Getting specific about your ICP is an old saw—but why then aren’t more companies marketing efficiently?Our guest, Annie Wissner, says the reason is because we’ve become too used to bull markets where you have wiggle room in marketing execution. “We're still in that digital wave where it's primarily about Google Search, but there's a lot of other methodologies that can be utilized to get to customers and prospects in a much lower cost and effective manner.”The times they are a changing—and those of us like Annie that have been through three recessions have a good idea about what comes next.Bottom line, the companies that operate marketing with efficiency will thrive and those that don’t…Well, don’t be in that category. Check out this episode for some clear strategies you can execute on immediately.---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

Suuchi Ramesh, founder and CEO of Suuchi Inc had envisioned a need for one single source of truth in supply chain across suppliers, factories, brands, retailers, warehouses, and customers when they began operations in 2017.A bold vision, for sure.But the timing (pre-COVID) helped making the space ripe for disruption.  In the same way that you’d eat an elephant (one bite at a time), Ramesh was able to break the problem statement into parts by connecting brands and retailers in the fashion industry with the network of factories in the Western hemisphere and expand to beauty, and Food & Beverages that make up 90 percent of their clientele.Today, after successfully building from a series A fund raise three years ago, their efficient money management strategy has positioned them well for growth as they raise the next round and expand their go-to-market strategy to generate demand in the 10 percent dramatically increasing their total addressable market. ---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

We knew that Dan Johnston, CEO of WorkStep had a great story about how they’ve shifted the go-to-market strategy as they’ve expanded post series B--especially for B2B SaaS marketers that have had to make the case for patience.That’s in here, but the overall story is much bigger than that.Having started managing a third-party logistics warehouse that imported trampolines, Johnston noticed something unsettling. It was staffed primarily with temp workers fraught with hidden costs. Not only is there constant turnover and constant training, but there’s also a detrimental human impact. Workers can’t move up in the organization and lose $5-$6 per hour in the spread.People shouldn’t be treated as cogs in a machine. They have valuable skills that are critical to the success of an organization. They’re talent. That was the problem to solve. Starting small, WorkStep limited itself to Portland, Oregon where they provided software solutions that make it easy to directly employ frontline workers for their supply chain roles.Starting small also gave them a big opportunity to learn about what their customers and their employees really need—to reduce turnover at scale.Recently, WorkStep wrapped up a $25-million Series B fundraise to add fuel to what’s already working, and the best part is that the entire ecosystem wins. ---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

The founding story of Fireflies.ai told by co-founder Krish Ramineni sounds like a post-college rock band that turned into software hack. Instead of going to graduate school (working as a PM at Microsoft), Ramineni took his would-be co-founder up on an offer to “hang out” and “work on different things” in some free co-working space that a VC had given them in Boston.When they had something real, they went back to San Francisco, went heads down, bootstrapped, went through an accelerator, and raised a seed round. A month later, the pandemic hits, everyone goes remote, and the roller coaster ride begins. In the past 4 years, Ramineni and co-founder Sam Udotong have been scaling up the abilities of an enterprise voice assistant (or AI) meeting assistant. But it’s a lot more than the mystery attendee you see popping up in your Zoom meetings. But competing in a crowded space (with technology that wasn’t new) Ramineni and co-founder Sam Udotong knew they needed a broader vision for the product. So, they started looking at what teams needed that could be accomplished beyond automated notetaking. Their idea was transforming the product into voice workflow system for enterprises and for organizations. For example, if you’re in a zoom meeting, you could say “Fireflies, pull up the Q2 financial reports and tell me what went right and what went wrong.”Fireflies has capitalized on a product-led growth strategy from the beginning. They don’t spend very little on advertising today, and instead, doubled down on the freemium model, which gets the Fireflies.ai name is naturally viral in every single meeting. Also, because they’ve spent a lot of time and effort to integrate with the major CRMs, and because they have a compelling vision of what could be done with the tech in the future, we’re switching our transcription service now.---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

Before you buy tech for Account Based Marketing (ABM), and even before you start picking target accounts, check out this episode with StrategicABM’s Chief Marketing Officer Declan Mulkeen.Their firm is 100% focused on ABM and Mulkeen talks about how the tech vendors have popularized the approach in recent years, but they didn’t create it. (it’s been around for over 20 years, and he proves it.)But today, most companies are getting into trouble by purchasing the tech first and launching ABM programs second. That’s only one of the myriad of reasons that companies are experiencing poor results according to Mulkeen, who advises that "you should do ABM without technology and get it working first. And then you can worry about what tech you need later." In fact, the only tech you need is a pen and paper. Write a strategy, think about the business outcomes, start small, test and measure. If you’ve been struggling with ABM, wonder if it’s the right strategy, or don’t understand how it fits with other marketing and sales initiatives in the first place, the answers are waiting for you here in this action-packed 30 minutes of straight talk about ABM. ---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

