Mark Colgan: How to Source High Quality Leads Who are More Likely to Buy in the B2B SaaS Industry

The following message is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq have decided to support the SaaS District community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners. This episode of SaaS District is sponsored by Onboard, a customer onboarding software that helps automate and optimize to create the perfect journey for every customer. If you're a SaaS company, you probably already know that a poor onboarding experience can be one of the primary causes for users to churn. Most companies wrongly neglect the onboarding experience for their clients, creating that first poor impression. Onboard is a software made specifically for companies' onboarding and implementation. They onboarded several unicorns and Fortune 500 companies at their previous startups before they were acquired, and now have taken that knowledge and know-how to build onboard.io. Be sure to check out onboard.io where they're currently looking for early beta customers, and the founders will work directly with you to help improve your onboarding process. Make sure to check it out, onboard.io. Thanks again, Balsamiq, for sponsoring this podcast. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsamiq, or even just thank the folks at Balsamiq for their support of our community, please visit balsamiq.com/go/saas-district today. Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akeel Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how to source high-quality leads who are more likely to convert and buy in the B2B SaaS industry. Today we have our special guest and friend, Mark Colgan, joining us. Mark is the co-founder and CEO of Speak On Podcast, an outbound prospecting coach at the Sales Impact Academy, the chief revenue officer at TaskDrive, a B2B SaaS revenue growth consultant at YellowO, And a mentor at Growth Mentor. By day, Mark works with B2B companies to increase revenue by helping them with their lead generation and data enrichment strategies. By night, he helps B2B SaaS companies scale revenue with their sales and marketing automation and customer journey optimization.

Revenue generation is Mark's brain default state, and his personal mantra is to give without expecting anything in return. So welcome, Mark. Glad to have you on today's show.

Cheers, Akeel. Really glad to be here too.

Cool.

So for those in our audience who aren't familiar with your background and expertise, can you just share a quick summary of how you transitioned from being, you know, on the recruitment side of industry and how you made that switch to decide to focus on, you know, the B2B SaaS revenue growth side of the business?

Sure. So it's a story that goes back about 10 or 13 years, so I'll try and be as brief as I can. But I first started off in, in university, I studied marketing. But when I was looking for a placement, which we had to do as part of our degree, all of the marketing placements weren't great. They were just admin sort of roles and they didn't have the responsibility. But I saw recruitment as a role that paid really well compared to all the other placements, as well as having a lot of responsibility. So I did that in my placement. And then I had a job on the table as I finished uni. And I spent the next 4 years in recruitment and I was mainly recruiting sales and marketing roles. Just before I made the switch at the time to marketing, there really wasn't that many digital marketers or online marketers in the market, so I knew it was a good opportunity for me to move into a new industry or a new market. And by doing that, I taught myself online marketing. I bought The Dummy's Guide to Marketing and Pimp My Site, which is all about SEO. A lot of the stuff wouldn't even work anymore, but it gave me a good foundation. I built a portfolio of examples that I could share and talk about. during interviews. And then that landed me my first digital marketing role, and in my subsequent role as well, I was the first digital marketer. So that meant I had to build the CRM, build out the marketing automation platforms from scratch, and that helped me land my third role as head of marketing. But I got to the age of about 30 and took an early retirement and traveled around South America and Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough money to keep doing it, so I had to go back to work. When I was in Santiago in Chile, I did a CRM implementation and charged on a project basis for it and knew it was possible to work remotely. I had a skill, it was in demand, and I could charge a good amount for that and do it from anywhere. So for the next 2 years, I did exactly that. I worked with B2B software companies mainly as a tech stack and growth consultant, mainly helping out with the selection, implementation, optimization of marketing automation and sales automation platforms. As well as outbound sales and marketing campaigns as well. So did a lot of work with those two. So that happened for 2 years. And then, you know, I was just a solo consultant. I could handle 3 or 4 clients at a time. Started to kind of hit the ceiling. There's a bit of a roller coaster because 3 clients would finish, then I hadn't been nurturing my pipeline. And I wanted something a little bit bigger where I didn't have to do the delivery as well as everything else. So I joined TaskRides. And for me, as I said, there's an opportunity to do something a lot bigger. And I managed a team of almost 100 remote employees all across the world where we served sales and marketing audience, which I knew very well. And in that time, I managed to consult with hundreds of sales teams with their outbound sales campaigns, just advising and tweaking and making suggestions. And now more recently, which I think we'll move on to a little bit later, I co-founded Speak On Podcasts where we help people secure podcast interviews like these. And in my kind of spare time, when I have spare time, I also coach the Outbound prospecting course with the Sales Impact Academy, and I mentor startups with Growth Mentor.

