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SaaS Backwards Episode 22: A Half-hour Master Class in SaaS Marketing with Jay Gaines, Head of Marketing at AgentSync

Welcome to episode twenty-two of the SaaS Backwards podcast, where we interview CEOs and CMOs of fast-growing SaaS firms to reveal what they are doing that's working, and lessons learned from things that didn't work as planned. 

You can listen to the full episode directly below via Spotify, or visit SaaS Backwards on Buzzsprout or wherever you listen to podcasts.

 

A Half-hour Master Class in SaaS Marketing 

With Jay Gaines, Head of Marketing at AgentSync

Edited for clarity and readability 

Host, Ken Lempit:
Welcome to another episode of SaaS Backwards. It's a podcast that helps SaaS CMOs and CEOs to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. We take a look at what's working for growing SaaS companies, leadership decision-making, and what did and didn't work, and why.

Our guest today is Jay Gaines, Head of Marketing at AgentSync. But before we dig in, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, AgentSync?

Jay Gaines:
Sure. I'm currently the Head of Marketing at AgentSync, and prior to that I’ve been in B2B sales and marketing for most of my career. Most recently, I spent about 10 years at SiriusDecisions and Forrester. At Sirius, I ran our demand services and our CMO services, and was CMO with Sirius, and then Forrester, before getting back into the SaaS startup world.

AgentSync is a relatively early-stage enterprise SaaS company serving the insurance industry, which is entirely new to me. I had no background in insurance prior to joining AgentSync, but I'm pretty good at tackling the learning curve. It’s gone pretty well so far, and AgentSync recently announced our Series B just a couple weeks ago. We're growing very fast.

We help make the insurance industry infrastructure, modern. Our core product helps with distribution channels for insurance companies, end-to-end producer management. But we help them grow and stay compliant in a number of ways.

Ken:
So, it's a young startup company with $1 billion valuation, right?

Jay:
Correct. That's right.

Ken:
I think the first topic is one that's pretty near and dear to my heart, which is that one of the byproducts of everybody working from home (and with no events) was that there's been this content tsunami that we're all trying to swim through.
When we were talking in our prep session, we were saying that pretty good isn't good enough.

So, what does it take to create to good content?

What's your perspective on content that's worthy of driving opportunity for SaaS companies?

Jay:
Such an important topic. As we all know, content is king. Blah, blah, blah. Right?
It fuels our ability to engage audiences, build audience, convert audience, and drives everything--and it's a huge challenge right now. I talk to a lot of CMOs, and everybody's struggling with the same thing.

I want to talk a little bit about context first, because I've gotten some great insights from some of my peers around this.

With the rise of COVID, everybody's spending a lot more time in front of screens--that's not news. But combined with that, every marketing leader I know had a really big events budget. It's just typically a big part of the budget of any marketing team in B2B. And instead of letting that go, most CMOs did a really good job of holding onto that and took that budget and directed it towards creating greater experiences in digital channels, which typically means investing in content. So, everybody's investing a lot of budget, a lot of resources, energy, and content.

Ken:
That's the earthquake behind the tsunami, right?

Jay:
Exactly. That's the earthquake that caused the tsunami of content.

“Good” just isn't good enough anymore.

What I've seen work well, (both in my own experience and talking to peers) is we're getting back to an age where creativity matters a lot.

Having a point of view matters a lot--saying something that helps you break through the noise.

That sounds easy and obvious, but it's actually pretty challenging when you think about it, because so often hard to create content that's valuable for your audience. But then adding that layer of saying:

  • Do we have a unique point of view?
  • Do we have a brand personality that we want to make sure comes through in all of our content, as well?
  • What are we doing with our content that makes it more compelling than everything else that's out there?

That's the hard part. It comes down to the quality of the content, what you're saying within it, the formats that you're using, and the design that you're using.

But, ultimately, it's about the creation of a point of view, a brand personality and being willing to take some risks. For example, maybe you're trying to be contrarian in some way by saying something that others might disagree with. But by taking risk and making a commitment to a point of view and a personality that you're trying to get through with your content.

Old-school creativity, as far as I can tell, is winning the day when it comes to content.

Ken:
For a long time, I’ve wrestled with the art and science. This is really an apprenticeship and guild kind of business. And yet, there's this drive to do attribution on every single activity to revenue. And these are fundamentally conflicting ideas.

Personality and relevancy are also what we're focused on and having a foundational understanding and customer knowledge (really knowing these people well enough) so that what you write is relevant.

