Welcome to episode thirty-nine 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.

Enabling sales is the name of the game for marketers in funded SaaS startups

With Director of Marketing at eVolve MEP, David Gabriel

Edited for clarity

Ken Lempit, Host:
Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CMOs and CEOs to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is David Gabriel. He's head of marketing at eVolve MEP, a SaaS platform that helps mechanical, electrical and plumbing contractors increase productivity, profitability, and growth. Hit David, welcome to the podcast. 

Before we dig in, could you tell me just a little bit more about yourself and eVolve MEP?

David Gabriel:
I've been in the industry for over nine years. When I was 22, I started my own marketing agency and had some great success. There I was able to work with all types of SaaS companies, enterprise, mid-market and small startups. I found that the startup space, especially for SaaS, is my favorite place. 

Now, I’m the head of marketing at eVolve MEP where we've been growing fast over the past three years (100% per year). So it's been a fun ride so far. We are building the first ever platform for MEP contractors to increase their productivity in their MEP operations.

Ken Lempit:
Thanks for that. So a 100% year over year, that's like definitely being attached to a rocket ship. Isn't it?

David Gabriel:
It's a lot of fun. I think a lot of it comes down to opportunity and a high-level strategy–and it's when all the right pieces come together, not one department can do it on its own.

Ken Lempit:
Well, fair enough. So you're at a high-growth company, but the economy is a little wobbly with the looming recession threat. But employers are hiring. It's a strange economy. What does that mean in the life of a startup marketer and how are you adjusting to that?

David Gabriel:
Yeah, well, it's a really exciting time because believe it or not, you look out through all of history, this is when the future companies are made during times of uncertainty. We’ve found that you must stay agile and able to adapt when the market is changing. 

One of the ways that I do it, is that I’ll look at my department and I'll almost fire all of the roles. Now. I won't actually fire anybody, but I'll fire all the roles.

Ken Lempit:
Well, you had me scared there I was. Wow, this guy's truly blood thirsty.

David Gabriel:
No, not that type of head of marketing, but I'll fire all the roles, fire the technology and ask myself, I do this exercise every six to 18 months. And I ask myself, "Do I have the right team? Do I have the right people? Do I have the right technology for this change?" And that's an important question because things change almost every six months. So in order to stay agile, sometimes you have to change the roles and responsibilities within your organization.

Ken Lempit:
That’s an interesting thought experiment, because it allows you to think abot your organization and your technology stack. How do you bring the people along with you then? It sounds like it could be really exciting for folks and keep them fresh.

David Gabriel:
Yeah. Well, a lot of the people that I bring on in the startup world I call “T-shaped marketers”. They’re marketers that are skilled in every aspect of marketing.Maybe they're not an expert in Adobe, but they can make designs in Canva. They're resourceful, but they've got one area that it's their sweet spot. 

That allows me to shift people around where I don't have to take them out of what they're passionate about, but they can shift over into other areas of marketing if we need more support on that end. 

Ken Lempit:
So, there's the results of the work that's used as a signpost. And then there's the people in tech that we array against the goals and objectives, right?

David Gabriel:
Yep.

Ken Lempit:
So how do you work to understand what is and isn't working? What are the ways that you can anticipate rather than after the fact?

David Gabriel:
At the end of the day, nobody can predict what the future is going to look like, but there are signs and it’s about how you’re setting up your leading and lagging indicators.

Here at eVolve, we in marketing are focused on revenue. We want to contribute to the number. And it's not just the demand gen side. We believe that branding should be married to demand gen. It affects growth in the organization when done right. 

So the north star is revenue. Are we growing? Are we maintaining that growth of a 100% year over year?  That number gets harder as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But this year, it's a 100%. So are we on track to hit that? 

Leading indicators could be leads or website traffic. And sometimes our leading metrics are how many new tactics are we testing? But if we're not trying new things as a team, we're not going to find those new areas for growth.

Ken Lempit:
So let's talk about that. Finding new things. Do you actually have a discipline around building new tactics into the mix?

David Gabriel:
Yeah. So there's a great book called Traction. Not the one by Gino. Ginos is really good, too. There's another book, Traction and it's geared specifically for startups. It's about different tactics and it talks about bullseye methodology and it's a good way to test out different tactics to figure out what are your core drivers for growth.