Wow. So you got a lot on your plate there. So that's interesting that you did everything kind of self-taught out of interest. You know, you're in that industry, you were hiring for marketers and then you thought, hey, let me learn this myself. And then you started applying it to other companies and here you are today. So that's awesome.

Yeah. I mean, I was at an advantage because I had experience on both sides of the table. So I knew what I needed to say and demonstrate during an interview. But I still had to do the hard work to get to that point to then be able to articulate it and talk about it.

Sure. Yeah, I remember when I was in university, I actually launched my first recruitment agency at the time, and I was doing recruitment and whatnot. And I realized how, you know, that's actually a very good skill from like a sales perspective, right? Because you're always, you know, screening, finding candidates, you know, it's part of the sales process and, you know, finding high-quality candidates and then selling them on the vision. So I think it's a great skill to translate.

It's double-sided, but the thing is you're selling the hardest asset ever, which is humans, because they change their minds all the time. And I always use the example of I had a conversation with a candidate, they accepted the role, and I said to them like, the commute is going to be an hour and a half each way, are you sure that's okay for you? And they were like, yeah, Mark, that's fine, that's completely fine. They went away over the weekend, spoke to friends, family, their partner, and everybody put this seed of doubt in their mind that, oh, that's 3 hours of commuting. So come Monday they ring me and say, actually, Mark, I'm not going to take the offer. So, you know, I'm celebrating popping champagne and then realized I had to then replace them. And it is everybody, they're humans, there's emotions involved. So it's a very difficult role to balance the prospecting and the human side of it.

That's exactly the realization I had and why we stopped it. I mean, it was great money and I was in university making like $10K a month or something like that. It was, you know, felt like the richest kid at school, but yeah, you're selling humans, right? So unpredictable. It's not a, Consistent product. Yeah. So kind of shifting to the sales side, you know, for a lot of our audience who are B2B SaaS founders, they're looking to optimize their sales process, whether that's closing their, you know, 6-figure deals or landing, you know, that whale enterprise client.

What are your suggested channels for building, you know, predictable and scalable outbound system?

Are you working on email? Are you doing LinkedIn? Are you doing a combination?

Yeah, so it's really a combination, but it falls under the bracket of outbound prospecting. So using those channels, and it's really the channels where your prospects are. So for me, if it's B2B, It's LinkedIn and email being the main few, the main 2 channels and really running that multi-channel, multi-touch campaigns and sequences to companies.

Mm-hmm.

But it really starts out, you can say, well, that's the tactic, you know, that's what you do, but you really need to have the right strategy and it definitely comes down to understanding your customers and really understanding what their pain points are and then also focusing on the triggers and signals and what I mean by that is, Thinking about what happens in their role before they need your solution, your service, your product. Like what's happening in their world where they— before they get to the point of needing you. And then what I suggest to people is that they prioritize focusing on those people, those people that have a need rather than people who just match the buyer persona or the job title.

And then, you know, can you speak a little bit more of that? How are you sourcing these leads or how do you suggest finding, you know, high-quality leads and then Actually enriching them to get higher quality and sourcing, looking through those signals so that they're more likely to buy.

Yeah. And Akeel, I think we could record another episode all about this, but it really comes down to understanding the different triggers, first of all. So I split them into 3 categories. There's individual triggers. So what's happening to the person? There's persona triggers, like what's happening to the role that they do? Are they hiring? Are they using a particular software? That's not individual, but it's part of their job.

Mm-hmm.

