modes in startups

(10:00) Implementing the 1-hour rule

(14:55) Having a better perspective with everyone’s ideas

(16:00) What you are excited about versus what the users might want

(20:19) Launch fast and learn quickly

(25:25) Have an action-oriented mindset

(27:00) Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes

GUEST BACKGROUND

Nitesh Banta believes technology is a force to be reckoned with, which drove him to co-found B12, a human-assisted AI that builds your website in 60 seconds. He completely swapped the business and company strategy from self-serve to enterprise and built a marketing team and strategy from the ground up.

MAIN INSIGHT

Using the 1-hour rule that Nitesh implemented at B12 helps you and your team to be more productive

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. For early-stage companies, it is important to focus on the phase of learning and validating their ideas
2. The 1-hour rule gives you real-time feedback from your users/customers
3. Give everyone on your team the opportunity to share ideas
4. Talk and observe the behavior of your users to know what their preferred platform is
5. Be clear on the process and try to understand what the output looks like with that process. 
6. It’s more important to have the mindset (putting yourself in your buyer’s shoes) than the process to follow 

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Brainstorm to figure out the intersection between what you are excited about versus what the users might want.
2. Think about how you could get started with that idea and test it within an hour (or the quickest possible version of the idea)
3. Jump in and do it – see what happens

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Launch fast and iterate quickly based on your user feedback. 
2. You don’t need a lot of time to get user feedback.

MORE FROM B12

B12 is the all-in-one platform to help your business more easily attract, win, and serve clients online. Learn more at b12.io

TIMESTAMPS

03:57 – Thinking of marketing channels “Stock Portfolio”

07:10 – Validation process

14:53 – Crafting your marketing team

23:51 – Short and long-term bets in marketing

25:39 – The thing that most marketers fail to do

GUEST BACKGROUND

Emil Kristensen is currently the CMO of Drip – a marketing automation platform for eCommerce. Previously he was the founder and CMO of Sleeknote. He also hosts a Danish podcast called Marketing Brief with over 3 million downloads.

MAIN INSIGHT

Interpreting marketing channels as a stock portfolio can give you better decisions and understanding.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. When you invest in multiple channels, you must give them time and resources to show its results
2. There’s no hack to growth in marketing 
3. Selecting marketing channels involves a validation process
4. Analyze your competitors and do exactly what they are not doing 
5. Recreate your competitors’ org structures from LinkedIn when crafting your marketing team
6. Short-term bets in choosing a marketing channel is a bet you want to take and see if it is good to invest for your long-term bets/goals
7. If you find something that works, try putting a little more effort into it over time, rather than doing new things every single time

PRACTICAL STEPS

Choosing which marketing channel to put in your marketing “portfolio”  

1. Figure out what skills are already in your marketing team 
2. Analyze what are the KPIs of your company
3. Analyze your competitors’ weaknesses and identify opportunities to beat them
4. Use this information to craft your team and decide which marketing channels to invest in
5. Set a goal framework for your team (short and long-term goals)

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Don’t copy what your competitors are doing
2. Instead of trying new things, do more of the things that have already been validated 

MORE FROM DRIP

Drip unleashes the power of direct-to-consumer brands’ customer data to deliver perfectly personalized email marketing strategies that are proven to grow revenue. Learn more at drip.com

GUEST BACKGROUND

Clay Kramer runs SEORadar; a SaaS company focused on helping marketers and SEO managers to have visibility over their website's changes that impact organic traffic. He has over 10 years of experience as a product manager, where he delivered results and more than doubled engagement and monetization.

MAIN INSIGHT

Understanding your customer and broadcasting it to your team can help you decide your marketing strategy and positioning.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Broadcast the insight you get from your customer to your team
2. Cut out the assumptions
3. Understanding their language and terminology can help you create marketing content and redesign your copy

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Invite a potential or existing customer to hop on a call
   1. You can give incentives such as Amazon gift cards
2. Let the customer walk you through their day-to-day activity
3. Allow the customer to speak out and avoid interrupting them
4. Ask them what would happen if your product were gone tomorrow
5. Summarize and add your perspective
6. Broadcast to your team

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Filter the best conversation you had with the customer before sharing it with your team
2. Only take snippets of the conversation you had with the customer and share them with your team
3. Don’t be afraid to experiment and redesign your software from the insights you received

MORE FROM SEORADAR

SEORadar allows your team to avoid code changes that lower search rankings. SEORadar monitors webpages and alerts website managers (SEOs, CEOs, Marketers, QA Engineers, Product Managers or Webmasters) to site changes that can have potentially dire consequences for organic traffic. Learn more at seoradar.com

Connect with Clay at linkedin.com/in/claykramer/

TIMESTAMPS

02:40 – Data makes content more exciting

13:16 – Breaking down data into content and actionable tasks
17:50 – The hardest part of creating content based on data

24:00 – Why the product and marketing team should work together, and what opportunity is being missed

26:30 – Data is not interesting to everyone

29:30 – How Platypus never runs out of data

34:00 – Brainstorming content

GUEST BACKGROUND

Katie Johnson is the Marketing Manager at Platypus, an HR tech startup with a mission to reinvent the future of work by prioritizing company culture. Katie started her career in marketing in 2017 and previously led the marketing activity at the award-winning search and behavioral science agency, Reflect Digital, supporting the company's ambitious growth and revenue targets.