Too many marketers just skip over that part—and that's the hard part.

Jay:
I totally agree, and with both things you mentioned there's an extreme focus. I feel like everybody's gotten super good at creating content that drives SEO value—but that’s only the science behind it. Maximizing the frequency with which we're using certain words and phrases in a content asset.

But I guess, my question now is, "Are we willing to sacrifice a bit of that sometimes, in order to be creative? And are we really willing to say something that might be a little bit unexpected, that might not create immediate SEO value, but is creating a positive impression and engaging audiences in real ways?"

Of course the foundation is having a real understanding of your audience, and I'll share a personal experience with that.

I had no background in insurance before I joined AgentSync. So, I came into the company knowing that, (and being very clear about that) learning about the industry was one thing.

But learning about the people within that industry is an entirely different thing. And understanding those buyer personas.

Today, I feel like I have a very firm grasp of how insurance works. That's fine and good to have, but building that audience knowledge, I'm a little over four months in now, and I don't claim to have that nailed down just yet.

So, I must lean on the people who do. I spend a lot of time talking to customers and people within AgentSync, who’ve spent 20-30 years in the industry before coming into the company.

And we pass what we're doing by them, because again, it's hard to be creative if you don't understand the audience. Good creativity happens in context, and for content, that context is audience insights.

That goes way beyond mapping buyer journeys and making sure you have assets aligned to the various stages of it.

It goes beyond having a decent set of buyer personas.

It really gets into understanding, on a deeper level, what's important to this audience?

What is challenging them?

In insurance, one of the things that I would not have caught onto had I not been talking to them and the people in AgentSync who have been around for a long time, is they feel under-appreciated, which may be a universal quality among humans. But these are people who are doing licensing administrations, dealing with regulatory issues across all states in the U.S.

And the work that they're doing is not just driving the success of their business, but in a lot of ways, driving the economy. Insurance is central to managing risk, and the ability to do a lot of things that businesses and people want to do. Acknowledging that and pointing that out is something creative that we're doing that nobody else in our space is doing.

And just appreciating them and laying out there that, "Hey, the work you do is hard. It's important. And it's under-appreciated, under-acknowledged," is something that's driving a lot of positive sentiment and engagement. But again, it just came from getting to a bit of a deeper level of understanding that audience.

Ken:
Yeah. That's one of those basic human drives, validation, right? Feeling that you're seen and heard, that if you can channel it in an authentic way, can be very powerful. Certainly, have seen that before.

Next I’d like to talk about the use of direct mail--getting in somebody's physical mail stream.

I'm wondering how you see that as a media choice, and what you might be doing about it?

Jay:
I’m a big fan of direct mail for a lot of reasons. It's a little bit more challenging these days with a lot of people working from home. But there's a lot of solutions and ways to do it.

I should take a step back here though.

Being an analyst at Sirius, we benchmarked all our customers at the tactic level--what were they doing that was working, that was driving engagement and response in their audiences?

Direct mail was always top of the list in terms of conversion and response rates. A lot of folks didn't want to talk about that because everything's about digital channels all the time. And direct mail just seems old-school.

And by the way, I'm not necessarily talking about postcards. I'm talking about boxes, something that lands on somebody's desk that they have to open.

Ken:
Yeah, we call that undeniable.

Jay:
Yeah. Undeniable, right. It's going to get opened, it’s not going to get tossed.
The other thing I'll say about direct mail is, having been an analyst, one of the things I refuse to do is ever say that anything's dead.

There's all sorts of pundits that, way back when, we're saying direct mail is dead. Nothing is ever dead. And in fact, I would argue that if a lot of people are saying something's dead, that's a moment in which you want to do more of it, because it's going to be unique, and unusual, and stand out a little bit. So, direct mail, it's a platform for creativity. It's going to get noticed and it's going to get opened unlike email or other.

And when I say it's a platform for creativity, thoughtful direct mail is what really makes sense because it’s rooted in an understanding of your audience and what matters to them.

Just to share an example of that (and this goes back to my time at Sirius) one of the things that we enabled our SDR/BDR team to be able to do was to leverage direct mail as part of their toolkit to engage the folks that they were reaching out to.

Pretty typical stuff, not unusual.

You could send everything from gift cards to some predefined boxes of swag, and it worked fairly well. It increased engagement rates.

There was one BDR who was relatively new. She was pretty junior, but we noticed was just way outperforming everybody else. And we couldn't figure out exactly what was going on, until, of course, we sat down and talked to her.