And the account level. So have they just raised a round of funding? Are they moving or expanding to offices? Or sorry, opening up new offices? And once you know the triggers and signals that you're looking for, then you select the technology that you want to use. But to give a real quick summary, if it's on the individual level that you're looking for, such as their job changes and other such information, then LinkedIn is your best resource for that. It's the most up-to-date. Database effectively if you use it that way for prospecting data. On a persona level, you could look at companies like SimilarTech, which will tell you which companies have started using a particular software. So an example would be if let's say that you're a sales trainer, you train salespeople, you can get a list of companies that have just started using Outreach or Salesloft or any of these big sales engagement platforms. And then you might reach out to them then because you know they've just made an investment in a sales engagement platform. They want to get the most out of it, but that doesn't come down to them just logging in and using it all day. They have to use it effectively. And if you're a sales trainer that can help them do that, it's a good time to start that conversation. And you may want to speak to the VP of sales, but rather than looking at a list of VP of sales, just start with the list of VP of sales who have just started using outreach in Salesloft. And that's really the key when it comes to these signals and triggers. From an account base, there's tools like Owler that gives you account insights based on the company. And you could use tools like Crunchbase, which you can sign up to, and anytime a company raises a round of funding, Series A, they're based in North America, Canada, and the UK, you can get a list of all of those people that have just raised that round of funding because they're likely to have new challenges that they haven't faced before and therefore are in a buying mode.

Makes perfect sense. So when you're working with these campaigns, you're sending out high-quality emails, targeted emails to high-quality leads. How are you then analyzing the data of those campaigns? Like, what are some key metrics that you're paying attention to? attention to and to keep the pipeline flowing, or what are some industry averages we should be comparing to, that we should be targeting?

Yeah. So my number one or my North Star metric has always been revenue. So how much revenue am I adding? So that would be the main one. But on a more meta level, you might want to look at reply rates. If you're getting low reply rates, it means that your messaging, either your targeting is off or your messaging is off. So maybe make some tweaks to those. Opens and clicks, I don't necessarily worry too much about that because the reply rate is really the most important. And you know, you've got to remember the point of prospecting is to start conversations. And even if that conversation tells you that this person, and they reply and say, this isn't for me right now, you have an opportunity to handle that objective. And then you also have an opportunity to build a relationship because if it's not ready, if it's not right for them right now, it might be in a month's time. It might be in 3 months' time. That person might change roles tomorrow. You just don't know what happens in all of these individual roles. Those would be some of the metrics. I also look at opportunities generated from that source or from that channel. And as I said, revenue generated. And once you know your revenue generated, the opportunities created, your reply rates, then you can work out if this is going to be a scalable channel for you. And then you know how many emails you need to send to get X amount of revenue.

So I guess I'm trying to understand because revenue you might not get if these sales cycles are 6 months or a year long. Um, you know, maybe you don't wanna wait until that happens, but you know, what are some other, you know, you look at conversations and demos and maybe that's probably like a, a number you wanna pay attention to, or is there like a number, a percentage? Like should we be getting 10% reply rate or, you know, 1%? What's a, what's a good number we should strive for?

Yeah, so unfortunately the, a lot of, a lot of comp— the majority of companies send a generic template to a poorly curated list of, uh, of people. And they typically get a 1.5% reply rate, which is so low, which means that their attitude is, well, let's just send more emails out, which for me is just bonkers. That's the worst strategy to have. I'd much rather send less emails which are highly targeted to a smaller amount of people and have more conversations. If you're looking at sending— if you've got a well-researched list, a very targeted email that's personalized based on those individual and maybe the account level, you could expect maybe 20% reply rate. That can really increase if you start to introduce phone and LinkedIn as well. 50% reply rate could be, could be that, but you really got to be top of your game. And to be honest, there's not that many companies. If you know, if you look at every company that does outbound, there's only 1%, 2% of companies that actually hit those rates, which is unfortunate. But the secret is there's no silver bullet. It takes time and proper planning and proper research. But those are some numbers that should hopefully help.

Okay. And is cold calling still working? Or I guess, you know, these are targeted lists, uh, you know, send the emails, maybe they reply and then they don't, they don't give you any follow-up after a couple of messages. Do you, do you suggest picking up the phone and calling them or?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it all depends on your audience as well. Like if you're targeting sales or marketing people, they're going to be more likely to answer the phone. If you're calling, if you're trying to sell to a teacher or to an HR person, it might be different. Cold calling definitely has its place. And if you take the fact that most people don't cold call, then there's less noise on that channel. So if you do cold call and you've got the right scripts and the right tone and conversations, then cold calling can be an effective part of that outbound strategy.

Cool. So in the early stages, many startups are looking to scale, right? That's their end goal. They might find that the CAC or the cost of acquiring a new customer at the initial stages will be higher than their LTV or lifetime value. How should they be thinking of investing their marketing or sales budget to acquire their first customer and keep that revenue cycle functional? Is there some process you suggest there?

