120 - How Our Early Customer Pioneers Took Hunters From $1M to $5M ARR In One Year (Sarah Breathnach, Head of Demand Gen at Hunters)

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Sarah Breathnach works with early stage SaaS companies to build a strong marketing foundation for fast growth. She's currently Head of Demand Generation at Hunters. Prior, Sarah was Demand Generation Lead at Tamr, a SaaS startup backed by Google Ventures and others that has raised $69.2M. I happened to stumble upon Sarah while listening to her speak in a recorded webinar and thought "woah, I gotta bring her on the show."

Hunters is a Series C ($118.4M total) security tech startup based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

Here's what we hit on:

Generating leads versus generating demand - what’s the big difference between the two and the big "aha!" for startups, why can’t you do both;

People think you need a big team and lots of money to generate demand - how many people do you really need and how much money do you really need;

What are some smart ways to approach demand generation when you’re lean and have a small budget (HINT: focus on the innovators and risk-takers);

We setup "kiosks" at trade shows and events to find out if we were selling to the right person;

How did marketing help 5X revenue (HINT: early on marketing built those important foundations);

Why we decided to focus on the "2 opportunities goal" from any demand generation effort we did;

Top marketing channels for Hunters;

From Chris Walker (CEO at Refine Labs): "It’s time to get out of the tech. Top marketing teams will be talking with customers every week and leaning into marketing fundamentals.” Are we too much in the tech and not enough in the fundamental, foundational marketing work;

Sarah asks me her burning question "what is the hardest thing about being a marketer today."

You can find Sarah on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sarahbreathnach/

Find out more about Hunters: www.hunters.ai/

This episode is sponsored by UMSO, the website builder for startups. Visit umso.com/MSM to learn more and use the code MSM20 for a 20% discount on your first three months.

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