SaaS Breakthrough

Meet Bob Sparkins (Jenkins), Manager of Marketing Education at Leadpages and the author of "Take Action, Revise Later". Leadpages is a well-known tool that empowers its users with lead generation and sales software to quickly promote their products and services. In this episode you'll hear about the journey of Leadpages from a bootstrapped business to a funded company. Bob told us how and why they went through that funding route. He uncovered how content marketing and dedication to webinars has brought Leadpages to seven figure ARR. They continue to grow every year with almost the same webinar strategy. We also cover how education is an integral part of marketing and exactly how Bob does it and why he does it that way. You'll hear about the lessons learned from Bob's 1000+ live webinars ran at Leadpages, and how to find, engage and keep affiliates happy, which has ultimately become one of their biggest traffic sources. We talk about a lot of incredible strategies in this episode!

Meet Dan Murphy who leads the demand generation team at Drift – one of the top SaaS companies in the industry right now. Dan has worked at several SaaS companies from early stage to growth and is passionate about building strong lead generation machines for startups. In this episode we get an inside look at what it's like to run marketing in a rocketship SaaS as Dan gives an insane explanation of what things are like inside Drift. We talk about the cultural items that make Drift so successful, not just externally, but internally as a company. We discuss how product marketing has shifted into the perfect fit for demand generation, and go over the exact step by step playbook that Drift uses to successfully release and innovate product launches. They've done 12 of them over the past 12 months and it's absolutely incredible. We also talk about the biggest lessons Dan has learned from running these product launches in 2018. This is an incredible episode and you're absolutely going to love it.

Meet Paralee Walls - a guest lecturer for the Digital Creative Institute, General Assembly, a contributor to Forbes, CMI, and Kapost's own Marketeer. In this podcast episode you'll hear all about what Kapost is doing in marketing, including how they are using The Pillar Model to create a content powerhouse. We talk about why content operations are essential for big companies like IBM, GE, Fedex, as well as yours. You'll learn how to tell bad content from good content, how to use leading indicators and some powerful syndication strategies that Kapost is leveraging every single month. You're going to love this episode!

Meet Theresa O'Neil - the leader of Showpad’s global marketing team, responsible for increasing awareness, generating leads, and supporting all channels to grow revenue. She has delivered marketing, sales and business development strategy for companies such as PowerReviews and IBM. In this episode we dive into more advanced marketing channels than those applicable to early stage startups. You'll learn why Showpad has chosen to go global at this time, the lessons learned so far, and why combining marketing and sales to align KPIs is the most powerful growth hack you can ever do. We also go into essential marketing ideas and concepts that you need to know for SaaS. It's definitely a very deep episode.

Meet Amit Bivas - the head of marketing at Optimove. Amit is a seasoned marketing executive with a vast experience in planning, developing and executing B2B and B2C marketing strategies from the ground up. His sharp skills, creativity, and a keen eye for detail, alongside with a strong background in data analytics and statistics, position Amit as a unique combination of the art and science of marketing. In this episode we talk about Optimove and how they built the platform that has both the left and right brain of software. We go into details, like how to market a highly technological innovative product to a new market and how content marketing can be a powerful initiative, especially early on. You'll find out how Optimove doubled down on content in a completely new way. It's absolutely incredible to hear Amit tell this story. And finally, we'll talk about the marketing skill that Amit feels every marketer needs to know today, in order to be effective. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Welcome to this special SaaS Breakthrough episode with our host, David Abrams, covering the Top 10 Insights from our first 25 episodes. What a milestone! We've learned from great companies like LucidChart (who has 16MM users), Chartmogul, Hotjar, AppCues, Olark, Buffer (gaining 1.5M unique views on the blog), Gainsight, PicMonkey (with over 450,000 subscribers and 3.5 Billion images edited, JotForm, Groove, and a ton of other amazing companies. We started this podcast with the desire to find great companies and learn from the marketing teams in the trenches. We wanted the down and dirty tactics that are working today. Not to just get a 1,000 foot view of a company, but learn what it takes to actually MARKET to users, find the right prospects, what it was like to find product-market fit, and then how they made a lead generation system to bring in customers month after month. What you continually hear in these episodes, is that SaaS marketing is not an easy feat to do. It's about understanding your customer, involving your product with marketing, solving pain points, articulating that message, and attracting the users in a moment of pain. SaaS Companies of all shapes and sizes have been on this show, but these things hold true. For those of you who are marketing and in the trenches, or growing your own SaaS, this podcast breaks down the 10 of the biggest insights I've taken away so far. Enjoy!

Meet Andy Baldacci, the demand generation lead at Groove - the best help desk software for small businesses. With over 8,000 teams trusting Groove to help them manage online customer support, they are an amazing example of an industry leading SaaS. In this episode, Andy transparently shares where Groove is in their marketing after 3 years of growth. Groove actually pioneered the approach of SaaS transparency blogging, and with these stories their blog really took off. From the blog alone, their growth exploded using a combination of original content and with their founders' unique way to get influencers to share the content. You'll learn why Groove made the hard decision to end this technique. As well as how they are now strategically reviewing their new approach to content marketing and the lessons that they're taking from their first blog into the future. You'll hear about Groove's SEO strategy, how they are building separate content pillars and doing content marketing to attract their perfect target customer. Andy shared a ton of great content information. Make sure to sit down and strap in, you're absolutely going to love this episode.

Meet Leeyen Rogers who is the VP of Marketing at JotForm, an online forms platform with over 3.6 million users worldwide. JotForm was named one of the "Best Privately-Owned Companies in America" by Entrepreneur Magazine. In this podcast episode you'll learn about the different strategies JotForm used to double their user base, and the exact launch process that has been a critical growth factor. You'll hear how Leeyen looks at product launching and product development from the marketing angle, the research process to go from broad audience to personalization and highly detailed segmentation. We also talk about how JotForm launched co-marketing opportunities with companies like Square to niche personalized audiences. Finally, we get into a genius acquisition process led by Leeyen. It includes partnering with companies like Adobe FormsCentral and bringing in a huge amount of new users by adding value to the marketplace. Lots of amazing lessons here, so I hope you enjoy today's episode.

Meet Matt Emmons, the VP of Marketing at PicMonkey. Matt helps the marketing team to tell the story of PicMonkey, from business successes to new product launches. In this podcast episode we talk about the importance of in-depth knowledge of your customer persona, and what that truly means for marketing. We go into the fundamental 6 digital segments you must understand to truly comprehend user behavior, and it goes far beyond any typical user experience. We also learn how Matt creates actual emotional user experiences that contribute to business growth. With 450.000 subscribers and 3.4 billion images edited, PicMonkey has a ton of data to help create these amazing lessons, so take the time to listen to this episode. Maybe do it a few times even, because Matt goes through some cutting edge, very smart lessons that every SaaS company can learn from.

Meet Agata Krzysztofik, the Chief Marketing Officer at SimScale, a cloud-based engineering simulation platform that is revolutionizing the way engineers, designers, scientists, and students design products. Before joining this company, Agata spent 7 years at Google where she led the community and social media team, and project managed the launch of Google AdWords communities globally and in this podcast episode you'll hear about some of the amazing strategic stuff she brought from Google into SimScale and how she was able to take SimScale to a 1000% increase in customers in just under 3 years. We talk about how they found product market fit in a new market as they were bringing a really revolutionary technology that hadn't really been seen before and go deep into how they were able to launch a free plan to bolster huge SEO benefits, the webinar campaigns that they run and continue to run and how they're actually finding great partnerships and defining what a partnership is in their industry. You'll also learn exactly how they do B2B influencer campaigns and see direct ROI from it. This is an absolutely incredible episode. She really brought it.

Meet Ahin Thomas, the VP of Marketing for Backblaze, an 11 year old player in the cloud storage space with the unique model of having both B2C and B2B and entrusted with 600 Petabytes of data from customers in more 160 countries. In this podcast episode, you'll hear what it's like to find positioning in a very crowded, competitive marketplace like cloud storage. You'll learn how company values can make or break your marketing and how they have to come from the top. You'll also learn how they make social work and what you need to do to get an actual ROI out of it, the KPIs that really makes sense for your marketing on a large scale all the way to the very nitty gritty campaigns, and how WWE can make you a better marketer!

Meet John Bonini, the Director of Marketing at Databox, a software company making performance insights more accessible to everyone. In this podcast episode, we learn how they just broke the 1 million ARR mark and go deep into how they use things like content marketing, using specialized systems like polling of user generated content to create amazing articles that have created a wave of traffic to their website, referral marketing using partners, and how they've been able to bring a Hubspot style agency model into their business to really push their growth in a great way. We also talk about the focus that they had to do as a younger company and what it meant for the marketing department. The key lesson is how they learned to stayed focused, but also created innovation inside of marketing systems. You'll love the honesty and the openness about the bootstrap journey.

Meet Matt Stone, a marketing operations and demand generation veteran with experience in both transactional and enterprise sales cycles, currently with Gainsight, the leader in customer success software and #102 on the 2017 Inc. 5000. In this podcast episode we talk with Matt about Gainsight's amazing brand recognition, thought leadership, product evangelism, and how that was created to give the company so much traction. We also talk about how he runs the marketing operations' team and how he built a very, very powerful demand gen engine that brings in MQLs and easily translates them into SQLs, as well as what he sees happening in marketing in 2018. You are going to love this episode.

Meet Will Devlin, a 15-year veteran of the email marketing industry that leads marketing strategy and execution for MessageGears, an enterprise email marketing technology company that works with high-volume B2C brands. In this podcast episode, you'll learn how Will has helped build the brand into one of the premier software providers in the enterprise marketing space, serving companies like Expedia, Ebates, and Chick-fil-A. You'll find out how they found product market fit and what it actually looks like when it happens, why non-scalable activities are so great in the beginning and how they built great relationship using small dinners. You'll also hear about creating content for nurture cycles in enterprise and marketing in general, internal champions and the KPIs that they're using to define success in their business. This is another incredible episode.

Meet Leilani Latimer who leads Global Marketing, Partnerships and Commercial Operations for Zephyr Health, the Insights-as-a-Service leader harnessing the power of global healthcare data to help Life Sciences companies engage the right physicians, accounts, and institutions. In this podcast episode you'll learn how how they found the pain points in a market that didn't have any database companies in SaaS. We talk about the pains of cold outreach to high touch sales and how Leilani went after her persona, understood the channels that they were at, how to approach them and how she went content and value first to really get big wins. As a self-proclaimed data nerd, Leilani talks about what KPIs are most important, most of them relate to engagement, something that it's a little bit of a shift that you hear from some other SaaS companies and the strategic advise she gives to her team regarding metrics. It's a really incredible episode with a ton of high level knowledge.