S2 E11 - Breaking into SaaS Marketing

What's up everybody? Welcome to the second growth podcast. I'm Tori Kinlick, VP of Demand Gen at Refined Labs and your host for today's episode. On this episode I sat down with Matt Chanela, DDG at Refined Labs and we covered breaking into SaaS marketing.

A couple of tips for anyone that is looking to get into SaaS marketing, a couple of topics to think about, for those of you that are already in SaaS marketing and even got Matt citing a little wane at one point. So hope you enjoy the episode. Thanks. Hey everybody, this is your host Tori Kinlick and I want to welcome to the show my buddy Matt Chanela.

Matt, you mind giving a quick intro? Yeah sure. So I have one. My name is Matt Chanela, I'm Director of Demand Generation for Refined Labs.

Then with Refined since March, it feels longer than that, but it's been since March of this year. Part of that, I worked at another agency, you may know, called Grilla76, which is led by Joe Sullivan, who's quite active, only thin himself. And for that, I had a couple other stops along the way, gravy, and then a welding company called Abacor Bedwell. Awesome.

Great experience there and super relevant to the topic. So today, we're going to be kind of talking through how to break into SaaS marketing. And for those of you that this is a totally unfamiliar term, SaaS software as a service and SaaS marketing is certainly a popular form of marketing today. I think you're seeing more and more of these SaaS companies that are getting funding and with that funding, some really large growth targets and with that comes in need for marketing, for demand generation, demand creation.

And so I think that certainly there's a lot of marketers out there that are noticing this trend and are wanting to get into SaaS marketing. But oftentimes, one of the biggest kind of requirements on a JD, on a job description for any role in SaaS marketing is that you need experience in SaaS marketing. Right or wrong, that is often one of the kind of disqualifiers, right? And so Matt, one of the reasons that I wanted to chat with you on this one is because you've made the switch very recently.

In fact, the agency that you're working for, Gorilla, prior to coming over here and working with the SaaS refine, was not really focused on the SaaS industry. So yeah, why don't you, we can kind of start out, tell me a little bit about the transition, kind of what you were doing before, and then we'll kind of see where the conversation goes from there. Yeah, I mean, so the private previous experience was with industrial companies almost up and down the line. So there was a couple different go-to-market strategies that they would apply.

So I'm had a very high cap ex with a profit margin. And so you were basically looking at your programs against that profit margin and trying to help them bring in revenue at a profit vis-a-vis your marketing program. And then there's some assumptions that you have to make in order to do that, like they have certain percentages when they'll sell to that company again within two, three years. And so it becomes a little bit more palatable for them to even take that at cost in order to acquire one customer.

There's others that had a recurring revenue model as well, similar to SaaS, which is primarily using MRAR model, where the company will require the customer break even or even out of slight loss and then become profitable after that. And then there's, we also work with a couple of SaaS companies as well. So then prior to that, in the welding industry, we worked on very long-term deals with larger clients. It was very account-based for the way that we did it.

Most deals were in the high five to mid six figures. And so again, it was about customer acquisition and even lead generation at that point as well too. So that's most of my experience before I got into SaaS. But I've been following SaaS principles and been reading up on them really since I broke into marketing.

It just seemed to me and spoke to me as the most advanced way to do it. And it was obviously the biggest, the biggest thing, the biggest accelerator to your career is understanding SaaS marketing principles and then figuring out ways where you can. And also, the most more important thing is where you can't supply them in traditional industries. And that was something that I really brought with me to Gorilla.

And towards the end of my tenure at Denzel, the welding company was really something that I was pushing and making decisions on. Yeah. And I'll tell you, I may be a little bit of a hot take here. Go ahead.

I think that this requirement of having SaaS experience in order to be an effective SaaS marketer, I think it's overblown. I think that certainly there are really important elements of SaaS marketing that are not followed and practiced in some other industries. But I don't know. I feel like good marketing principles translate across any industry.

And so certainly there are nuances to this, right? In particular, I think one of the biggest differences you mentioned it, right, is this revenue model. That is to me, maybe the most important one, right? The fact that like, you're not just selling a product and your conversion, when you acquire that customer, you're jobs only about halfway down at that point, right?

