SaaStr

JANUARY 9, 2024

A new VP of Marketing has to do demand gen themselves at first. Not just hire a team of 5 and a bunch of agencies to do it. Ask the VP of Marketing if they’ll do the campaigns themselves. The other day I interviewed yet another other great AE who had recently become a Director of Sales. Not just hire and manage people?”.

Sales Hiring 237

Sales Hiring Interviewing Startup Customer Success 237

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2023

Klaviyo is a customer data platform company which ingests marketing data & empowers their customers to automate their marketing with data & AI. When the company spends $1 in sales & marketing expense, Klaviyo produces $1.03 Klaviyo’s sales efficiency tops the market at 1.04 for the last 6 months.

Benchmarks 182

Benchmarks Venture Capital Marketing SMB 182

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Referrals and agencies can really work as channels with SMBs. 37,400 agencies and web design shops referred a customer to Shopify in the last 12 months. What are you doing to really incent agencies, designers, third parties, partners, etc. Once you’ve won the market. From A $1.6B run rate a year ago to $3.2B

Payments 333

Payments Merchant Services Payment Solutions Scale 333

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What are some of the “ultimate sins” in marketing and sales and success in SaaS in the early stages? Marketing: Hiring too junior of a marketing person as your first marketer. Hiring a brand marketing firm. Hiring lots of “agencies”. Get rid of this marketer. A bit more here.

Sales Hiring 224

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 224

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2023

Klayviyo is a customer data platform company which ingests marketing data & empowers their customers to automate their marketing with data & AI. When the company spends $1 in sales & marketing expense, Klayviyo produces $1.03 Klayviyo’s sales efficiency tops the market at 1.04 for the last 6 months.

Benchmarks 171

Benchmarks Venture Capital Marketing SMB 171

SaaStr

JUNE 8, 2022

When you work in B2B marketing, you don’t often get a great reason to show off your work to your friends and family. These things are fascinating to me, and probably to other marketers, but they just don’t have the “wow” factor of Doritos’ latest Super Bowl ad, or whatever new TV show Netflix is plastering on trains and buses.

B2B 243

B2B Branding Marketing B2C 243

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Today, at $600m ARR, Blackline’s market cap — is right in the middle of SaaS leaders. Leaving Some of Its Smaller Customers Behind As Blackline standardizes around $250k+ deals as growing mid-market and enterprise companies, it’s found its tough to support the smaller ones. #8. Only a founder CEO knows the why.

Payment Features 198

Payment Features Scale Enterprise Software 198

SaaStr

MARCH 2, 2022

Teams finally have a better way to instrument their marketing stacks and understand customer interaction. Here are some things to consider: Listen to your customers and pay attention to the market signals. . Market demands may force you to shift from your original idea. Now, however, the focus is on product-led growth.

Outsourcing Services 196

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Marketing 196

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2020

A little while back we put together some of the top sales & marketing mistakes SaaS companies and founders make, especially in the early days. Marketing: Hiring anyone for “demand gen” whose #1 job before wasn’t … demand gen. Hiring a brand marketing firm. I’m even making a few myself again.

Sales Hiring 363

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Marketing 363

SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2023

“Doubling Down” is a new series where we hear from top B2B SaaS investors on their most recent activities and takes on the current market. By the time companies get to Series B, they’ve figured out their product-market fit but they still haven’t scaled. What’s your pulse check on the venture markets right now, today?

Scale 218

Scale Venture Capital AI Generative AI 218

Buffer Resources

APRIL 23, 2024

For one thing, it’s likely influencer marketing teams have come across the more popular free templates already (and a quick copy-paste job is not the best way to make a good first impression). I spoke to content creators and influencer marketing team leaders to get their best advice for creating media kits that stand out. 

Social Media 93

Social Media Branding Metrics Engagement 93

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

Q: How do you market a B2B SaaS product in the early days? At the end of the day marketing is still “getting the word out” — just done with a lot of tools, systems, platforms and processes. But the playbook to do that varies based on the product, how mature the brand is, the space, and the skills of the marketer.

