Listens

👍 On Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best, former AmpPush CEO Jesse Pujji dropped in to give a high level explainer on performance marketing and where most companies get it wrong. Making big Facebook or Google ad buys without an understanding of your funnel is the most common culprit of wasted dollars, but he also points to CEOs deferring marketing activities towards others as a key mistake. There’s really no one who can explain why their product is a winner better than the CEO, so as a rule of thumb, Pujii suggests CEOs spend half as much time on product as they do on developing unique marketing strategy. A lack of patience can also be the killer – it should take 90 days with more than 50% of a CEO’s time and focus to really get a channel nailed down, a big commitment which is worth the effort.

🎒 Education can be a difficult vertical to sell into – the sales cycles are long with multiple decision makers involved, and your product better be squeaky clean to get past IT. GoGuardian founder Advait Shinde recounts how he faced these obstacles on The SaaS Podcast, receiving countless rejections for his classroom management software in their first years of the business. He and his cofounder’s young age and lack of experience didn’t help their case, but he kept a positive mindset and was persistent with his prospects, who slowly but surely started to come around. Fast forward to today, and they’re used by 18 million studies and above 50m in ARR. Of course there are many reasons why Shinde was able to succeed, but as you’ll hear in the pod, he credits persistence above all else.

🧗 The SaaS Revolution podcast recently had LB Harvey, CRO at Front, on to discuss how to bring a company upmarket. One point she made which is worth repeating is that when you move to a larger customer segment in the B2B world, you are not going to win over customers because you are cool or have cutting-edge UX/technology. Midsize and enterprise clients truly only care about how your solution will help transform their business, so aligning your customer, sales, and marketing teams to develop in-depth use cases is much more important when making that move upmarket.