Welcome to episode thirty-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.

Marketing as an investment portfolio with Fractional CMO Yasmin Morrsion

With Fractional CMO Yasmin Morrsion

Edited for clarity and readability 

Ken Lempit:
Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CMOs and CEOs to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Yasmin Morrison, a fractional CMO who specializes in helping SaaS companies reach their growth potential. Hey, Yasmin, welcome to the podcast.

Before we dig in, could you just tell us a little about yourself and your company?

Yasmin Morrison:
Sure. I'd be happy to. I help my clients grow quickly and profitably using an 80/20 approach to marketing. Let me explain.

I have been fascinated by the 80/20 rule for a while, and that's the concept that a small percent of activities drive a large percent of results. And I first started applying that to marketing, I was totally amazed at the results and it was fun to experiment with. 

But now that I'm a consultant and a fractional CMO, it's just a necessary way to operate because I have to fulfill the responsibilities as a CMO in just 10 hours a week instead of full time. So I have to know the levers that really drive an outsize impact for my clients.

Ken Lempit:
That's awesome. And it makes a lot of sense. If you have a finite amount of time and you're expected to make a real impact, you have to focus on what's going to work.

Yasmin Morrison:
Exactly.

Ken Lempit:
So let's go right into it. One of the things we talked about in our prep session was how you go about uncovering the low-hanging fruit. I feel like that's an evergreen topic and we can't get too good at revisiting that. Even if you're not new in a job, it seems like a good thing to do first–look for low-hanging fruits. So how do you go about doing that?

Yasmin Morrison:
Definitely. And new 80/20 levers pop up all the time, if you're doing it right, you're experimenting and you're finding new things. So I found that the first step is a mindset shift. If you don't have this mindset shift, the other stuff I'm going to tell you isn't going to work. So I think about marketing like an investment portfolio, and this is actually the opposite of what many companies do, which is checklist marketing and checklist marketing would be, we should be on every social channel. We should have a newsletter for every market segment. We need to go to all these conferences. 

Everybody has a different idea of what marketing should do and that it just all gets added to the list. And that's why checklist marketing typically happens by accident because things keep getting added to the list and then they never come off.

So a classic example that I see pretty much everywhere I go, is the CEO says, "Okay, let's get on this new social media platform." They like this new and shiny thing. And a year later marketing is still spending time on it. And there's not great results from it, but it was the boss's idea. They've invested that much time in it already. The CEO probably forgot about it a long time ago and doesn't really care, but now it's part of the checklist. And so it just doesn't come off. Checklist marketing is a recipe for getting a low return on your marketing spend.

Ken Lempit:
I think as a CMO, that kind of stuff ultimately is a recipe for a bad meeting with the CEO. In fact, we just had a CEO we've known for some time, forward his marketing leader’s plan. And it was literally like 20 pages of just stuff to do with no unifying idea, no real sense of how to allocate the resources or measure results. So I think it's a real-world problem. And we haven't heard that yet on the podcast. So I'm really glad you brought it up.

Yasmin Morrison:
No, that's exactly what happens when you just keep on adding on tactics because it's a hodgepodge of tactics and that doesn't make a strategy. It's quite the opposite. So conversely, if you manage marketing like an investment portfolio, you wouldn't keep your money in a fund that's not performing well. You would move that money. You would double down on what's really working well, the investments that are really paying off.

It doesn't mean you stop trying new things. You're always trying new things. But the difference is, with this mindset, every new thing is now an educated bet. And you're not saying you're doing it forever. You're saying I want to see these leading indicators of success by this date. And if I don't, then it's time to reevaluate. It's time to see, okay, do I optimize? Do I cut it? Because we're all going to sink time into things that don't work and that's totally fine and that's expected, but when you're managing a portfolio, you can cut losses and you can free up the resources to double down on the bets that are working really well.

Ken Lempit:
Do you actually go to management with expected outcomes on new tactics and then mark your reporting to those?

Yasmin Morrison:
Yeah, definitely. I think it's an exercise that you need to do at minimum every quarter where you think about, okay, what are the new bets that I want to try? And some of the bets can be small and you don't wait until next quarter. Some of them, you don't even need permission or you don't need a consensus for. You could just go and try it.

