With a startling low average tenure of 18 months, today’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is struggling. The pressure primarily stems from the need to drive growth in a capital-efficient manner. This includes rapidly accelerating revenue growth while managing and optimizing the cost of sales and marketing operations, often within a constrained budget or shifting economic conditions. It's this intense focus on both top-line growth and cost efficiency that’s contributing to the high turno...

We all know video is important to grow exposure, but creating enough is still challenging. The tools are complex, production is expensive, and it can be overwhelming just to come up with ideas. In this episode, Aug X Labs founder Jeremy Toeman talks about his personal frustration with the complex tools just to make basic videos that can be used on websites and in social media posts that led to the creation of the company. And their goal is to make video creation as simple as writing an email....

If you went to the doctor for a sore throat and she said, “Last time I had one, this is what helped me get better” versus “I looked at the clinical trial evidence for 5000 people with your symptoms in your age range, geographics, and background,” which of those solutions is more viable? That’s how Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze views the world of A/B testing.  Spiralyze crawls and scrapes 34,000 websites that A/B test to find the repeat winners, analyze why they won, and run those same tests...

Feedback is not just a tool for improving products, but a strategic asset that can drive growth, innovation, and competitive advantage. In this episode, Satya Ganni, CEO of Beamer and Userflow, explains the importance of feedback in reducing churn in product-led SaaS companies.  Feedback provides valuable insights into customer needs, preferences, and pain points, which makes it a critical component of product management success.  By listening to customer feedback, Beamer is able to...

In this episode, we delved into the transformative power of algorithms in business with Jason Radisson, CEO & founder of Movo, a platform that provides real-time scheduling flexibility and improved workforce management for large companies with frontline workers.  Jason recounted his time at Harrah's Entertainment, where they used data to optimize customer interactions and significantly increase profitability over others on the strip. He explains how his background in algorithmic...

As a startup with shaky product market fit, prospective customers often want to associate you with a mature category so they can determine where it might fit in their tech stack—or not. But for Warmly, the existing categories represented only a small subset of their capabilities—albeit cheaper than the mature tools. And they couldn’t just settle for being known as "Drift but cheaper.” In this episode, Alan Zhao details his transition from CTO to marketing chief, a move that was pivotal in...

As a seasoned sales expert and popular sales podcaster, Brian Burns has more than a few opinions about how companies are selling to the enterprise today. Most notably, because reps haven’t been taught the difference, they try to make up for the lack of pipeline by increasing outreach activity. That may have worked in 2011 when the Predictable Revenue Model gained prominence (and our inboxes weren’t flooded with sales pitches).  But today, the compartmentalization of prospecting and closing...

Originally, the founders of Plytix set out to create an analytics platform for e-commerce that measured the performance of a product (instead of a website) so brands could see how end users interact with them, even when sold on a third-party website.  But even after positive early traction and investment, they were stalled—many of the brands didn’t have their product information at the ready. So, they built a simple source of truth—a Product Information Management (PIM) so they could get...

Having moved from a miserable culture in investment banking to an incredibly positive one at tech startup ZipRecruiter, Jonathan Fields learned early in his career the profound impact culture has on an organization. So inspired, in fact, that he and his co-founders worked nights and weekends to create a platform that could make those elements scalable and easy for companies to adopt. The result is Assembly, a platform that focuses on creating opportunities for coworkers to connect beyond...

Are you making one or more of these mistakes in your messaging? Given the number of websites that we review regularly, chances are that you are—and that means leaving revenue on the table. In this episode, Ken and Jason from Austin Lawrence Group discuss the eight common mistakes that SaaS companies make with real life examples. So if you’re revisiting messaging and content strategy this year, or you’re frustrated with the quality of leads coming through your website, this episode is for...

Business development poses big challenges for today’s SaaS. It becomes twice as ineffective every year as people learn how to ignore you. And it’s such a grind that it’s hard to find good people who want to stick with the sales development rep (SDR) position over the long term. To get engagement on the phone today takes the right experience, technology, and triggers. That’s why we sat down with Gabriel Lullo, CEO of Alleyoop, an outsourced SDR service that specializes in lead generation...

We’ve all been frustrated by those pesky ads that pop up when trying to read an article. We understand that publishers are trying to capture more of that lost ad revenue, but the solution is not to create such a poor experience that it drives consumers away. And the rise of ad blockers is not the only problem for publishers. The decline of traditional tracking methods due to privacy regulations and browser changes, such as the death of the cookie, threatens the business model even more....

In this episode, SaaS Backwards host Ken Lempit switches places to the guest seat to discuss upcoming trends in SaaS marketing for the new year and what companies will have to do to be successful. Ken is the Chief Strategist of the Austin Lawrence Group, a growth marketing agency specializing in B2B SaaS, and has a 30-year track record in software marketing. The key areas discussed include: As outbound prospecting gets harder, how will companies be successful?How will sales and marketing KPIs...

Pricing is often the most overlooked “P” in the SaaS marketing mix. We see it in our marketing practice often. Companies may be averse to raising prices for fear of losing customers, focusing on other priorities like product development, or simply don’t understand the impact on the business. In this episode, we caught up with Pat Meegan, Senior Partner at Maple Street Advisors, who talks about assessing the opportunity for pricing growth regularly by looking at four key...

When going through a repetitive and time-consuming mortgage application process in 2017, Mang-Git Ng was surprised that the process wasn’t automated. He realized that there were many industries that still operated in the internet dark ages and that moving all these PDFs and paper documents to online forms could solve a major problem. But after he and his co-founder had built their initial product, they struggled to gain traction, especially with limited sales and marketing...

Because of the challenges in the current financing environment and the cautious approach of strategic buyers and private equity firms for SaaS companies, we invited Marty Magida on to discuss practical strategies to enhance company value and navigate the complexities of the M&A market. Magida is the managing director of Berkery, Noyes & Co an independent investment bank providing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisory to middle-market leaders in the global information, software,...

You’ve probably never thought about what goes on behind the scenes when you return a product, but there’s a lot to it. In this episode of the SaaS Backwards podcast, Chuck Fuerst, CMO at ReverseLogix, gives a look behind the scenes at some of the challenges and opportunities in the returns management system category. And because it’s so complicated, their go-to-market strategy requires problem agreement to be considered. And because companies enter different stages of problem awareness,...

You may have noticed that deals today take longer to close and scrutinized heavily. So, what do SaaS companies need to do? Spencer Dent, Founder of Clozd says to make sure you understand the how the decision-making process, people involved, and priorities have changed.  And since the CFO plays a bigger role, it’s less about ease of integration and more about the bottom line—and you’d better be ready to prove it. Key takeaways: Are ROI calculators worth it anymore? With people caring more...

As a CEO, you probably don’t care much about how your accounting and bookkeeping is done. But you do want insights you can drive once your month is closed out. Burn rate and cash flow comes to mind. At the Ascent conference in New York, we caught up with Swapnil Shinde, CEO of Zeni, a SaaS that claims to have the world’s first finance operations platform for startups that includes intelligent bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services. Key Takeaways: When it comes to defining ICP, the...

For our 100th episode, we’re excited to interview Brent Adamson, the global head of research with Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management that helps its users quantify and align with customers based on the value being delivered. Adamson is most known as the co-author of the books The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. And as marketers, both books have been instrumental in shaping our view of content development as an agency and the role it plays in...

Coming from sales positions where she’s carried quotas, Brandee Sanders knows what having skin in the game for marketers looks like.     And it’s not tracking MQLs or developing a strong tech stack.    It does look like examining the data to find repeatable opportunities for sales pipeline.    In other words, do we truly know how and why closed/won opportunities entered our orbit and what motivated them to take action to purchase?    According to Sanders, the disconnect is that “Most...

Strategic initiatives often get de-railed when CEOs delegate them instead of taking ownership. This lack of clarity can lead to confusion and lack of focus throughout the organization. That’s the problem Ulf Arnetz is solving through his Swedish-based company Howwe, a SaaS enterprise platform for CEOs to orchestrate and operationalize strategy implementation at every level of their organization. The platform allows CEOs to prioritize goals, track progress and align teams towards achieving...

Probably best known for helping Gong grow from $200K to $200M in five years, Chris Orlob talks about following his passion for helping people learn valuable sales skills through his new company pclub.io. (That’s short for President’s Club for non-salesy folks). But sales training wasn’t the original focus. Originally, they started out to build a company called QuotaSignal that sold a hiring value proposition, but since hiring took a nosedive in the current economic climate, had been...

The attribution problem has long been a challenge for marketers—probably first articulated by John Wannamaker when he said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” It seemed like marketing tech had solved it (for a minute)—until buyers went and changed their behavior. So how do we map the customer journey today? That’s where today’s guest Steffen Hedebrandt, Co-Founder and CMO of DreamData.io comes in. DreamData is a B2B revenue...

Seemingly not too long ago, searches for new products and services overwhelmingly started at Google. And it made sense to optimize for keywords, so you’d appear organically on page one. But things have changed—just a bit. And no one is more qualified to talk about those changes than our guest Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro and formerly the founder of Moz. As Fishkin notes, today if you ask Google a question, over half the time they’re going to give you a snippet with an answer. And as soon...