One of the ways we look at it is if I was starting from ground zero, I might look at, start with hypotheses. 

What are six ways that I might be able to create demand or capture demand for this product? 

So then I would create minimum viable tests for those six campaigns. And then it's like racing horses. You go through that test, you evaluate based off of effort, based off of the investment that was spent, and then off of the result. What was that return? And those that are producing really well, we double down and continue to double down. And scale that until we see, most of the lead gen tactics have a bell curve so eventually they flatten out. But you keep scaling it down until you see that bell curve.

Ken Lempit:
I like that. You have effort, investment and outcome–those are the three things. And so you might have something that's low money, but super intense on the manual. Labor might not be something you want to do again, so  you have to try and optimize all three of those. Do you happen to, off the top of your head, know the author of that other Traction book?

I love  it when practitioners share what’s in their library, and I think this could be really important for people who are looking for how to build that agility into their testing.

David Gabriel:
Yeah. This was a game changing book when I first went into the startup arena. So it's called Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth and it's written by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.

Ken Lempit:
Awesome. So how have you applied that at eVolve MEP? And, you have some examples of some tests that you might want to share with us.

David Gabriel:
Yes, one of the things was asking initially what has worked, and what has gotten us some of the success that we had and we were just under a million dollars. It was the first year I came on board and  we needed to understand  what's currently working right now in the industry and events.

Events were an area that was working, and we didn’t want to pull back from those, especially when we were seeing a net return on investment. 

Digging in deeper understanding on how much we were spending at events and not just on the event, but the effort that our employees are spending on this event, the time, all of that resources, and understanding what was the return on marketing investment for that event.

Coming on, looking at adjacent industries, as well as in our industry, what's working. So in our industry, collaborating with influencers has been a great thing. Publications like NECA. They are the National Electrical Contractor Association, collaborating with them. That's really worked well in this industry. I also looked outside of the industry at similar ones but not the same. What's working that they might not be doing? And what we found was digital looking at LinkedIn and digital ads. There is a big opportunity there, and that's been one of our huge drivers of growth just because the lead cost per, opportunity cost per acquisition is so low compared to spending in the event space.

Ken Lempit:
That's interesting. When you talked about events during our prep call and you said that it was something we had de-emphasized, and it had a comeback. And I think that might be worth just sharing that vignette because I thought it was really pretty interesting.

David Gabriel:
Yes, and it’s  the key to being agile–having people on my team that are not just event people, but they're marketers that can do events because with the world we live in with COVID events could, like we saw, I mean they disappeared over night. So you want to have people on your team that are T-shape who can wear many different hats, at least at the startup in the startup space.

One of the things we saw, obviously during 2020, events went completely down. But every quarter, we're always surveying our customers and trying to understand what's important to them. 

So in our webinars, we sent out Q&As around events. This was April 2021, and we sent out a survey to our customers saying, "Hey, if we were to meet in person, would you come out?" And it had a couple different options. We found that the majority of people in the MEP space, these mechanical contractors, they’re  rough gruff. They're not drinking lattes.  They're eating barbecue, and they're like, "We want to get out. We want to do stuff."

Ken Lempit:
Hey, they're out in the real world already.

David Gabriel:
Exactly. Right. So if we followed what is mainstream, we would've missed out on that opportunity. So we did an event. We ended up having over 80 people attend that first event that we did. And it was at Top Golf, and we completely sold out the event. 

That was a main key part of our strategy for the rest of 2021. Now this year, we've started to see in 2022, I think with this summer, there's been some issues with COVID. We've seen events go a little bit down, and  we have those leading indicators of seeing, "Okay, attendance. Are we getting the engagement?" We're looking at the conversion rates based off of our outreach. And if we're seeing a dip, that's where we funnel, we've been funneling more money to other tactics.

Ken Lempit:
I love the idea of using the survey to help you figure out what to feed your prospects. I mean, that's really almost what you've done. Right?

David Gabriel:
Yeah. Surveys. I think it's definitely an underutilized way to engage your customers. It's funny because a lot of marketers are always talking about being data driven. And I know marketers, they'll look at Google analytics, HubSpot analytics, their dashboards all day long. But they miss out on the qualitative information, which is surveying customers or actually picking up the phone and talking to a customer. I've learned so much, and a lot of it is balancing both of them.

