Welcome to episode forty-eight 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.
At the 2019
Ascent Conference in New York,
Aptiv.io’s CEO Guy Mounier recalls their informal poll about how well their demand generation programs were working.
Two-thirds of respondents said, “we’re fine” or “we’re good.”
Fast forward to the same conference in November 2022 and almost everyone was struggling to cut through the noise to generate qualified leads. Even those with good results were still getting pressure from boards and investors to produce more leads at a lower cost.
Effective demand generation has become like Moore’s Law in reverse – you have to double down on marketing spend every year to maintain the same number of leads.
To solve this conundrum, companies have gravitated towards AI platforms that identify buyer intent signals to prioritize account focus—a space Mounier calls “Revenue AI” where AI platforms can identify buyer intent signals for accounts potentially entering a buying window.
Only a third of the survey respondents knew about the potential of these platforms though—and 90 percent of them said they couldn’t afford it--the value for the money and the complexity didn’t make sense to deploy.
The game changer according to Mounier is to have a 360-degree approach to intent signals (versus the siloed approaches that exist today) and do it a quarter of the cost.