Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast Archives - Page 4 of 8

January 17, 2023January 17, 2023/ Keirra Woodard

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 34: How to plan video content and use it in your marketing strategy — Pedro Góes, CEO at InEvent

TIMESTAMPS

06:33 – Why video is the channel to focus on now

08:30 – How to plan video content

10:40 – Where and how to use your video in your marketing strategy

16:10 – How video content helps InEvent

22:30 – Who should be the face of the video

24:30 – How to optimize your videos

GUEST BACKGROUND
Pedro Góes is the CEO of InEvent, a Y Combinator venture-backed company providing an event, marketing, and sales platform for Forbes 2000 Global companies, including Amazon, Coca-Cola, KPMG, Santander, Unilever, Boeing, Embraer, and Citibank. Early in his career and during college, Pedro started a company with more than 10,000 monthly active paying users.

MAIN INSIGHT
Using video in your marketing strategy helps train customers and build trust.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Video is a great medium to convey emotions, but can be hard to execute well.
Video is the best channel to focus on currently.
A script is essential for a good video.
The video should have a story and be as short as possible.
Utilize video to train customers on your product.
The person in the video should be comfortable on camera.
Video marketing works like an inverted funnel.

PRACTICAL STEPS

Identify and research who your actual customer is.
Figure out what they like.
Plan the video.
Add humor and engagement to the video.
Make it as short as possible.

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

Focus on one topic per video.
Don't use fancy edits that distract viewers.
Make sure background music is at the correct sound level.
Cut out unnecessary elements.

MORE FROM InEvent
InEvent is a powerful software for in-person professional events and video productions. It can be used to run live meetings, real-life experiences, TV-like broadcasts, or virtual events. Learn more at InEvent.com

January 11, 2023January 11, 2023/ Keirra Woodard

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 33: How Aligning People, Process, and Performance Can Help You Achieve Your Goals — Pius Chan, Head of Growth at Lumen5

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.

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 32: Announcement: Changes Coming to Forward Launch Your SaaS

Sign up for the newsletter at forwardlaunchyoursaas.com

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!

December 27, 2022December 27, 2022/ Keirra Woodard

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 31: How trusting yourself and your team fuels company growth — Kate Bradley Chernis, Co-Founder and CEO LatelyAI

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

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

PRACTICAL STEPS

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

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

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

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 30: How to Increase Sales by Instantly Responding to Leads — Zeze Peters, Founder and CEO at Beam.city

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

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

PRACTICAL STEPS

Tips for creating ads that will hook people:

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

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

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

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 29: How The 1-Hour Rule Can Help Your People Do Meaningful Work — Nitesh Banta, CEO, and Co-Founder at B12

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

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

PRACTICAL STEPS

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

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

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

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 28: How to Manage Marketing Channels Like A Stock Portfolio — Emil Kristensen, CMO at Drip

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

When you invest in multiple channels, you must give them time and resources to show its results
There’s no hack to growth in marketing
Selecting marketing channels involves a validation process
Analyze your competitors and do exactly what they are not doing
Recreate your competitors’ org structures from LinkedIn when crafting your marketing team
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
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”

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

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

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

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 27: How to get your team to deeply understand customers — Clay Kramer, Head of Product at SEORadar

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

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

PRACTICAL STEPS

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

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

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

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 26: How to bring data insights into your culture — Katie Johnson, Marketing Manager at Platypus

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

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

PRACTICAL STEPS

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

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

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

Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast 25: How to create an integrated campaign strategy — Nishchal Dua, Director of Marketing at Airmeet

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

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

PRACTICAL STEPS

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

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

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