 But I think every quarter you need to have some bets and you need to say, okay, this is what I expect from it. And it could be wrong and that's okay. Every bet should have some assumptions there and you should track it. And you should revisit at the end of your experiment and your test and see what went right, what went wrong. And that's how you keep learning.

Ken Lempit:
I want to go back a little bit though in our conversation to talk about the low-hanging fruit idea, because I think that maybe it's not instinctual for everybody to look through their organization, the history, the wins and losses to do that work of figuring out low-hanging fruit. And I'm wondering if you have any advice for, maybe it's the new marketing leader. It's probably an easier scenario to imagine coming in. Where do we find pockets of opportunity? Where do they likely turn up?

Yasmin Morrison:
If I am a new CMO, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start with the data. And that's what I love about SaaS companies is they're so good at collecting data – they're sitting on a gold mine, because there are always 80/20 opportunities to be found there.

It’s important to look for them without expectations and assumptions, to just look at the data and be really curious about it, which is why sometimes it does help to get a fresh perspective from somebody else if you have been at a company for a while and you want to see where are the 80/20 levers. But I would definitely start with mining the data. The 80/20 levers are always there.

Ken Lempit:
And what kind of data are we looking at?

Yasmin Morrison:
80/20 shows up everywhere. Depending on your specialization, I'd start with whatever you're most comfortable with because most CMOs have grown up in one part of marketing, right? You might have a knack for content marketing in which case I would look at how to do a content audit and look at landing page stats, email stats and all that stuff. 

Start with something you're really familiar with and be able to know your way around the data. And in that case, you'll be able to see the 80/20 levers. And you'll kind of get a hang of what it's like to look for those.

Ken Lempit:
I think that makes a lot of sense. If you're very comfortable in a marketing automation platform, you know where to look for the performance stats, right? It's really easy to walk through the actual outcomes. I take your point also on things like landing pages. It's like being a primary care doctor or one of those urgent care docs–you can see a head cold coming when they walk in the room. Well, I think you can see a poor-performing landing page before you even get the data. A lot of times you can just tell, hey, that page won't work. There's something there to work on and then back that up with the actual performance.

Yasmin Morrison:
Yeah. And I remember when I first started looking at 80/20 marketing, I had been at a company for a few years and I really didn't realize what a small number of pages were really driving that much of our business. When you really understand that, you can see the areas of optimization. It's way more valuable to be optimizing those pages than to be worrying about all the rest combined.

Ken Lempit:
You know what, I'll give a little shout out to Marcus Sheridan at IMPAC– he talks a lot about what the areas of interest really are for your customers–one or more blog posts can drive much of your organic traffic and result in conversions. And I think that mindset is really good, what's actually getting the job done and maybe not worrying as much about everything else.

So it sounds like, also, that if you're a new marketing leader, you have to educate management in this thought process too, right?

Yasmin Morrison:
Yeah, definitely. Because like I said, checklist marketing happens by default if you don't. I think you have to sort of manage up in this case where you say, this is the way that marketing should be run as an investment portfolio. This is the way I'm going to track things and we're going to make bets and we're going to do this quarterly. It should be regimented. People will catch on. When you give them a framework, you give them a structure, it starts to make a lot of sense. But absolutely, a lot of companies have never seen that type of marketing and they don't know that's the way to do it.

Ken Lempit:
And I also like that idea of managing the CFO, because now you're starting to speak their language upfront. And as you move through your planning and execution, CFOs can either be your friend or they can be a big roadblock to getting things done. If you're constantly demonstrating some intellectual rigor and discipline, that's going to help you with those people.

Yasmin Morrison:
When I implemented this at a past company, the biggest fan of the bets framework was the CFO because marketing is often such a black box and they're saying, oh, okay, you're putting this investment in here. You're expecting to get this return. You're monitoring it to make sure that you're on track for success or, if you're not, then you might cut it. You are speaking the CFO's language in that case.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. I think that's a really important insight. I think a lot of marketing people are kind of, they try and stay out of the CFO's office, and I wonder if that's the smartest move. We had Jay Gaines on the podcast quite some time ago, and one of his earliest successes as a marketing leader came from recruiting the CFO into the planning.

