10 Things That Always Work in SaaS Marketing with SaaStr's Jason Lemkin: LIVE at Workshop Wednesday

Marketing. All right, Jason, feel free to take it away.

Okay, thanks everybody for joining. We had a little bit of a, of an extra hole in the schedule today, so they drafted me to join and I thought what could I do to help? And this is a SAP. Both a classic Saster post I've updated and actually on my own YouTube channel. We have so much content at Saster that sometimes I put my own stuff on The Jason Lemkin YouTube if you want to watch it. It's got some, actually some pretty good stuff. And I did a version of this by myself, talking to myself. 10 things that always work in marketing. But I thought it'd be good to do live and do it together and do it to share some of our learnings because frankly I do this literally every week with some founder I've invested in, have partnered with. I literally just did it yesterday with a great SaaS company. I did it with the CEO at 4 million. And these are things that just always work. And this is especially good stuff to talk about now because I think almost everything on my list cost either nothing or not a lot of money. And we are actually all, as an aside, we are all underspending on marketing today. We are all getting it wrong. Everyone has froze marketing spend, froze this and look, that's cool for a quarter, three, four months. But I did a LinkedIn poll the other day, we'll put it up on Sasser. And I asked folks if they thought after their marketing freezes they had enough pipeline to hit the plan for the rest of the year. And basically everybody said no, I don't. Great that we that we froze marketing spend. But I'm not going to have enough pipe. So no matter what, you got to do more marketing in the back half of the year. But I will tell you it hasn't come quite come back yet. We've got about 200 core sponsors just for our Saster event. So we kind of have this little crystal ball because we can see how 200 SaaS leaders are doing and a lot of them are doing great and are consistent in their spender up. But folks that are that got real conservative, they have not yet come back. So you're not alone if you have paused marketing spend. But one way or another you got to get your team more pipe, more opportunities, more leads in the back half of the year or they will starve. You cannot cut your way to growth. It's an old expression but it's like good every year. You cannot cut your way to growth. So what I want to do is talk about 10 things that always work. And almost all of you have thought about these things, done some of these things. They may seem basic, but I don't think you've done enough. So what I want to do is go through these 10 things, talk about it at each one. I'll. We'll try and experiment. Let's open it up to a couple of stories or questions after each one so we can collaborate a bit. And then, and then just think about doing one of these things better or, or just starting it and you will get more leads. Okay, so the first one, again, this is super basic, but I am guessing if we had a. If we're, if we were at Saster Live, I would ask people to raise your hands and the question would be, hold on, how many of you are doing your own customer conference? And we would look around the room and I think we'd see like 10% of you really raise your hand really high. And like, a few of you sort of raise your hand because you sort of do a customer conference, but you don't really do it. Okay. It doesn't have to be huge. I just saw on Twitter today that Stripe just announced they're doing their first in person customer conference since 2019. You don't have to do it the way Stripe did. And we'll talk about it. Just start. And let me tell you why a customer conference is magical. Magical. Even if it's like 30 people together for three hours in a hotel room, it's because when you get customers and prospects together, they sell each other. Okay? Now look, if they don't like your product, they don't sell each other. But the beauty is, if they don't like your product, they won't come. Here's the magic of the customer conference. Only two types of folks come. Folks that are interested in your product, prospects and potential customers. And customers that either love you or even if they don't love you, you're very important to them. They won't come to your customer conference, especially if they have to travel. If you're not one of the most important apps that they use and they cannot help themselves, they will get in a room and they will sell each other. The customers will sell the prospects. They'll tell you why they chose your product, why it's great. The prospects will listen. The prospects will get more excited. They will move through the funnel faster. They can interact with you, you and your team in a way that is less stressful. And there's lots of ancillary benefits. Like you, you'll generate great content if you have a few sessions and record it. There's so many benefits. And I say this to folks and they're like, oh, it's so complicated. Or I don't have a head of marketing, I don't have a head of field, or whatever. No, you could do it yourself. Literally. If you have a hundred customers and you can get even 10 or 15 of them together and you have any prospects in your pipeline, 15 and 15 is enough. Even on our little Saster team last night, we had a little sort of customer. It wasn't a conference, but it was a meetup and we had like 50 folks come all talk to each other, sponsors and partners and stuff. It just always works. So do this, get them together, rent a hotel room for an afternoon. Amelia, you've done a lot of events. What does it cost to rent the smallest ballroom at like a Marriott for three hours? What's it going to cost me?

Oh, man, less than five grand, I would say.

Okay, less than five grand. So you could probably find a place for two grand if you're really, really cheap. Right, so two grand to five, biggest suite. Yeah, yeah. To get like your best customer. So, so, so just do this and plan it, give it 90 days ahead of time, make it a little bit fun. And then, you know, just, if you, if you don't have any other ideas, have like two or three pieces of content, like not too many. Two presentations on how they use your product and then a little cocktail party. Anyhow, this always works and you'll get good at it. And then each year you build on it and it's. And it's just magical. So I can go to the next one, because next one I really want to chat about, but anyone have any story to add about how they did this early and how it helped them? If anyone's got one, raise your hand and I. Someone will add you to the conversation. Does anyone have one? I can't quite see anything in full screen mode here.

Chantel said she did this with Mace Maestro. And it was fantastic.

Fantastic. Fantastic, right? Yeah. Chantelle, if you, if you're on the chat, how many folks came to the first one that you did at Maestro back? Because Chantelle was there. I'm an investor in Maestro. She was there probably at a million in revenue or even earlier. So that's pretty early. And how many folks came to the first one?

We had 100 people and we did it at this, like, pretty divey music venue.

Diving music venue. What did it cost? Five grand.

Like, Amelia Said it was, it was probably like 15k all in. And we fed people and we had an open bar, but we also got some sponsors, so we had partners. Sponsor for like a 5k price point. It was super cheap.

Yeah. Someone, if you, if you're worried about the price and you have any partners in there, someone will split it. Someone will give you a couple grand to access your customer base. It's a good reminder. Right. So it was totally worth it. Right. Especially with doing sort of slightly larger customers. The ROI was immediate, is that what you're saying?

Yeah, basically. And we had like, we had prospects in the pipeline who, you know, attended and closed shortly thereafter that were our biggest customers at the time. You know, it's just a really nice, super personal touch point.

Super personal touchpoint. Yeah. And that reminds that we could spend a whole session on this. It's also for, for, for folks, you know, if you can get any prospects to come that you've only talked to on the phone and you have not been able to visit in person or someone on the sales team, it's just another way to talk to people in person at sort of a mid sized scale. Right. That's always worth it. So you want to visit every customer in person that you can. You want to go hit up your biggest prospects with. The reality is we don't do enough of this in 2023. We don't get on enough planes. But at least if you can get, you know, 50 people to come, or 100, like Chantelle said, like you could meet 10 or 20 folks. You never have. Right. So anyway, that's a great story. It's magical. Okay, next one. And I bet Chantelle could like do this whole one with me because I'm sure she would agree with this one too. I literally have this conversation with a VP of marketing or a founder every week. This always, always, always, always, always, always, always works. Even for our own team, Saster. We, we finally restarted this a couple months ago and it works. What is it? Okay, trust me. A weekly webinar. And I want. And I want to talk about why it works and I want to talk about how to do it, but the most important thing is what it says under number two. The weekly webinar always works. If you. Okay, I know we're not all on mute, but I would say say it together with me. For together. You have to do it every week. You have to. You have to. I hear this again and again. Oh, do. Are you doing a weekly webinar, I hear. Well, we did it. It Didn't. It didn't work. Okay. I actually just talked with this amazing founder a couple days ago and I said, did it work for you? Said, no, it didn't work. I'm like, well, what did you do? Well, we put one link on our website. Okay. Of course you put a link on your website. He's like, no one came. I'm like, how would no one came? Oh, we just put a random link on a website. I'm like, well, do you have a list? Do you have a database of prospects? Yes. Did you invite them? No, we just put a link on our website and no one came. Well, okay, Like, I get it, but this is super simple. We do it. I think we do it every Wednesday or Thursday for team saster at 10am Amelia. Is that right? Thursday.