Because of these reoccurring revenue models, you effectively need to almost continue selling the value of your product beyond that initial contract being signed, right? The revenue model is a subscription model. You expect and you want your clients to continue paying you after that, you know, that initial purchase, that initial contract execution. And so to me, I think that's probably one of the most important things that's different about SaaS marketing versus other industries is that it extends far beyond that acquisition.

And we can certainly go into some other nuances there as well. But what do you think? What do you think is the real difference between SaaS marketing and, you know, let's say marketing in some other industries? I think the biggest difference probably, and that's just someone who was transitioned to it.

I mean, I worked in house at a SaaS company, which was gravy for a few months, wasn't a great fit, ultimately, fun with Don. But the biggest difference that I see usually is speed of play. It's like going from playing on a college basketball team to going on on an NBA team. And it's just like, there's the learning curve there in terms of how fast and agile you need to be as a marketer.

And there's some bumps that kind of go with that. I always think about, I had someone on my podcast on my podcast one time and he made this great analogy. It's like the difference between turning a jet ski and turning a cruise ship. And you know, and when you go into SaaS, especially early stage SaaS, you're making changes on the fly.

And it's like you're turning a jet ski. Whereas when you're in a traditional organization with a large structure, big sales team, they've been around for 30, 40 years, they have certain ways of doing things and you want to create big change. It can be like changing, it can be like turning a cruise ship around. It takes a lot of time, effort.

You're turning that wheel multiple times. And sometimes you end up getting some bumps, bumps and bruises along the way there. So I think the biggest difference is probably the speed of play. The other difference that I think exists a lot is the belief in digital versus traditional channels.

There is like, you inherently, when you go into SaaS, there's just an inherent belief in digital as a means by which to acquire a customer. So that means using whether that's organic or paid, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, anything digital in order to attract and engage and acquire a customer. Whereas in a lot of traditional industries, they still very much place an outside emphasis in value on trade shows. They even still place an outside emphasis on things like print magazines or billboards or putting things in newsletters from their industry publication.

So I just think there's just a lot more belief in digital channels going in SaaS than not SaaS. And that's usually a conversation in the battle that marketers have to fight in traditional industries. Yeah, I think oftentimes there's a suggestion that the SaaS buyers and the SaaS purchase itself is just more complex. And so with that, it lends itself into what you and I and all the other refined labs folks are out there trying to evangelize, which is really needing to create demand, needing to create excellent content consistently, put it out into the marketplace on channels where you know your clients are frequenting.

And a lot of the things that you're mentioning, these old school or more traditional ways of marketing, honestly, they remind me of just working at a larger company. And I've worked at a large company where I was doing SaaS marketing and was dealing with a lot of these same challenges. And so when I first made the move going from, I made the move not just from a more of a business services offering to SaaS, but I also made the move at the same time from enterprise and to startup. And it was a little bit of a culture shock for me at first.

I still remember my first week on the job, I met my new boss and he said, hey, what do you kind of have in mind for our demand-gen playbook? I know that this is a big part of your background. And so I went through the whole kind of waterfall model that I had gone and studied from all these analysts for years and thought, you know, this is how you market. This is the way that all the analysts, all the best in class companies are doing it.

And so this is the way I need to be doing it too. And so I explained to him this whole model and he said, yeah, I don't think that's going to work. I don't think that our buyers really operate that way. What else you got?

And so I did not have much else in my arsenal at that point. And fortunately, this was about three years ago. And some guy named Chris Walker and this other guy named Gitano Janardi started the city demand gen podcast and I started following along and the rest of history. And thank goodness that I found that content and that I did start to kind of see things from this other lens.

Because all these things that you're saying, especially these kind of these channels and the fact that so many of these buyers are native to these digital platforms and you need to be where they are, that was one of the biggest things for me. It was no longer about just collecting leads and names and content syndication and trade shows and just dripping them through an email funnel. People don't purchase that way, right? You need to get ahead of it.