We asked what she thought she was differently. “What's your talk track? How are you driving so many meetings and such great engagement?"

And she said, "Well, I'm using direct mail." And we're like, "Interesting. Which package are you using? Which of these predefined packages?"

And she was like, "No. I'm not using any of those," (which, by the way, stung a little bit, because I played a major role in defining those predefined packages.)

And she said, "What I'm doing, is I'm digging in and I'm going on LinkedIn. I'm seeing what the alma mater is for the people I'm reaching out to, and I'm sending them something from whatever school they went to, with a little note in there, as well."

And I was like, "What kind of things?"

She said, "I started with coffee mugs. That wasn’t great. But you can get these really cool, little bobblehead folks that are wearing the school jersey or t-shirt. And those things are going really well. And I'm finding just by doing that, I'm getting people to respond to me and engage with me, because it's thoughtful and something that they liked."

And I think her exact words, "I feel like I'm making them feel obligated to engage with me."

So, that was just an example of somebody being a little bit creative, using some audience insight and knowledge to do something that was highly personalized in the right scenario.

Ken:
But also, that kind of insight, that's free, right?

Jay:
It's free, yeah.

And the other lesson is that usually when companies implement direct mail programs (especially those that are not marketing-led, but are going to be sales-led), they put a lot of rules in place.

You definitely want to have guardrails, in terms of spend limits and stuff like that, but allowing them to be creative really can help out quite a bit, because they're going to be doing research.

The good ones will be, anyway.

But by not only having a group of things to choose from (that helps), but also doing things that are meaningful, creative, that stand out, it's, frankly, a little bit easier when you're sending people a box of something.

For example, at AgentSync, I talked about appreciating our customers, and the hard work that they do, and the nature of their job, and being a little bit under-appreciated, and totally overwhelmed all the time, sets us up to be pretty creative with direct mail and send them things that demonstrate empathy.

"We know your job is super hard, so here's some coffee. Or here's some other things," making it a little bit funny, acknowledging the challenges that they're facing, helps them feel understood. And it works.

Ken:
Yeah. I think that's a great use for it. And especially if you think of the SDR team almost as part of marketing, as opposed to sales, right? They're doing the work, the hand-to-hand combat of marketing, to surface opportunity for sales. I think that use for direct mail is really cool. We've also seen things that are more broadly-based, like sending a book that is talking about contemporary topics, especially if your CEO or CTO wrote it. That could be very cool. Find a way to get the box opened and just get some acknowledgement, depending on where you are in the funnel.

It's probably a good time to segue into one of your favorite tactics. And I think this is the first time I've heard this, and it's always fun to hear something for the first time. So, talk to us about the lightning strike, and tell us what that is, and how you pull it off.

Jay:
Sure. So, definitely my favorite topic. So, there's a common thread across everything we've been talking about so far, and it is getting noticed. Breaking through the noise.

That is the common thread.

In my experience, lightning strikes are the best way to do it. And again, I'll tell a little story from my SiriusDecisions days where we were very operationally oriented.

We were very much about the science of good B2B marketing and helping our customers achieve operational excellence.

We benchmarked everything and, especially with demand, you could benchmark everything. It's very measurable. And we would constantly be looking for what moves the needle most here. And what I found when I was leading that service, and we had hundreds and hundreds of B2B clients that we were benchmarking, is that lightning strikes move the needle more than anything else.

Now, that's hard to admit, because again, we're all about excellent demand management processes, and program design, and creating the right mix of nurture flows, and all of that. Yes, it's important. It definitely works over time.

But the keywords here are "over time."

What you see is gradual, incremental improvement in building that demand engine, and that's because marketing, as we know it, is predicated on the concept of reach and frequency.

Again, I would never say that's dead. It's important stuff.

But lightning strikes break through all that noise and accelerate your ability to engage target audiences, help them to understand your point of view. Usually, you're evangelizing a problem, and establishing yourself as the logical and inevitable solution to that problem.

Ken:
I think we need to tell people what a lightning strike is.

Jay:
Yes. So, let me get to the point. There was a lot of buildup. I was trying to build tension, which is part of a good lightning strike.

Ken:
You did a good job. That was awesome.

Jay:
So, what a lightning strike is, it's an activity that happens in a very short period of time, targeted to a very well-defined audience, that compels them to engage, and notice you, and understand whatever it is you're trying to communicate.

I'll give you some very tangible examples of lightning strikes that I've observed firsthand, that worked really well.