Yeah. So this is quite a tricky question to ask because every company is different. They have different sales cycles, different deal sizes. But if they're very early stage, they might not actually know their lifetime value. If it's a startup that's only been around for 6 months and they say that their LTV is 3 years, That's just a figure that they have pulled out of the air. Obviously, they've given it some thought and everything, but I think David Scott has said it in the past that you need to have data flowing through the calculation to really find that meaningful result in terms of what the lifetime value would be. And I personally think if you're very early stage, you really need to focus on the go-to-market process and product-market fit or product-channel fit, because you'll need— with that data, you'll start to learn which size or type of customer is the most efficient to acquire across which channels. And unfortunately, again, this isn't a fancy answer, but you need to do those things that don't scale first and build the processes as you go along.

Mm-hmm.

Last thing I typically say to startups is like, think very hard about acquiring the right customer, not the wrong one. And at the early stages, don't be afraid of turning away customers who you know are going to be bad customers. They're going to cause a lot of issues, whether it be from a technical point of view or customer success point of view. So yeah, that's usually how I think about it in the very early stages.

Got it. And at what point are you ready to scale? Like how many clients should they keep or acquiring at a loss? Or would you suggest providing like a certain ratio for LTV to CAC and then you say, okay, we're ready to scale now?

Yeah. And if I'm honest, I probably haven't worked with enough companies to give you a real, like an average across this or enough different companies. But I think it definitely depends on the months to recover CAC. I think that's definitely something to think about. And also the expansion opportunity in the deals and also the virality of the product. So if you've got viral loops baked in and you can create a flywheel model, then you could probably afford to go longer whilst those numbers are slightly imbalanced.

Got it. Makes sense. Just going back to building out the list and your list of leads, How are you differentiating between that ideal customer profile and user persona? Any suggestions on how to build this profile for higher success, like in getting more positive responses?

Yeah, sure. So I think the important thing to remember is ideal customer profile is only about the companies and the accounts that you want to target. The user profile or buyer personas are the individuals within those accounts. So you really have to start with the ideal customer first, and that's the company. What revenue are they or what rounds of funding would they need to have achieved? What's the number of employees that a typical customer needs to have? Is it more than 1,000? Is it more than 10? These are the characteristics that you need to define. Locations can be very important. The industry that they're in, the market that they serve, the budget that they may have available. If you sell a service or product which is $200,000 a month, you're not going to want to sell to a company that has 10 employees. It's just not going to work. And what technologies they might be using is a really important indicator as well, because you can start to understand the maturity of an organization by the technology they use. So that's really from the company level, and once you've determined your ideal customer profile, then you need to look at the individuals that make up the decision-making process or the buyer's unit within those companies, and that could be splitting them into multiple personas and looking at the job titles, the seniority, their locations, and also thinking about the challenges and motivations that these individuals have as well. Where do they spend time online? Because that will help you understand which channels to focus on. And what communities do they belong to? Because you never know, there could be joint venture opportunities in those communities. And if there's audiences that are already being built, then you may be able to leverage those audiences. And effectively, that's what speaking on podcasts is all about as well.

Interesting. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. You know, another gear, you know, there's also using content marketing as a way for, you know, building leads and getting high-quality leads such as you know, we are here today. So in an article I read from Close.com, they talk about, you know, the 5 myths about SaaS sales founders usually believe. One that stuck out to me was if you create content, customers will come, which I know is only one part of the puzzle, doesn't serve the purpose of itself. What's your thoughts on this statement and what else is missing in that puzzle in content marketing to actually drive results?

Yeah, and I completely agree with the statement and it's like build it and they will come. That's what we used to do with websites back in the day and it worked because there just wasn't many websites or the channel wasn't saturated. But so whilst I agree with the statement, you really need to combine your inbound, if you're talking about content creation, with your outbound marketing, because the logic behind inbound is correct. And that's all about creating content that helps your prospects or your customers overcome challenges and educates them about your solution. But you need to couple that with outbound. And what I do with a lot of the clients that I work with is look at what content they've already created and see, does this answer a question or does this help their prospects solve a problem? And then use that as the reason why they might be reaching out. They're not reaching out to pitch their product. They're reaching out to share and give value. And going back to that mantra you mentioned in the intro, it's like giving value without expecting anything in return. And just to add a little bit more weight to that, HubSpot, when they— when HubSpot are the godfathers of inbound marketing, they wrote the book on it literally. But when you look at HubSpot today, and I looked at LinkedIn, they've got 4,500 employees. over 1,000 of those employees, so 25% of those are in sales. So even such a huge organization which is a big proponent of inbound, they also understand the importance of balancing that with outbound.

