SaaS Breakthrough

Meet Remco De Vries, the Head Of Marketing at InSided, the only Customer Success Community Platform. Remco is a demand generation enthusiast. In this episode, you'll hear about the 10-years journey of InSided into customer success for SaaS. You'll learn why community is more important than ever for SaaS companies in 2020 and beyond and what it takes to build an effective and successful community. And you'll also learn about InSided wins from attending and sponsoring a recent event by Gainsight and the strategy his team created specifically for it. Enjoy!

Meet Agata Krzysztofik, Head of Marketing of Piktochart which is on a mission to empower people to tell great visual stories that stick. Agata is a startup mentor and a marketing leader with 10 plus years of experience in developing and executing growth strategies at companies like Google, Groove, and SIM scale. In this episode, you'll hear about Piktochart's mission around visual storytelling and what that actually means for marketers. You'll learn the step-by-step process to create storytelling through video and how SaaS companies can tell more engaging stories. You'll also learn how to implement the OKR framework, advertising platform secrets for video, and finally, what you can learn from Piktochart's mistakes in 2019 and why failures are so important for your growth. Enjoy!

Meet Garrett Mehrgutt, the co-founder and CEO of Directive, a next-gen software performance marketing agency. In 2019, Directive ranked in the top 500 in the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies in the U.S. In this episode, you'll hear how Directive was born and found its footing in SaaS. You'll learn how you probably need to reset your traffic expectations, the approach for SEO that creates positive ROI, why vanity metrics can destroy your pipeline, and different approaches for scaling SEO. And finally, you'll learn about SEM ideas for 2020 and beyond. There are lots of hidden nuggets in this episode, including a little tactical tidbit to drastically lower your CPA and skyrocket your results. Enjoy!

Meet Juuso Lyytikkä, Head of Growth at Funnel, where they help thousands of businesses to be more data-driven and thus delivering higher returns. He leads the marketing and operations teams and built a highly scalable lead generation engine by melding best in class B2B and B2C methodologies and focusing on empathy. In this episode, you'll hear about the creation of Funnel.io from an advertising agency, how they moved upmarket from e-commerce and SMB based on new product requirements and signals from their market. You'll learn the major pitfalls to avoid in advertising for SaaS today and how you actually make advertising work. And then look at LinkedIn advertising, targeting, and requirements for successful campaigns. And finally, you'll hear about where Juuso thinks the SaaS landscape will end up, especially for advertisers in 2020 and beyond. Enjoy!

Meet Len Markidan, CMO at Podia, a platform for creators to sell online courses, membership sites, and digital downloads. Previously, Len was Head of Marketing for 5 years at Groove and his work has been featured in Forbes and Entrepreneur. In this episode, Len returns for a Take 2 episode and you'll learn what's been happening at Podia since Len was on the podcast on episode #45 and how they're taking on the new landscape of marketing during the COVID-19 epidemic. You'll hear about the growing and evolving content economy, how Len and Podia are leading with empathy and education in the marketplace and the key performing indicators for education success. Finally, you'll also learn about the challenges and opportunities Len is seeing for SaaS marketers and where your focus should be for 2020 and beyond. Enjoy!

In this episode, you'll hear about the challenges of a new categorical SaaS disrupting a prebuilt industry. You'll learn about piggybacking on search versus defining new languages, how content marketing has been critical for success for Threekit and how their outbound mixed with content has been in an essential step for new growth. And finally looking forward, you'll hear how Hillary sees the changing landscape in SaaS after COVID-19, what she's expecting to play out and how they're working to make sure that they're ahead of the curve. Enjoy and celebrate with us as this is our episode #100!

Welcome to a special episode of the SaaS Breakthrough podcast. As 2020 reveals itself to be full of surprises, challenges, also new opportunities, we felt it would be helpful to collect the top marketing insights we heard so far from our amazing guests to help you with SaaS marketing in these uncertain times. We collected the best marketing advice for challenging times given by 19 incredible SaaS marketers that we’ve been lucky enough to host on the podcast. Enjoy!

Meet Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva, a cloud communications company. He has a track record of success working with brands like Major League Baseball, Pipedrive, Sales Hacker and Outreach.io. In this episode, you'll hear about the SEO strategy Gaetano used to grow Sales Hacker over 400% from start to finish. You'll learn about the two-step process to audit your existing SEO system, where the low hanging fruit is so you get started right with huge wins and the big pitfalls to avoid "painful SEO mistakes" that can cause you to go backward instead of forward with your SEO. You'll also learn about LinkedIn marketing strategies to drive engagement in your business and the painful lessons that Gaetano learned from Nextiva over the past year. This is an incredible episode that covers both the strategy and tactical steps that you can execute on right away. Lots of hidden lessons throughout. Enjoy!

Meet Casey Hill, the Growth Manager at Bonjoro, a personalized video messaging company with the mission of making business communication more human and personalized. For the last decade, Casey has been focusing on helping SaaS companies rapidly scale and doing so through finding levers to create customer evangelism and brand advocacy. In this episode, you'll hear where Casey sees the future of personalized video going and what you need to know today. You'll learn how to use video at scale to personalize customer experiences with your SaaS, how Bonjoro team built a playbook from A to Z, onboarding tactics that leverage the beauty of video and how to increase trial conversion with personalization. Finally, you'll learn about the tangible testing approach that you can use to explode your sales. Enjoy!

Meet Anna Schena Walsh, the Director of Growth Marketing at Narrative Science, a SaaS that turns data into stories. Anna leads marketing initiatives including brand, content, digital, and demand generation and has previously led product marketing for both of Narrative Science's products. In this episode, you'll hear about AI-driven storytelling and the power of Narrative Science. You'll learn how to develop the mindset of internal storytelling, what it means to tell a story in a cross-departmental way, and how product marketing can break through the noise with better stories. And finally, you'll hear about the process that Anna used to write, launch and distribute her new co-authored book "Let your people be people" in just a few months. This is an episode full of stories. Enjoy!

Meet Jason Bay, the Chief Revenue Officer at Blissful Prospecting, where they help sales teams remove the mystery of what to say in their outbound calls and emails. In today's episode, you'll learn how Jason does not believe that prospecting is just a numbers game or that it has to suck. You'll hear about the outbound strategy that he created to become a sought after resource for SaaS teams and the critical cross-department strategies to streamline messaging and communication. Then you'll learn Jason's REPLY method and hear how he breaks down some examples of good and bad outbound campaigns to showcase how you can effectively write campaigns for response rates. And finally, you'll hear about the key KPI benchmarks you should always shoot for. This episode is a little bit longer because is FULL of examples and actionable information. Enjoy!

Meet Anna Kocsis, Head of Marketing at 10to8, an appointment scheduling software that aims to rid the world of wasted time. Anna loves experimenting and finding new tactics that really work. In this episode, you'll hear about the data-driven approach that has helped 10to8 find their job-to-be-done use cases that really shape their different personas and how these use cases drive their approach to feature design and marketing. You'll learn about the data needed to help create smart Google campaigns and the optimization flows that Anna uses to always improve those campaigns. And finally, you'll hear about the KPIs that matter most in conversion marketing and get to look inside different campaigns. Enjoy!

Hello, 2020! Welcome to a special episode of the SaaS Breakthrough podcast.  As we start a new year, and decade, we felt it was a good time to collect the top marketing insights we received from our amazing guests, so you can make sure to use their wisdom in your SaaS Marketing in 2020. In this episode, you'll hear the Top 20 SaaS Marketing Insights for 2020 by 20 incredible SaaS marketers that we’ve been lucky enough to host on the podcast throughout 2019. Enjoy! Thank you so much for listening, subscribing, commenting, and for being a part of this amazing journey last year! We have more amazing guests aligned for 2020!

Meet Rachel Yen, a Customer Events & Experience Specialist at HubSpot. Rachel has been growing HubSpot's Customer Delight program since 2016 and loves to preach customization over automation. In this episode, you'll hear about the start of HubSpot's Customer Delight program, how it got off the ground and how HubSpot is humanizing customer success with an amazing gift-giving initiative. You'll also learn how to balance personalization with gifts, the goal set for gift-giving and how to maximize your return on these initiatives. And finally, you'll hear where Rachel thinks business is heading in 2020 and beyond. It was so great to have HubSpot back on. Enjoy!

Meet Mikko Luhtava, the Head of Marketing at Vainu, a real-time company data provider for salespeople and marketers. Mikko has been working in tech marketing and sales for 7+ years, in both Europe and the U.S. In this episode, you'll hear how a change in their target ICP created data points for a company rebrand and then we discuss the lessons learned in rebranding a scaling SaaS company. You'll hear about the changes happening in both inbound and outbound marketing using data and the sales flow that Vainu uses to identify the right prospects at the right time. Finally, you'll learn the best way for U.S. companies to scale into the European market. Enjoy!