SaaS Breakthrough

Meet Theresa O'Neil, the CMO for Showpad, the world's leading sales enablement platform. As the CMO of Showpad’s global marketing team, Theresa is responsible for increasing awareness, generating leads, and supporting all channels to grow revenue. In this episode, you'll hear about the stellar year of growth that Showpad had, growing from 30 to 150 employees and the lessons learned from their global expansion. You'll learn about the key experiments that have helped them drive growth over the past twelve months. And what they have learned from new market opportunities; including the lessons, the mistakes, everything. And finally, you'll hear where the sales enablement industry is headed in 2019 and beyond. Enjoy!

Meet Talia Wolf, the founder of GetUplift which provides conversion optimization services for high-growth companies. Using customer-centric strategies, emotional targeting, persuasion, and data, Talia generates more revenue, sales and leads for her clients and students. In this episode, you'll hear about how GetUplift was founded and who is the perfect company ready for conversion optimization. You'll learn about building the framework for the emotional targeting methodology, the system that Talia uses to run her tests. You'll also hear about winning campaigns in SaaS and how Talia has built these over the last year, what tests you need to know and how to run them in your business. And finally, you'll hear about what Talia wants to see changing in the marketing landscapes that I think all SaaS companies need to know. This is an episode with many great lightbulb moments. Enjoy!

Meet Anthony Payne the VP of Global Marketing at Brightpearl which is a retail operations platform for retailers and wholesalers, with the mission of automating the back office so merchants can spend their time and money growing their businesses. Anthony and is responsible for demand generation, branding, positioning, and PR. In this episode, you'll hear the journey of BrightPearl from selling skateboards to e-commerce software, the initial steps that they had to take as an organization in growing the marketing department and how that became a scaled marketing department. You'll learn all about the thought leadership content pieces that BrightPearl is becoming so well known for and how they created this process. And, you'll discover the distribution secrets to evergreen pillar content and product marketing concepts you need to know for marketing. Enjoy!

Meet Ekaterina Kazakova the marketing manager at Blendr.io, an embedded integration platform for SaaS companies. Ekaterina joined Blendr.io during the very first days and is responsible for its global growth. In this episode, you'll hear how events can be a great kick-starter for a marketing team, live events in particular. You'll learn about the ABM strategies need to find your perfect target market, person-based advertising and how to incorporate it seamlessly into your outbound messaging. You'll also hear about the opportunities that are presented once you find product-market fit and how Blendr.io utilizes that and the number one event you should absolutely attend if you are in SaaS. Enjoy!

Meet Patrick Campbell, the Co-Founder and CEO of ProfitWell, the industry-standard software for helping companies like Atlassian, Autodesk, Meetup, and Lyft with their monetization (through Price Intelligently) and retention strategies. ProfitWell also provides a turnkey solution that powers the subscription financial metrics for over ten thousand subscription companies. In this episode, you'll learn about what every SaaS business needs to know about pricing, why pricing can be over complicated and the warning signs that you need to know to put more emphasis on it early. You'll hear about both the tactical and strategic elements to cure churn, running content like a media company for massive results and finally how to find that leverage in your team for maximum velocity. You're going to absolutely love this episode, lots of valuable tips, strategies and ideas.

Meet Mike Korba the Chief of Customer Success at User.com, a full-stack marketing automation software for all your messaging and relationships with customers. Mike has worked in the marketing industry for over 17 years; ten of those years specializing in digital marketing. On this episode, you'll hear how User.com found product-market fit within a growing and competitive marketplace. You'll learn why the chief of customer success is a critical role for any company, how concierge onboarding can be implemented and the ongoing activities that your team must know to keep customers in customer success. And finally, how NPS can be used to keep a continual pulse on customer retention. A great episode that goes in-depth into important processes of customer success. Enjoy!

Meet Rob Patterson, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at AWeber, which is a SaaS that helps entrepreneurs and small businesses connect with their audience and accelerate the growth of their business through powerfully-simple email marketing tools and expertise. In this episode, you'll hear how Aweber has remained a market leader in a red ocean market for 20 years and what the first 90 days have been like for Rob as the new Aweber CMO. You'll learn about strategic branding for both internal and external marketing purposes when you need to spend time on net new marketing versus internal customer marketing and how marketing must be used for retention and hiring purposes in a growing company. This a very, very interesting episode. Enjoy!

Meet Aashish Dhamdhere, who leads the marketing team at Skilljar, the leading customer training platform for enterprises to accelerate product adoption and increase customer retention. Prior to joining Skilljar, Aashish was the VP of Marketing at Amperity and built the global demand generation function at Apptio. He was also the VP of Customer Acquisition at LiquidPlanner. In this episode, you'll hear about the start of Skilljar and the pivots that took them into the SaaS software niche. You'll learn how customer education affects every single part of your SaaS customers life cycle, what webinars and courses can do for your onboarding and education process and the exact setups they use. You'll also hear the ABM lessons from a growing SaaS company and finally, the exciting opportunities that are coming in 2019 for Skilljar. Another incredible episode, enjoy!