Ken Lempit:
Hey, in all our engagements with clients, the first thing is, we need to talk to your customers, your prospects and the people who didn't buy. We need to get right in with them and mix it up and find out what's really on their minds. And I think you have to do that on an ongoing basis, if you can build that into your plan. Absolutely. Can we talk a little bit about the tension between lead generation and demand generation? You alluded to it, but it was really almost we didn't get much in there. How are you managing that tension between what you need to do this month, this quarter versus building this company for success?

David Gabriel:
Yeah, it comes down to short term and long term thinking. You always want to start with the long term, big picture. Where do I want to be, five years from today? And I think the reason that's important is, a lot of times we're very ambitious of what we can do this year, but we usually underestimate what's possible in five years. I'm a big believer in having that big goal, that big vision of where we want to be in the future. You never want to compromise hitting the short term goals at the expense of the long term, sustainable success. So, and that's more the demand generation now.

As it relates to balancing how much should I spend in lead gen versus demand gen. It really comes down to being a team player with what's the priority of our CEO.  So I want to make sure I'm aligning with the CEO where he's going, because he's driving the ship. 

I also want to align with sales, because at the end of the day, marketing is all about growth. And if they're not working hand in hand with sales, then we're failing. And sales has the hard job. They're on the ground. If you think of the military, they're on the ground and they've got the guns, they're infiltrating. And marketing's at the top in the planes, shooting cover fire.  But they're actually in the trenches doing it.

I think part of it is looking at what we can do to make their lives easier. If they have an insane, aggressive goal that requires more leads and they're going to miss their number if they don’t get some help from marketing, then I'm investing more in the lead generation.

From a branding standpoint, if we're launching new products, and we see that the top of the funnel is small, then we invest more into branding. But it's really, it's looking at that funnel and also aligning with other departments.

Ken Lempit:
I want to make sure I have it right for myself and folks who would listen. We actually want to look at what the content of the funnel and the velocity is to help us make those investments. And also how our colleagues are doing in sales. So if they're really, if they're able to generate a lot of opportunity on their own, in the short term, then that can also release the pressure on the bottom of the funnel for us.

David Gabriel:
Yes, and it's wild, but I think having that empathy for sales is really important in the marketing space. We're seeing it a lot in the SaaS industry that marketing really views themselves as partners with sales. 

I've been in a lot of different organizations outside of SaaS, and it's not the case–marketing's looked at as, “Oh, they're just creative types.” But that's really changing, especially when it comes to companies that are growing rapidly. We need to be working hand in hand and have that empathy of, we don't want to just hit our number. Are these quality leads? Give us feedback. We want to know. Are we passing good leads, bad leads? Are they converting? You might say they're great leads, but wait a minute, are they converting? You know what I mean? So there needs to be a little bit of that empathy for sales, and I think that's a big part of it as well.

Ken Lempit:
That's a really interesting point. I think you're right in the software world. I think we talk the talk and try to walk the walk much more than in other vertical markets. What have you done? Well, you have alignment in your case because you worked for the head of sales. You worked for the CRO. How has that influenced how you operate as a marketing leader?

David Gabriel:
That's a good question. At the end of the day,  it's my vision. But  I look at myself as I'm in sales. It's that old question of, "Raise your hand if you're in sales," and everybody should be raising their hand. You know what I mean? 

I think even if I wasn't reporting to the CRO, I think it really comes down to understanding that if we don't sell things... Even as a startup and  backed with lots of money, eventually if you are not profitable, you're not going to survive.

Sales is the name of the game, and when it comes to demand gen versus lead gen, it's really long term versus short term thinking. Right. And I think it needs to start with long term. You align with the CEO, if they're specific changes. And then you look at the velocity of the funnel. If bottom of the, if you're producing a lot at the top of the funnel, then I would focus more on that conversion rate, lead generation, just pushing them down to sales. Right. If we're not even, we're squeezing that as hard as possible then, and we're not getting anything, then it's more the demand gen.

Ken Lempit:
Interesting. By the way, what are the KPIs that you're living by? What are the most important things to you guys?

