Welcome to episode thirty-five 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.
Preparing for recession marketing starts now
WithAnnie Wissner, fractional CMO & business development specialist
Edited for clarity and readability
Host, Ken Lempit:
Welcome to SaaS Backwards. A podcast that helps SaaS CMOs and CEOs to accelerate growth and enhance profitability.
Our guest today is Annie Wissner, a marketing and business development expert who helps SaaS companies to build out their marketing organizations, including hiring and full restructures of demand generation programs and revenue operations. Hey, before we get started, Annie, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you help your clients?
Annie Wissner:
Good morning, Ken, and thank you so much for having me today. What I do is I'm a revenue marketer so I help companies find the quickest path to revenue.
Ken Lempit:
That's what we all need today, especially in the economy we think we're facing. And let's dig into that. One of the things we talked about when we did our prep was the economic downturn, inflation. These are important developments in our lives and the economy that are influencing our clients and prospects. What kind of playbook do you recommend companies use? We've done this before if we've been around a while.
Annie Wissner:
I've been in tech since 1996, tech marketing and business development and partner and channel work. And so this is my third tech downturn. The first one was in the early 2000s, none of us can forget 2008. I was sitting in a Microsoft office and all of a sudden the phone stopped ringing. I'll never forget it. And now we appear to be in another one. I think that the first piece of advice I have is don't panic. And the second piece of advice that I have is that business continues and the worst thing you can do is pause. So keep moving.
Ken Lempit:
I think the pandemic was a preview, especially for software companies that are delivering meaningful benefits to their clients, even in the face of impending doom, these clients didn't really log off their SaaS. I mean, these SaaS companies withstood the onslaught of the pandemic pretty well. So I agree with you, it's time to continue what's been working. And maybe that's something to talk about right out of the gate is focusing on what works and the strengths that have gotten you to this day.
Annie Wissner:
If you look at tech marketing, it comes in waves. And we're still in that digital wave where it's really become primarily about Google Search. And I think that there is definitely a time and place for Google Search, it's really crucial, but there's a lot of other methodologies that can be utilized to get to customers and prospects in a much more low cost and effective manner. There's a lot of tactics that I use, the theory, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, are you familiar with it?
Ken Lempit:
Oh, yeah. In fact, I asked Alexa what my degrees of separation were from Kevin Bacon and she couldn't help me.
Annie Wissner:
Oh, really? She failed that assignment.
Ken Lempit:
She did.
Annie Wissner:
Well, for people that don't know, it's basically, we're all six steps away from a particular person or individual, whether they're famous or not... It could be six degrees from Obama or whatever you want to say. So basically one exercise you can do is you can just look at a potential target list, bring all of your partners, all of your sales people, all of your marketers in a room and say, "Does anybody know anybody from this company?" You can go into LinkedIn and see who has a first connection and that's your entry point and then you just do introductions. That doesn't cost anything, it costs a little bit of time. And you'll be surprised. I've seen scenarios where if you bring your stakeholders in, you're at 90% penetration right there and just by using introductions, you can really make some inroads. That doesn't cost anything.
Ken Lempit:
Yeah. It's interesting, we were doing planning for a client earlier this morning and I think you're absolutely right. The idea that you have to spend money to target people that you want to reach, maybe it's a little too easy so that's why we do it. But a little elbow grease, we can do our own homegrown ABM without spending the money on a platform or advertising. And maybe also be more effective in some ways, because it's much more personal. So can you dig in a little bit more on how to take advantage of that approach?
Annie Wissner:
Yes. I mean, my whole philosophy is ABM-centric demand generation. So when I say ABM-centric, I'm not necessarily talking about traditional ABM where it's one to one. Unless you're in the enterprise space and you've got monster deal sizes, most people really can't afford that model.
I do a hybrid demand gen waterfall known as ABM-centric Demand Gen. And really what it entails is getting really clear on your ICP, so your ideal customer profile, what does that person look like? And then doing really deep work on TAM, SAM, SOM. So what's your Total Addressable Market? Who would be the people that you could sell to? And then within that market, looking at... In a target market, there's going to be tertiary people that aren't necessarily people you want to sell to.
For example, if you're selling to manufacturers, there's going to be service people, affiliates and partners and you're not going to necessarily sell to them. You must get crisp on that. And then you take it the next step down and you think about people that already have competitors in place or maybe they have a solution that their website is built on. They're not going to rip and replace that. So you would immediately remove those customers and so forth until you get to that real serviceable market.
