Category: Forward Launch Your SaaS Podcast

Want summaries, show notes, and more? Subscribe to the Forward Launch Your SaaS newsletter

MORE FROM MARCH HEALTH

www.march.health

GUEST BIO

Mark Amouzgar is CEO and Founder of March Health. After seeing his wife suffer from a severe level of menstrual pain every month, Mark started March Health with the aim to help women with the process of managing menstrual pain. With an app and a wearable device that emits low wave electrical impulses and a heating pad, March Health aims to reduce the physical pain suffered during menstruation and the emotional and psychological effects that may come with it.

Want summaries, show notes, and more? Subscribe to the Forward Launch Your SaaS newsletter

MORE FROM PROCESS STREET

Process Street is a simple, free and powerful way to manage your team’s recurring checklists and procedures. Learn more at process.st

Reach out to Vinay at twitter.com/vinayp10

GUEST BACKGROUND

Vinay Patankar is the CEO of Process Street. Manage employee onboarding, workflow automation, checklists, the team’s handbook & more with Process Street’s modern management platform.

MAIN INSIGHT

Continuously learn and evolve as your company grows and scales by strategically adding on new marketing channels. 

TOPICS WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE

• Early days of entrepreneurship and how he founded Process Street
• Why does your marketing strategy need to evolve along with your company
• When to find the next channel or marketing strategy
• Common signs of a declining channel
• How to encourage a learning culture in your team
• What to do to a deteriorating channel
• Common pitfalls in finding a new marketing channel and strategy
• How to avoid burning money when it comes to finding a new marketing channel 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Systems and processes are key pieces of building and scaling a business
2. Processes and systems need to be deployed once a business needs to scale
3. Do not overestimate the scalability of a particular channel or strategy
4. Invest early in testing new marketing channels and strategy
5. All marketing channels will eventually deteriorate
6. Two ways to grow your customer:
   1. Unlock new channels to drive more people
   2. Improve the customer journey to drive growth 

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Analyze customer journey
2. Find the low-hanging fruit and the most efficient channel
3. Find a new channel to run experiments and only do micro testing
4. Create a good system for analyzing experiments
5. Execute the campaign properly 

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Do micro tests to limit risks
2. Encourage proactive learning in your team

Want summaries, show notes, and more? Subscribe to theForward Launch Your SaaS newsletter

MORE FROM KAIKU

Kaiku is a smart matchmaking platform for early stage venture funds. They work with 100s of venture funds globally focussing on supporting technology enabled Seed to Series A start-ups raise funding. Learn more at kaiku.co

Reach out to Alex at alex -at- kaiku.co or www.linkedin.com/in/alexbalderstone

GUEST BACKGROUND

Alex Balderstone is the co-founder and CEO of Kaiku, a platform that provides smart, data-driven matchmaking between venture funds and startups.

He is also the Venture Director at the Birmingham Enterprise Community (BEC) and the Founder of Warwick Congress.

MAIN INSIGHT

Grow your business by building and maintaining a network of referral partnerships by understanding the community and what incentives could work for them.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Build a solution to a problem that already exists as opposed to a problem that doesn’t exist
2. Always create an opportunity to be present in your community or network
   1. Stay relevant to your network to the point that they’ll mention you if there are questions or news about your industry or niche
3. Go to events and speaking opportunities and create content to grow your network
4. Follow the right people on social media and interact or engage with them to build a solid presence
5. Two pitfalls of networking
   1. Quality of Network – making sure that you’re targeting the right people
   2. Maintaining and keeping a strong presence on your network through attending events, conferences, etc.

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Get your message out there, whether on LinkedIn, at events, or at conferences
2. Leverage other platforms such as lunchclub.ai – an ai networking platform to get clients or referrals
3. Create a segmentation of your partners and clients and create unique incentives and referral programs for each segment
4. Maintain your relationship and presence with your network
   1. Give them updates about your product, service, team, position, etc., to stay relevant.
   2. Connect with people and create content
   3. Get them on your list

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Don’t be afraid to get your message out there
2. Spend an hour each day on LinkedIn or Twitter to be relevant to your network
   1. Create content
   2. Share highlights and news on your industry
3. Understand the community and what incentives would work for them

Want summaries, show notes, and more? Subscribe to theForward Launch Your SaaS newsletter

MORE FROM CALQULATE

Calqulate connects startups, investors, banks and lenders with financial data to speed up fundraising processes and lending decisions.