Thursday, yeah.

Okay. Literally, my first head of marketing at Echo Sign taught me this. We did it every Wednesday at 10am for seven years. The same thing. Okay. Now, I'm not saying the content was the same. It was magical. One, let's bear in mind if you, you do this to your list, to your prospects and existing customers, you invite them both. You do it every Wednesday. And it's a little bit like the. The customer event we talked about. Not as good, but 52 weeks a year. They will come, they will listen, they will ask questions, mix it up. Okay, you don't like. Not every week needs to be the same product demo. Have a customer have every other week or every three weeks a customer share their stories. Right. Chantelle was talking about when she's at Maestro, they're 20 times bigger. I just got the CEO Vasu to do the CEO's webinar with his customers, like starting a couple. Couple of weeks ago. It's their number one performing thing they've ever done. The customers just love to hear from the CEO interacting with the customer. So mix it up. And there's so many benefits to this. A subtle benefit, which will get you in a while is people will invite other people. So if you do a weekly webinar each week on your product, what will happen is almost all of us, even if we sell the SMBs, we have multiple stakeholders. We have other folks in our organization that might use the product. We have other folks that want to demo. We have finance. We have all these other people. And you can't always do a demo for all of them. And you can't even get them all to pay attention. But you'll. If you keep doing this every week, you'll see this magic, which was someone will show up that you didn't expect, right? We did one I think this morning and we had a CEO of a multibillion dollar company show up to our own little webinar this morning. We didn't know he was coming, gave us a great case study and testimonial. We didn't even know he was going to come. Now if you do it once with a link on your website, that's never going to happen. But you do it 52 weeks a year and you magical people will come to this webinar and the last point I'll say and then I'd love to hear anyone else that has a story to share if your ACV is even reasonably high. Like I don't know what it was at Maestro when when Chantal was there was probably still 20k or 15k. Now it's all six figure and up deals. But like I know you might be like oh only three people came to the webinar this week or only two. But like what if you close one deal? Like it's worth it and what if three people come but they're really good? That's more efficient than a one to one demo, right? And you will get different types of people because personally I don't like to sit in one on one conversations with the salesperson but coming to something where I can be passive but ask questions at the end is good for me and it's good for a lot of other folks in your pipeline. So, so so many benefits. But again you can mix up the agenda, you can have different things but you have to do it every week and it and it needs an owner and what I like to do and then I will open up to questions in 30 seconds. I love it when this is a partnership between sales and marketing. When for example marketing usually has to own this because sales has too much add. Like they can't really own this themselves. But you get a commitment out of your sales team that they will join every week. You can rotate the reps. It gets them in front of them, it gets them learning how to hear new questions and new objections and do the demo. So it's good for the whole team. But I like sales and marketing committee and that every week they will do it as a team. And then if marketing can't do it or is an out, usually a couple of your sales folks get pretty good at this and they can just do it on their own. So anyone have a good story to share of their own weekly webinar that's worked for them? It's okay if we don't.

I've just definitely seen people have demo webinars too. Not even like yours has interesting content, but like an ongoing standing kind of demo webinar that has different will come in, then the salespeople could always refer back to that. And somehow the demo webinar got people that, you know, a recorded demo doesn't always get and they could get on and ask questions. And especially in technical sales, like having someone who's more of like an SE that can answer questions. I think, Jason, that really gets to your point of inviting different stakeholders across a deal and having a standing time that the salespeople know that they can use. Which is a little bit different than like an intriguing, interesting webinar every week that gets people like talking about something new. It's like a little bit more like working for the sales process.

Yeah, that's important nuance. I should have wrote. I think this works best until your brand is huge. If no matter what the content is, every week you have a standing live demo, right? And you get it, you get it succinct. It shouldn't be an hour, right. Or you'll fatigue your base. But if you can get a demo into 10, whatever the content is, if you can get a demo as part of that, as, as Carlyou said, it's great because your sales team will use it as start to use it as an asset. They will start inviting folks and their prospects. Hey, I'm happy to do one, but if you want, we have this weekly demo each week. It's Wednesday at 10am Invite everyone there and they will. It will start to build momentum upon itself. Right? And yeah, for sure. However you do it, worst case, you can do a demo every week and nothing else. And if no one shows up, you just end it after five minutes. It's. It's okay. Or I like until you're big. I do like starting with a demo and making it concise and then coming into another piece of content. Right. Unless you have an amazing speaker. But yeah, it's good. You will. It is a really good point. When you, if you do this randomly and nobody knows, the sales team will not, will not invite their prospects, right? Cause they don't know what's going to happen. But if literally the sales team knows every Wednesday at 10am I can tell my prospects and existing customers that this exists. They will start using it as an asset every week. It's a great reminder which, speaking of.

The length of time and stopping at five minutes, what is the length of time the webinar should be. We're getting some questions in the chat of what is the ideal webinar length as well as some content topics outside of demos.