Meet Pia Riquelme, the Head of Global Marketing at Talkpush, the first Conversational Recruitment Platform for high-volume hiring companies. In this episode, you'll hear how Talkpush found their perfect product-market fit with enterprise volume hiring companies. We don't often have in the podcast the bigger companies that are doing enterprise sales, so this is an interesting new conversation. You'll learn the brand questions you need your team to review when looking at strategic branding and brand positioning, how you craft thought leadership and a strategic brand position for long term sales cycles, what that actually means, what it looks like for their dedicated ABM team and the constant organization they create to nurture enterprise clients. And finally, you'll hear about how small events can become global thought leadership growth hacks. Enjoy!

Meet Aaron Krall, who we bring back from one of our most watched episodes in 2018 -- episode #7. Aaron helps SaaS businesses who offer a trial, get more trials and convert trials into paid users and is the creator of the SaaS Growth Hacks Facebook group. You're going to hear about what he's been working on for the past year in the SaaS market industry. You'll learn about all the major issues he sees with non-US based SaaS companies that are actually an easy fix for huge wins, the exact framework breakdowns that he's using right now in SaaS companies, that you can implement to see incredible growth increases, especially in your free to paid trial conversion rates. You'll hear about the roadblocks to success most SaaS companies face in onboarding and you'll get a masterclass overview of how Aaron has found so much success with his Facebook community. Lots of actionable content, be ready to take down notes!

Meet Amir Jirbandey, the Head of Growth Marketing at Paddle, a hassle-free SaaS subscription management for growing businesses. He has been working in tech for the last 10 years and more recently implementing scaling Inbound Marketing strategies at fast-growing SaaS companies. In this episode, you'll hear about the market evolution of a fast accelerating growing tool like Paddle and what Amir's first steps were to get started as the head of growth marketing in an expanding SaaS. You'll find out about the outbound lessons learned that are leading the way for new initiatives in the company, how inbound marketing shapes the funnel flow of top, middle, and bottom of funnel content and the challenges they're up against that are creating fantastic new opportunities in 2019. Enjoy!

In this episode, we bring back Austin Distel, the CMO at Proof, who was a guest in episode #1. After making waves in the marketing world with their social proof notifications, Proof has continued to build website personalization products and by the end of this episode, you'll be looking at personalization and experiences through a whole new lens. You'll hear why personalization is so critical for marketers in 2019 and how Proof is now splitting their time to build the perfect positioning for Experiences, their new personalization product. And you'll find out why a content channel can set you up for a marketplace shift quickly and what you need to know if you're getting started with marketing in 2019. This episode runs a little bit longer as we had a lot of fun talking about what the future experience of the Internet looks like! Enjoy.

Meet Sid Bharath, our favorite SaaS consultant and growth marketer, who specializes in growing SaaS companies and was previously the VP of Growth at Thinkific, an online course platform that he's helped grow to the leader in the industry. He's also a marketing consultant who has worked with amazing companies in San Francisco like Gorgias, ShareDesk, Olark, LemonStand, CartHook, ReCharge and many more. In this episode, we bring back Sid Bharath who was a guest in episode #3. Since then he's been working in San Francisco with top SaaS companies so he has lots of insights into what's happening in the SaaS marketplace, what's changing and where are we going. You'll hear about the SaaS strategies that are actually working in today's B2B space. You'll learn the biggest mistakes Sid sees most SaaS companies making in marketing, the exact KPIs and systems you absolutely must have running to scale any marketing you have going and finally, the shifts in the SaaS marketplace that you need to be aware of for 2019. This is a really fun episode!

Meet Adrian Maynard, Marketing Director at Refersion, a top affiliate and influencer marketing platform that has been very successful on Shopify. Adrian has led tech and B2B SaaS marketing teams since the early 1990's and has already started and sold his own B2B SaaS. In this episode, you'll hear about how Refersion found the perfect vertical on Shopify, finding the key problems to solve in marketing when Adrian joined and what the outlook for what the department was going to be. You'll learn how they had to expand outside of their own industry outside of that vertical of Shopify and the new challenges that come with it. And finally, you'll hear what marketing requirements are lined up for 2019 to actually get through all of those challenges. Lots of insights in this episode. Enjoy!

Meet Ryan Bonnici, the CMO of G2 Crowd the world’s leading B2B technology review platform that’s helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. Previously, he lead global marketing at HubSpot, Salesforce, and ExactTarget. In this episode, you'll hear about Ryan's journey from HubSpot over to G2 Crowd and the lessons he learned while making that transition. You'll hear what the first 120 days of going into a new company are like, what it was like for Ryan to be a CMO and the challenges that he was up against. You'll learn all about the major marketing experiments that have crushed the G2 Crowd yearly goals. And you'll find out how Ryan turned a $6,000 budget into an insane pipeline of growth for HubSpot. This story is remarkable. It's inspirational. It's a fantastic listen. You're absolutely going to enjoy this episode!