There's a company called Splunk, the data-to-everything company. They went through a rebrand and positioned themselves as the data-to-everything company. And the problem that they're addressing as a company, is that we are awashed in a sea of data.

We have more access to more data than ever before and the problem has become leveraging that data to solve problems.

When there's so much data, it's easy to become overwhelmed and lose sight of what matters and what doesn't. Their technology helps you do that--properly use data to solve problems.

So, what they did for their lightning strike, was they hosted an actual event. And when they hosted that event, they targeted the top 50 or 100 CIOs at their top strategic accounts that they were going after, and then invited Barack Obama to come in and host a half-day with them, where he was talking about how data is helping to solve global problems.

They had media there, and pretty much in the course of a half-day event, established themselves, not just in the mind of those 50 or so CIOs, but because media was there and there was lots of news about it, pretty much, in the world, established themselves as the company that was at the center of solving massive problems with data.

It was fast and targeted. They generated huge amounts of pipeline directly out of it.

Essentially overnight, they became the category king or queen of that space.

Also, it doesn't have to be an event.

Drift, the chatbot company, published a book. The same day it was published, they used couriers to hand-deliver it to tons of CMOs all over the place.

It made a big impression that was undeniable--they couldn't ignore it.

Suddenly, they were at the center of conversational marketing, a new category, and everybody needed and wanted it.

We watched all of our clients suddenly needing to buy and implement Drift overnight.

Ken:
I think it's really cool to look at those, because they're very different, but similar, in a way. And that's what makes them categorically lightning strikes. Short duration, burn bright, and in an era where we can't go to eight trade shows in a year, we can take that $500,000 or $1 million, and redirect it into something we can do, and really break through. And I think that's a pretty powerful set of case studies.

Certainly, the Splunk event must have created a lot of fear of missing out, in case you missed it feelings. And a lot of opportunity to share that content in different ways.

Sort of the ultimate ABM, being invited to sit with Barack Obama for a half a day.

Jay:
Right. It's hard to say no to that. The other thing I'll say about lightning strikes, obviously, it's an approach that goes beyond releasing news and doing things in drips and drabs over time. But it works well with a sister approach, which is called the cadence.

David Sacks at Craft Ventures wrote this article about what he's seen work well, especially in SaaS startups, product companies, which is this cadence.

The cadence is basically, four times a year, once a quarter, you do something really big.

Typically, it's oriented around a product launch of some kind, but what he advises is to save up your news.

If you've hit key milestones, if you have great customer stories to tell, whatever it is, save it up.

Don't release it in drips and drabs--do something big once a quarter and release it there.

Again, you're going to command a lot more attention that way, than just making a little bit of noise consistently over time.

He uses some pretty great examples.

He'll say, "Look at who has done this. The masters of this are people like Marc Benioff, and Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk." They're on stage doing launch events, showing their stuff. And they do lightning strikes on a regular basis.

Ken:
Part of what they do. I think I also want to just talk to something I've witnessed and provide a little coaching for marketing leaders.

You have to look out for the CEO who's thinking about something spectacular, but it's not aimed at any business outcome. There's no way to correlate the spectacular thing he or she wants to do with something that might drive the business. And perhaps, you can aim that desire if you see the spectacular coming at you, this big thing that has no real meaning, maybe aim it this way.

Jay:
Yeah. That's a real risk. And again, what makes for a good lightning strike, is that it's targeted. It’s designed to have a specific outcome, establish you as a category leader, drive some kind of outcome. And when I've done it my past, there's revenue targets that we're expecting to come out of this. You want a very specific outcome to be defined. And it needs to be targeted, rather than just doing something random that's big.

Ken:
Perfect. I think another thing that we see CEOs involved in for too long, is defining the product, keeping the role of product management. As a company grows, and we can think about AgentSync, where now, there's a real ramp up, right? The organization's getting broader and deeper.

But companies that are in this growth mode, how important is product marketing? And where should that responsibility, ultimately, lie, from your point of view?

Jay:
What you say is true. The vast majority of SaaS CEOs are product people. They have an idea for a product and they start a company. They're often the user with the problem and they feel this personal connection to it. They have great visions all the time.

But having awesome vision, I would argue, makes you terrible at being a product manager, because if you're product managing or product marketing, your goal is to release product on schedule and consistently get that done.

Very often, what I've seen, is CEO product vision disrupting the ability to actually release product. Even if it's a minimum viable product--you need to get product out the door.

Product marketing is absolutely essential, and I don't think it's ever too early to start doing product marketing.