Makes perfect sense. So podcasting is obviously an important part of inbound marketing. What's the story behind you launching your most recent startup Speak on podcasts?

Yeah, so I guess I'm scratching my own itch in a way. When I was working at— when I was at TaskRabbit full-time, In a bit of spare time that I did have, I started to pitch myself and the 2 co-founders to podcasts to get them on interviews. And I found that in 3 months I managed to secure 40 interviews across the 3 of us. And that was before the end of 2019. Now some of those have been recorded, and the majority of them have released. Some haven't been released yet just because some podcasts are so far ahead in terms of their scheduling. But when I look back at the data for Q1 of this year, 40% of closed won opportunities were sourced from podcasts, which blew my mind. And not that I am an advocate to say that podcasting is a direct lead generation channel, it can influence the lead gen. Another few things that kind of fell into, you know, fell at the right time is that number of podcasts that have been released is over a million podcasts now. And it's still only the beginning. I think we're in the sales, marketing, VC world. We understand podcasts have been around for a while, but for a lot of people, they're new. And I've always been a fan of looking to leverage other people's audiences and not leverage to abuse, but leverage to form partnerships and see if you can add value to that audience, then the person who owns that audience would maybe, may want to share that value with them. And lastly, it was also an opportunity to combine my outbound prospecting skills and also help my personal mission, which is about always be connecting people. And I think You and I, we've introduced each other to a few people in the past and it's something that I do without expecting anything in return. So really there was a number of factors that influenced the reason to start it. And then the last thing that kind of was the green light was I was introduced to somebody else, my business partner Jacob, who was offering a similar service at the same time. And we decided to join forces rather than work together. Why not work— sorry, work against each other? Let's work together. And have two people leading the business rather than one, which has been a great decision.

Yeah, and thanks for that introduction to Oren from Curve. It was it was a great podcast. Yeah, if you guys haven't checked it out, check out that episode. So what you said, you know, like I started listening to podcasts almost you know seven years ago, and I actually started one back then. I wish I continued with that. It was based on personal finance. I just realized like doing the editing and all that part just got me discouraged. But you know, here I am. today and we're actually flowing and continuing to do this. With being such a saturated space, over, you said, a million podcasts now, do you think there's still value in launching a podcast as a SaaS founder or marketer today?

Yeah, I really do. And not just because I have a business in this space. And I think it goes back to the point I made before is that we're in marketing and we're in sales and it's different because we inherently are more accustomed to learning more about our craft, our skills, because we need to adapt a lot quicker than some other roles and some other functions within companies. If you take financial accountants for a while, The basics of accounting have been the same for years. They don't have as many ebbs and flows as what marketing does. So we are a little bit biased that we see a lot of sales and marketing podcasts because we're looking for that sort of content. But one thing that we talk about a lot with our customers is that it's not about the podcast episode and interviews itself, not as an individual interview. For example, if you run a podcast yourself, you start to build relationships with your ideal customers. And in fact, that's some podcasts, what we're finding as we're pitching guests to podcasts, they've got the right audience, but they say, no, we only interview people that could be our customers. And it's a way for them to build a relationship with them. It also allows you to create a ton of content that you can repurpose. And you can repurpose that by turning it into a blog post, into videos, cutting it into different formats like images and audiograms. And all you've had to do is a bit of obviously preparation, planning, and you've edited it, which you can outsource to other people. But really, you're just having a conversation with somebody. And you could ask questions that they haven't been asked or they haven't answered anywhere else. And that's kind of unique content. Another thing, if you're a podcast host, you can leverage your guest's audience if you give them the tools and the promotion— yeah, the promotional tools that they can to share it with their audience. So if you interview somebody who's got an email list of 10,000 and ask them to share it of their 10,000 email subscribers, they likely will because they obviously want to give the value to their audience as well. And that might be 10,000 people that never heard of you, your service, your product before. So that's how it works. And another thing to remember as well is that the majority of podcasts don't actually last. I couldn't find the stats before this interview, but it's something like there's the majority of podcasts have no more than 4 episodes. And if you think about that, that's crazy. There's a million, but Only a handful really out of a million are regular. And also another fact is that 52% of podcast subscribers listen to an entire episode. So that's 52% of that audience listening to 30, 40 minutes, an hour maybe, which is a really unique position to build that authority, be known, liked, and trusted by the people that are listening. Another objection that we often hear as well is that, oh, there's other podcasts that are in my niche. So why should I do— why should I create a podcast? And, you know, look at those podcasts. And if they only produce an episode once a month, then you can produce an episode twice a month or 4 times a month or daily. I mean, that's a bit, maybe a bit overkill depending on your resources. But just because there's other people doing it doesn't mean that you can't. Obviously, find a unique part of your podcast and The last thing that I just— well, 2 things actually, Akeel, sorry. Go for it. People will always want to know what their peers are doing and how they are doing it. Because, and even more so in coronavirus when we're in lockdown, when we're not able to socialize as much, you could be the head of marketing for a SaaS company, but not have anybody else on the same level as a peer to you in that company. So it's great to be able to hear what other SaaS marketers are doing, for example, If that's the focus of your podcast. And then the last thing is remembering that things that are obvious to you are often amazing to others. Because you live and breathe what you do every day, you forget sometimes that you are a domain expert about that particular thing. So you might think that, well, I have nothing to share, I have nothing of value. You'll be so surprised by just sharing and reaching a new audience. People will turn around and say, thank you, I never knew that existed, or I didn't know I could do that, or I didn't know that was possible. So obvious to you, amazing to others. This is something to remember.

Nice. And even as a host like myself, a lot of these questions I formulate, it's more out of my own curiosity and I'm always learning. And sometimes like I kind of know some of this stuff, but I want to make sure, you know, I know you're the expert in podcasting. Let me ask Mark a couple of questions here that might help me. And I also heard that I think it's average of people launch, I think 4 or 5. I think I heard 5 as well. And I guess it's same like blogging or any other Sure. You know, marketing channel, people get a little bit of excitement and then they realize, you know, they don't have a proper system to continue doing it. How else should we be thinking about lead generation through podcasting, you know, as a marketing channel? How long should we be doing this before we should, you know, start seeing some kind of ROI? Is this, you know, once a week, you know, 20 episodes in, you should start seeing it? I mean, just trying to understand that a little better.

Yeah. And I want to break this down a little bit and go into detail because I don't personally believe that podcasting should be seen as a lead generation strategy, but it can generate leads.

Okay.

So I think if you view it through the lens of maybe it's brand awareness strategy, or maybe it falls into the PR bucket, like as long as you're not expecting leads to come out of it. I think Chris Walker, who really, he has a great podcast and he really produces a lot of content too. He talks about brand marketing being a demand accelerator. If you get brand right, it accelerates revenue growth and can shorten sales cycle and increase win rates. And just because you can't measure that with leads generated in your attribution software, it doesn't mean it doesn't work. And with podcasts, they generally have a compounding effect because you typically get the most downloads in the first 30 days, and then the 30 days and beyond, you still get downloads of that podcast. And going back to those triggers and signals, maybe you've got a podcast about prospecting, let's say, and then somebody is looking for help, support, looking to learn about prospecting, they can go back and listen to previous episodes about prospecting, which may have been yours. And it might be that you were selling a course on prospecting, for example. But because that person has sought that information when they had the need, they are more highly likely to purchase or to make a decision when they find it. So it's an opportunity to create that evergreen content for your brand and for your business. You know, it hasn't— marketing and sales hasn't changed. People still do business with those that they know, like, and trust. And we get asked, you know, what's the ROI of podcasting? And I often throw back the question of what's the ROI of being in a customer's ear quite intimately for 30 minutes whilst they, you know, they might be walking their dog, cleaning their house, going for a run, but you're with them and you're sharing knowledge, you're sharing stories, you're sharing examples. I don't know how to put the ROI on that, but I would definitely take being listened to by 200 people for 30 minutes rather than 200 people clicking on a Facebook ad because there's no personality in that Facebook ad. Okay, you can put some personality in copy, but not as much as you can get across in a 2-way conversation like this. And, you know, I've had it before as well where somebody reaches out to me after a podcast episode and says, hey Mark, I really enjoyed the episode. It seems like you you know that exact pain that I'm going through and you explain how to solve it and I need your help to solve it for me. And that happens on a regular basis for the podcast interviews that I do. And then some of the other benefits as well, Akeel, are high-quality backlinks. A lot of podcasts put links in show notes. It gives me a ton of content to repurpose into blogs, social, into video. And also I can share that content with leads and prospects and customers as well. You know, a lot of times as a marketer you might think, oh, What do I, you know, I've got to create content, I've got to write a post and what do I write about? You might just have spoken for an hour on a podcast but there was a 15-minute segment which would be really relevant to your audience. So share that with your customers or share that with your prospects. So it really enables you to do a lot more by just having a conversation with somebody.