Marketing 278

Marketing Scale Content Marketing Consulting 278

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 17, 2019

This concentration limits the market size, but improves product market fit. I’ve started to call them AI Agencies. AI Agencies use machine learning to disrupt a market dominated by agencies. Often, these startups begin as software companies selling machine learning software into agencies.

Machine Learning 203

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence AI Startup 203

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 12, 2023

Daniel Weiner is a former agency executive turned Founder. What You Will Learn: How to assess what type of external support is the best fit is for you (agency/fractional/freelancer). A playbook for vetting agencies upfront andmaking process as efficient as possible. He also hosts a podcast and private CMO dinners in Atlanta.

Advertising 79

Advertising Finance Branding Investment 79

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 19, 2021

50% of Hubspot’s 100,000 customers want to deploy the product themselves, while the other half buy through an agency partner or a CRM implementer because they need the help to set up the platform and deploy their campaigns. . Halligan: “Marketers like services. I think we were right about our target market.

Social Media 272

Social Media Content Marketing Enterprise Retention 272

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 15, 2023

The adoption of an ecosystem-led approach to growth is integrating into the go-to-market environment as an entire motion. Today, we’ll look at how ecosystem-led growth specifically manifests in marketing. As JK Sparks (Head of Marketing at AudiencePlus ) expresses, “ecosystem-led marketing is inherently collaborative.

Marketing 90

Marketing B2B Branding AI 90

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Since writing The AI Agency: A Novel GTM for Machine Learning Startups , I’ve been meeting many companies who operate this way. These startups use machine learning to disrupt an industry traditionally dominated by agencies: law, accounting, recruiting, translation, debt collection, marketing…the list is long.

AI 192

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 192

Buffer Resources

OCTOBER 24, 2023

Yet here I am, with a (small) content marketing agency, selling services to companies, including series A startups and tech enterprises, and making a six-figure dollar income each year.  I also kept writing, mostly for affiliate marketing agencies, as a side hustle.

Outsourcing Services 112

Outsourcing Services Scale Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team 112

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2023

Still, neither stuck with those agencies after 4-6 months. It’s hard to outsource your core, especially when there are so, so many competitors on the market. It’s hard to outsource your core, especially when there are so, so many competitors on the market. Specialize within your market Or 2.

Outsourcing Services 231

Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Development Team Review Sales Hiring 231

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2021

But they’re not the only ones who have significantly boosted growth with the help of partners: HubSpot’s agency partners account for 44% of all their customers, and Salesforce partners make five times more than Salesforce itself. Types of partnerships include agencies, SaaS apps, CSMs, or brand evangelists. . Is it just the lead?

Scale 216

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Funnel Consulting 216

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2023

If you’re a new startup, maybe you have your first couple of AEs, or you’re figuring out product market fit, or you just don’t have a big enough brand or cash in the bank to sell to big companies, you need to strike a balance. Some sales folks might disagree, but Lemkin believes startups should be about 85-90% transparent.

Sales Hiring 222

Sales Hiring SaaS Banking AI 222

Buffer Resources

AUGUST 16, 2023

As the founder of a PR agency that defied the odds, I learned firsthand that reaching the seven-figure mark requires more than just a passion for communication and storytelling. So how did I scale my PR agency to a coveted seven-figure powerhouse? So how did I scale my PR agency to a coveted seven-figure powerhouse?

Scale 78

Scale Scaling Strategy Social Media 78

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2023

Watch it here: And only then … product-market fit. Mailchimp started off inside of an agency. Too low, and you may confuse the market. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribed Slow it down if you don’t have a great co-founder. We all get excited to “get going” with a start-up. To have a great idea.

Scale 206

Scale Pricing Innovation Revenue 206

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 25, 2020

If you are looking to scale up your marketing, you will need talented people that can take charge of and execute your strategy. But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? The Benefits of Working With a Digital Marketing Agency. Diverse Skills.

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 145

Neil Patel

AUGUST 11, 2020

Deciding to hire a digital marketing agency is easy. . The hard part is deciding which digital marketing agency to hire. Which… is what makes choosing the right digital marketing agency so tricky. Every business is different, as is every digital marketing agency.

Marketing 144

Marketing Web Development Web Developers Social Media 144

Neil Patel

DECEMBER 30, 2020

If you’re like most business people, you’re looking to hire a link-building agency because you heard links drive higher rankings and traffic to your site. So, before you spray money on a link-building agency, be sure to choose one with experience building quality backlinks. In fact, they usually don’t. So what’s required to win?

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Content Marketing Technical Review Strategy 145

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2023

HubSpot Inbound: While not exclusively focused on SaaS, HubSpot Inbound brings together marketers, sales professionals, and customer success teams to explore the latest inbound marketing and customer engagement trends, which are crucial for SaaS companies’ success.

ChatGPT 214

ChatGPT AWS SaaS CTO 214

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 3, 2020

If that’s the case, then you need to hire a Conversion Rate Optimization Agency that can help you fix this issue. Today we’ll go over everything you need to be aware of before hiring the right agency for your business. You are about to hire a CRO Agency and there are countless Conversion Rate Optimization companies out there.

Social Media 145

Social Media Advertising Consulting Strategy 145

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2020

Watch it here: And only then … product-market fit. Mailchimp started off inside of an agency. My top list of advice founders never hear: Slow it down if you don’t have a great co-founder. We all get excited to “get going” with a start-up. More here: A Simple Commitment Test For You And Your Co-Founders | SaaStr. To have a great idea.

Revenue 361

Revenue Branding Investment Product Marketing 361

Neil Patel

AUGUST 28, 2020

Today, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO agencies out there. Thus, your question shouldn’t be, how do I find the right SEO agency, but how do I choose an SEO agency that’s right for me? First things first, why do you need an SEO agency? In SEO, where you’re going requires a different airplane (or agency).

Outsourcing Services 144

Outsourcing Services Sales Hiring Outsourced Development Company Culture 144

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2024

Coming in early on to start the marketing function at Zoom, it was all about driving revenue and surviving. At different stages, the Marketing department of your org and your company may be focused on different initiatives to try to meet a mutual outcome. And without that context, you lose out.” They needed to move quickly.

Sales Hiring 238

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Review Leadership 238

SaaStr

DECEMBER 8, 2022

If at almost $2B in ARR, and a market-dominating brand, HubSpot has to still do RFPs … even when selling to medium-sized businesses … well get used to it. Marketing spend isn’t down per se, but you really have to show ROI now. You can’t do it all, but HubSpot picks its top markets and really leans in there.

Scale 227

Scale SMB Scaling Customer Success 227

The Daily Egg

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

(A Note from Crazy Egg’s Departing GM, Suneet Bhatt: This is the second guest post from our friends at Verblio, a community of content marketing experts for hire, who focus on creating you excellent blog content and then, getting people to read it. One of the biggest challenges we hear from our community is how hard it […].

Content Marketing 252

Content Marketing Business Marketing 252

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 4, 2020

For many business owners and marketers, analyzing and deploying data can be an intimidating prospect. For that reason, analytics agencies have emerged, whose aim is to help businesses leverage their data for better decision making and improved outcomes. The reason for this is that not every analytics agency is built in the same way.

Artificial Intelligence 136

Artificial Intelligence Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 136

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2020

These research agencies diligence software products directly and through surveys. Of course, trust doesn't stop with marketing. That's why Apple's brand is worth about one-quarter of their market cap. It's the core purpose of marketing. Today, the world's most valuable brand is Apple. Why is Apple's brand worth so much?

Software Review 278

Software Review Technical Review Software Marketing 278

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 5, 2020

The power of social media as a marketing and advertising channel is hard to deny. You might want to work with a social media agency if you: have a budget but aren’t sure how to get the most from it are struggling to increase performance don’t know how to measure the results of your social media efforts etc.

Social Media 145

Social Media Advertising Branding B2B 145

Neil Patel

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

If you visit the websites of Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot other top marketing automation tools, what would you see? Having the right agency to help you wield that power to set up a lead generation machine for your business. Having the right agency to help you wield that power to set up a lead generation machine for your business.

Marketing 124

Marketing Technical Review Social Media Systems Review 124