Yeah, I think that what I've. Listen, I mean, you, you will learn the answer. I think what I have learned over the years and even learned for Saster is you want the scripted content to be as succinct as possible, but add value. But then add in as much time as you can do for Q and A afterwards. There's an ex. If you have good people come, you will have. You will fill your time. So I would always book an hour. I would try to have, you know, no more than 15 to 20 minutes of scripted content. Maybe a 10 minute demo and then a 10 minute, 10 minutes of something else. 10 minutes of a project roadmap, 10 minutes of features that are coming soon. 10 minutes of a quick customer case study, which might take longer. 10 and 10. We know from. Forget about as a founder, we know from like thousands of sessions at Saster, people don't want much more than 20 minutes of scripted content, but they love interaction and Q and A. Right. Your customers will another. So I would try to make. Get it, get it pithy, get it tight, add value and then literally save 30 or 40 minutes. Don't end it. A small, a small unforced error I see is when people end their webinar after 30 minutes or 45 minutes. If you have good attendees, no one wants that. Everyone wants it to go. You want. And those questions are magical because they inform the rest of your base and the folks. And they will again. They'll keep selling you to the other prospects and customers if you let them keep going, even if it's just a few. So that's my advice. Keep the structured content to 15 to 20, but do not. But, but whatever you call it, let the questions go on for a full 60 minutes. All right, we can come back to some of this. Okay, the third one, this one's so basic. It's so basic and yet I see such poor execution. Such poor execution. Okay, everyone's on LinkedIn talking about how after six months of being an SDR, they figured out sales. Everyone's sharing their amazing strategies for. For whatever type of everything across social media. Everyone's obsessing about how many substacks, substack subscribers they have. Forget all that. Everyone's doing this wrong in B2B. Okay, there's one thing if you listen, if you have an amazing content marketing content engine team and it's working Like a notion or a GitLab or HubSpot and you're getting millions of visitors a month and, and, and tons of leads from it. Then don't listen to me, right? You, you have an engineer. But I actually think everyone does a terrible job with content. And it's really simple. SEO changes, but you don't have to be an SEO expert. You will. This is the magical thing to do to get a small but always growing amount of high quality leads. Which is right, two amazing pieces of content a month. Not two things that look like chat gbt, not two things your competitor could write, not two things that looks like you got off from an upworker. And look, we use upworkers ourselves a little bit from here and there, but that is not an enduring piece of content that will find Google. I will. I can give you a million examples, but not to over index on Saster. But you know Saster, this blog launched in 2012 and you know we wrote some of the best content in that time on how to hire a VP of sales. Okay, how to hire a VP of sales. Now a lot of people could write that content better today than when we wrote it, but it was fairly neat. But 11 years later it's like 20% of our traffic. We have 8, 10,000 pieces of content, but a few iconic pieces per month. If you Google on Saster, on content marketing always works, but you got to do it right. You'll see a couple case studies but one of my favorite from that is a company called Revenue Cat I I invested in which is an API for mobile subscription management. Pretty niche but. And they're at tens of millions of revenue now. But in the beginning I invested when they were doing 300amonth in revenue. $300 a month. But the CEO, the founders really knew how to manage mobile subscriptions and they wrote this piece and it's linked on Saster and the piece was not why revenuecat is so great or blah blah, blah blah blah or it was actually how to implement mobile subscriptions. Okay, it was a hard problem. It doesn't seem that hard. But it turns out if you buy a mobile SaaS app, Apple and Google just they don't allow you to manage your subscriptions over lifetime. Your customer. Okay, so they wrote actually how to do it, how to do it technically, how to do it at business level, what the pros and cons are and how it works. And it was great. And over the years everyone still reads this article. So I know everyone wants to do a content farm and have 10,000 pieces of low value content and they think it's all about SEO, games and maybe, maybe. But when I talk with founders that want to get more stuff going in content marketing, I ask them, do you write two amazing pieces of content a month that like everyone in your industry would benefit from? And the answer almost always is no. No. I have a junior marketing manager and he writes some stuff. Have you even read it? No. Is it great? No. Does it add value to the industry? No. Slow it down. Right. Write two things a week and first of all, it will work for Google. Second of all, you can put it on your website. Third of all, it will be if it only gets you two great leads a month, it's fine. You don't need 10 million people subscribing to your personal LinkedIn or a whole bunch of people who've never heard of you on your sub stack. What you need is a couple great custom customers a month reading something and saying, this is the vendor that understands me. This is the vendor importantly that can solve my problem. Teach folks how to solve an important problem in your industry because. And then I'll move on to the next point. You are domain experts. Here's the part people don't get about content marketing. Whoever, whoever is on this now or watches it at your startup, if you even hit a million in revenue, 2 million, you are a domain expert in something. Maybe you don't know everything that Stripe knows or Salesforce knows or HubSpot knows, but if you have a hundred customers, 200 customers, you became an expert at least in your niche. You know how to do CRM for microphones or, or whatever it is for the coffee industry. Whatever you do, write content about that. Don't try to copy people that are bigger and have more resources and do two amazing things a month that you know would add value to customers. And watch, watch this just work. As time goes on, people will see it. It is the magic of Google and you got to turn it into your ally. Okay, I'm going to combine this with the next one, but then we'll, we can open it up or maybe three and we can open up to questions so we have time. Okay, I know you're going to see a theme with the prior ones, but I just want to nail this so that you'll at least pick a couple to do. So we talked about doing your own customer event. Chantel showed how great it was even at a million ARR. We talked about doing the webinar. Carly, some great points. Do it every week. Do a demo make it a weekly live asset for your sales team. And this one, this one always works, especially if you're just a smidge enterprise. If your deal size is even like 5 or 10k and up. And I know this requires work and I know it requires getting off the Mac and I know it requires travel, but this is not 2020 folks. Do a city tour. Do a city tour. This is like a mini event. This is a classic field activity. It is between the customer event and the other. Just visit a city every month if you can, where you have a group of customers, almost all of you have customers in the Bay Area. If you're not, if you're not there in New York, in Southern California, you know, get your energy up in London, in Paris, in Chicago. And yes, you should go visit all of your customers one on one and that should be part of your customer success team's goals. And you, but you can't do all of them. There's only 30 and a half days per month. But what you can at a bare minimum do is do a city tour. Do one in each major city. And you know, I call them steak dinners. And I didn't get, I remember the first one, I didn't know how to do this as a founder at first. I was good at like classic go, go get on a jet and go visit them and kind of self serve. But I didn't understand the power of this middle. And I'll tell you, I remember I was, I mean this was years ago but I was randomly in the Ferry Building in San Francisco and I go upstairs now there's a co working space. So I go upstairs and Aaron Levy from boxes there at a steak lunch or dinner with like 30 prospects. And I asked him later why, why you're there? He's like, well we're going to enterprise. This is the stuff we gotta do. Like we gotta steak dinners and you know, fast forward today, boxes, you know, 92% enterprise. It just works. The dinners work because again, I mean I know you'll see them on social media, you'll see these dinners and these long rows and you'll see people. But it works. You get your prospects and your customers together again. Customers share with each other. Prospects share with each other. They get to meet for you, they'll do the selling for you. So these are like mini scalable events that again all you need is to call a restaurant, find out, figure out which one has a private room, okay. And you know, scale it up and down. If you got to start in the Olive Garden. So Be it. Okay, it doesn't always have to be at Ruth's, Chris or Morton's. It really doesn't matter. Your customers will have just as much fun at their favorite Chinese or Italian restaurant if it has a back room, frankly, as they will. It does not have to be the world's fanciest restaurant. And sometimes actually in the early days, too fancy a restaurant actually can be a, a turnoff. I remember it an early Dreamforce. Back in the day, Groupon was one of our biggest customers. I think they had 4,000 seats of Adobe sign, Echo sign, and we took them out to a fancy restaurant at Dreamforce. And he's like, oh, I'm overpaying.

Now.

It said as a joke. But, but those jokes always have a hint of truth to them. So maybe the Olive Garden is not, is not your worst idea. But listen, you can do this. This always works. I don't care if you don't have a marketer. I don't care if you don't have a team. I don't care if you don't know how to book a ballroom at the Marriott customer event or don't have. You can do this. You can call a restaurant, book a room and get your folks together and sit them down to eat. It always, always works. And, but the key to make this work, if you really want to do it, just like you got to do the webinar every week, try to do this once a month. This is the hack. It will for. Because otherwise people will push it off. Otherwise. Well, you know, it's, it's. It's the end of the quarter. It's the end of the quarter, Amelia. It's the start of the quarter, Amelia. I'm really busy. It's the end of them. I can't do. It's the end of the month. Like all of a sudden, it never happens. But if you say each for the next 12 months or maybe the 10 months, you know, we do have 10 digits for the next 10 months, we're going to do a city tour and we're going to go to one city every 10 months and cut yourself a little slack. One of them can be wherever you live. That makes that one a little bit. Takes a little stress off the system. But you got to do it every month or it's not going to happen. It's going to get pushed, it's going to get pushed, it's going to get pushed. But magic will happen. You just got to do it again. Ideally one per month. Okay, fifth one. And then I will Take a pause because I want to hear some stories. I just realized we may run out of time if we do stories after each one. This one is so basic. It's so basic. And yet, and yet. I asked so many founders, do you do this? And the answer is, eh, meh. No. Okay, you gotta go visit your largest customers. You've got to do it. Most founders don't do enough of it. A handful do. A handful love it. The Nick Meadows of the world feed off visiting their largest customers, but most of us don't. Most of us don't do it. So number one, visit your largest customers. But a question a lot of founders have is how, like, what do I talk to them about? What do I do? Like, I, I can't just do a sales call. I mean, you can, but here's the trick. Especially for this works especially well for founders, but can work for if you have a head of customer success too, do a roadmap presentation. It's so magical because you know when you go, your customers, if a customer, if you want your largest customers have invested in you not. It's not just the money. They've invested their careers, their livelihoods, the outcome here. And they want to know the future of your product. You're a startup, they know you're not Adobe today. They know you're not. They know you're not Asana. They're investing in the future, that you will get better and better and better over time and they will benefit from that. And so they generally love a roadmap presentation. What's coming in the next 12 months? And here's the magic. First of all, they'll take the meeting if you say, hey, Linda, at Dell, I want to come sell you a new product that we're launching. Sounds great, but you know, you may get pushed off or it might not happen, but. Hey, Linda. Hey, Bob. I want to share what's coming. I'll be in, I'll be in Round Rock. I'll be around. I want to share our roadmap for the next year and get your feedback. Boom. I literally have almost never seen a top customer not want to take that meeting for that to get their feedback on the roadmap. And then if you haven't done this, and I know it sounds basic, but here is the magic. You walk into this room and there'll be 20 people. If it's a big customer, you'll be shocked. And again, I, I said Dell and Round Rock. But when I did that back when they were my customer, that was my epiphany because that was the first roadmap meeting I went to and like the room was just packed. I mean I did not know this many people at Dell cared about our product. And I walked in and there were senior folks and mid level folks and our champions boss was there and her reports were there and they were all there because they were using our product every day and it was important to and they all came to this roadmap. And it's really, not only is it hard to meet with a big customer, it's really hard to get 20 stakeholders into a room, right, for a, you know, for a sales pitch. I mean maybe if you're a better salesperson than I am, but this roadmap is magic. You're not asking for to sell them something, you're asking for their input and feedback and be prepared for some tough feedback because they're going to take it seriously when you ask for product feedback. But it's magical. This always works. So get on the road. Do do, do a steak dinner once a month and you can do it in the same city. Go visit your largest customers in that city and ask them if you can present the roadmap for the year for feedback. I'll be shocked if the majority of your largest customers don't want to, don't want to do this roadmap meeting. You can even do it. You can easily do it twice a year. Every month's a lot for roadmap, but you can definitely do it twice a year and for sure once a year. And it just like always works. Anyone have any experience with this being a killer category? And again, it costs zero, right? Any Anyone do a good job with roadmap presentations?