Learn more at calqulate.io

Reach out to Cameron at linkedin.com/in/cameronomurchu

GUEST BACKGROUND

Cameron is the Head of Growth at Calqulate, a financial analytics software startup. He has worked mainly in the finance vertical and his degree in science has given him a unique perspective on the business world, especially since A/B testing has become all the rage.

MAIN INSIGHT

New customers or new users do not mean growth all the time for the company. Growth also comes by stopping the acquisition of unprofitable customers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Growth can be an increase in the price of your service or product
2. The marketing and finance department meet at customer acquisition cost
3. The marketing department burns money to make more money
4. The ratio of customer acquisition cost (CAC) to customer lifetime value (LTV) is typically around 1:3 (For every dollar spent on CAC you get three dollars in return)
5. Growth only comes when you can measure it

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Reduce rather than add – take a look at the things that you can take away before looking to grow your customers
2. Identify if you want to grow or scale
   1. Growth – You’re going to put more money but you’ll get the same results
   2. Scale – Scaling is being efficient. You’re going to put in the same money but you’ll get better results.
3. Start A/B testing the strategies
4. Once you gather enough data, analyze which one is working by looking at the CAC to LTV ratio

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. See if you can increase your product or service price
2. Focus on sustainable growth
3. As a marketer, it’s a great thing to be aware of the financial factors of the company so you can see if your efforts are bringing revenue to the company

Want summaries, show notes, and more? Subscribe to the Forward Launch Your SaaS newsletter

MORE FROM ZESTY

Zesty is the first cloud management platform that leverages AI-driven automation to increase efficiency and reduce AWS spend by over 50%. The platform automatically adjusts computing and storage resources to match real-time application needs, with no human input. Learn more at zesty.co

Reach out to Ido at linkedin.com/in/ido-assaf

GUEST BACKGROUND

Ido Assaf is the Marketing Director at Zesty, an autonomous cloud management solution that helps businesses maximize efficiency, reduce costs, and free up engineering resources.

His philosophy is centered more on the buyer rather than on “classic” marketing tactics. His use of an ingenuitive branding campaign brought in thousands of leads for Zesty.

MAIN INSIGHT

Innovating best marketing practices and using creative and unique methods to stand out from others is the best way to win in the long run.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Marketing approaches should rely on data
2. A company needs to have subject matter experts
3. Marketing and branding should be balanced
4. The best way to win in the long run is to reinvent yourself
5. Different is better than better
6. Too much creativity can make you drift away
7. The marketing strategy should come to a point where you can trust your customer to buy your product 

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Assume you know nothing
2. Identify the subject matter experts in your company
3. Understand your buyer by doing research and doing interviews
4. Run a test and validate 

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes
2. Understand that people buy from people
3. Rely a bit on your gut instinct but always validate with data 

Want summaries, show notes, and more? Subscribe to the Forward Launch Your SaaS newsletter

MORE FROM VERVOE

Vervoe helps you predicts job performance using skills assessments that showcase the talent of every candidate before hiring them. Learn more at vervoe.comReach out to Regan at https://www.linkedin.com/in/regan-mcgregor-au

GUEST BACKGROUND

Regan McGregor is an experienced B2B and SaaS marketer who leads the marketing team at Vervoe, a company that helps businesses hire top performers through AI-powered skills testing.

He also worked with several Australian SaaS startups, including Head of Growth at Digivizer and Head of Marketing at AgriWebb.

He’s passionate about finding growth channels and leveraging those to create scalable growth strategies. One of those channels is search, both organic and paid search.

MAIN INSIGHT

Focus on people’s intent with regards to your business’ mission to get more traffic and maximize your SEO marketing efforts

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Focus on pre-existing demand of content from your customers
2. Identify high-level questions that your ideal customer has and use that as your main topic to create multiple SEO-rich pieces of content
3. Being an expert on one topic for your content is a good SEO strategy to help you get more brand recognition

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Identify your business mission by finding the problems that you’re solving
2. Niche down to one or two topics that you want to rank high on Google
3. Brainstorm ideas for content
   1. Talk to your customers, sales, and marketing team
   2. Do keyword research and cluster them into groups of different topics
   3. Look at competitors and indirect competitors and figure out what content you can do better than them
4. Create premium content or content offers that can convert people and turn them into leads
5. Run an ad campaign for your sales and solution pages
6. Invite your sales team to do outbound to promote your premium content
7. Develop features or tools within the product that help to improve each pain point

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Focus on one strategy that works and where the actual lead is coming from
2. Deep dive into your chosen topic
3. Paid ads are best used for potential customers that are searching for specific problems that your content can solve or keywords that are being searched at the bottom of the funnel

Want summaries, show notes, and more? Subscribe to theForward Launch Your SaaS newsletter

GUEST BACKGROUND

Ben Sperry leads the marketing department at Place – makers of an agile finance platform built on Salesforce. In his first six months with Place, Ben grew inbound demand by over 400%. Ben has also held various sales and marketing positions at Gartner and is a Teach For America alum.

MAIN INSIGHT

When starting at a new company, minimize the assumptions you make based on your experiences at previous organizations.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The great thing about performance marketing is that you have all the metrics necessary to assess everything with enough data clinically
2. Depending on volume – a typical campaign can be assessed after 45 days upon launch
3. Speak the language of your target audience by collaborating with your colleagues or interviewing current clients

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Approach any marketing role at an early-stage company with humility
2. Familiarize yourself with the company’s objective in the short, medium and long term
3. Minimize the assumption and acknowledge the known and unknown
4. Identify the strategy you’re going to use to achieve the objective and execute it with confidence
5. Assess your strategy/campaign clinically once you have enough data
6. Tweak your strategy to achieve the metrics that you set

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Stay flexible on your marketing tactics and strategy
2. Having a hypothesis is excellent but always minimize the assumption of what’s going to work and what’s not
3. Collaborate with your colleague that spends a lot of time interacting with your clients

Want summaries, show notes, and more? Subscribe to theForward Launch Your SaaS newsletter

MORE FROM BEHAVIOR SALES

Behavior Sales uses behavioral intelligence to gain a competitive advantage to shorten sales cycles and close deals faster. Learn more at behaviorsales.com

GUEST BACKGROUND

Benjamin Bressington is the CEO of BehaviorSales.com, a Behavioral Intelligence company. He is a Speaker and Author of multiple books, including his latest book “People Ignorant: Unlocking Success, Confidence & Influence.”

Benjamin has a Law & Criminology degree from Australia. He spent 10 years helping Fortune 1000 companies apply gamification principles to their sales and communication process. Ben now helps people improve their sales conversations, specifically by closing deals faster and discovering the hidden opportunities in daily communication.

MAIN INSIGHT

Tailoring marketing efforts to the personality types of potential customers improves engagement and conversions

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Create segments on your list based on personality types to improve your engagement
2. Focus and attention is a currency
3. You only need 1000 loyal followers that will buy from you
4. Four personality types that you must know:
   1. Liberty (eagle) – decisive, ROI focus, get things done, dress well
   2. Vegas (peacock) – wants to be the center of attention, gets bored quickly, loves shortcuts
   3. Thinker (owl) – knowledge-driven, loves to approach things systematically
   4. Pigeon (steady) is slow and steady but always driven by their packs or friends

PRACTICAL STEPS

For outreach and sales:

1. Search and gather contacts of people that can be a potential client or customer
2. Segment them by personality types and identify which personality type you can resonate with
3. Exclude the personality type that you don’t want to work with
4. Create a different message for each segment