Yasmin Morrison:
Also, if  you are thoughtful about sharing the wins and you don't come out and say, “Wow, this customer advisory board really drove way more business than we ever expected,” he or she is not going to know. You have to be able to circulate those wins and celebrate. And I think that's a really important part of getting people onboard with your approach.

Ken Lempit:
Let's turn our attention to the idea of being excellent at a few things versus average at a lot. I really like the way you phrase that because no one wants to be average. And I if you're going to sell a new mindset as a new marketing leader, or if you're reinvigorating your own department, the idea that you feel you've been average (or the company has been average) in the past at a lot of things, I think would have some appeal, right? It's sort of a challenge that people would want to embrace. Can you talk a little bit about introducing that mindset and then maybe we can get into some of the examples of things you've done recently that you think are worth making that real?

Yasmin Morrison:
When you're thinking about what you're really good at, the 80/20 rule actually also applies to teams when you're thinking about, what are the skillsets we have? What are the strengths of this team? And you marry that with a strategy that leverages 80/20 and you've got a strong strategy, that's unstoppable because you have really aligned... You've really put yourself in the best position to win at that point. Does that make sense?

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. Is there like some stuff people can read about applying the 80/20 to marketing that you would refer other marketing leaders to?

Yasmin Morrison:
Yeah. A great resource, there's a book called 80/20 for Sales and Marketing, and that really gets into some of the tactical stuff, but it's really fun and easy to start applying to your business. 

There is another book called Essentialism, which is not a marketing book, but it shows you how to separate the critical few from the trivial mini. And so it provides a framework that you can really apply to anything, including marketing. And I love that one. That's one that I go back to probably every couple of months and I reread different sections of that. And I remind myself, this is how I can keep this mindset because especially in marketing, it's so easy to get bogged down in the weeds. It's so easy to stay on the tactical level, because that's what's getting thrown at you. These are these ideas that people are giving you. And so it's important to, as often as you can, elevate the mindset that way.

Ken Lempit:
Thanks for those recommendations. Let's get into some of the examples that you wanted to talk about of things that really can pay a lot of dividends. One of the things you talked about was a customer advisory board that you've implemented at a client recently. And I think that it's good to understand what that means to you, what it meant in this situation, and how we could evaluate the applicability in a situation we might find ourselves in.

Yasmin Morrison:
We were just talking about being able to double down on bets that are working really well. And so one example would be when we at one company that I worked with tried implementing a customer advisory board. We'd never done it before and had no idea what to expect, but we put together the things that we wanted to get out of it, set some objectives and it way surpassed and  exceeded our expectations. 

We were onto something. Fast forward to now there are seven different customer advisory boards, one for every market segment that we serve. If we weren't paying attention, tracking the investment, tracking the ROI on it, we may not have done that. We may not have been able to exponentially increase the return on that.

Ken Lempit:
What are the kind of key things to make an advisory board valuable for a SaaS company?What are the essential components that you think a good advisory board should have?

Yasmin Morrison:
Yeah, we could easily spend a whole episode on CABs, but I can give you the broad strokes. When you're just starting out, you want to think about who your best customers are, the people that you would clone, if you could, because they keep buying from you, they keep referring other customers. And you want to put them in a room and just start with one meeting and you want to roll out the red carpet for these people. They are your best customers. You want to make them feel really special and important.

 It can't be all about your product. This is about adding value for them, about listening more than anything, about giving them a group of their peers that they can talk to, because they get that sounding board when they get the group of peers and you get to hear all those issues firsthand, all the pain points, right? 

You get to ask questions, you get to ask all the questions. It's just like the new focus group of your best customers and you get to tailor your product to solve those issues.

And so if you think about it from that mindset of how can I add the most value, bring in guest speakers, maybe, let the CAB members present to each other and share their wins and things that they're seeing in their market, that's when it becomes an event that they're really looking forward to and they will add that much more value for you.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah, it's interesting. I think many of our clients have been afraid to do this. And I think if you go back more than four or five years ago, there was no G2 or Capterra for these folks to register their likes or dislikes of the products they use. But now there's almost no reason not to do an advisory board, because they're airing their concerns either in these public forums or in completely private groups that they participate in. So it's almost preemptive, if you think about it. Get these folks in a room, get them talking about their likes, dislikes, the things they wish they could accomplish, the things they have accomplished and how, and gain the benefit of hearing it firsthand and also maybe keeping the bad news out of things like G2.

Yasmin Morrison:
Yeah, definitely. And I think when you have that open, candid feedback, you're going to stumble upon opportunities to innovate your product that you didn't even think of–pain points that you're not even addressing yet. That's one of the best benefits of a customer advisory board is being able to merge that with your product roadmap and really prevent a lot of wasted time and resources and ideas that you think are really going to be a hit with your audience, but maybe not. So best to test it out and get some really qualitative feedback on that first.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. I like that idea, especially where the initial impetus for the product might have been a founder who was in the space, but is now five or seven years out from actually having the pain him or herself. So now that founder is still trying to drive the product roadmap with personal insights that are way out of date. This might be a way to reframe what's actually important.

Yasmin Morrison:
Right. 100%. It allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of the market always if you're meeting with your customers in this sort of environment on a regular basis.

Ken Lempit:
Let's talk a little bit more generally about paying attention to customers and contrasting that with your view of competitive analysis and monitoring. So I thought that was a really interesting mindset. And I don't know about you, but almost every CEO I've ever met wants to talk about their competitors.

Yasmin Morrison:
Definitely. Yes, they do. And I think most companies pay way more attention to competitors than they should.I think the best way to be competitive and to beat your customers is to have the best understanding of your customers more than your competitors. 

When you're paying too much attention to your competitors, you're taking your eyes off the prize.

The principle that I live by is to serve the starving crowd. These are the customers that really need you the most. Often, competitors don't know who they are, so if you know, it really gives you a competitive advantage. 

If your product, for example, can serve a lot of different segments, there are a lot of use cases, it can be hard to know what to focus on, what customers really need you the most, but you have to know exactly when and where people are starving for your product. 

For example, this happened a couple months ago: a CEO I was working with was really excited about his digital signage product. His favorite thing about it is that it integrates with over 100 apps–no other product has this many integrations.

I said, "Okay, great. Sounds like a great product. The problem is that nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to buy a SaaS product, right? That's not the way it works. They start having pain, they decide they need to solve it. So let's talk about your use cases and let's look at these integrations." And just knowing the 80/20 rule, I know that a few of these integrations are going to be a lot more valuable than all the rest–they're going to drive a lot more business.

Sure enough, I did about an hour of data crunching. I did some market research using Semrush and I found that two out of the 100 integrations had significantly more demand than all the others combined.

My suggestion was, let's do a test and run an experiment. I want to show you that this is worth pursuing. 

I said, "Write one blog post, just on this one topic, and  just on this one use case." 

One month later they had 10 Xed their website traffic. 

And so this was just getting to understand the starving crowd, finding the starving crowd, and getting found on Google for those right search terms. And they were able to do that. So that's the power of 80/20 marketing, one integration out of a 100. If you didn't do that research, you wouldn't know.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. I think that starts to drive your product development too. If you realize that so much of what you've done has no take up, maybe you rethink what you're building.

Yasmin Morrison:
Definitely. And so after I did that, I worked with a product manager. The product manager said, "Tell me what these other use cases are?  I don't want to be wasting my time on the ones that aren't driving business." So it's all about prioritization.

Ken Lempit:
I think it'd be a good time to talk about when a CEO should be thinking about a fractional CMO. And this is something we don't encounter often enough, I think. So that's why I was really interested in having you on the podcast, because we find all too often that our client in a marketing organization is an army of one. We have this typically one-woman army, not always, but 80% of the time it's probably a woman head of marketing and this person is responsible for everything. They're planning, they're buying, they're outsourcing, they're partnering, they're writing content, they're on social media, they're doing press releases. They have no time to manage up and it becomes worse than a hamster wheel. It's sort of a death march and at some point the CEO is going to be unhappy.

And so I think from a marketing leader's point of view, and as well as the CEO's point of view, I think it'd be good to talk about how do we get people to see the need for this strategic layer and how do you come in and make that case? Because, I think that's really important.