David Gabriel:
For my department, return on marketing investment is our north star. Our goal is one dollar spent yields $5 back. From there, we look at marketing opportunities, opportunities generated that came through marketing and then marketing generated leads. We do look at traffic, we do look at email open rates, but again, these are more indicators for those specific tactics that should never overshadow the leads, ops, marketing, attributed revenue.

Ken Lempit:
I think it's interesting if you have a CEO who's focused on your open rate, you have your CEO focused on the wrong thing, right? I've got one of those in my client base.

David Gabriel:
That’s wild. You don't want to just be focused on fuzzy metrics. I think it's good to share, "Hey, this is what an open rate means," but it’s  important to have the right KPIs. In most organizations, you've got a marketing department and they are supposed to be helping sales and if you're not tracking revenue, ops, leads, then I don't know if you're tracking the right metrics. I mean, at the high level in the SaaS world. That's just my opinion.

Ken Lempit:
Do you have responsibility for the revenue after the initial sale?

David Gabriel:
For the expansion of it, yes.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. So we get them in the door. We get the logo on the wall. Now what?

David Gabriel:
It’s definitely new revenue. I'm not responsible for anything renewal–that's more of our customer success team. I'll enable customer success, but I don't look at that as the return on marketing investment. I'm more focused on new revenue, which could be a new logo or expansion of cross selling rather than the upselling.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. Awesome. So if you were talking with a friend or a contact who's considering a position at an early stage company, what are the few things you might suggest they ask before they make the leap? So you're evaluating a job op at a funded startup. What do you suggest they ask?

David Gabriel:
That’s another good question. I think you want to make sure that you're compensated fairly, so understand what the market rate is for that. If you're a part of the founding team or very early, you want to be getting equity in a company. That's what makes going to a startup attractive. So just understanding is this a fair opportunity. 

And you need to understand how they view marketing? Is marketing a part of the growth engine or is it a glorified designer?

Also, do you really need a head of marketing that's focused on brand or  focused on demand gen? Is it the full suite or is it just one segment? 

Obviously, whether that can be good or bad is based on your goals. If you're somebody that just wants branding, that’s okay. But if you're looking for the big, eventually be a CMO, then you want the whole thing.

I think understanding the opportunity, doing a little bit of your own market research and understanding is this is the market in a good spot. Does this startup look like it's going to make it because at the end of the day, you could be the perfect head of marketing, but if the other departments and hey, sales could be doing great, too, but if the product's not doing great, you're going to fail. 

The challenge is that marketing can’t make things successful– It just accelerates whatever the outcome is going to be. So if your product's going down, good marketing is going to make it go down faster.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. We didn't talk a lot about what eVolve does, but what makes this company special and what attracted you to their mission?

David Gabriel:
Besides the amazing team here at eVolve, we also have amazing leadership. This is one of the most exciting products I've ever seen. I did not grow up in the construction industry. My dad doesn't work in construction or anything. So this was an entirely new industry for me. But when I realized how ripe this industry is for growth and specifically, being at a place where we can build the first platform for this niche market and really dominate this market, it was just such an exciting opportunity.

Part of it is starting from a place of empathy of realizing, "Wow, there's a lot of people, literally their job all day long is pushing a button. What if we could just automate that? We've got clients that say "It used to take me a week, and now I can do it in a day." 

There haven't been many products I've worked with where I've heard results like that. 

That's in one of our promo videos and we've had several customers say that. It's a great product, and I think that if you're going to be head of marketing somewhere, you need a product that is amazing. It'll make your life a lot easier.

Ken Lempit:
It is good to believe in the business you're in, without a doubt. Well, this was really a great conversation.If people want to learn more about eVolve MEP or get in touch with you, how can they do that?

David Gabriel:
If you want to learn more about eVolve, go to our website, evolvemep.com, or you can email me at david.gabriel@evolvemep.com.

Ken Lempit:
Awesome. Likewise, for me, if you want to reach out LinkedIn is the place. linkedin.com/in/kenlempit and if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please do so wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Hey, David Gabriel, thank you so much for being on SaaS backwards today.

David Gabriel:
It was a pleasure. I enjoyed the conversation.

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.