For marketers and content creators:

1. Identify the personality types that you want to work with
2. Create content for each personality type
3. Get them on your list so you can segment your market
4. Craft a different sales approach for each personality types

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Deep dive into each personality type and get to know what makes them buy your service or product
2. Tailor your content and pitch to the different personality types
3. During a call, it’s best to also use their words/adjectives to them to build more rapport and connection

Want summaries, show notes, and more? Subscribe to the Forward Launch Your SaaS newsletter

More from Eduflow

• If you’d like to build a course, try Eduflow (eduflow.com) – the free plan allows up to 15 course participants and is a good way to test whether a course would work for your brand
• Reach out to David: david -at- eduflow.com

Guest background

David is the co-founder and CEO of Eduflow, a modern learning management system for active and social learning. Before that he started Peergrade, a service for providing peer-evaluations and peer-feedback.

He did his Ph.D. at The Technical University of Denmark with a focus on machine learning, data science, and educational technology. He previously worked as a software developer and as an external consultant for doing predictive modeling on large data-sets.

Main insight

“Lengthen the marketing funnel” by providing a valuable product or educational course for people who are not ready to buy your main product.

Key takeaways

1. Big enterprise deals don’t happen right away – there’s a long sales cycle and companies buy when they need the product
2. Therefore, how do you get companies to hear about your brand and remember your brand when they are ready to buy?
3. Answer: Create a longer marketing funnel
   1. For example: Eduflow gets people to sign up for their educational course (obtaining their email)
   2. People like the course, get value out of it, and share it with their peers
   3. When there’s a need in their company, they remember Eduflow and enter the sales cycle 

Practical steps

1. Create an easy-to-use intermediary product that your ideal customers can immediately buy or use for free
   1. This can be a simpler / smaller version of an existing product that’s attached to your real product
2. Introduce the users of this intermediary product to your main product 

Tip for success

1. Make your smaller product something that educates people on the value of your brand.
   1. For example – Eduflow builds and runs courses on their own online course platform, which shows potential customers how easy the platform is to use
2. Make the product something that outperforms similar products on the market
3. Make sure you smaller product is built for the right audience so you have high quality people to sell the main offering to
4. You can build more than one small product – perhaps one for each different audience segment

More from Casted 

Find them at Casted.us

They’ve released an industry survey of content marketers on the state of content marketing – helpful for understanding how other marketers are currently using content can be helpful for planning out your own content

Check out Amplify – view interviews with leading B2B brands (Drift, Salesforce, HubSpot, and more) on how they are harnessing the power of audio and video to connect with audiences in a whole new way

Ready to create content?

If this episode inspired you to start repurposing content, Forward Launch can help. We help B2B SaaS startups create interview-based podcasts that can be repurposed across various marketing channels. Get in touch.

Guest background

Holly Pels is the Vice President of Marketing at Casted – the first content marketing platform for B2B podcasting, making podcasting more engaging, efficient, and effective for brands. Holly is a strategic and tactical marketer who loves podcasts and content creation.

Key takeaways

1. Have conversations with experts and record them in video and audio format
   1. Starting with video allows for easiest repurposing across channels
   2. Publish to YouTube because YouTube can be used as a search engine
2. Syndicate to podcast platforms (e.g. Apple, Spotify, Stitcher) and Youtube channels
3. Turn the transcript into a blog post
4. Create audiograms and videograms to be used on social media
5. Use themes that came up during the interview and plug them into the content calendar
6. Review previous episodes for similar themes – create a thematic blog post or thematic narrative episode
   1. Example: Holly’s team realized they had already interviewed several experts from Hubspot on the podcast, and they pulled those stories together to a larger narrative episode in advance of a content collaboration they did with Hubspot
7. Make “look books” out of the content – i.e. a downloadable piece of content where people can access the written versions of podcast episodes    

Tips for success

• Trust the process – not everything needs to be new
• Don’t be hard on yourself – it doesn’t have to be perfect. Just start!
• It doesn’t have to be for everyone, it just has to be for your audience