Listens

🏎️ We are all for short podcasts that can be knocked out on the drive to work, so Stephen Cummins’s 14 Minutes of SaaS has been one of our recent favorites. In his latest episode, he talks with Trustpilot CEO Peter Mühlmann, who discusses how your market is most important to success, followed by your team and your actual product. He also argues that most startups take 10 years to succeed, rather than the overnight success story we often hear of the hyper-growers. It can take 2-3 years to even figure out if you are right about your product and that it truly works as intended, so he urges founders to be more patient with their idea. In a world where we are encouraged to pivot quickly and “move fast and break things”, that can be a difficult balance to strike.

📊 If you work in SaaS you have probably come across ChartMogul at some point, most likely when looking up the right way to calculate net retention or another SaaS metric. That’s because they invested heavily in content since their inception 5 years ago, becoming a go-to thought leader in the space without spending a dime. Their CEO Nick Franklin shared how that content strategy got things going when they lacked funds for other activities, and other growth tips for bootstrapped businesses. He also delves into a dilemma many serving the SMB face – churn from customers going out of business. For Nick, slowly moving upmarket where more upsell potential lies is 100% of his current focus.

👂 Drift’s Tricia Gellman and InVisions’s Brian Kardon recounted the biggest mistakes they made in their early CMO days on the SaaS Revolution Show. Both pointed to a lack of alignment with their stakeholders on where marketing should be focused as the #1 mistake, which is pretty ironic given that marketing is all about being a great listener to your audience! Another mishap was not moving quickly enough. You want to be able to make a noticeable impact in your company within your first 90 days, so Kardon suggests starting to look for new hires (if you are adding to your team) the day you sign. They also pointed out some simple improvements like more detailed reporting which can serve as quick wins.

🤬 We listened to Gong.io’s Mike McEuen (Senior Marketing Manager) chat about the company’s most successful marketing tactics on the SaaS Marketing Superstars pod. They’ve seemingly been everywhere since early 2019, and it started with carving out a voice on LinkedIn via organic posts, which remains one of their top traffic sources today. Unlike Facebook, which pretty much requires businesses to buy ads for exposure, LinkedIn offers great visibility that can lead to ultra efficient customer acquisition. Visibility of course relies on well crafted content, which McEuen thinks Gong did by taking a hard, counterintuitive stance on sales. For example, they posted data showing that cursing on calls actually led to more deals closed.