And that way, you're not spinning your wheels as much, it's a much smaller market than most people realize that they have. So again, it's just doing work on who can you sell to? Which companies are going to really be happy with you to get that long term value from? And then narrowing it down. And there're great tools, there's BuiltWith where you can see what types of solutions people have installed. There's ZoomInfo that lets you look into that as well. But again, you don't need these tools, you can actually do it through just elbow grease.
Ken Lempit:
I think that's an important message, especially if it's not an enterprise sale. The value of a full-throated, tech enabled ABM approach is muted for the smaller companies.
Annie Wissner:
I think during periods of hyper growth coming out of bull markets, I think that people get into this idea of adding logos and they really don't think about cost per acquisition or CPA, a word that we love. And they don't think about if that customer's actually going to be happy, if they're going to up sell to them, if they're going to be just churning in six months, et cetera. So I think that in periods of more bear markets, I think people really need to be careful who they're spending time selling to because that cost of sale could be enough to really cause trouble for a business.
Ken Lempit:
Going back to the ABM demand gen hybrid, I think that's kind of a cool idea, first I've heard of it. Thank you. You mentioned something in our prep about surround sound as a way of approaching the ICP, your ideal customer profile. Can you talk a little bit about how you achieve surround sound with your clients?
Annie Wissner:
It's as simple as when you know who your target is, you try to skate to the puck, as Wayne Gretzky said. So you find out where that person is gathering information, where they are on social, obviously you'd have their email address. So you could do something like, let's say you didn't want to launch a targeted Facebook ad. Facebook is still really good. You can get very specific about who you're targeting, you can make it more casual and fun. Let's say you launch a Facebook ad that same day, you could launch email sequences to that person, you could also connect with them on LinkedIn. And instead of trying to pitch them on LinkedIn, you could say, "Hey, I've got a valuable resource for you. Here you go." You don't gate it, you just give it to them and you add value so that you're actually surrounding them on social, on Facebook, on email, et cetera. And you're creating a dynamic process where you're reaching them where they are.
Ken Lempit:
Yeah. What do you think about traditional tactics like postal mail or events?
Annie Wissner:
I think that a lot of people are forgetting about traditional tactics. Obviously if you're in front of someone, that's the best opportunity possible to sell to them. Events were and always will be one of the most effective ways. I think if you're going to do events and invest in events, make sure that you're really looking at who's going to be participating in the events. I see a lot of situations where I've gone into marketing teams and they're going to 10 events and there's a lot of duplication across those events. Or it seems like the right industry but when you really dig into the people attending, maybe they're just an influencer and they're not actually the people that you would be selling to.
Also, if you're going to take the trouble to send three people to an event and there's only 500 attendees, your opportunity for conversion at such a small event is going to be far lower than if you go to event that's targeted with 25,000 attendees, you're likely to penetrate a lot more leads. And part of it too depends upon where you are in your company life cycle. If you've got a database in HubSpot of a million contacts that are targeted, going into an event, they're probably are all going to be there and that's not going to move the dial for you in most cases. But if you're a startup or mid-stage or perhaps you haven't done proper opt-in and you've got a light database, then going to events to get those opt-ins is going to be really effective for you.
Ken Lempit:
Yeah. I think as long as people are willing to meet in person, we should want to meet with them. Put our folks that are willing to do the live events out there and get face-to-face. And with some idea of the magnitude of the opportunity, you don't want to put 10 people in a small meeting. Do you have any experience with paid-for events?
Annie Wissner:
Actually, I do. I've done those with Gartner, I think Argyle as well and several others and I think they can be really effective. Again, it's got to be a really crisp ICP, it's really got to be someone that you can add value to. You've got to make sure that you're not setting appointments with people that have a competitive product installed. So I think that as long as you can really work with the person that you're buying this from and have targets that you could actually sell to and that the business that you're working with doing that really cares, it can be extremely beneficial. I've seen those work quite well. They're usually about 25K, 30K a pop so you want to make sure also that your deal size is big enough to support that. Because typically you'll get between 8, 10, 12 meetings. So I would recommend that more on the enterprise side, if you've got a 10K SaaS solution, that's not probably going to be the best engine for you.
Ken Lempit:
Yeah, absolutely. I think you mentioned this briefly, but I want to talk about the dark funnel and how we as marketers can approach that. It's not easy, this is the opposite of the coin-op. So how do you help your clients to get into meaningful conversations on these properties?
Annie Wissner:
I do think with intent, this is an area where you really do need to invest in a tool. Because there are algorithms available and database that these companies have built that you really need to tap into. If you are concerned about third-party cookies going away, go to businesses that literally won't survive without third-party cookies, they've cracked the code on it. And I really think that businesses, especially in the SaaS space, in the tech space and the B2B tech space are going to need to have these tools to navigate the next stage. Especially, like I said, if you don't have a database of a million targets that you're nurturing already. A couple of brands that do this are Demandbase and 6Sense, they're not inexpensive. I've personally chosen Demandbase several times, I think it's a fantastic tool. It's not as easy to set up, although they've worked on that quite a bit.
And what it does is it just lets you do some deep work on keywords and targeting and who you target. Again, you have to do the work of knowing who you're selling to and who is a happy customer of yours. So you put that all in and then it serves companies that are looking and searching, exhibiting buying behavior online, but they haven't clicked on a single form yet, they haven't taken a demo yet. So it's that earlier stage that people are doing 60% to 70%, 80% of shopping before they ever reach out to a company. So it lets you tap into that while they're still searching and be the first one. And when you think about sales, typically 85% of the time, the first vendor that gets to a customer wins. I think that this dark funnel piece and identifying intent is a game changer and it's something that everybody should be attempting to do.
Ken Lempit:
So we can get intent data elsewhere, right? So we can get that on things like ZoomInfo or SalesIntel?
And if you can't afford Demandbase or the other ABM tech, but you do have something like a ZoomInfo or a SalesIntel, you could almost craft your own, right?
Annie Wissner:
Absolutely. Yeah. Again, when you don't have as much cash on hand, it just takes a little bit of effort but you can still get there.
Ken Lempit:
Excellent. Cool. So one of the things we about, and it's one of my favorite topics, is the power of creativity in changing the fortunes of a company. I'd love to get your take on where we are on the pendulum swing between creativity and metric-based marketing?
Annie Wissner:
Well, sadly I think that the pendulum has swung all the way over to metric-based marketing in most scenarios. And I think it's unfortunate. I feel like it's a really simple philosophy that I have and I tell the teams that I work with and that is if what you're doing, writing or promoting doesn't wow you, then it's likely not going to wow someone that's not paid to look at it. So I feel like it's just become almost... People are just doing what they think is going to work to get that lead. It's like the music industry, music is all so similar now.
Popular music is so similar because there's a formula of music with a certain pattern of hooks. And I actually saw something on YouTube where they analyzed all the pop songs and they were all so similar and that's because there's a winning formula and that's all that's being put out now. And I think that there's just a boredom that comes with that. And I think that people can feel that it's overly programmed to get them to take a certain action and it just doesn't feel as authentic.
Ken Lempit:
So if I'm following the formula, I don't stand out. And I think the point of doing marketing work and I like to talk about Big "M" marketing as opposed to this process marketing. But if we want to have our investments in thinking content and the events and activities that we put on, we want them to stand out, we have to be willing to take some risk, right?
Annie Wissner:
Yeah.
Ken Lempit:
And do you find that leadership is unwilling to take the risk or do they give the rope and then hurt their CMOs when they have one or two things that don't come off as they might have hoped?
Annie Wissner:
Yeah, I think so. I think that there's this pressure to produce these leads and it's like people are doubling down on what's not working. So you're producing all of these leads and the problem is, in most cases, unless your sales cycle is a day or a week, the results of what you're doing now are a bit downstream. So if all of a sudden you're doing weekly lead reviews and all of a sudden there's a 30% dip in leads because you're changing focus, there's going to be a lot of concern with that. And you don't necessarily have the runway to prove that's going to work. What I've primarily had to do is keep that going and then in addition to my regular work, doing this separate work of truly innovative messaging and meaningful messaging on the side, which can be pretty exhausting and I think a lot of marketers are dealing with that. It's almost like you're rebuilding the plane in flight, but you have to keep the fuel going or else the plane is going to fall.
Ken Lempit:
One of the things I see happening is the desire to shorten the sales cycle and maybe that has an impact, while the need to do that is felt in marketing as well. So the sales people need a shorter sales cycles because they're under a lot of pressure to perform and in marketing, we have those same pressures. And I'm just wondering, when you're a new marketer and they come into a situation where the mandate is, "Fix our lead gen. Fix our demand gen." I wonder if we should be looking at the product as well and trying to take responsibility for that and say, "Hey, if it's taking us three months or four months to get to a decision and four months to get an implementation, that's half the year we're not going to have any revenue." So maybe we as marketers, we need to also be sensitive to what the product is doing to us on the revenue generation side and maybe build up our product management chops a little bit. What do you think about that?
Annie Wissner:
Totally agree. Marketing, it's like you can lead a horse to water. But it does come down to the product. If the product is positioned competitively in that market and clearly. Because in the technology industry, when people purchase, everybody wants a list of the four competitive products and the details of each one to help make their decision. And if your product isn't really clear on where it's positioned and if you don't have the features and functions to really make it competitive, it's going to be harder for you to sell, fewer of those leads are going to convert.