I've heard some marketing leaders and others argue that you don't really need product marketing at a SaaS company until they're right around 30 to 50 million in ARR (average rate of return).

I would say that's not the case at all, because what product marketing is doing for the business is a lot. First of all, obviously, it's about product insight, but the core of good product marketing is audience insight.

We've talked about really understanding your buyers and your users. And good product marketers are the ones who are building those buyer personas, mapping those buyer journeys, understanding value in your product that meets your target audience's need.

Without it, usually what you have is a company that's building product and bringing it to market based on somebody inside's great idea (which isn't always a terrible thing. Steve Jobs was famous for ignoring outside audiences and the voice of the customer. But not everybody is Steve jobs).

Typically, to create and innovate good product, and position it properly in a way that's going to be compelling to your audiences, you have to have good audience insight. And that's what product marketing brings. It's mapping those products to that audience in such a way that you're going to be successful over time.

Ken:
When does product marketing start in the life of a young company?

Jay:
What I would tell any SaaS founders is: when you're looking to hire your first marketer, right off the bat, your first marketer should be somebody who has some product marketing chops and experience in their background. Sure, they can be demand-heavy, but having that product marketing experience range is going to help them just be more effective, in general.

Ken:
To me, if you don't understand the customer and the product market fit, you can't do a great job of generating demand. You'll be off-target right out of the gate.

Jay:
Absolutely.

Ken:
So, thanks for putting the highlight and underline on that. That was awesome. Couple more things I wanted to cover. If I'm a CMO or head of marketing in the SaaS space, where do you hang out online? Where are the places where you're looking for ideas and where you're sharing your ideas?

Jay:
Yeah. There's no end to SaaS CMO groups out there.

I guess the first thing I would say is, find some and join them. It really helps to talk to peers. We can all learn from each other all the time. I'm lucky, in that my unique experience as being the person who ran the CMO services at Sirius and Forrester, I got to meet and work very closely with a lot of CMOs. So, I have a huge network of CMOs that I tap into constantly.

And by the way, I should mention that, as an analyst advising CMOs, I learned more from my clients than, I'm sure, they ever learned from me, because I just got to talk to so many. And there's so many great ones out there. So, find some. The ones that I'm currently engaged with, and use the most often, there's one great Slack group, called CMO Coffee Talk, that I'm involved with.

I think the original founders were Matt Heinz and Latané Conant, who's a CMO at 6sense. It's just a thriving community. You rarely see Slack groups that are that active. I check in on it several times a week. And, pretty much, any question you can ask, somebody's going to offer up an answer in that group. There are tons of resources--everything from planning templates, and more. It's fantastic. So, that's one.

The others that I'm part of right now, I'm part of a much smaller group. There's probably about 10 or so of us total, which we call, B2B in the Black. And it's unique, in that it's a group of SaaS CMOs and a group of SaaS Chief Financial Officers, as well. And the whole point of this group is talking about that relationship between finance and marketing. And specifically, the CFO and the CMO, which I appreciate deeply, because I’ve found that being able to communicate effectively to finance people in terms that they understand and understanding finance in general, has helped me in my career in massive ways.
I typically get the budgets I want because of it, which is a really important thing to be able to do, to be a successful CMO.

There are others. I'm part of another one called, The CMO Power Hour, that Erica Seidel runs, who's an executive recruiter that focuses on CMOs.

She brings together a really great, unique group of folks. And there's different topics each week. And in fact, interestingly, coming full circle a little bit, the big topics of conversation among all of the groups I've been in recently, is how hard it is to find good product marketers right now, and how expensive they are. There’s so few of them, and it's almost like it's a lost art -- you can't find good product marketers, but everybody's realizing how much they need them.

Ken:
That’s interesting. I remember about 12 or 13 years ago, I had an experience where I helped a company go public as their public relations council. The IPO almost didn't happen, and we got them excluded from bad coverage on CNBC and Barron's.

And within a month or so, I'm in the CFO's office and he halves my budget. He knew the drama and he was central to it. And I realized that I'd almost never had a meeting with a CFO where the budget went up. This was the most glaring example. We had, literally, saved the bacon with them.

And that's why we reinvented our business to be, for the most part, marketing that we can measure, and attribute, and understand the contribution of what we do to what the outcomes are.

I want to just peel back a little bit what you did as a marketer, to help you have those successful conversations, because it's one thing to say you want to do it. And it's another thing to build the context. And that's a word you've used a lot. But I think a shared context with the financial leadership is something that doesn't get enough air time. I don't think we talk enough about shared context with finance.