Sean had a great comment in the chat that with remote work it is surprisingly how dip or it is surprising how difficult it is to do those roadmap presentations. Get people in one place, etc. Any advice for now? This like more mobile, remote office environment and connecting in person with these individuals.

Listen, I think it's a fair point and I don't, and I don't have the perfect answer other than in a way it's the opposite in a way. I think that in a world where we're all working, most folks at most are working three days a week in the office. This stuff's more important. It's even rarer to meet people and so fine, like if, if, if, if, if only 15 people are going to show up and the rest are on zoom and it would have been 30 or 40 or even if it's 5 or 6, it's still worth it, right? You still try. And if no one can come, well then, okay, move on to the next customer. And I think also bear in mind the further you get out of startups, the less and less true this is right. Even the big tech companies, they're all forcing everybody back three days a week. So you might have to do it on a Wednesday and not a Monday and Friday. Traditional companies, they're all back. So let's not. We are not our customers. Usually we are not like our customers and sometimes we are a lot like our early customers. But as we get bigger, they get less and less like us. So I don't think this is the end of the world. But if no one wants to show up, do it on Zoom, right? It's still worth it. Like it's still a great. It's still. When we're doing this on Zoom right now, I wish we were all in the room together, but at least we get to do 52 of them a year, so. Good question.

True. It looks like Lydia has a question.

Oh, I was just going to double down. We saw a lot of success with it at a larger company. We were acquiring companies and so before we finalized any of the like integration strategy, we would always get feedback, you know, do the roadmap, especially doubling down on conferences. Hey, we'd like to invite you to a dinner to get feedback on this. Super great to tee up, cross sell early.

Yeah, Feedback, right? People, as long as it's authentic, they love it, right? That's the learning, right?

Yeah.

The one thing I will say just for founders and then we'll go on the next point. Here's, here's something that has. I don't know if the in person remote thing has changed. I actually think this has made this an even better strategy. Right. As we're split across the world. I do, I know this sounds obvious, but for, especially for executives and founders on this, if you ask for the feedback, you got to take the feedback. And I can't tell you how many. Now this is not the same as a robot presentation. I can't tell you how many CS presentations Team Sasser has been on where I show up. Okay. The CEO. Oh, Saster is such a. I mean we are, you know, we have a lot of scale but we're only nine people. We're not that big a deal. But I come and, and there's some CS persons and she asked for my feedback and I, and I always caution, I always say, you sure you want it's going to be direct. Right. I was sure. Because if you don't want my feedback, I don't want to waste your time. And they're all yeah, I want your feedback. I'm like, well this doesn't work and this is broken in your product and this cost us $50,000 and this and this. And I, not only do I, I never get the right recognition, I never get the feedback, I never get the commitment and you can't. It's not that I'm expecting that all 10 of my complaints you'll do something on but I'm expecting some sort of response or follow up or something. So you, if you do the roadmap, do it for your big customers and realize it may actually not change your roadmap at all. But you have to at least take some of that feedback and show them where it give them a sense it's being impact, give them a sense they're being heard. And if you push this too far down your org or if you have folks show up that are not empowered at all for your roadmap presentation, I don't work right. And so back in the day we rotated this between our, my head of product who had power to impact the roadmap, me and my head of customer success. They were all empowered to some extent. My head of sales, but he was closing. But, but if you push this too far down the org chart and you only have people that want positive feedback, it will frustrate. It may frustrate your customers. Okay, six, this sounds so basic. Okay, it sounds so basic but I'm going to say it anyway because I don't see enough folks doing it for real Outbound. Okay? So I just, I just, I know this sounds basic and but I want to slow it down for a minute in 2023. Highly personalized outbound to the right buyers always generates conversations. It always works to not to read this, but mediocre outbound and trite cadences often get you narrow. So what do I mean here? Let me slow it down in terms of things that always work. I talk to a lot of founders that tell me outbound doesn't work for them. Okay? And here's my one challenge to that. If that's you or here if outbound doesn't work for you, you didn't do it right. You simply did not do it right. Take your top 10 biggest customers, top 10 most engaged customers, top 10 customers getting the most truly getting the most value from you that love you. Find 30 other prospects exactly like them, like the every customer has a clone, right? Every, every Aetna has a Cigna. Every. They're all, they're all clones and literally figure out who is the buyer which is going to take time and write them the most personalized email, right? Hey, did you know, hey, you know dear, you know dear, you know UnitedHealthcare Aetna uses us here. Dear Facebook, Google uses us here. Show exactly how they use it. We where they get value from you, why they picked you and why it works. And if you get to the right person, you're probably at least going to get get an email back that we don't need it and you should get a double digit connect rate. You should get more than 10% of folks responding to incredibly personalized outbound to the right buyers, to folks that are clones of your happy customers. You should get it. You may not now we, you know are, you know there are these numbers folks throughout 10% of customers are in market at any given time. 15,5% sure they're not all going to buy. But goodness gracious, this I've never seen highly targeted outbound to customers just like the customers you have not worked. I've never not seen it get 10% or more of folks on the phone when it's done right. But when you hire some outsourced firm or agency to like dump a lot of cloned content and and destroy your list with 50,000 emails an hour, I mean I know that works once in a while, but I don't see it work for a lot of startups. I don't see trite cadences and half hearted outbound with no research work. So prove it yourself. If you think outbound doesn't work, I'm going to argue it's because you haven't tried harder, hard enough. You haven't slowed it down, done the research, done your homework and found instead of trying to target 3,000 folks randomly who already buy another product, you haven't slowed it down and found the 30 or 300 or even 3 that could truly benefit your favorite customer and that you literally are just like your existing customer. You already have a case study. You already have a proof point. You already have the roi. It's not a game. And you know, you know, you know yourself when you get inbound pitches or outbound pictures, you know, they're all terrible. You know, no, no one does this. No one does the work. And when someone does the work, it's just, it's just amazing. And I want feel free feel if anyone's got a couple Great stories about how this works, but I can just tell you, you know, when I started my startups, this is. I didn't even know how to do outbound, but this always worked. I mean, the. For my very first startup, I got a 10 million 6 million dollar a year customer by. By literally telling a story to the head of product of why their number one competitor used us. I got an email back that day, right? It eventually got bounced up to the CEO and all around because their number one competitor was using our product in a highly differentiated fashion. I got the meeting. It took like 10 months to close the deal eventually, but I literally got the meeting the next day because it mattered. Because, hey, your number one competitor is using our product. It's disruptive in the industry. I think we. I could really help you. Can I show you why I'm not trying to like break up with you or ask for a coffee meeting or see if I could pick your brain about the industry? No. This was so targeted. Your top competitor is using us. It's working great. I didn't share anything confidential. Can I tell you why it worked for you? Boom. Literally right to the top. A kid who never knew how to do outbound. Guest at the email, guest at the phone number, and within 24 hours I had, I had this deal going. So ever since then, and then, you know, I love all these tools. I, you know, I was one of the first investors in Salesloft. I've invested in Mixmax and so many others. And these tools are great, but we're just misusing them through sheer laziness and lack of management. So. I know it's obvious, but I just wanted to say this because I don't think most of you do enough of this. I think you're not doing it the right way and it always works. So do you want to have an epiphany story?