I think what happens is the finger gets pointed right back at marketing, "Hey, you're giving me all these junky leads." And then marketing goes, "Well, wait, but this is the industry. They've got buying power, et cetera. They didn't choose us because we didn't have a Native API." So I don't think that we can remove the product piece. In fact, I think HubSpot's really good at this. Mentally, I think marketing, support, customer success and sales need to merge a lot more and become one engine, an end-to-end seamless engine.
Ken Lempit:
Yeah. So I really do believe that this taking control of the product and a lot of these firms are entrepreneur-led, they're founder-led and these folks have started with a singular vision for what their product should be but by the time we come in as professional marketers, that is not as crisp. And in fact in our practice, we see firms with this telescoping time to implementation, we're not great fit and I think we have to make sure we do a good job diagnosing on the way in, which is a big part of what you do. You come into a new client, we have to do this diagnostic work.
Ken Lempit:
And I think bringing in new, either a fractional CMO or a marketing expert like yourself or a new agency, we have to have an open mind as to what the implications of that could be. The hiring company has to have an open mind because they might think, "Hey, we need more leads." And that might be the symptom, but the cause might be, "Hey, the product market fit isn't right. Or your implementation takes too long." There might be other things at work here and I just feel like it's a message we need to carry to the market that we're not magicians, we can only work with what we have.
Annie Wissner:
Yeah. That's a tough one because I think that people say, "Oh no, we want to change, we're open to change." And then you go in as a change agent, you go in and you consult, you diagnose. And there's so many people out there with static mindsets, that truly don't have a growth mindset, they dig into keeping things the same or doubling down on tactics that aren't working because they feel that they're protecting their business. They've almost merged with the business to where it's part of themselves.
I had one scenario where I was trying to work through a series of acquisitions to reorganize them under a single brand umbrella, and there were people that had the company name tattooed on their bodies, from one of the acquisitions. I mean that's how much they identified with it. They held the business hostage from that next growth stage. In their minds they were thinking that they were helping it when they were doing just the opposite. And you could show them data and they still were so deeply ingrained in keeping things the way that they were.
Ken Lempit:
I want to land on where we started. Which is, there's definitely storm clouds on the horizon and maybe you could give us a little riff on what you think marketing leaders should be doing to get through this year. We still have half the year left. What your top line recommendations would be, generally I realize every different, but how can they succeed with what are likely more nervous CEOs and boards?
Annie Wissner:
I would say, to really look at what's working today and what's not working and be honest about it. For things that aren't working, be realistic about how long they've been in place. I think that marketing has been additive over the past 10 years, we just kept adding more and more and more to it. And there's such a pressure to produce new, fresh content, new eBooks, et cetera.
But I really would argue that it's better to have a couple super strong blogs and a couple killer eBooks that people really want.
I also think there's some fatigue with content as it stands today, but I do think there's an opportunity to do more niche-based content. For example, depending on who your ICP is, research has died down, nobody's doing research to help business decision makers, make decisions.
I think the time is ripe for surveys to collect feedback on what's working today, I think people are seeking that. I think that the paradigm of inbound is shifting. We went really heavily digital during COVID and there's some fatigue there. So I would recommend that if you have an audience to start doing some research for them, prospects too, give them business value based upon what could help them in their business. And then I'd also, as I mentioned, look into what you're doing today and what's working. I'm all about positive psychology, Gallup, discover your strengths. I believe in leaning into strengths. And I think during a time like we're in now and that we're heading into, you should lean into your strengths.
Ken Lempit:
Yeah. I love the idea of much higher quality, marquee content that adds a huge amount of value and is well thought out and researched. I think you're right on there, we're seeking greater certainty that our investments are going to yield outcomes. The pressure on marketing is greater certainty that $1 in is going to be $8 or $10 out. And I agree with you, I think one of the ways to do that is review what's actually worked, be willing to end things that aren't working and double or triple down on the stuff that's doing great. Maybe that's a great place to land our episode, double down or triple down on what's working and be willing to part with some things that you might have wanted to do that didn't pan out. If people want to get in touch with you, Annie, what's the best way for them to do that?
Annie Wissner:
LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, Annie Wissner.
Ken Lempit:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on SaaS Backwards. And if folks want to reach me, I'm also on LinkedIn at LinkedIn/in/KenLempit or feel free to email me at KL@AustinLawrence.com. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do so. We're found pretty much wherever podcasts are given away, they're not really sold. And look forward to seeing folks on the next episode. Hey Annie, thanks so much for being our guest today.
Annie Wissner:
My pleasure, Ken. Thank you.
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.