Referrals are the lifeblood of every business. The cost of acquisition is the lowest, and they tend to close faster and at higher rates, making the sales process WAY easier. So why do companies spend so much on paid channels where the cost per lead is going up and the quality is going down at such a rapid pace?Referrals have always been hard to scale—especially if you haven’t trained your people to ask.Referral Factory founder Kirsty Sherman believes she’s figured out a solution, even for B2B SaaS companies, where the referral process can be embedded into the platform by providing incentives for users to easily refer their connections. ---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

Raising capital for your SaaS has one purpose—to amplify and scale the business. It cannot define the business model or product-market fit for you. And once you raise capital, the whole dynamic changes. The pressures are different (you’re now on the clock to deliver return for investors) and so is the go-to-market strategy (the founder relationships won’t be enough to scale).  With several successful fundraises and exits under his belt, Jeff Solomon, CEO of Markup Hero talks about how he’s bootstrapped companies to a certain monthly recurring revenue rate that made it much easier to attract the right capital. Having started his current venture (Markup Hero) as a side project, he’s now able to decide whether or not to keep it as a lifestyle business or raise capital for a bigger exit.---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

Most companies fail with ABM because of their ad hoc execution. They target accounts as a wish list and continue to do business as usual. The truth is that successful ABM requires an organizational mindset shift, and that doesn’t happen by changing it all at one time. “Marketing usually gets it,” says Jennifer Leaver, senior global ABM Manager at Bazaarvoice. “The tougher sale is with sales. There’s a lot of change management involved.”Leaver’s approach to ABM adoption was to start small with “sales friendly’s” (Two salespeople out of 200) where she piloted an ABM program and focused on engagement metrics into their target accounts such as click-through rates, impressions, and web traffic. Later, she was able to measure pipeline in terms of full funnel metrics, they increased pipeline generation by 129%, increased opportunities by 57%, and deal velocity increased by 122%.With triple digit number increases across the board, full adoption after that wasn’t hard.If you’re thinking about adopting an ABM program or would like your ABM to reach its full potential, this episode is a must listen. ---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

Healthcare is one of the most difficult industries to penetrate, even for established brands.They’re risk-averse, have strong defenses against being sold to, sales cycles are long and they significant data protection requirements.So how do you do gain traction as a financial management startup targeting hospitals and healthcare systems?In this episode of SaaS Backwards, Ben Beadle-Ryby talks about how they’ve met this challenge by: Building the company around subject matter experts with deep industry roots to earn immediate credibility and early customersLeveraging VC connections who have connections in the spaceEnsuring that they have all of the necessary certifications to protect dataInvesting in long-term demand through thought leadership; positioning Akasa as thought leaders in AI applications for healthcareAligning his company's employees, customers and prospects around a larger mission to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare in the U.S.Ben also talks about ways they built the company to increase the odds of being successful, including how they built the founding team and product concept. He introduces the idea of "founder dating," that helped them work on team dynamics and recruitment, as well as doing a lot of up-front work to "pressure test" their initial product ideas. There's a lot of takeaways here in just 30 minutes... enjoy!Resources for SaaS ExecsRecently closed a funding round and need to ramp growth?Check out our comprehensive "scale-a-saas" guide:Think your website could generate more leads?Get our inbound lead generation self-assessmentWant to be a guest on SaaS Backwards?Click to meet with Ken Lempit to talk about an episode.SaaS Backwards is a free service to the SaaS community.---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

Business Development Representatives (BDRs) have typically been a sales function, as part of the compartmentalization of sales functions defined in Aaron Ross’ Predictable Revenue (2011).What worked well for a decade has met challenges today. They don’t want the phone calls or emails until they’re ready.In short, buyers have changed their research and buying process--what was predictable five years ago is…Well, not so much.Because prospecting is actually marketing, some innovative organizations have moved them under marketing and changed the incentives to focus on engagement over number of meetings booked. That’s a tough pill to swallow for many B2B companies that have built their sales (and marketing) infrastructures around the Predictable Revenue Model. As Vice President of Marketing at Intellum, Robyn Hazelton has led the charge to move their BDRs under marketing, develop a closer relationship with sales, and align all their sales, marketing, and customer success motions around the buyer. In this episode, she talks about how they made the move to marketing, the organizational challenges, and how to use the data to drive better decisions. The results speak for themselves—dramatically shorter sales cycles and four times higher revenue over the previous year.It’s an illuminating interview and will help you evaluate whether or not your current sales and marketing process could be modified for greater efficiency. Resources for SaaS ExecsRecently closed a funding round and need to ramp growth?Check out our comprehensive "scale-a-saas" guide:Think your website could generate more leads?Get our inbound lead generation self-assessmentWant to be a guest on SaaS Backwards?Click to meet with Ken Lempit to talk about an episode.SaaS Backwards is a free service to the SaaS community.---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch. 🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations. And the best part? 💡 It’s completely free. No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos. Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.