Yes, I have an epiphany story.

I don't know if I'm allowed to do that. Yeah, share it, Share it.

Thanks. My name is Matthew Suarez. I'm the CEO of Ibombo, based in Mexico City. Last year we did almost $1 million in sales. So last year we did this 100% outbound, 0% marketing. Literally it was like 100% outbound. So I think it's all about creating like a very, very like structured processes. And we have an investor that all invests in B2B. Just Jason and these guys have created an algorithm that they tell you if you can demonstrate us and you can get to X amount of Meetings in X amount of time with an algorithm we have created that it's a very powerful algorithm. We invest in you and actually, and yeah, I mean what I'm trying to say with this is that basically if there are vcs that they think the same thing the same way as you, be very aggressive in the outbound part. And these guys with this algorithm are generating us like, I don't know, they've generated us like 150k in sales Q1, you know, and it's just like by being very, very aggressive on the outbound.

But it's.

Yeah. Just wanted to say that, you know, it's very important.

It's a good story. Yeah, I would. If the other thing I would say just to summarize this, then we'll hit the next point, which is another super obvious one that folks aren't doing right, which is that I don't know the perfect algorithm for outbound. But I can tell you, going back to this final point, double digit connect rates. So if you're not sure outbound is going to work for you, don't worry if you can't close a deal in a week. Okay? Outbound has the advantage that you get to pick who you talk to, but you're also starting a sales cycle. Right? An inbound, an inbound lead is usually further down the down the pipeline because they've reached out to you. You. The problem with inbound is you're stuck with whoever reaches out to you. If it's some junior person that can't buy, it's frustrating, but at least they're usually in their discovery process. Outbound they may not be, but let me simplify it all. If you do 30 incredible emails to the right people in the right organization and you can get 10% of them to take a call or a zoom, a 10% connect rate, it's magical. 10% connect rate is a sign that you have a pitch, an offering that people really, really, really resonates with people. Don't sweat it. If you can't close them all in five minutes, it's okay. Be heartened by the fact that getting. You're going to find a divergence. You're going to find folks that can't get anybody on the phone or the zoom. Right? And if you get double digits 10% or higher, you have something magical. You have a value proposition that as a new vendor with a hundred thousand SaaS apps out there, with 50 competitors, with everyone already having purchased 200 or more SaaS apps as it is, with budget freezes, with all those issues, you can still get people on the zoom or the phone. You have true value, market fit and run with it, run with it, productize it. Okay, so that's outbound. This next one's so basic. But I want to talk about this because it's so funny. With Saster, I was never sure whether top industry events were a good idea. And should you go to them? Like it's so much work. Should you go to Reinvent? We want as a team to reinvent. Should you go to Saster Annual? Should you go to Shop Talk and E Commerce, which just had 10,000 folks? Should you go to Dreamforce, which isn't what it used to be? And let me just slow this down for a minute so you can just reflect on some obvious learnings. But people miss when you have, when you're bigger, when you're or well funded and you're running a traditional field marketing strategy and you have a field marketing team and bear in mind, like self service, great. And PLG is great. But Generally speaking, most SaaS companies get 40% of their revenue at scale, 40% of their new bookings from field marketing, from events. It's not necessarily third party events. It can be their own events, it can be steak dinners. But if you look at almost any state, you're going to see 40% of most marketers that bring in deals come from the field. That's why there's so much energy put into events. As much money as they cost, the soft cost, the headaches. And so just bear in mind, I put it down here, 40. Eventually you're going to get from that if you're not there today. So there's a gap. Like you can say, oh, hooray. We spend nothing on marketing. We do nothing in marketing. Congratulations today. But at some point you would grow faster if you actually did marketing. It's great to be bumble. If you got to a million doing all outbound, I think that's good. But sprinkle a little marketing on top of it. Maybe you'd get to 12 or 14 or 1 6. You could see my point, right? So what do you do about events? What do you do about an event where, oh my God, a booth, $70,000. But it's even worse if you think about it. I gotta fly 10 SDRs out. I gotta do all this. I gotta buy swag. I gotta. Oh my God, it's so much money. And it is a lot. It's too much money. Like, it's too much money, you know, why does why does it cost $100,000 to go to an event when I could like rent a booth at a farmer's market for like $200? Like I, it's just one of these things that doesn't make intuitive sense. And so what a lot of founders want to do is one of two things. First, they don't want to do it. Two, they start to, they want to do their own event. And I think you should do it. That's the first point on their slide. If you're not sure whether you want to do a re event or a Dreamforce or Saster or Shop Talk or whatever it is, by all means do your own event. It will be more targeted, it will be cheaper, it will be simpler. But the only problem with your own event is the only people that come to your event are your own people. So you should do it. You should do the steak dinner, you should do the customer conference. But here's the thing that I, I'll, I'm embarrassed to say it took me a while to figure out. You should do the biggest industry events in your industry. And you guys know this. Folks know this because the buyers come and the customers come and the prospects come. They don't generally come to the fourth tier event in the industry, but they do not every year. Sometimes they'll come every two years, sometimes they'll come over time. But your customers will come and it's a chance to meet them. And what's crazy is like, you know, even though we've been doing Saster annuals for nine years, when we started to do it, I'm like, I don't want sponsors. Like I like booths are old fashioned, they seem kind of icky. I don't want to, this is a community event. I don't want to sell people. I, you know, oh my God, lead scanners and badges, like that seems like not something that's current, but, but here's the. I know it sounds silly, but here's the point I didn't get for years at Saster, which is that the top events in an industry, the best ones, buyers value them. Buyers want to do all different types of discovery. Some buyers want to use self service products and free trials. But that's only like 10% of folks are so tech savvy. Other folks want to sit in their office or at home and just have you demo everything and do all the work for them. That's a group of folks. But other folks want to carefully do discovery. They want to meet with, with vendors in person. They want to Meet with vendors in person. They've seen a demo over the phone. They want to look at all the different inventors in the space. And they go to the top events in the industry to plan out what vendors they might bring into their company each year. Right. Budgeted and unbudgeted. And this is only true for the most part at top events. I really think, I think there is a field strategy being everywhere for your brand. I think it's a good strategy, which is being everywhere. But I think you should either be everywhere or at least show up at the biggest events in your industry. Industry. And if you want to do side events at first, great. If you want to hack it and put, put stickers in the restrooms like you know, everyone thinks is so effective, great. Start there. That stuff's all free and do all the free stuff. And then when you're bigger, throw in a few nickels because it's just easier. It's easier when you can spend 100k and you have a turnkey offering, whether it's a booth or an activation or an event or a dinner or whatever. But be there. It just, I know some of you folks will totally get it, but for some of you folks won't totally understand that buyers go to events intentionally to check out, discover or just as importantly, due diligence on potential vendors to meet them to decide, hey, is this a vendor I actually want to use to influence, to influence your pipeline. So if you're not there and your competition is, it's going to help them win the deal. And if you're not there, you might not be considered. So find a way to do the big events and then build up over time to where the expense doesn't, doesn't stress you out to the nines. But buyers are there. Okay, eighth point. And then maybe we'll, I guess we have a little bit of time, but.

I want to run.

Well, I want to hear your stories, but maybe let's hold them until we kind of get to the end these basic stuff. Okay, I get, I, I get that people ever since I wrote the initial version of the post, I get people get this more. But I don't see folks taking partner marketing seriously. Okay? And here's my point. Everyone gets that. Hey, like I, I, I, I, I sell to B2B E commerce companies and my buddy runs my friend business friend runs a company that sells to the same buyers. Let's, let's pull our marketing efforts, right? If you do this really, really well, it works, right? If you do those weekly webinars and every fourth one you swap with each other. Right? You do one with your friend that has a thousand customers and she does one with you that has. And you do it right and you promote yourself right. It will work. But I see two problems. People just spam each other's base. Like it never works. Like, we will see this at SAS ourselves. We'll see some folks that are early and don't have a lot of budget. They're like, you know what, let's throw some crummy party off site and we'll just throw. We'll share all the leads.

Okay.

I'm sure you've tried versions of this. Well, why doesn't it work? Why can't we just all take our 3,000 leads and throw them into a pot and then spam the base? Well, they're not leads. The reason it doesn't work is they're not leads. Yes, they are names. If you're unable to to use a scraping service or a database service and you want to build a database, I do think there's a limited value as long as you're not violating terms of use, which you probably are, or other issues to building your database. But they're not leads. But if you do a sustained effort of partner marketing, I've never not seen it develop up 10% or more of your revenue. But you need full time and you need to be working on it every single week. And it ultimately needs KPIs after it. Right. So the final point is, and I could do a slide on business development and it would have the same conclusion at the end. Cos and founders are really good at getting partner marketing going, which is kind of like a version of business development, getting partnerships going. Business CEOs are really good. CEOs do not have 50 hours a week to manage it.

It.

You need a lot of time to manage a partner team and a business development team. And if you want to do it for real, you gotta make it their only job. You need a full time person. It cannot be an eighth of your time or a twelfth of your marketer's time or that's why nothing's happening in partner marketing. Because it's no one's full time job. But I've never seen it not work. If you just have enough scale and enough friends in the industry that you could really do great, go to market together. It always works. Okay, two more. Two more really simple ones. But I just. But just because they work. This one sounds so silly. Okay, but I just refreshed a SASTER post this week on it. It's an old one that I rewrote and updated, which is that your marketing site needs to be better than your product. Okay. And this is really a way to summarize a good website redesign versus a bad website redesign. It took me a while to figure this out. When you hire a new head of marketing, I always get nervous when one of the first things that they want to do is redesign the website. I'm like, no, get, get. Get us leads. Like, do some real work. Like the. When all they want to do is bring in a bunch of agencies and redesign the website and have strategy. I really fear it's not going to work. But over time, I realized it's a little bit simplistic. Right. This is my first point. What the best marketers realize. I know I just said it, but is that the marketing site's got to be better than the product. And here's what happens. Here's the real time to. You don't just want to work. Optimize your website so that it's has better SEO or better color scheme or with a cool new font like. That can wait. The font can wait. Okay, Your font is fine. Like, look at Gong's font. Like, I think that was drawn in Microsoft paint years ago, and it's still working just fine for a $10 billion tool we use all the time. Okay. But what tends to happen, I see this a lot of founders is the founders develop the first marketing site themselves. They get a cool template. Sometimes they have a designer, it actually looks cool. And it's very straightforward. Like, like, hey, sell faster this way, right? Or listen to your reps calls if it's gone, or whatever it said in the beginning. And it doesn't get touched, it doesn't get touched enough, and it gets dated. And a year goes by, 18 years go by. You have all these workflows, you have all these integrations, you have case studies, you have customers that love you and the website looks like it's 18 months ago. And so that's the job. Like, this costs time, but it costs no money. Sit around with you and your management team and just take a pause and look at your marketing site and you say, hey, is this better than our product? Is it better than our product? Because you can sell ahead a little bit and if it's worse, realize you're losing revenue, you're losing leads. Folks are going to come to your website and not realize you closed Google and you'd close Facebook and you'd closed whoever they're not going to realize you have this workflow. They're not going to know you have the Shopify integration because it's barely there or hidden or broken. They're not going to know you did 20 weekly webinars with great customers and you can all watch them and get exposed to it. It. And I see this divergence from founders that get that they have a really slick marketing site in the beginning and then so think about, is it better than your product? If not, go fix it. Go fix it. Like this month. And more folks that come to your website will inbound. They'll attend your webinar, they'll attend your events and they'll close. Okay, this last one and I, I only bring this one up because we're all. There's so much. There's so much, so many new podcasts. And everyone's got a podcast today, don't they? I think everyone. Does anyone, does anyone not have a podcast? And I don't just mean for your customers. Everyone's got their own podcast. But the reason I bring this up is because I think everyone's doing this wrong. Not everyone. 90% of folks are doing it wrong. Podcast, YouTubes. This is the same thing as the blog post. The best ones are magical. And here's what people miss on LinkedIn when they're self congratulating themselves on the 7000 podcast interview. The exact same sales influencer. Like it's always the same 12 guys, isn't it? They're almost all dudes and it's like they're all interviewing these same folks again and again and again. No, you don't want 2,000 people listening to your podcast that will never buy your product. You want 20amazing product prospects or customers falling in love with that podcast and video. And maybe it will never get you in the top 0.5% like the Saster podcast or whatever on Spotify. Doesn't matter. Build this amazing content just for your prospects and customers and push it out to your list and put it on your website and distribute however you can. But I see way too many marketers and other folks wasting times on doing a cloned boring podcast or video to be a thought leader. Don't do that. Don't do that. Do something that adds incredible content if you can. If you're gonna do it for real, you gotta do this once a week. Just like the webinar. Just like the other thing. Do one podcast a week that adds incredible value to your industry and you can hybridize with YouTube and magical things happen. But everything else is just, it's just burning time and effort and you'll. You'll get no leads. So those are kind of my 10 things that sound basic, but if you do them for real, they always work and they mostly cost nothing. And I guess we have a few minutes to open it up to questions or other stories.

Great. Okay. Keep the questions coming in the chat, a few questions. They're going to jump around from all 10 tips. Just so you know. Jason, we have a question from Ingrid Woodley if you would like to unmute and ask. Hi. Yeah, I would love to. Jason. I love the presentation. Thank you for this. So my question was we were talking about doing weekly demos. If you do demos every week, are you locked into that? And if you want to discuss different topics, should they be at different times.

Or are you okay to just.

Look, you can do what you want, but I can tell you everyone that doesn't do it at the exact time every week. Fall falls off the wagon. They all fall off the wagon. Wednesday, 10 o', clock, Wednesday, 10 o' clock or Thursday 10 o' clock every week. Don't change it. Don't move it because someone's on vacation. Have someone else do it. Hook or by crook. It happens every week. I should have brought in. I'm going to update the blog post with Carlos Point. I. I do think that you should do a demo in almost all of them because people are going to want to come for the demo. If you only do a demo sometimes then people are con. The sales team's confused whether they should refer folks to it. But you can just just be yourself. Just, just, just, just have a hat for. Here's my. Here's my hack. Have a new title each week and still do a demo. So force yourself to come up with a little bit. You don't have to do 52 weeks out, but map out four or six of them and just have a different title, right? You know how, how to add a. How to. How to do whatever in the construction industry, how to do this and just make them a little bit different each week, but still do a succinct. The key is succinct demo, right? And one of them every four weeks can be like a super deep dive demo. If that's the title, right? Going really deep. Like maybe the title is really deep on product. An hour of endless minutia on our 400 integration. So be it. Because at least. But the key is it's a novel piece of content, right? Map it out so that it's different and watch what your open rate is when you send these emails? I bet the open rate's going to be pretty high, right? Emilia, do you know what the open rate is on ours for the one we do for workshop Wednesday or for our. No, no. For a sponsor one, I bet it's close to 40%, right? Yeah, yeah. 50 depending on the week.

Right?

40 to 50. Right. So. So map it out. Have them different and it's cool if they decide not to come to this one. You're not spamming them. As long as each one seems to add different value. They'll read it, They'll. They'll enjoy it. You're not sending them 52 emails a week. 1. They'll open it and they'll just decide which one that they want to go to. So, anyhow, that's my. I have a different title for each one. But going to Carlos, don't forget the demo. That's. I'm gonna go update the blog post. Thank you for that one. Because I think that that's a bridge too far. The sales team won't get the full benefit if there's not a demo.

Thank you. Great. Our next question is on Outbound, and it is from Joel.

Hi, Jason. Huge fan of Saster. Right now, we're completely Outbound Motion. How do I know as a founder if I'm doing mediocre Outbound or amazing Outbound? Other than that open rate or that interaction rate being double digits, is there any other things that essentially are good rules? Well, what. First of all, I. I'm gonna. I'm. I can't. I'm gonna give you some answers. They're not perfect. But before I go there, how. How good a job do you think you're doing? I think we're doing okay. We're okay right now. It's a team of two. It's me and one sdr, and we're. Well, that's not. That's good. But they have you. Have you. You're helping the sdr. So. So we've got this founder led, Outbound Superpower thing going.

Right.

Right. And you're getting. And you're getting any customers from. Let's step back. So it's just two of you. Are you getting any customers from outbound? 90% of our customers are out. Okay, well, then it's working. So why do you only have one? One's not enough. If it's working, how you paying this SDR? 800,000. 2 million a year. Like, SDRs are cheap if they perform right. SDRs are a great deal. Right. SDRs typically have. Have a. A little bit of attention span issue. They have high turnover, they're hard to train. But why don't, why don't you have five? Right? Definitely. Yeah. And, and I'll give you the other point. Not only if one. If it's working. Here's the thing. In the early days. Let me, let me. And then I'll share one story. Then we can mode. In the early days, if anything works, it's working. Because you have so many competition, no one's heard of you. So, so here's the mistake founders make, and your question's a really good one. Right. They wonder, hey, I'm doing outbound, I'm doing viral, I'm doing this. And I'm not sure if it's working in the early days. Okay. My question is, are you getting any customers? Yes. Then it's working. It's amazing. I know it's frustrating, but if anything works in the early days, it means do more of it. Okay. It's magical that it works. So one. One SDR is not enough. Right? You should have five. Okay. And then. And at least get it to three or four that are performing. And then you're ready to hire whatever you call this role, whether it's head of sales or head of outbound or director of outbound, whether it's all of sales or just this piece, once you got three or four, you're ready to hire a manager. Right. That can then get you the rest. Right. And if you hire someone good, then you'll get even better at it. But it's working. The simple answer is it's working. So do more of it like that. In the early days. And, and anything you. You're frustrated that you think it's sort of working, you're wrong. It's actually just. It'll just get even better at it. It's magical that it's working.

Working.

Great.

Okay. Our next question also comes from a Jason, and it is on percent spend on marketing budgets, on events.

So, yeah, Amelia answered some of the questions there. I have. And I read that article. Great article. Slightly different question. Would you have a recommendation of percentage of gross revenue that you would allocate to entire marketing budget? Yes. Yes. Although, here's the thing. I do think almost everyone gets this wrong. Okay. Because all the VCs and thought leaders are trying to come up with magic numbers for tax and spend and this and that. I actually think you have to be both less and more sophisticated than that. Do you have a sales. You have a Sales driven motion is. It is a sales driven company? Yes. Okay, I, I'm asking, I'm a CTO for multiple startups for different SaaS companies. Let me step back because people do this wrong. They get, they think about CAC and all this wrong. If you have a sales driven motion, your sales team has to eat. You can't not pay them. So in a sense the sales cost is almost fixed. Okay. Now it has variables and it has dependencies but it's going to be really, really hard for you not to spend 25 to 30% of your ACV of your first year deal on sales. OK. Typically sales is going to take home 20% of the deal and base and bonus 10 and 10. Okay, that's pretty typical. Plus there's management costs, there's health care, there's trips to the Bahamas, there's turnover, there's inefficiencies. So you're lucky to get away with 30 to 35% of the first year ACV spent on sales. Yeah. If you're very, if you've built an engine, you can get it down a bit. If you're inefficient, it'll go up. But my point is there's some number there. You gotta calmly sit down and it's kind of a rock. Like if you want to sell, you gotta sales team has to eat, right? And the best salespeople have to eat a lot like they deserved. You know, they deserve to go to the four seasons. So before you figure out your marketing budget, figure out what your, what your rock is in sales. Then figure out what you have left, spend all the rest in marketing, okay? Because then you'll have a budget left. You'll be like, look out of that doll. Forget about cac. And you know there's so many founders who'll be like, hey, I have a 57 year lifetime value for my customer so I can spend 18 years acquiring a customer. Just. You'll burn up all your cash, right? So figure out what's left for cash and then spend it the best you can. And then when you have ahead of marketing, have give her him a marketing budget and within reason trust them to spend that much money the best they can. Right? Their job is hey, you're gonna get like let's, let's come up with some rough numbers. Let's say we want to add, go from three to six this year. Okay? So I had three million in bookings, okay? So listen, I want to add three million bookings. I'm have to spend a million dollars A year on my sales team. Okay. And then figure out what you're going to have left. If you're in lean mode, it might be a million to market, right? And then a million for everything else. It depends. And so marketing. Hey, here's a million. I'm giving you a tough job. I want you to double leads this year because sales is going to double, and you got a million bucks to do it. Go for it. And that's how it is. And this CAC stuff, you got to get it right. But if you do it wrong, you'll congratulate yourself on your CAC as you go bankrupt. Thank you.

Another question related to events on those small dinners. What is the right balance between professional talk and personal talk? Any advice on that, Jason?

Well, I founded Saster because I'm terrible at this, and I only wanted to do professional talk, so I figured if I founded Saster, I could just talk about SAS all the time. Like, you know, at dinner and at work and after work and at events. So I'm the wrong one to ask. I don't know. I think. Just. Just. Just listen. I. Maybe. I think. I don't think. Just be yourself. Right, people. Let me answer the question differently. I think what we've learned. We've done big events, we've done small events. We've done things. What we've learned is when we have smaller events, too much structure is too much. Okay? So I think, like, for example, like, we did this Miami meetup, I guess. When did we do it, Amelia? Last year. It was amazing. Okay? We had the CEO of Saleslop, the CR of Brex, the VP of Demand Gen for Snowflake. I mean. I mean, for Miami, this is, like the greatest lineup in the history of mankind. And I did an ama. It was. It was twice as much content as we needed. Right? So I think however you do it, you need, like, one piece of professional whatever, whether it's content or whatever, and then just let people interact with each other the rest of the time. One is enough. One. Don't do too much content and too much structure. Less 1. 1 is the answer for a small event. I think.

We have a question from Mateo on the right time to hire a marketing team.

You want me just answer it, or is there a specific. No, no, no.

Thank you. It's like a brief question, like, when do you know it's the right team, the right time? You know, Like, I mean, do you. When you do a Series A. When you have, like, I don't know, $1 million in the banks and you're making $1 million in sales. What's the right time? You know, because we haven't spent nothing 100%.

Well, let's imagine you're at, let's imagine you're at just 200k a year in revenue. Not even a million. You're 200k a year. Right. And let's imagine you hire a marketer now and you get over the course of the next 12 months, instead of going from 200 to 800, you go to 200 to 1 million because they bring in just 20% more deals. Was it worth it at 200k?

I would say so, yeah.

Yes, that's the answer. The answer is, the answer is and, and founders are actually getting worse and worse of this as time goes on. In the early days of Saster, like literally like first 50 pieces of content. Ten years ago, I wrote a piece and I've updated over the years. I hired my first head of marketing at 20k, mrr. It wasn't a moment too late, too early. Right. I wrote that. And you can reread. And I've updated insured examples. What I've seen over time is it's like gotten worse. I see startups get to 8,10 million in revenue without having hired a market team and hooray. But what if you'd gotten to 12 instead? Or 13? Right. And so I think the key is like everything in the entire world, especially the last two years, is not lowering the bar. Okay, do you need a marketer at 20k mrr that's not going to commit to getting you more customers, more leads, more pipeline, more anything? No. Right. You don't need a check the box marketer in most cases unless you have a lot of money. But if you meet someone and you're like, wow, he or she really actually can just get me 10 more customers, 20% more leads, that's going to pay off way earlier than you think. Way earlier. Right. And it just compounds like everything in sate compounds. So I think everyone is not only lowered the hiring bar, which we got to stop doing, but as part of this, they wait too long to hire marketing help. And I just, I mean, I, I, I, I, I literally went through this math. The, I was talking with the founder, she's at two and a half million in revenue and she's like, I think we're going to go without marketing for a while and we have a huge product launch coming up that we think we can sell a million dollars of. I'm like, ugh, okay, you're at two and a half million. You think you're going to get a million dollars out of revenue out of this new product? And I'm like, okay, have you segmented your list? How many of your customers are coming? Are you doing a webinar? Are you doing a discussion? Are you doing a roadshow around this million dollar. No, we're not doing any of it.

It.

Okay, so again, a two junior marketer, a check the box marketer. No KPI, no commitment marketer. You don't. You could wait on that. But someone with a commit, that's good. I mean, as soon as you have customers is the right time. Right? And again, just for just like the cac math like we talked about is off. If you hire a marketer earlier. If you're nervous, just find someone you love, don't settle, and then have some honest discussion about how can this person just pay for themselves. It's like your first sales rep. You don't need your first sales rep to bring in five times their comp. It'd be great if your first sales rep on the start could just cover their costs, wouldn't it? That'd be magical if they could just cover their costs when they start. Same with the marketer. Like, if I'm gonna pay you 150k US, whatever, how can you bring in more than that from what we have today, first year, that's a win because it will compound. So take a lot of these things. You've got to like, think of them in accretive fashion. And it will de stress sales, it will de stress marketing. If you do things that are accretive, don't worry about how much they cost more. Worry about having 80% or higher confidence it will cover its cost. Because if that customer lasts 10 years, it's. It's magical. Right?

Thanks, Jason. Great advice.

Great. I think we have time for one more question. Jason, does that sound good?

Sounds great.

All right, Mike, do you want to ask your question out loud?

Sure. I have a lot of experience in sales and in product and not a lot of experience in marketing. So like, like in that same example that you gave, I should say in being responsible for marketing myself, I don't have a lot of experience there. In that last example that you gave, you know, you're 20 KMR, you have enough capital for a few years of Runway. How long would you give that marketer that you hire early to like, know what you know, until you have a sense if they're going to be a good fit or not? 60 days max. For all. What's an example? Higher. Any higher? 60 days. What's an example of what might happen 50 days on from a hire? Well, when I hired my first head of marketing, Loretta Jones, the next week we did the weekly webinar and by, by the fourth week we had 10, 15 people coming and she'd already worked with my sales rep and they'd improved the collateral that we were giving to reps and she'd set up marketo. Like, was that perfect? I mean, probably not, right? Could she have done more? Maybe. But look what charity did. Weekly webinar marketing automation and improved our sales collateral. Like, okay, did any of those deals close in the first 60 days? Probably not, but it clearly had an influence. This is your job as a CEO or a founder in many cases is you got to make. They have to put points on the board fast, but you have to be honest about what those points are, right? And you have to not give them excuses or cut them slack, but you also have to make sure they're the right points, right? Expecting a VP of Demand gen where you have 6 month sales cycles to increase closed one in 60 days. Impossible, right? Expecting them to move to bring in some new stuff. And importantly for marketing, here's the other way. That's not what Loretta did. But other folks move stuff down the pipeline faster. This is what I see all the time. A new marketer will come in and maybe they don't do the weekly webinar or the cod, but you know what they do? Like all the deals are a mess and the marketer gets all the stuff mid pipeline and puts structure and content and engagement so that things move further down the pipeline and you'll see that happen too with a good demand gen person as well. You got to see something happen quickly. And the last reason is just realize like, and I've written this a lot in Saster, like you can't. And this is a mistake. So you can't expect every marketer to be great at everything or even want to do. There's too much to go into marketing. Not everyone wants to do a podcast. Not everyone wants to do steak dinners. Not everyone wants to do all the things. Like if you want, if you, if you fire them because they didn't do all 10 things in their first 60 days, like you're a bad boss, right? What I'd love to see is them pick a couple of these 10 things that they're passionate about personally, okay. And implement them and see results, right? And the final point I'll make related to that and I've written about this, but not enough people listen to this. When you go to hire a head of marketing, okay, at this point, ask them just to have your conversation. But ask them just like two questions, okay? The first one is telling and the second one is what you're buying, okay, what you're getting. The first one is, okay, you know Mike, you know Amelia, Caitlin, Jason. How, given what you know today, how can we get more customers and more leads? Just give them the Columbo open end question and see what they say. Most will fail that question. They will either can't answer it or they'll give you a dumb road answer. Just, okay. And you got to arm them. Okay? Not enough founders do this. I can't tell you how. How many like calls I do for portfolio investments where I talk to a VP of sales and VP of marketing, I'm like, okay, so let me just. Before we dig in, let me make sure. Do you know how many leads, how many customers, how many this we have each month? I have no idea. Who have you talked to? The CEO, the cto, the vp? You don't even know how many customers or leads. How could you know how to. What to do if you don't even know the physics of the company? So you got to share the physics. Today we have 37 leads coming in per month. 20 come from organic, 10 come from Shopify, 5 come from this. You got to arm them with all the data and then, and then let them ask all the questions in the world. Don't hide anything. And then, you know, 20 or 30 minutes into the interview say, how can we do better? Give. But you got to arm them, right? And someone that knows what they're doing, you know, they'll ask enough questions, they will be armed to tell you how to do better. And the answer will be, let me be clear. For sales, it'll be a little bit wrong. For marketing, the answer will be quite wrong because they're not there. But what you want to hear is the right thoughtful response that, that seems like it's going to work. Okay, so you'll already. Most of them will fail this test already, but you have to arm them with data. And then if you like somebody, if you think, hey, this person might, might be above the fold, like they might make the cut. Here's. And I've written about this so many times, I think I could. I should write about it every day because people constantly make this mistake. Then ask marketer, especially ask them what are, what do you. What are the top things you think we should do first? Okay, and this is a trick question because that's all they'll ever do. Okay, what are the top three things? And you'll, you'll hear if you, if you have a true like quant demand gen growth person, they'll be like, you know, I wanna, I wanna immediately get going on on demand gen. I wanna get going on ABM and I want to get going on segment interbase and doing email marketing. That's one type of person, right? Another type of person will be like, I think we gotta get our event strategy going and I think we gotta do steak dinners and I think we gotta do webinars. Like that's another type of fieldy person. And then you hear a third type of person which is being, I think we should work on our social media strategy. You don't need that third type of person. That's like 80% of the candidates. Okay, but my point is ask them nicely what the first couple things they want to do. And the reason this is so telling for marketing is again, there's so much to do in marketing, right? And I'm not saying when they hire 20 people, they won't eventually get the YouTube going or the Instagram, but they're really only going to work on the things they, that they, they, not only that they like, but that they know they're good at. Because the, the clock is ticking in marketing, right? CMOs know VPs of marketing. The more senior they are, the more they realize the clock's ticking in, they're going to get fired, right? Sales has to put up points, revenue, but marketing has this different clock which is if they don't build pipeline, if they don't build leads, if they don't build opportunity by the end of the year, they get fired. And I can tell you across our sponsor base, like I think the half life of a CMO is like 13 months, right? They go through a cycle and talk is cheap and they don't put the points up on the board for the sales team and boom, like they get it's too fast, it's meant to be. But so ask. They won't really do anything in that first 13 months and the three things that they are passionate about and think will work right? And if those are the wrong things for your business, I don't care how great they are, don't hire them because they won't do the things you need. So I think we're a little bit over. Is that right? How many other questions do we have? Do we have a lot.

I think we are good right now. We def. Unless anybody has a last question. Don't want to cut anyone off.

All right. Okay. Thanks everybody for all the time. Yeah.

Thank you so much, everyone. The last question I'll answer in the chat is where you can hang out with us. We are coming to London in June and San Mateo in September. Speaking of events. So check us out and hang us out with us there next week. You can also see us with Solanas Secrets to scale a company in hyper growth mode. We will see you then as well. And thank you again, Jason.

All right. See everyone in London. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks.