Saas Breakthrough

Meet Lissa Daniels, VP of demand generation, marketing operations, and analytics at Looker. Looker is a unified Platform for Data that delivers actionable business insights to every employee at the point of decision. Prior to Looker, Lissa spent her entire marketing career manically driving leads to the sales team. Over the years, she has worked at companies of all sizes and stages of growth, including, BEA Systems, VMWare, and Medallia. In this episode, you'll hear about the initial steps you need to do when joining an early stage company as the first marketer and how to handle having multiple customer personas - how to manage each one of them and how to look at them from a marketing perspective. You'll also learn the one phrase every marketer must make their mantra, key testing methodologies, how to make budget-driven decisions like Lissa does and finally, what needs to shift for marketers in 2019. Enjoy! Show Notes 02:37 A Platform For Data: A Single Source of Truth for All 04:57 First Full Time Marketing

Meet Dan Levy, the Editorial Director at Smooch, which helps enterprise businesses connect with customers through conversation. An experienced manager, strategist, and leader, Dan specializes in helping mid-stage startups and SaaS companies build and grow their content strategies and teams. In this episode, you'll hear how Smooch utilized Dan's skillset to come up with an insanely powerful content strategy and his process to switch from a free trial (the self serve model of SaaS) to a higher touch enterprise model as he moved from his last job at Unbounce to Smooch. You'll learn about the key steps to create a strategic content plan, how to find the primary questions or content needs to answer to attract the right prospects, how to find and create winning distribution channels to get that quality content out to your audience and the exciting things happening in the world of messaging in 2019 that are creating amazing marketing opportunities for businesses. Enjoy! Notes: 03:25 Making Communicating With Brands

Meet Patrick Edmonds, the Chief Marketing Officer of Proposify, a web-based business proposal software company. Patrick has helped 3x Proposify’s customer base to over 7,000 customers and more than 5x the annual recurring revenue to over $5.5 Million in the last 2.5 years. In this episode, you'll hear how the two founders created Proposify out of their own frustration and why sometimes even with a growing company, you have to step back and rethink where you're going and if you need to change direction and with that your target persona. You'll find out about the hard parts of growing and changing your sales process kind of midstream while you were already growing, how to align messaging with both your current user audience and your up market audience and how to go from a no touch sales system to a sales team and the scaling process they went through in 2018. You'll also learn Patrick's B2B content strategies and SEO concepts to grow your SaaS. You'll want to take notes of the actionable ideas or hacks that you

Meet Hailey Friedman, the Head of Marketing at Improvado, a tool that helps marketers automatically collect all their data into one place. Hailey has worked with startups around the world and writes about many of the lessons she learned going from novice to sophisticated marketer on her blog Growth Marketing Pro. In this episode, you'll hear about how Improvado used their marketing agency to find a perfectly fitting product into a niche they already knew about. You'll discover how Hailey created a growth engine that actually doubled the company ARR in about eight months, the affiliate program lead magnet that siphons and quality affiliates fast and how she came up with this amazing new idea, what her side hustles have taught her about marketing experiments and what actually works. And most critical, we talk about the huge success Hailey is having with webinars and why webinars are the most powerful sales method for SaaS. Enjoy! Notes 02:35 All Your Marketing Data in One Place 04:50 Joining Improvado 08:30 Pi

Welcome to this special episode #50 of the SaaS Breakthrough show with our host, David Abrams, covering the top 2019 SaaS Marketing Trends and Top Skills you NEED to know in 2019 from our past guests who are the world's leading SaaS Marketers. What a milestone*****!!! Thank you for being with us on this journey! We will be doubling down our efforts around this podcast in 2019, so stay tuned :). In this episode, you'll also find out about the big revamp in 2018 in Demio and the awesome things we have coming up in 2019! Notes: 01:43 The 2018 Big Revamp Inside Demio 06:07 Fine Tuning the Vision for Demio 06:50 Attending Saastr and SaaStock Dublin 2018 08:32 SaaS Marketing Trends in 2019 from Past Guests 09:18 Scaling Personalization 12:58 Transparency Arriving to B2B 17:06 The Creator Economy is Booming 20:04 SEO is Just Huge 21:13 Top Five Skills for SaaS Marketers in 2019 28:22 Coming Up in 2019 at Demio