MAIN INSIGHT

Bringing data into your culture can help your team craft better content, which leads to successful marketing campaigns.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Content is king, and data is the castle
2. Change and adapt your content strategy, and focus on the key data findings
3. Helping people see the actual benefit of your product can help increase the traffic on your website
4. Writers love it when you have proven data
5. Creating content that is backed up by data is a huge authority builder
6. Data can help you get more backlinks which in return helps to boost your SEO
7. Too much branding can hurt your content

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Gather data
2. Identify the patterns, themes, and correlation
3. Blend the data into your content strategy
4. Work with your team to figure out the content theme
5. Make the content digestible and easy to read
6. Review how the content performs

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Work closely with your data scientist
2. Make the data interesting for your audience
3. Jump into your audience's shoes and see if it’s valuable to them
4. Ask your customers what data they want to see

MORE FROM PLATYPUS

Platypus is an HR and recruitment tool that measures cultural drivers of people across the organization to help you qualify decisions on hiring and managing your culture. Learn more at Platypus.io

TIMESTAMPS

00:57 – The most difficult science and how he got into marketing
08:18 – Evaluate works from a customer perspective
12:24 – Achieving an integrated marketing strategy
18:00 – How to get enough data efficiently
19:58 – How to make sure your teams are working in the same direction
25:38 – Using leading and lagging indicators in goal setting
27:44 – Understanding factors that can affect your metrics
30:12 – Determining controllable and uncontrollable metrics

GUEST BACKGROUND

Nishchal Dua is a remote work evangelist, co-founder of The Remote Work Summit, and the Director of Marketing at Airmeet. With 8+ years of B2B SaaS marketing experience, Nishchal has seen the B2B buyer's journey evolve from a top-down funnel to a roller-coaster ride.

MAIN INSIGHT

Most SaaS companies don’t have an integrated campaign strategy, which puts them in a position to fail and burn money on marketing.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Winning people with your idea is difficult
2. Marketing is about building the right relationship with your customers
3. Marketing is a way of connecting people and getting them to the right place that will help them
4. As your company grows – never forget to always look at the bigger perspective and make sure that every decision aligns with it
5. If your revenue is not growing, the problem is not with the efforts, but with the direction you are moving
6. Everybody has to be aligned on the same goal for autonomy to work
7. Prioritizing your campaign and goal will save you from doing unnecessary tasks
8. Evaluate the WHY of the activity and the effort you’ll be doing
9. Ask for enough advice to get enough answers
10. Think of your reports to executives not from a delivery standpoint, but based on campaign success reporting

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Get feedback from leaders and executives before executing a plan
2. Identify the part of the funnel that you want to work on
3. Identify the levers you can pull
4. Share it with your team and get feedback on how they can impact the funnel

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Always look at the big picture
2. Stop thinking that you can do it alone as a marketer
3. Get enough data before jumping into a decision

MORE FROM AIRMEET

Airmeet is the fastest-growing platform for hosting a rich variety of virtual events. From Hackathons to ice-breakers, panel discussions to workshops, Airmeet’s intuitive experience delivers on organizers' expectations for a wide range of events and not just conferences. Learn more at airmeet.com

TIMESTAMPS

02:00 – Insights on growing the company

06:02 – Getting direct feedback from prospective customers

06:52 – Dealing with different marketing design ideas

11:00 – How to make marketing design work

12:14 – Minimum work needed to get you to your customers

16:01 – What companies should be doing before creating different platforms

16:38 – What assets to test and not to test

GUEST BACKGROUND

Sharon Biggar is currently the VP of Marketing & Sales at Hotjar, a tool that provides product experience insights to over a million websites worldwide. Sharon recently spearheaded a company rebrand that helped Hotjar’s revenue grow more than 50% last year.

MAIN INSIGHT

Keeping your customer at the heart of marketing helps you be more intentional and avoid burning money on testing.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The core of marketing today is analytics
2. Marketing has to be data-driven at its core
3. Keep the customer at the heart of marketing
4. Prospective customers can give you great, honest, and straightforward feedback
5. An advert needs to be understood before making it beautiful

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Give up the idea that a beautiful advertisement is going to be the most effective
2. Identify the minimum viable concept that you can deliver to your prospective customer
3. Get feedback from your customers

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Develop empathy with your customer
2. Do not assume that you understand your customers
3. If the cost of testing outweighs the cost of producing the asset and getting it live, it’s suggested not to test it, and if the cost of producing the asset is high, then it is to be tested

MORE FROM HOTJAR

Hotjar is an intuitive, visual way to discover, consolidate, and communicate user needs. Hotjar provides product experience insights which shows how your users are experiencing your website and how to improve your website so that users have a great digital experience. Learn more at hotjar.com