You need to be out there educating the market, putting your brand out there. And so yeah, I think for me, like the experience I had understanding this more traditional mindset and more traditional industries, I knew that they weren't going to work. And so ultimately knowing what wasn't going to work is probably what prepared me best for moving into the SaaS space. What would you say out of all your experience kind of working in some of these other industries and agencies, what do you think best prepared you for working in the SaaS space?

100% without question. And this is a great lesson for anyone who does not work in SaaS and is marketing in an industrial company or an insurance company or something like that. A thousand percent, nothing prepared me better for working in SaaS than insisting, pushing, prodding, pleading and eventually breaking in to my company's CRM and getting a chance to just play there endlessly and learning the mechanics and the guts of the businesses that I was working in. So I would say there's anyone who wants to break in to SaaS marketing.

Your best route is actually probably not running the best campaign that you possibly can. It's honestly getting into your company's CRM, surfacing insights that you see from your company, that your president doesn't see, that your director of sales doesn't see, that financial officer doesn't see, and helping drive the company's strategy that way. Because I think the biggest shortcoming that I see a lot of people who want to transition in to SaaS or even want to make the junk from marketing manager to director or something like that is just a lack of fluency working out of HubSpot or Salesforce and being able to understand what am I measuring, why am I measuring and how am I going to measure it. So I think a thousand percent, that's the biggest difference you can make and accelerate your career and getting into SaaS marketing is getting into your company's CRM and understanding it.

That's honestly what's catapulted my career more than anything. I did the same things that you were doing. I ran e-book campaigns and did lead gen and did chip campaigns and I was able to get some nice wins, some nice wins doing that because in industrial where I was working that was considered very cutting edge, something HubSpot was doing. I was following a lot of HubSpot's playbook at the time.

I was wanting from HubSpot more than anyone before I stumbled across Chris's content. But honestly, the thing that I recognized looking back on it was it wasn't the e-book campaigns or even the content I was putting out. It was more so understanding how it was impacting us in the CRM and being able to go back to my leadership team and say, hey, this is where it's working, this is where it's not, this is where we need to make adjustments overall and then getting permission to do that. I mean, that's taking my career properly farther than anything.

Yeah. And I think those lessons sometimes learn the hard way. They are critical to the growth of any marketer. I think the other thing that I reflect back on in my journey is really getting closer to the customer and hearing directly from them.

There's a lot of different ways to collect that qualitative feedback. For me, when I moved into this staff space, into the startup space, I was working for a healthcare tech company and it was right in the beginning of COVID. And so, great timing to break into the healthcare field and feel like the sales team that I was supporting, I was being tasked with generating meetings for them. They weren't going to allow the hospitals at that point.

And so, it forced me to go even heavier on the digital side and it ended up working out really, really well. But part of that as well is that we were a company that produced a lot of content. It was kind of what we did, almost part of what the company offered was content, not the marketing content that you and I know, but content more for kind of builders and coders in the business office of a healthcare environment or a hospital. And so, what the company was doing previous to my journey was, they were running a webinar maybe once a month.

And when I, like you said, started getting the CRM looking at the data, I did a double take. I said, whoa, is this right? You guys are getting 800 people on a webinar? How are you doing that?

And what I came to found out is that in this specific industry, the company was offering, because we were producing this content and we're legitimate thought leaders and a source of knowledge in this space, we were able to offer these continuing education units, which is effectively a mandate of our audience to continue collecting them to do their jobs throughout the year. But what I saw was a huge opportunity. And it was like, hey, you know, this is working. We're doing it once or twice a month.

Let's do it every week. Everyone is being forced to kind of work in this digital setting right now. They still need their CEUs. There's a lot of information that we're going to be providing out to the market.

That is new and especially relevant with COVID and how all these doctors and physicians are being expected to treat these people. And so, we started leaning really heavily into the webinar approach. And I can't tell you just how much value I got out of just watching the chat on, you know, and looking at the questions that were submitted from each of these webinars. And that was my first taste of really getting closer to a customer closer than I ever had before and any of the other industries that I worked in.

And I think what I found was that hearing directly from them was giving me all kinds of new ideas for marketing campaigns that ended up really, you know, becoming a huge part of the other content, the marketing content that we were producing and how we were continuing to add value. And it was kind of a snowball effect from there, right? People kept coming back. They wanted their CEUs.