Meet Corey Haines, the new Head of Growth at Baremetrics, a tool for SaaS and subscription companies to get the metrics forecasting and dunning they need to grow their startup. In this episode, we change slightly from the usual format around specific experiments or marketing channels that are working today. Corey recently got the position of Head of Growth and we talk about what that hiring process looked like, the tactical side of it, the tangibles of what you need to do to win these positions, who you have to become and what do you need learn. So for those of you who are looking to grow their career or apply to new opportunities, or to build into that head of growth or head of marketing position, this episode is for you! You'll also hear about Corey's background at Cordial and how he went from a new department to a growing marketing team and set that all up. You'll learn the key frameworks that Corey learned and uses to build into any marketing department, which are key things that you should absolutely kno

Meet David Ly Khim, a senior growth marketing manager at HubSpot, a business that offers a full stack of products for marketing, sales and CRM to power the world's small to medium-sized businesses. In this episode, you'll hear what it was like to join an extremely fast moving company with 18,000+ customers already and be a major part of growth initiatives to take the company to over 150+ Million in ARR (as of Q3 2018). You'll find out about the strategic partner outreach strategy that David created to find, promote and attract great strategic partners for them. You'll learn how to think about virality and how they build virality into a product and the strategic approach they have been following to leverage SEO for growth. You'll get lots of takeaways for growth marketing initiatives in this episode. Enjoy! Show Notes 02:30 Extremely Easy Advanced Tools for SMB 04:05 Education: Value and Differentiator 05:00 Joining Growth At 18000 Paid Customers 07:40 A New Freemium Type of Product 10:10 Figuring Out Marketi

Meet Sophie Steffen, a Digital Marketer at TravelPerk a next-generation business travel booking & management platform for companies of any size and the world's first and only all-in-one platform for booking business travel that is 100% free. In this episode, you'll hear how TravelPerk became the number 4 fastest growing SaaS company growing 700% year over year. Sophie takes us behind the scenes of the last two years of explosive growth and dives into the marketing strategies and systems her team uses, from Adwords to partnerships, attribution models and optimizing SQLs. There are so many great insights to share. Enjoy! Notes 03:08 All-in-one Platform For Booking Business Travel 10:02 Joining A Rocket Ship Growth SaaS 12:29 Most Successful Channels 14:05 PPC and Optimized SQLs 17:30 Using Your Data To Optimize 21:33 Partnerships and Building Relationships 24:44 Testing Networks 26:33 Turning Roadblocks Into Opportunities 29:26 A Multi-touch Attribution Model 34:28 Prioritization, Goals and OKRs 36:53 Ligh

Meet Matej Kukucka, Senior Growth Marketer at LiveAgent, a multi-channel customer service software, which helps companies deliver exceptional customer service through various support channels. Previously Matej was the Digital Marketing Manager at Fleming and the Digital Marketing Specialist at LIFARS. In this episode, you'll hear about the birth of LiveAgent from another SaaS product, solving the pain point they found while growing their company, the initial research steps for a growth marketer entering an existing product or service, the strategic outline for a marketing and growth plan, and how Matej specifically does this. You'll also hear about SEO from the inside out and what Matej does to excel in his SEO duties, and finally, you'll learn about the review gateway method to generate huge results that you're absolutely going to enjoy. In this episode, we really go deep into the ins and outs of systems and the exact steps to take. Enjoy! Show Notes 03:05 How LiveAgent Was Born 06:36 First Initiatives Join

Meet Len Markidan, the CMO of Podia, a platform for creators to sell online courses, membership sites and digital downloads. In this episode we talk about the journey Podia went through from their early name Coach to the amazing online platform they are today. You'll hear about the importance of early customer research and the reminder of why these foundational principles are so critical in marketing. You'll find out about the three primary channels that have been extremely effective for growth for Podia, how to create content with a perfect balance of art and science, and finally about partnerships, influencers and events. Len provided lots of actionable content that you can learn from and take away from! Show Notes 02:37 A Digital Storefront With a New Brand Name 03:50 Segmenting An Universally Beloved Dream 05:09 Joining As First Marketer 05:59 Talking To As Many Customers As Possible to Build Marketing Avatars 07:32 Similar Challenges And Goals Across Niches 09:14 Focusing On The Channels Supported By Cu

