This episode features an interview with Steve Rotter, CMO at DeepL, a global communications platform powered by Language AI.

In this episode, Steve shares with us the power of a small uplift to your website when you see large scale website traffic, and the importance of pushing your point of view over your product features. He also dives into the value of brand in avoiding churn.

Key Takeaways:

• Small changes to the website can have a small uplift, and when you are dealing with large-scale website traffic, that can have a big impact on the business. For large enterprises, don’t underestimate the value of small optimizations on the website.
• People churn products, they don’t churn from valued brands and communities. Make sure to invest in your brand accordingly.
• Explaining your POV over pushing your features, allows you to demonstrate the outsized impact of your product more effectively.

Quote:

•  Brand is critical. My general sense is, people churn from products, they don't churn from communities, they don't churn from brands with personalities that they enjoy. So, we spend a lot of time looking at that in terms of, you know, what is the voice, what is the language, what is the identity of the brand?

Episode Timestamps:

*(04:11) The Trust Tree: People churn from products, not brands and communities

*(24:13) The Playbook: Explain your point of view, over pushing all your features

*(39:22) Quick Hits: Scott’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Scott on LinkedIn
• Learn more about DeepL
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Bill Macaitis, Founder & CEO, SaaS CMO Pro, where he shares growth strategies for SaaS and AI companies. His past roles include CMO positions at Slack and Zendesk, and SVP of Marketing at Salesforce.

Bill joins the podcast to discuss findings from a recent survey of over 300 B2B marketers that gives insights into marketing strategies and budgets. He shares what they learned about marketing versus sales budgets, the most common attribution model, and more.

Key Takeaways:

• Companies that are growing the fastest, invest the most in marketing. While cause and effect of that correlation is unclear, it’s an interesting finding.
• Pipeline generation was one of the most tracked metrics for CMOs, which is a nice move away from only looking at MQLs or leads. Unfortunately, awareness was rarely tracked, making it hard for marketing teams to invest in long-term initiatives.
• A lot of companies, 65 percent, continue to use first or last touch attribution models.
  
  

Quote:

•  So, what we learned is a lot of companies, I think especially in their earlier stages - percent still use first- or last- touch.  It's kind of crazy. I'm still shocked by it. I remember my time at Salesforce,  I was running the marketing ops team at that point, along with a couple other teams, and I just did a deep dive into attribution. Like I really wanted to understand like, hey, how many touches are people having with us before they became a lead? And then how many touches before they became a customer? What we would see is people would have 10, 20, 30 interactions or touches with us before they became a lead, and then they'd have like another 20 or 30 before they became a customer. And just imagine giving all the credit to the very first or last thing. And by the way, it's one of the reasons Google got so big was because a very common last touch thing is they will search on your company name. Branded search, right? And it's like, oh, like the SEM guys are like, this is amazing, right? We need to spend more on Google because they're producing these massive deals. And it's like, well wait, what about all the stuff in the middle?

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:48) Marketing Strategies and Budgeting

*(22:31) Attribution Models in Marketing

*(26:44) Top Metrics for B2B SaaS and AI Companies

*(31:06) Marketing's Role in Revenue and Expansion

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Bill on LinkedIn
• Learn more about SaaS CMO Pro
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Jenny Force, VP of Global Demand Generation at Meltwater, a company with a suite of solutions that spans media, social, consumer, and sales intelligence. Jenny discusses her experience launching the company’s first big summit, as well as the work they have done to automate their inbound process to maximize each MQL.

Key Takeaways:

• Launching a new big initiative and then proving ROI to the executive team requires careful positioning and careful measurement against KPIs.
• Automating the process for inbound leads through tech removes manual human intervention and puts the sellers into positions where they can do their job at a more impactful level.
• Imbuing campaigns with humor, while a little scary, can cause a big lift in engagement.

Quote:

• We've been really investing and not just spending more money to get more MQLs. It's making, not to sound cliche, but every MQL count. It's about automating the process. Here at Meltwater, we're a 20-year-old company, we're very sales-centric and there's a lot of energy that used to be put behind outbound. So, it was changing the narrative around inbound. Until we totally make this change as a business where everyone in the business is shouting to get an inbound lead and are super excited about it, it's how can I get every single lead responded to in under an hour without any delays? And it's been a bit of a journey to put the right tech in place to automate those processes that we can, take out that manual human intervention and then put the sellers into the business so they can actually sell. So, I've got some tech around instant meeting scheduling, self-serve demos, a conversational email that we've put in. And honestly, I feel like that has already had such an impact on our conversion rates. I wouldn't get rid of it.

Episode Timestamps:

*(06:03) The Trust Tree: Improving inbound efficiency and increasing deal velocity

*(14:32) The Playbook: Launching a summit and investing in automation

*(45:53) The Dust Up: Changing inbound KPIs to get a seat at the table

*(49:30) Quick Hits: Jenny’s quick hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Meltwater
• Learn more about Caspian Studios