Yasmin Morrison:
I work equally with CEOs and CMOs. For companies that are around $10 to $50 million, typically I work with the CEO because they need the strategy and leadership of an experienced CMO, but they don't have the budget to bring one on full time. And yet they're at this critical growth phase where they really need it. 

With bigger companies I tend to work with CMOs because they want to work with me. They want my help with the division or a business unit. 

I have a friend, a SaaS CMO who came to me saying exactly like you were talking about, "My plate is overflowing. My plate's full with our core product and we need somebody to focus on product B, this new up and coming thing we really think is going to be a hit, but I can't take my eyes off product A, I would be spread too thin."

And so he wanted a partner and a sounding board, and I think every marketing leader, marketing tactician, I think we all need a sounding board, especially if you're an army of one, sometimes to just have somebody to talk to and say, am I crazy? How do I navigate this? How do I do that? So, that's typically where I think it makes sense to bring in a fractional CMO in both of those cases.

Ken Lempit:
I want to dig in just a little bit more on the one-person army, because it's common, especially at the lower end of that revenue range of 10 to 50 million. We find this person and they literally have every responsibility. 

I think it actually might be a really good survival tactic for that person to bring in someone else, first of all, to carry their water with the CEO, and to make the case that they've been making. These people are pretty smart, so maybe along with the five content items to approve, I want to talk to you about these strategic things, the conversations sort of get muddy.

And I think having someone else to carry the strategic conversation and say, yeah, Mr. or Ms. CEO, all these things are true, but here's the five things we need to do and here's how they should be measured. 

Again, I think that marketing leaders already had that conversation, but wasn’t heard. And I think a lot of times, I know we've been brought into validate what's already pretty well understood. Does that happen with you too?

Yasmin Morrison:
100%, it happens. I think it helps to have that separation–somebody that's totally focused on strategy and somebody that's totally focused on execution and making it happen. So often the one-woman army is an execution machine, just becomes invaluable to the organization. They do everything and the problem is then they get burned out and they leave–that’s not good for anybody. It's not good for them. It's not good for the company. And so this often helps by keeping that kind of separation of church and state and having a partnership between strategy and execution.

Ken Lempit:
And maybe doing fewer things and doing them better, and it’s not such a burn out, right?

Yasmin Morrison:
Exactly. It can also be a good cop, bad cop situation. Sometimes I can play that bad cop role where I'm saying, no, we decided on doing these things this quarter. We decided on these bets and I know you have all these other ideas (and I love these ideas) but let's inventory them and compare next quarter to decide on five new bets. It keeps people focused and it keeps people focused on the most important things and the things that we already agreed on, which often leadership needs a reminder of that.

Ken Lempit:
I also think it's good for the marketing leader to bring that kind of resource in. First of all, you're not a threat to them–it's not like you want their job. And you also don't want to work there full time, right? That's not your goal. So I think it's almost a threat free way to get the CMO level skill set if you're that marketing leader who's executing everything. It just seems like a lot of opportunity.

Yasmin Morrison:
Totally. That is a great point. But I think that it can be really helpful for the one-woman marketing army, because honestly, I have been there. I have been a one-woman marketing army for several companies and I decided, no, there's got to be something better than this. There's got to be a different way to do this.

Ken Lempit:
Absolutely. So if those one-person marketing armies want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to reach you, Yasmin.

Yasmin Morrison:
Connect with me on LinkedIn. I love meeting new people. I love just bouncing ideas, having conversations. Just tell me what you're working on. Tell me that you heard this podcast so I know it didn't go out into the ether. So yeah, that would be a great way. You can also visit my website, resoundconsulting.com. Learn a little bit more about what I do and how I might be able to help you. But yeah, I would love to connect.

Ken Lempit:
Thanks so much. This was a great episode. I think no editing will be required. Every moment was high value. Thanks so much.

Yasmin Morrison:
Awesome. Thanks.

Ken Lempit:
And if people want to reach me, I'm on linkedin.com/in/kenlempit, or check out our website at austinlawrence.com. And please subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts and tell Yasmin you heard it here first.

Yasmin Morrison:
Thanks so much, Ken.

Ken Lempit:
Yeah. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Till the next time, thanks everyone. Perfect.

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.