How Marketing Can Be Your Secret Sauce to Fundraising and Growth | Bandwidth CMO Noreen Allen

And again, these sessions will be recorded, and we have plenty to go on this afternoon. But without further ado, I will be kicking it over to Noreen to get us started. Great, thank you, Caitlin. Great to see everybody today. Thank you for joining the session. I'm a big fan of SASster, so always fun when I have the opportunity to be part of a SASster event. And just kudos to Caitlin and team for great programming so far today. Everything's really been great. So today I'm going to talk about the role of marketing in fundraising and growth of a software company. So I think folks often think about marketing and think about the sort of natural role marketing plays in driving revenue growth and the alignment with sales, but not everyone's thinking about the role marketing can play as a company is scaling and trying to attract revenue. So whatever stage you're at, whether you're early stage, you know, with an angel investment, maybe you've done an A or B round, or you're contemplating an IPO, I hope that there'll be some things you can apply from my talk today. So very quickly before I jump in here, just a quick background on me. So I'm with Bandwidth. Bandwidth is a communication software company. We're based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company has been around for 20 years now. If you're familiar with Twilio, we're in the same category as Twilio. So companies come to us to add voice or messaging services into an application or to build an application around that. We were bootstrapped for the first 17 years of the company. And in 2017, we took the company public on NASDAQ. So before Bandwidth, I was with 4 other tech companies. Across several different industries, e-commerce, cloud computing, wireless infrastructure, and mobile software. And across the companies that I was with, the 5 companies, 4 of them IPO'd, 3 ended up selling. And of those 3, 2 sold after they IPO'd. And then there was lots of rounds of fundraising, both VC and private equity fundraising along the way, a lot of rounds of strategic M&A. So today I'm going to talk to you about the approach that I've taken at all the different companies I was a part of over the years and the role marketing had, particularly around fundraising, and, and the way we played a strategic role in that and really helped to steer the company and, and get the outcomes that we wanted. So I boiled it down really into two main areas that I think you can apply to your business. So the first is Connect your business to a growing market. So you want to make sure that as you're working on your messaging and positioning, you clearly show how your business is connected to a growing market. So we all know investors want to see all the up and to the right charts that show all this great growth. So you want to go out and look at the category that you're in, figure out how you fit into that category. What's your unique differentiator within that, within that market? What are the macro dynamics that are impacting the overall market? You want to pull all of that together. You obviously want to bring in forecast data that shows how big the market is growing, but you want more than just the data. You want to be able to tell a story and connect your business to trends that are happening in the industry and in the broader world around us. You have to remember, you know, the investors you're dealing with, they're people, and you want them to get excited about the growth potential for your business. So the more you're able to really show, hey, we're part of this industry, here's where it's growing to, and these are the trends that are impacting that, that industry. And if there are trends that that person can connect with and easily understand, it's going to be a lot easier for you to sell that positioning in that story. The other big part of this is if you're entering, or if you're in a market that's a crowded market Let's say, let's say you're in like the email marketing software category. It's a pretty crowded market, or marketing automation. It's okay if you're entering a crowded market. You just want to be able to show what your differentiated position is within that market. You can show that, hey, here's the whole pie for email marketing, and here's where it's growing to, and the trends that are impacting things, and here's my slice of the pie. You don't have to show that your addressable market is that entire email marketing space. You just want to show that you have a meaty enough slice that's going to be interesting and big, big enough for your company. So that's the first big piece. Then once you've, once you've connected yourself to that growing market, you've shown that there's clear product market fit. The next piece is the messaging and really bringing the message to life. So this is an area where I think a lot of companies fall down. And they fall down because I think so often the temptation is to, you use all this jargon and to sound really smart and to sound really clever with your headlines and with your copy and with your boilerplate. And what ends up happening is it's really hard to understand. And the key thing here is, I think, in everything you do within your business, you've got to keep it simple. You have to remember that you're talking to people, whether it's an invest— a potential investor, whether it's a research analyst, a report, a tech reporter, a potential employee, potential customer, whoever it is, you kind of think, okay, this is an analyst from Gartner, or this is a, you know, Silicon Valley VC who's invested in a lot of software companies. They're going to understand this. I need to be at their level and speak tech talk to them. You don't, you really don't, because too often what happens is they don't understand the nuance of your business. They don't understand all of that jargon. So what I like to do is just break it down into very, very simple basic terms. So it may not sound super sexy and really clever as a headline, but it's really clear. So I'll give you a couple examples from Bandwidth. So we were, years ago, we had, we did a website refresh and we had this big hero image, cool image behind it, and the line on the hero was "A more connected world built here." More connected world built here. What does that mean? That could be anything. That could mean anything. It wasn't specific at all. It was so broad, so pie in the sky. The image looked really cool, but it said nothing about what we do. And so we changed and iterated many times over the years, and now we have something super clear, super simple on our site, on our homepage, but people understand what we do. So clarity has got to trump everything. That's, that's the super important part. The next important piece is when you're describing your company, don't be afraid to describe your company relative to competitors. So when, when I first mentioned Bandwidth in this talk, I mentioned that we're in the same category as Twilio. Most folks at SaaStr know who Twilio is. Twilio has done a fantastic job of building a great brand within the business. They're great. They've got a great business. We're in the same category. There's a bunch of differences between the companies, but if I'm giving you that high-level pitch, And I say, "Bandwidth is communication software. You know Twilio? We're similar to Twilio." You instantly are grounded and know, "Okay, I understand HighLevel, what they do, because I've compared it." I think too often companies are reluctant to do that because they want to carve out this brand new category and they don't want to compare themselves to anybody else. And I encourage you to make it easy on your listener. Whether your listener is an investor or whether they're a potential employee, whoever it is, make it easy on them. The other piece that I like to do with bandwidth is I like to try and break down what we do into relatable examples. So I'll say, yeah, you know, bandwidth communication software company, you're likely using bandwidth every day where you live, work, and play. And I'll give a couple examples. You dial into a Zoom call on this Zoom call right now. You're using bandwidth if you dialed into that call using phone number. You book a pet sitter using Rover.com app, that's bandwidth for messaging service. You got a reminder about your dentist appointment tomorrow, that's coming from bandwidth. So I give examples to try and bring it to life for folks. And this is particularly important with the investor audience because as you try, you know, in the first slide, we talked about connecting to a large growing market. And when you really bring that to life for someone in relatable terms, now all of a sudden they're walking out and going about their day and they're looking around and thinking, that's another bandwidth use case. That's another bandwidth use case. Holy cow. Bandwidth could get into— they power Teams. They could get in and power this platform as well. So now all of a sudden they start thinking about all the different ways they can use your business. Breaking it down into those really basic relatable terms is really important for that reason. And the other piece is, you know, I look at every person that I talk to as a potential evangelist for my brand. And I've always done this with any company I've ever been with. And it's people, whether I'm talking to a reporter or someone in my booth at a trade show, or even someone I meet around town at a concert and, you know, They say they see a Bandwidth t-shirt and say, oh, hey, tell me about Bandwidth. I use it as an opportunity to talk about what we're doing at Bandwidth and use those relatable examples. And then I'll maybe throw in a little bit about the culture or some other unique elements. But I'm looking at every person as this is a possible evangelist, a potential brand evangelist for me. I want them fired up. I want them excited about my brand. And I want them to then go on when they go to the next booth or they go to the next conference or it's a reporter and they're in their next meeting or they're back talking to, to their co-workers, they're saying, man, I met this really cool company today, Bandwidth, and here's what they do. So as you're thinking about getting your message out, building your brand, remember that every encounter is someone that's a potential brand evangelist that could help you, whether they're a future customer, future investor, future employee. So now that you've, you've got your message nailed you've connected to a growing market, and you're thinking about, how do I now get out and tell the story of the company? I can't just rely on these brand evangelists. I need to get out there and tell the story and raise my visibility among those potential investors. So if you have a limited budget, if you have a limited budget, you really want to take a surgical approach to reaching your stakeholders. And the reason I say that is, you know, you can get out with these mass tactics. They tend to be expensive. The market's noisy. There's so much out there that you're competing with. It can be really hard to get noticed. So what I've done in the past that's worked really well is particularly around fundraising. So, you know, when you're, when you're in that phase of talking to VC firms or private equity firms, or maybe you're talking to investment banks about, about strategic M&A or or IPOing, they will usually share with you some reports, research reports from different analyst firms. If you're not at that stage where they're sharing reports with you, you can go to their blog and they're typically in their blog, they're quoting different research analysts and different sources. A lot of them on the VC side, a lot of them are quoting Saster and retweeting Saster. Pay attention to what they're writing about. Pay attention to what they're retweeting. Understand what, what's in their sphere of influence, like who's influencing them. And then you want to go and target those outlets. So if the VC firm that you want to get in front of pays a lot of attention to Saster, you want to make sure you're aligned with Saster and that you're getting visibility through Saster. If the investment bank reads everything that IDC publishes, you want to make sure you're briefing IDC. You may want to become a client of IDC so that you get more time with them. So they fully understand your story and where you fit within the industry. You want to look at, you know, as you're trying to position the company, oftentimes it makes a lot of sense to commission some— commission a research piece about your category or about where you fit within the category. You want to bring in those analysts and third parties that, that your targets are paying attention to. So, so this is a really big one. Um, and then just working with analysts in general. This is big. This is, um, particularly if you don't have a big budget. If you don't have a big budget, so you can't go out and spend a lot of money on ads, um, taking $40K and getting into an early, you know, relationship with a research analyst firm, whether it's one of the big guys or there's some really great small nichey boutique firms that specialize in certain categories of software, it's really worth it to invest in that early on. They can help you to craft your message. They can absolutely— I mean, so many of these analyst firms have a direct line into the investors, and whether it's VC, private equity, absolutely investment banks. When you read the investment bank reports, you'll see so many things quoted from these research analysts. So it's really— it's a really important part of the mix if you are looking to raise money. You want to make sure that that group understands who you are. And then seeking third-party validation, you know, doing things like going after awards, making sure you're getting speaking ops, at the right places that your audience is paying attention to. That's going to be important as well. The other piece of building a brand and raising awareness is just remembering that your brand is so much more than your website. And today, in this world, it's influenced by so many other things. It's all the G2 Crowd, Capterra, TrustRadius, Gartner Peer Reviews. It's all of those third-party review sites today. It's social media, it's Glassdoor. You know, if you've invited— you're in conversations with a VC firm and you're telling a story about, you know, just the great potential for your business and the great culture that you have, and they go check out Glassdoor and they see on Glassdoor that your employees are really unhappy and they're revealing information about how disorganized and unaligned your business is, it's not going to help you. So you want to make sure that you really pay attention to all of this as well. And you want to make sure you pay attention to your employees. Your employees are such an important part of your brand, and you can have the strongest marketing department and the strongest brand presence, but if the minute one of your employees gets on the phone, maybe it's somebody, you know, in accounting or collections, or it's an account manager, or whoever it is, they get on the phone with one of your customers or one of your prospects and, and they're not exuding that right brand energy and personality, it's It's really gonna, it's really gonna impact your brand.