Makes sense. Yeah, we had a conversation with Rand Fishkin, the former CEO of Moz who's now running SparkToro. I'd rather have 20 people listen to my podcast than I think 10,000 people read my blog just because there's so much deep connection of people actually listening to you. They trust you and you build a deeper connection with them. Would you look at it more of like middle of the funnel? Because you said people are reaching out to you now. They've already— I feel they feel a connection with you and they already look at you as the authority and expert at that point. And then now it's just a matter of engaging with them.

Yeah.

and moving forward from there?

Yeah, I think it's top and middle because it depends on the podcast that you go on. So some podcasts are very, very broad. They talk about SaaS. They don't talk about SaaS marketing. They don't talk about SaaS sales. It's just SaaS in general. And they might have marketing guests or they might have sales guests. There are other podcasts which is just about outbound prospecting. I was on one the other day called Outbound Metrics. All they do is talk about case studies of outbound campaigns that have worked really, really well.

Cool.

So people that are listening to that podcast, they might work in SaaS, they're probably a lot closer to the bottom of the funnel and perhaps in the middle than somebody who's listening to your podcast, for example, because it covers quite a broad spectrum of subjects. And that's not a bad thing. It's just thinking that when you are selecting the podcasts that you want to speak on, have a mixture of those that are going to be top of the funnel, quite broad, and then middle of the funnel, a little bit more specific. That's the strategy we suggest anyway.

Makes sense. And if you're looking to use— first time, you know, you're thinking about using marketing Podcasting as a marketing channel, would you suggest starting getting on other people's podcasts as like as we are today or as a way to leverage their audience and your expertise or should you start your own?

Yeah, so I think definitely try it first before you invest your time, your commitment and your resources into creating your own podcast and you could definitely get a feel by speaking on maybe 5 to 10 podcasts. You'll start to see what the processes that other hosts have. You'll see that some hosts are super prepared like You sent some questions before for me to prepare, which is fantastic. Other hosts are just really laid back and say, yeah, we're just gonna have a conversation. We'll talk about XYZ. Sometimes they don't even tell you anything and you just turn up and you have a conversation. So you can, you can start to learn the different styles of podcasting. But definitely try it first because you don't want to, you don't want to commit to something that you don't know if you're going to enjoy. So speak on a few podcasts first and then make the decision whether you want to start your own one.

Cool.

I much prefer asking the questions. I get to learn. So I guess it's on your personality. Can you share any examples of what you've seen work really well with any of your guests or on podcast show in general that has led back to— I know we kind of said maybe it's not as apparent, but ROI on marketing spend. Have you seen clear ROI from marketing and podcasts?

Yeah. So we are very purposeful with our customers to say, Our objective isn't to generate leads for you. We're not a lead generation company. We're going to secure interviews for you and then we're going to help you deliver a good interview and think about the call to action. So we love it though when our customers send us screenshots of people reaching out to them saying, hey, heard you on X podcast, it was great, I might have some work to work on. We had another screenshot come through and we have a channel in our Slack which I share, me and Jacob share all of this information with our team because it's It's great to hear that customers are seeing the results literally the day after their podcast episode goes live. And just in the last week, we had one of our customers spoke on a well-known SaaS podcast and had 2 people sign up as a customer on his platform, which was awesome. And another customer had a number of discovery calls. And it all comes down though, Akeel, to like, what do you say at the end of a podcast? Where do you direct people? to. And it depends on what it is that you're selling or your reason. So one of our customers directs people to like an on-demand webinar, which people can learn more about the framework that he talks about during the interviews. Another customer, he recommends people book a one-on-one call with him just to answer any questions that they have. Somebody else would send somebody to an ebook. You know, it really does vary. You can definitely tailor the call to action and the offer based on the podcast that you're appearing on.

That's pretty cool. I haven't seen much of like, you know, right away seeing people get kind of leads, but just the other day I got a message from somebody on LinkedIn that I was just talking to. He said, I heard your podcast with Tom Hunt from Bcast and I just signed up for Bcast. And I sent him a screenshot to Tom. I think he was pretty happy about that. So I like that. Yeah. So, and then, you know, how long should you be podcasting, you know, either side, into before you can start, you know, seeing some results? Is it, you know, 20, 50? You know, I think it's like, you know, release 50 episodes and then, you know, hopefully you'll see something and make it worthwhile because that's a lot of time and effort, right, to prepare, sit through an hour. You know, if you put your time, you calculate your time all across that, it's quite high, right?

Yeah. But I think it goes back to outbound prospecting as we were talking about before, like If you have a list of 1,000 people that you haven't done your research on and you send emails out, you're going to get a very small reply rate.

True.

As a host, you could actually see the ROI of podcasting before the interview even goes live. Because if it's a guest that you brought on that shares your goals, shares your vision, you potentially can do some work together, you can partner up, that could give you the ROI of doing the podcast in the first place. And we've seen examples of that in the past. And like I said, many podcasts only invite their ideal customers. They only invite people that they would want to work with. From a guesting point of view, it's trickier to give a number. Maybe 3 months would be a good acid test to say, have I generated anything from this, or has this impacted me positively? But again, you've got to think of those other benefits of it's not just about the podcast interview itself, it's all of the content, it's the authority, the credibility that you're building.

Sure.

But for me, when I was talking about before with TaskDrive, we actually had a customer sign up before my podcast episode went live. And that was all because I shared a post on social media saying, really looking forward to the podcast episode going live today where I covered XYZ. And it was with a well-known person who they were following. And they said, hey, can we set up because we need help with this? And they signed up after that call. You know, my deal sizes were relatively small, not really long sales cycles. So it won't work for everybody, but the ROI can happen very quickly.

Super cool. What's your, Your top 3, 2 or 3 favorite marketing or sales stack tools or resources that you can share with the audience that they can start using today?

Yeah, so this is another topic we could do another podcast on, Akeel, because I spent years analyzing all of these, but I'm thinking of those that people could use straight away. ConvertFlow, it's a pop-up builder, form builder, you can embed forms on your website, but what it allows you to do is a really smart onsite retargeting campaigns across your website as well. So when people are coming back, you can serve them different calls to action. I don't know how many times you've been on the same website and you get served the same download the ebook even though you've downloaded it already or you said no, you weren't interested. So ConvertFlow, super easy to use and very easy to get started with. Zapier, for me, there are so many simple things that you could automate with Zapier that you just need to maybe sit back for a little bit, look at all the things that you're spending a lot of time doing And just ask yourself, can Zapier solve that for me by connecting 2 apps to each other?

Mm-hmm.

And then the other one, this is more from an aggregation point of view, is Feedly. I use that. It has all of my content sources, all the blogs I'm subscribed to, all in one place. So rather than, you know, click and look at content articles as they come out, I have a half an hour block where I'll just review my Feedly, read the most recent or relevant content I want to read, and I know I'm done. And I don't have that FOMO of missing out that I haven't read an article that Hiten Shah has just released, for example. So ConvertFlow, Zapier, and Feedly.

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. We'll put that in the show notes for our audience to check out. Mark, this has been great. I always enjoy speaking to you. How can our audience get in touch with you and learn more about your sales or marketing expertise?

Sure. So I think the best place to find me online is LinkedIn, and that's Mark Colgan. And I also released a new thing which is an AMA. So you can ask me any questions to do with sales or marketing by just completing the form, put the question, send, go. Takes me a little while. I've got a bit of a backlog to get through. But you can find that at markcolgan.co.uk/ama. So that's probably the best place to catch me.

Awesome, guys. Take advantage of that. Mark will help you with and answer your questions. Cool. Thank you so much, Mark. Really, really appreciate it. And it's It's great, great chatting with you again.

Cheers, Akeel. It's been great. Thank you so much.

Cheers.

Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again and see you on the next one.