Meet Daniel Twigg, the marketing manager at Cyclr, an integration platform for SaaS. Daniel is a "Jack of all trades" digital marketer, with over 9 years experience working in B2B marketing in areas including tech and IoT. In this episode you'll hear exactly what Cyclr has done to find product market fit and the early stage pivot that changed their business. You'll find out how they use direct partnerships and reachout for validation and direct revenue growth early on. Finally you'll learn about the SEO and awareness driven content that Daniel helped create and how Cyclr uses a unique system for it and their live events strategy and what worked at SaaStock. Enjoy this episode! Notes 02:14 An Integration Platform for SaaS 04:04 Joining to Find Product-Market Fit 04:47 Figuring Out and Doing a Pivot 06:57 Partnerships and Partnerships Campaigns 08:32 KPIs on Awareness Campaigns 09:22 Split testing Without Going Mad 11:50 Continual Testing 12:32 Content Planning and Organic Search 16:06 Going For Enga

Meet Maria Willoch, VP of Sales and Marketing at the video creation platform VIBBIO. Maria has spent her career in customer acquisition, the past five years in the video marketing space alone. In this episode, you'll learn how to set proper expectations coming into a VP role in an early stage SaaS company, how you should think of a Beta process to get feedback and how to actually get valuable feedback. You'll hear about the struggles to find your ICP early on, how not having an ad budget didn't deter the VIBBIO team at all from finding great growth strategies and the testing mentality needed to fail fast and find winning channels. This is a really interesting episode taking us through an early stage phase to an acquisition phase of this company. Show Notes 02:21 Creating Video Without the Hassle of Editing 03:38 Joining Marketing Just Before Full Version 06:18 Doing the Unscalable To Get To The Scalable 07:43 Getting Beta Users To Engage With Product 09:15 Identifying the Ideal Customer 11:40 Finding Your IC

Meet Miles DePaul, Head of North America Marketing at Mailjet, the email service provider for teams with customers like Product Hunt, Avis, MIT, and more. Miles oversees the growth of the Mailjet brand across the US and Canada, including content marketing, events, branding, and demand generation. On this episode, you'll learn about the expansion of Mailjet from Europe to North America and how they made that journey, how the core of product can help you grow the business and really dial in your marketing language, how marketing conversations can influence the product in a way that creates amazing marketing initiatives back to the team, engineering as a marketing concept and what they're doing in Mailjet, new products launching soon and the challenge for us all in 2019. This was a really fantastic episode, lucky I got to meet these guys at SaaStock in Dublin. Enjoy! Show Notes: 03:00 Bridging the Marketing and Transactional Email 05:02 Differentiator: Laser Focus on Email 06:10 Joining the US Team to Scale acr

Meet Olivia Milton, CMO, and Lucy Literado, VP of Marketing, at Reply.io - an email platform that automates one-to-many communication, dramatically scaling your outreach capability, while keeping it 100% personal. In this episode, you'll hear about the growth of Reply and the constantly evolving ideal customer profile and how as a marketer, you should be looking to educate yourself and the company on that evolving profile. You'll hear how the Reply team has grown to over 50 team members using acquisition channels like content marketing, webinars, and PPC campaigns. You'll learn how they view education in the funnel and how it's part of that acquisition process and finally, we discuss where they believe marketing is going in 2019. It's a fun episode with 2 guests interviewed together so we get to hear different perspectives and I think that gave so much more clarity to how they feel and what they're doing. Enjoy! Notes: 03:45 The Customer Research Phase and Process 12:38 The Struggles of Customer Research Aft

Welcome to this special SaaS Breakthrough episode with our host, David Abrams of Demio. In this episode, David takes on a Journey inside of Demio over the past month and the top lessons Demio took away from SaaStock 2018 in Dublin. In this episode we go behind-the-scenes of the release of one of the biggest features ever at Demio - Automated Webinars. David goes through the entire launch, covers the launch strategy, what worked well, and the lessons taken from it. Then we move into the 4 Top takeaways they got from attending SaaStock 2018 in Dublin and how they impact the future for SaaS companies and SaaS Marketing.

Meet Adam Tanguay, Head of Marketing at Webflow, a web platform that gives designers and developers the ability to design, build, and launch responsive websites visually while writing clean semantic code for you. In this episode, you'll learn about their challenges as a web builder in a competitive space, how they tell their unique story, the channels that have been incredibly successful to bring them to over 1 million users, and how they've optimized Youtube and referral channels to maximize acquisition. It's a wonderful episode full of thoughtful insights, you'll definitely want to take down notes on this episode! 03:25 Webflow Bridges the Gap Between Coding and Design 06:23 LightBulb Moments, Video and Community 07:51 Reaching for Influencers 09:46 Growing an Affiliate Program 11:46 Winning Combo: Youtube and Video Education 17:51 An Education Program for Educators 25:30 Huge Win: The Ecommerce Beta Teaser 26:31 Breakthroughs, Creativity and Art 29:29 The Numbers So Far 30:03 Coming Soon: Ecommerce Beta 3

Meet Neil Roy, Head of Marketing for FusionCharts, a JavaScript charting library for Developers. Neil has 6 Years in Marketing, with a deep focus on Digital & SaaS marketing. This episode has a unique format and is a bit longer than usual. The goal set for this episode was to outline what FusionCharts' marketing plans are for the next 3 or 4 months, so you get to see the process that went into thinking and organizing these objectives and then we'll circle back later on, on another episode, to go back through experiments run, all the wins and losses and any major lessons learned. Neil brought so many details and so much transparency to what they're doing, that you're absolutely going to love this episode. Notes: 03:38 FusionChart's Roller Coaster Journey So Far 07:50 Revamping Marketing: Understanding The Buying Cycle and Personas 11:41 Using the JTBD Framework 12:47 Creating a "mini playground" Website 16:12 The Step-by-step Process of Website Revamp 18:15 The New Goals and Initiatives in Marke

Meet Ronii Bartles, the Director of Marketing at VROOMRes where she leads overall branding, marketing planning, and strategy. Her strong background in consumer behavior research gives VROOMRes an edge on understanding its customers to meet organizational goals. In this episode, you'll learn about the critical things that you need to think about when starting an early stage SaaS company in a crowded and competitive marketplace and the long term and the marketing choices VROOMRes had to make. You'll hear about the SEO strategies that have produced direct ROI to their business and how they are using Instagram to reach a unique customer persona for their business, outside of their primary persona, to generate MQL's. Finally, you'll find out about the really exciting things coming up for this company in the next few months. Ronii brought a ton of great energy and enthusiasm and we go through a ton of great information. It's a really cool conversation to hear! Notes 03:12 Joining From The Start 04:53 Founder's Vis

Meet Andrew Guttormsen, recently the VP of Growth and Marketing at Teachable for the last three years and currently transitioning to a new role working on special projects to launch a brand new business unit at Teachable. On this episode you'll hear about the steps, the growth pains and the growth strategies that Teachable went through to take their company from $10,000 a month when Andrew joined, to 15 Million ARR. You'll find out what the one growth strategy they leveraged early on and how now they're using online summits to generate up to 60,000 leads at a given time and get an insane influx of annual sales. You'll love to learn their framework to run profitable summits and what is the one thing that matters the most to ensure success with summits. We end the episode talking about where the Teachable system is headed to revolutionize the membership marketplace, exciting times ahead! 03:02 A Different Online Course Platform 05:47 Figuring Out The Repeatable Predictable Acquisition Channel 07:11 Using Webin

Meet Kira Mondrus - a multi-award-winning recognized industry thought leader and CMO at QASymphony, a company that helps enterprises prioritize quality, develop more reliable software and increase speed to market. Kira's nearly 20-year B2B technology marketing track record of success includes companies ranging from start-ups to multi-billion-dollar enterprises. In this episode, you'll hear about the buyer centric demand generation machine that Kira was able to set up, how multi-touch point marketing qualification is the most essential part for them to go through that process and how networking can be a powerful middle of the funnel relationship builder (plus the brilliant way they use it). You'll also hear why webinars are the most powerful content mechanism for marketing and why they're so powerful in that middle of the funnel area. Enjoy! Show Notes: 02:25 Most Modern Testing Platform on the Market 04:19 Being The Fastest Growing Atlanta Based Tech Company 06:00 Changing Focus To The Higher End Market 08:0