Jay:
Agreed. It does come back to context, and I’ve found that one of the things I did early in my career when I was technically reporting to the CEO, but after a few months in the role, I was like, "I'm really reporting to the CFO here," because the CEO lived in a totally different part of the country and wasn't around very much. I took one of those executive MBA immersive four or five-week courses in corporate finance, and just having a basis of knowledge like how to understand a balance sheet and speak the language and understand the terms that CFOs are going to understand, that's foundational.

Bigger and more important than that, is to have empathy through context, which a CFO's role is to protect the company financially. That's at the heart of their job. Protect the bottom line.

The pain that CFOs have to deal with quite often, is saying "no." And I've interviewed a lot of them, and what I hear repeatedly is, "I'll have great ideas that are brought to me, whether it's a CMO pitching a budget or an investment in something that they want to do, and I look at that and say, 'That is a really good idea. I get it.' But guess what? I have to say, 'No,' because we can't afford it."

Usually, the reason CFOs will say that, even though they think it's a great idea, comes back to cashflow. Every CMO I know understands budgets, revenue targets, and growth goals, but do they understand cashflow? Do they understand where cash might be tight at certain times of the year? Do they understand the dynamics of cashflow in their business?

Because the number one thing the CFO cares about is making sure that we can pay the people who work for us and work with us, in terms of vendors. And that we're not going to find ourselves in a risky situation that's going to impact our ability to raise funds, the terms at which we can get loans, all those kinds of things.

I'm not saying you have to be in touch with all the dynamics of finance within your business. You just have to understand that your CFO is typically looking really closely at cashflow. And even if you have massive cash reserves, say you've just raised $100,000,000 and you've got that sitting in the bank.

Cashflow still matters quite a bit to your CFO--it's something that they're watching closely. So, what I found is, if I can go in and say, "Okay. Well, here's what I want to make big investments in." And yes, these are outsized investments. And have a conversation about cashflow and say, "How is this going to affect it? Are there things I should know about?"

Usually, the CFO will open up and be like, "Well, yeah. We're looking at opening office in Singapore that same month that you want to invest all that money in that massive event that you want to do. And that's going to be a problem for us."

Oftentimes, it comes to timing and being able to work that out. But again, it just comes back to empathy and having a conversation that goes a little bit deeper than, "Here's my great idea, and here's the outcome I think I can drive," and leaving it there.

Just digging into what is motivating the CFO and what are the criteria by which they're evaluating these decisions, goes a long way.

Ken:
So, there's been a few themes here that seem to just run through how you're approaching these topics. It's context, empathy, driving to outcomes. It seems like if you have those kinds of constructs at the heart of your planning, almost, no matter what you're doing, you're going to find some success or a common ground with people.

Jay:
That's right. And that example I just gave was a real one that happened in my career at a certain point. I was asking to spend a very large sum of money on a specific thing we wanted to do, and I proposed that we do it in a specific month in the year. And the CFO at the company was like, "No. We cannot do that."

But knowing what I know about cashflow and things like that, I asked if there's a cashflow issue. And they happened to say, "Well, yeah, because we have all these other things that are happening at exactly that time. We just can't do it."

And I said, "Well, you know what? I can do what I need to do at a different time. Does that work?" And he said, "Sure. Now, you can do it." So, it worked out.

Ken:
So, you can turn a "no" into a "yes," just by having a little bit of understanding of what the drivers of those other people are in your organization and finding a compromised way.

Well, I think I want to land it there with you, Jay. This was quite a conversation and I'm really grateful that we had this time together. If people want to learn more about your company and contact you, how can they do that?

Jay:
Yeah. They can go to AgentSync's website to check out the company. And to reach out to me, obviously, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's Jay Gaines. And I'm happy to chat with anybody. Again, I really value talking to others in marketing. They don't have to be CMOs, either.

Ken:
Yeah. The practitioners who are really taking the lumps, often are the ones that help us understand what not to do, right?

Jay:
That's right. Exactly.

Ken:
Get out to the edge. Jay, thank you so much for making time. And until next time. We'll see you on the podcast.

Thanks for listening to the SaaS Backwards podcast brought to you by Austin Lawrence Group. We are a growth marketing agency that helps SaaS firms reduce churn, accelerate sales, and generate demand. Learn more about us at www.austinlawrence.com. You can email Ken Lempit at kl@austinlawrence.com about any SaaS marketing or customer retention subject. We hope you'll subscribe, and thanks again for listening.

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