SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success Ken Lempit

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 about potential loss versus gain.Determining the narrative customers must believe for your solution to be a good decision.How should win/loss analysis impact your positioning and messaging. Other resources to check out:
Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publishes a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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 sharper the knife, the faster it cutsFinding the right accounting software mix for startupsThe state of AI technology being used to drive accounting insights faster
Other resources to check out:
Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publishes a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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 furthering the B2B sales process.

But with everyone trying to teach customers something new and lead with insights (whether they’ve read Challenger or not) the overall impact on customers is less likely to enlightenment, and more likely to overwhelm. 

So, instead of seeing your content and thinking, “Oh wow, I’ve got to do something different,” they’re thinking, “Oh no, here’s another thing I have to worry about.”

Adamson takes the role of content a step further in this episode, explaining that both the marketing and sales process today not must only build trust for the supplier, but also within the prospect's mind so that they can accomplish the implementation on their end. 

Key takeaways from this episode:
Why B2B marketers should focus on creating a collaborative and value-based conversation with customers, rather than simply presenting ROI calculations, and generating content.Why it’s important to help customers feel confident in their decision-making process by providing context, connecting them to relevant content, and addressing their concerns about implementation.Empathy is a crucial skill for salespeople, as understanding how customers think about their business and helping them feel better about themselves can lead to successful sales outcomes.Other resources to check out:
Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publishes a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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 marketers just roll over in the morning and say, ‘Hey, I have a great idea for a campaign.’ They won't look back and say, retrospectively, ‘Is this at a target audience that we know is an ICP? Is this going to be the type of content that even performs for us? Are we going to do a video when, like, 99.9% of closed/won came through a webinar or a podcast?’”   
As the new CMO of Revenue.io, Sanders immediately got entrenched in the data to find opportunities for repeatable processes that would fuel her roadmap to success.   
Key Takeaways from this episode:    
·  How to build a roadmap to ensure your success as a new CMO/marketing leader
·  Where AI is today in analyzing sales conversations and delivering real-time insights
·  How the role of the CMO is evolving to become more data-driven and revenue-focused  
Other resources to check out:
Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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 revenue and profit targets.
And like most, his entrepreneurial journey wasn’t a straight line.
Check out the full episode where Ulf teaches us the importance of solving specific problems, focusing on measurable results, starting from the bottom, embracing micro-delegation and more.
Key Takeaways:
·      Why success strategies rely on top-down micro-delegation where each level of the organization take ownership of their specific goals and initiatives
·      How the company transitioned from consulting to a SaaS with 96% of their revenue coming from licensed subscriptions.
·      A look into Sweden’s entrepreneurial ecosystem - a great place to start and grow software companies.

Other resources to check out:
Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.

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 developing an online sales training course that took off.

One of his biggest differentiators in his training is the focus on selling the CFO—and if you’ve paid attention to this year’s TrustRadius report on the buyer/seller disconnect, you know that they’re playing a bigger role in most enterprise purchases.

Other key Takeaways from this episode:
Why every SaaS should re-evaluate their pricing model on a regular basisHow to find the right buyers in an account, arm your champion, and write compelling business cases, and multi-thread.How they quickly grew their training through email, Linkedin and word-of-mouth.
Other resources to check out:
Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publish a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting.