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How to Get Started with B2B SaaS Marketing
102 Plays3 years ago
Many B2B SaaS companies are started by engineers with no marketing expertise.
They build the product but struggle to spread the word so people can discover and use it.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Verb Data's Dave Hurt talks about the steps he and his co-founder took to dip their toes in the marketing waters and some of the experiments they conducted along the way.
It's great insight into how, in many respects, marketing involves taking a deep dive into what your customers want and how they articulate their needs.
Recommended
Transcript
Challenges in Marketing for B2B SaaS
00:00:06
Speaker
It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Many entrepreneurs who start B2B SaaS companies are tech savvy. They're software developers or engineers who embrace an idea and then focus on building a product. But what happens when they need to do marketing? How do they establish a brand? How do they even get started with marketing?
Co-Founding Verbdata
00:00:27
Speaker
Today, I'm talking with Dave Hurt, who co-founded Verbdata, which develops dashboards for B2B SaaS companies. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Dave.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hey, thanks for having me. Why don't we start by having you tell me the story of verb data? How did it come to be and can you provide some color about what it does and the problems that it solves?
00:00:49
Speaker
So I've been working with my co-founder and business partner, Oleg Friedman, for about 10 years now. And we've always worked in the B2B SaaS space. So building e-commerce applications for restaurants, sports teams. And every time we needed to build a new application, customers would ask for a dashboard to share with their boss or to see performance metrics of our software.
Identifying Dashboard Needs
00:01:11
Speaker
And that was always kind of a difficult challenge to build. As the product manager, I would be talking to my customers and I would understand the value that they would get from these dashboards. Then I would talk to our sales reps who would really want these dashboards for demos to help sell the software. And then I'd go talk to Oleg, who is the VP of engineering, and he would say, well, there's so many other features we can build. It's going to take six months to do this dashboard. How about we do all these other things instead?
00:01:41
Speaker
We came up with this problem of it takes way too long to build a dashboard into your application. And the ROI rarely pays off. But there's got to be a better way, essentially. So when we first came up with this idea, we actually went out and we talked to about 100 people at the beginning of 2020 in the SaaS space and really took it from a typical product perspective of, what's your problem? And we really started that conversation with understanding
00:02:10
Speaker
how other people are addressing this problem. How do they see this customer analytics problem? And that's really the foundation of verb data.
Role of Customer Feedback
00:02:18
Speaker
So we provide developers with the tools to manage their data, but also build the dashboards into their software so that their end users can view their analytics within their own platform.
00:02:31
Speaker
As a marketer who is very much customer-centric, I love the idea that you actually reach out to customers to get their feedback, to see if there is actually demand and need for this product. A lot of entrepreneurs have a good idea and they embrace the idea that if we build it, they will come and then they're disappointed when it doesn't take off, when no one really needs what they're selling, even if they have good sales and good marketing.
00:02:55
Speaker
I love the idea that you actually went out and did some real research as opposed to simply scouring the web. When you reached out to me, one of the things that resonated was how you're developing or how you had an interest in developing a minimum viable brand as a founder who admittedly had limited marketing experience. And I'm curious about how you define minimal viable brand.
Testing Minimal Viable Brand
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah, you know, as my background, like I mentioned is in product and the very popular startup idea of minimally viable product, right? Thinking about what do you need to put together to test your assumption in the product world? How low of a fidelity of a product can you build and get feedback? And so, right, when I think about, I try to approach a lot of things like that. And so brand is one, right? How do we
00:03:44
Speaker
build something where we can get feedback on a brand to see if it resonates with our potential buyers, right? So I think about what can I get in front of people in those early conversations, not just about what's your problem, but how do you buy things? How do you think about the companies that you buy from, the brands that you buy from? I think about it as hypothesis testing just in the marketing and brand space and not in the product space.
00:04:10
Speaker
Okay, in theory, it sounds like a very solid approach. The question I would have is how do you find those subjects? How do you do the testing? How do you get feedback on your hypothesis? Because one of the challenges facing all the B2B SaaS companies
00:04:28
Speaker
is they've got a product but they have a hard time connecting with prospects. Part of the reason is that A, they don't have marketing budgets and B, there's so much competition, so much competition for people's attention. So what was your approach?
Shaping Brand Strategy
00:04:41
Speaker
How did you actually talk to prospects to see if what you were saying, what you thought resonated?
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, so a couple of different ways. One, in those initial product problem-focused interviews, I actually was doing brand-focused interviews along with those. If we had 30 minutes, 15 might be talking about the product and 15 minutes might be talking about brands that they like, words that they use around this problem set.
00:05:12
Speaker
When they're talking about dashboards, are they talking about data analytics? Are they talking about data dashboards? Even as simple as what are the words that they're using to describe the problem for themselves? Because those are the words that you need to be using in your branding, your messaging, that
00:05:29
Speaker
your competitors might not be understanding or might not be using right so that was one thing that i i definitely did early on as as part of these product and problem interviews the other thing is we just got something out there right and and that's kind of the the kind of prototyping side of things from
00:05:45
Speaker
building a landing page, even testing digital ads. So before we had a product, we spent a couple hundred dollars a month just on a couple different types of digital ads on Google's search, LinkedIn, those types of things and said, okay, this word gets a little bit better traffic. That word doesn't work very well. And that was a lot of good hypothesis testing just in that alone. That's an interesting idea. I'm curious about what you learned in terms of
00:06:14
Speaker
the feedback that you receive, the reactions that you got, and as important, how did that affect the product roadmap when you're getting a sense of what people are looking for or the problems that you think they have or the problems that they rally
Focus on Data Management
00:06:29
Speaker
around? How did that all come together in terms of helping you go from concept, which you had, to product?
00:06:38
Speaker
I mean, I would say our early ads sucked, right? So it wasn't like we had some magic out of the box, but it was almost like process of elimination. It was what not to do more than what to do, I think. It was really what that helped us focus on.
00:06:55
Speaker
And so thinking about in the world of our product, we did some ads around the front end user experience side of things like building beautiful dashboards, beautiful bar charts, those types of things. We also did some ads more on the data management integration side of things. And what we really found was people
00:07:16
Speaker
were searching and struggling more with the data infrastructure, the data management side, then they cared about the presentation. So that means that we really optimized and spent a lot more time and resources in making sure that our data management side of the product was more robust and could really solve the problems of the SaaS market that we were going after. So that really helped us hone in on
00:07:41
Speaker
a solution that was very different than the competition out there because most of them focus on that pretty dashboard and not so much the data. And we're saying, we're going to help you with the data. And oh, by the way, there's a dashboard too. So doing some down and dirty market research by leveraging advertising. That's really smart. I really liked that idea. You recently hired a head of marketing, something that I want to explore in a few minutes.
00:08:07
Speaker
How did verb data get started with
Laying Marketing Foundations
00:08:09
Speaker
marketing? Like after you've done the Google ads and the Facebook ads to test your hypothesis, what were the next steps that you took to actually start doing marketing? Did you develop a strategic plan or was it simply a matter of getting started tactically?
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah, so we did a couple things early on, we did kind of define our buyer personas, because that's something that, you know, it sounds fancy, but it's really something that anybody can do. And the way we did it was just, we took those 100 conversations that we did early on, and we just segmented them into two or three buckets, right of
00:08:45
Speaker
who we talked to, how they talked, they tried to organize. It really fell into how people work in the company. Engineers were very specific set. Then we had product managers in the set. Then we had more of the sales and CEO leadership roles. It was the executive side of things. We took those
00:09:07
Speaker
three buckets and that's that helped us kind of with that segmentation and not that we did like some amazing stuff off of segmentation but it's really important so that when you do go after cold emails or you start looking for prospects it's like got to fit into one of these buckets or I'm not going to spend my time and maybe that email looks a little different so that was one thing that we did the other thing we did is we actually brought on a low level PR firm and I don't mean low level in a
00:09:34
Speaker
derogatory way, but they help you with smaller projects. It's not like $10,000 a month. It was under $1,000 a month for us, and they helped get some guest articles going, help with some blog posts. Really, the way I thought about that was laying the foundation.
00:09:55
Speaker
You don't have to be, on day one, it doesn't have to be the most elegant blog post or the most elegant guest article, but you need a foundation so that when you do start building your team and you do start trying to put fuel in the fire and spend more resources, you have some experience. Start spending a little bit of money to build up that foundation, and that's what we did over the last 12 months. That really helped us. We announced some funding at the end of
00:10:23
Speaker
at the beginning of 2022 here, but we had 12 months prior to that of guest articles, podcasts, things that we could point to when we wanted to get into well-known publications and say, look at all this stuff we've done over the last 12 months. We have a name for ourselves. And so that really helped when we wanted to kind of have a bigger bang.
Defining Buyer Personas
00:10:45
Speaker
Let's take a step back because you've mentioned some really interesting vehicles. One is buyer personas. Now, I'm a big believer in the power of buyer personas because I think many B2B SaaS companies really don't know their customers well enough. And you could argue that many of them don't talk to their customers enough or at all. So how in depth were your buyer personas? Are we simply talking engineer, like to do this, spends a lot of time on LinkedIn? Or was it far more detailed so that
00:11:15
Speaker
you could have a real granular view of who you were trying to market and sell to.
00:11:21
Speaker
The main focus of our buyer personas was the problem we solve for that persona. So with the engineer, it was very focused on, I have a lot of different stuff I have to build, right? And the opportunity cost of dashboards is far greater than all these other things, right? There's so many other things that I could be doing while building a dashboard, right? So that's how we thought about it on the engineering side.
00:11:49
Speaker
On the product side, it was like, well, the problem we're solving is there's a feature you want to build for your customers, but you can't get it past the gatekeepers of the engineers, right? So how do we give you the tools to be able to do more without the technical resources? And so that's, and we thought about it really from that side of things is we're solving what type of problem for what type of person. And I think like,
00:12:14
Speaker
We didn't go as far as, okay, we're going to go target engineers on LinkedIn and product people here and things like that. You know, that's kind of evolved. And that's where that minimally viable brand comes in is like, we didn't know those things. And I don't know if we felt like we were going to.
00:12:30
Speaker
utilize a lot of that information on day one. So we said, look, let's get the problem identified. We will evolve this, dig into it as we go and add to those buyer personas over the next six, 12 months. And so now we're starting to add those things as we bring on more people to help with that. A couple of questions about the PR agency that you brought on
Creating Content for Tech Products
00:12:51
Speaker
board. Were they local or did you outsource them because $1,000 a month sounds pretty inexpensive, all things considered.
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's outsourced. I will say they're really good at relationships. So they know all the publications. They have writers. Their relationships with writers are a lot of the publications that we would want to be in. And that's really where their value add was. We have a very complex product. So writing blog posts about data analytics for somebody who's never worked in data analytics is quite difficult. So it took a lot of work for us to get them comfortable with writing about it.
00:13:27
Speaker
So we really felt that their value was that kind of connection to the publications and kind of that thought like they had been through the motions, which I'm not a marketer. I hadn't been through those kind of steps before.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting because one of the biggest challenges facing B2B SaaS companies when it comes to marketing, especially content, is trying to take complex technology and make it user friendly, to make it accessible, to tell stories. And many even good writers will have a hard time really understanding the nuance of a product.
00:14:00
Speaker
I think it frustrates a lot of entrepreneurs because they think they can simply outsource it. And what inevitably happens is they got to spend a lot of time with a writer to get them up to speed, to make sure they understand the language, the buyer persona, the key points, and come across as thoughtful, insightful, and the real deal. How did you get those writers up to speed? How much time did you spend with them? And did you ever get to a point where
00:14:27
Speaker
you could let them write an article and you didn't have to worry about it other than giving it a check mark at the end of the day. No, definitely. We're not there yet, to be honest. There's a couple of things that we did. One is, and I don't know if this is necessarily the best advice, but I would say what we did and you can correct us Mark, but we found topics that were more approachable, right? So our strategy of these early blog posts in the first six months was not
00:14:55
Speaker
creating the world's best content. It was to create content. And I think that's really where I struggle a lot is I want it to be the best.
00:15:05
Speaker
all every single time. And to do that plus doing all the other things that you need to do as a co-founder of a startup is very difficult. And so I felt like creating the content, getting it out there so that we could get feedback, so we could see what did resonate, what didn't resonate was actually how you're going to then eventually create the best content, right? So we really focused on
00:15:27
Speaker
more thought leadership type things that weren't so specific into how data analytics works because that's what they could help me with. So I identified the types of articles they could help me with more than trying to force them into writing some sophisticated article. I think the conundrum facing many B2B SaaS entrepreneurs is that
00:15:49
Speaker
They're super smart. They know their product inside out and they want to communicate that to the world. But it takes time and effort to do that in a really good way. So what they need to do in the short term, and I think the approach that you embrace was that people are going to hate me because there's so much emphasis on high quality content these days. It's content that's good enough. It's content that gets your
00:16:12
Speaker
story out there, their message out there without being perfect. Because if you're waiting for perfection, if you're trying to make that happen, it's going to take forever to do. And then you've got no traction, you've got nothing in the bank, there's nothing you can leverage to attract.
00:16:29
Speaker
prospects and customers.
Hiring a Marketing Head
00:16:30
Speaker
So I like your approach. It's a little unorthodox to the marketers in the crowd. It's probably sacrilegious the fact that you've put out content that you admit wasn't very good. But that's marketing sometimes marketing has to be down and dirty because if you don't do marketing, then then you're sort of you're sitting still on the water and that's not a good place to be you've hired a recently hired ahead of marketing.
00:16:51
Speaker
I really would like to get your view and this is a big hire for a lot of companies i mean the very product based then they hire a sales person. And then they finally get around to hiring a marketer and it's it's almost as seen as a necessary evil at what point did you finally realize or accept that you had to hire head of marketing.
00:17:13
Speaker
And how did you start that process? How did you take step one in terms of making sure that you hired the right person? Because if you hired the wrong person, then you've wasted a lot of time and effort, and then you guys are all over again.
00:17:27
Speaker
Yeah, it is very tough and hiring has taken us a long time and we haven't gotten it right every single time and this new head of marketing is fairly new and so far we're really happy with his progress and what he's been helping us do.
00:17:45
Speaker
I think really, I thought about marketing in a couple of stages, maybe. The first was foundational, and that meant getting that content out there that might not be perfect, but it was getting content out there. It was starting to build the muscle of marketing inside the company, getting some traction, seeing what worked, that kind of stuff.
00:18:05
Speaker
So as I started, as we started, you know, getting that muscle building and flexed or whatever you want to call it said, well, okay, now we've, we've got this going. We've got this kind of figured out, like the process of a couple of blog posts a month. This is working. That's not working ads. This, then it was like, well, now we need somebody to refine this. And that's where I really thought about.
00:18:29
Speaker
the head of marketing is not necessarily somebody who starts from scratch but then somebody who helps us refine what we have because i think if you have somebody come in with with absolutely nothing with no foundation.
00:18:43
Speaker
I personally think that's very difficult for somebody to come into a startup that's only a few people, and there's been no marketing done before, and then say, hey, go do this. Because there's no standard set, there's nothing to measure you off of, there's no baseline. Once we got to a point where I felt like we had enough to begin refining and chiseling it,
00:19:06
Speaker
that's when I started feeling like, okay, this makes sense to bring in somebody.
Integrating New Marketing Hire
00:19:10
Speaker
That's kind of how I thought about it. And he really is, his role early on is really to help shore up that foundation and then we'll kind of leverage it and kind of put fuel in that fire. But right now his first couple of months is really making sure
00:19:27
Speaker
the things that we did were that we said were good enough at the time are truly good enough. And maybe that might be a couple of new tools, you know, revisiting some customer conversations, things like that to make sure that we're on the right path with that brand messaging and things like that.
00:19:41
Speaker
I like that approach. Many of the clients, B2B SaaS clients that I work with are doing no or little marketing. They've got product, they've got sales, and my job is to come in and establish that foundation. So for me, it's positioning and messaging, getting a marketing strategy in place, and actually getting some marketing started. So when you have a full-time resource, they're not starting from scratch, because that's a big job starting from scratch. They can come in, they can leverage their specific skills, and then enhance or amplify what's going on. I am interested
00:20:09
Speaker
in the process. You said it took a long time, perhaps some false starts along the way. So what were the steps that you took? Did you just put an ad on Indeed and ask people to comply? Did you go out? Probably not. Did you go out to your network? What were the different ways that you found interview prospects and how do you eventually decide on the person that you hired?
00:20:31
Speaker
The first thing is trying to identify the role as well as you can and define it, I guess. Because it's hard to go write a job description without having a good definition of what you think you need and what you don't need. And so I actually started with some advisors who have strong marketing backgrounds or at least hired strong marketers and really just asked, at the stage that we're at,
00:21:00
Speaker
in their experience, what are those skill sets that we need, right? And so I think overall it kind of came around, it focused on, some of it was as simple as like familiar with getting the tools up and running and really getting some of that tactical stuff going, right? So there's definitely a baseline of tactical work that this person needs to do.
00:21:22
Speaker
Then the other thing that was helping define the acquisition funnel and the things that are a little more strategic, right? So is the brand positioning resonating or not resonating? Somebody that can answer those types of questions. So that's where I started was advisors.
00:21:38
Speaker
clear definition. And then it was going to the network first, trying to work that angle. We started looking in August of 2021, but we didn't make the hire until the very end of November. So that was three months later, which is all in. That's not too bad of a timeframe to find somebody. But we ended up finding somebody through LinkedIn, like a LinkedIn post.
00:22:05
Speaker
working the network, trying to work LinkedIn, that kind of stuff was really how we did that. And we felt like he had the right level of tactical experience, but also clearly showed that he could think at the strategic level at where we are today. Maybe not a Fortune 500 company, but where we at, where we need our strategy to be, he had kind of done that before.
00:22:27
Speaker
A lot of B2B SaaS companies hire a marketer. It's very exciting to get somebody with marketing expertise and experience on board because as an entrepreneur, you say to yourself, this is awesome. They're going to do amazing things and they're going to take us to the next level. The reality is it's another person that you've got on board and make sure that they do the job. What were those initial couple months like? What were the first steps that you had to do with them and what were the steps that they had to do to make sure that
00:22:56
Speaker
they knew the product and that you were actually forming a partnership in which one plus one equals three. What were those first months like to really get the ball rolling? Yeah, I'm a big fan of writing up a 30, 60, 90 day plan as that role starts. No matter what role it is, after the first 30 days,
00:23:16
Speaker
What are those milestones we want to hit? 60 days milestone, 90 days milestone. So that's something that I might outline when the person first starts, but it's a mutually agreed upon kind of, this is what we're working towards each of the first three months. And the first month with this marketer was get familiar with the product, get familiar with the foundation that we've set. So that's the blog post, that's the PR company, really understand what we've been doing last 12 plus months.
00:23:46
Speaker
And then also go validate what our positioning is today a little bit. Talk to our customers. So we introduced him to five or six of our customers, and he did interviews with each one of them to say, you know, to hear from them specifically what pain points we're solving, how they think of us, what are the words they're using when they talk about us, so that, like I said, we are
00:24:11
Speaker
We have our brand and our position that we worked on before he joined. That could be wrong. It could be bad, but it's where it is today and I want to get his input and him do the research and get to where he wants to get with that position compared to what we have today. Really testing our initial hypothesis. That was the first month of his time. We're actually in his second month right now-ish. Now it's really starting to
00:24:40
Speaker
Lay down the foundation for some new content some improved content is really what we're working on so working through like a brand guide and some of those pieces we didn't have anything other than those initial buyer persona so turning that into some more of a brand guides that he can kind of.
Refining Content and Brand Guides
00:24:59
Speaker
We can agree on that and he can then use that and go off and kind of work for it. So that's where month two is. Month three is more kind of going to be like off to the races, get going, let's see what you can do. But that's how we've been thinking about it. I don't know if that's necessarily how you've done it or how you think about it. But in our non-marketing simpleton minds, that's how we've approached it.
00:25:22
Speaker
It's pragmatic and it's the way that I work with clients. Messaging and positioning is important and talking to customers. I love the idea that they went up and talked to five or six customers because they'll tell you the truth. Entrepreneurs are really good at telling a story, but it's completely biased and subjective and from their own personal experience, but customers will tell you the truth and they'll often tell you things that you don't know or things that are surprising and then giving a marketer time to put together a plan to get some of the processes and frameworks together. That's great.
00:25:50
Speaker
And then they can do tactical execution because a lot of companies want to do tactical execution out of the gate. And if a market doesn't know the product or the customers or the landscape, they're operating with one hand behind their back. And I like your approach. Seems like you've hired the right person. So that that's very encouraging. Curious about what marketing looks like.
2022 Marketing Plans
00:26:08
Speaker
for the rest of 2022. I don't know whether you're planning on going to conferences or whether that's off the table, given what's going on. What are some of the things that you'd like to see marketing do for you or for verb data this year?
00:26:22
Speaker
Yeah, some of the stuff that our new marketing is, he's really digging in on is more partnerships, right? More partnership marketing is a big one for him. So that might be working with like industry groups in B2B SaaS or for product managers or engineers or product marketers. So partnership marketing is one that he's really interested in kind of doing some initial legwork on. And the other stuff is really,
00:26:52
Speaker
Right now, the foundation that we're working on is optimizing our web properties, our websites, how we're managing our ads so that we can do much faster iteration and work through those more. We've set up our ads.
00:27:07
Speaker
It's not something that we previously touched so frequently, right? We would track them, but we wouldn't necessarily optimize high performing and drop off low performing things and maybe play with landing pages as much as we should. So that's really what we're looking at is building a nicer front door to verb data.
00:27:25
Speaker
which is verbhated.com, right? Build a nice doormat and build the content around that and kind of give the experience to people before they're buying and joining verb. So that's really where we're focused, is that partnership side and building that kind of welcome mat to verb out a lot more. That might through content, through shared publications, that kind of stuff as well.
00:27:46
Speaker
That's great. This has been a really interesting conversation. I think a lot of entrepreneurs need more insight into how marketing happens, how you get started with marketing, how you build a marketing foundation, and eventually how you hire a marketing person because it's a journey that you're on. It culminates with hiring the marketing person and eventually hiring a marketing team, which is a huge step for a lot of companies. So I hope they've got some firsthand insight into how that happens. Final question is, where can people learn more about you and verb data?
00:28:15
Speaker
Our website is our welcome mat. It's verbdata.com. You can also see us on social at verbdata, and that's on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. So those are our main properties. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media.
00:28:40
Speaker
To learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you next time.