We were producing great content. We were getting more ideas and things really took off the company. They ended up having a successful exit after I was there for about a year. I found myself back in a big company, which I didn't want to be at.

And so I moved on from there. But all that to say, you know, that I think, you know, one of these lessons that you learned of just digging into the data and the CRM, that isn't something that you need to only be doing at a SaaS company, right? This applies to any industry. And it can be kind of the starting point that you need to build this effective framework or blueprint.

So when you decided that you wanted to make the jump into the SaaS space, I was part of the interview team, you know, some of the folks that spoke with you when you were coming on here at Refine Labs. And I remember one of my questions, he was like, why now? You know, I know, you've been following along with the fine labs for a long time. So why now?

And so when you decided to make that jump, why? Why is it that you decided to do that? Let me tell a quick story before I get in that, because you actually jog my memory on another thing I did in terms of getting started. I talked about getting close to your customers.

Like my first two months at the welding company, I did almost, I didn't know any better honestly at the time, but I compiled up a survey and I basically sent it out to our entire customer base. And I basically just wanted to understand what they thought about us as a company, what they have known newest from a product standpoint, what they knew about our brand, where they saw us kind of in the marketplace. And I got about, you know, 270 something responses of about, you know, 3000 people that I sent it to, which is fine. And it honestly became the basis for a lot of my decision making when it came to channel that's what we were going to do, where we were going to cut programs and I got great qualitative insights from it as well.

And honestly, it was almost like my second month into like a true marketing, B2B marketing job. I didn't even know any better. I would probably look back at that survey now and laugh at some of the questions that I asked. But some of the stuff I got was amazing.

And when I think about it, now looking back at just having that curiosity and just like not knowing any better, and it really drove a lot of my decision making that first year and helped catapult the programs that I wanted to run. So just to reiterate your point on trying to get close to your customer, even if you can't meet them face to face or talk to them or set up zoom meetings with them, even doing something like sending a survey as long as you design it appropriately, you can get tremendous insights to figure out what you want to do from a program standpoint. So just a lesson there. Going back to your question on why to make the jump.

I had definitely had some personal things going on in my life last year that were kind of like, we didn't feel like the right time wasn't in the right headspace to really make the jump. But honestly, I remember the answer I gave and this is something that I would say I tell anyone if you want to make the jump into SAS marketing, you need to ask yourself like, do I have the humbler for it? Because like, it's tough. The expectations are really high.

A lot of agility to the programs. There's an accountability or revenue. You basically have your existence question on a monthly and quarterly basis whether you like it or not. And you just have to decide whether you think that's for you.

Now, you ask yourself, well, why do I put myself through that? Well, it's a couple reasons. Frankly, you'll be challenged and tested in a way that you haven't before professionally. If you truly have a desire to be great at what you do, then it's absolutely worth the jump.

And it's worth the attempt. And ultimately, for me, I decided like, I made the decision early on in my career. I remember when I went back to school because I was late getting into marketing. I didn't start marketing until I was 30.

I turned 37 here in a couple of weeks. And a lot of people who started marketing jobs in the early 20s, you know, 21, 22, 23. I was working in government contracting for seven years before I decided I wanted to start. I mean, I decided like, you know, when I wanted to get in this, like, I wasn't going to have to step into it.

I had this, I was going to try to be great and being good. It wasn't good enough for me. And so each step along the way, I believe has been a progression towards getting to getting great at my job. But I think a lot of that also has to do with just the environment that you find yourself in.

You know, I progressively, as I've gotten more wise in regards to what I think good marketing is and isn't, I've also become more finely attuned into which situations are going to allow you to do great marketing and not do great marketing. Because you know, I've gone into situations where I thought it was going to be incredible. And it was basically the marketing job once you're inside is just masquerading of sales. And then I've been in other organizations where it's like, doesn't sound like an exciting, exciting, kind of setting, but like you got a lot of freedom to do a lot of creative stuff.

And that was a lot of fun. And it's a lot of great proving grounds, a great place to learn. So when you decide to make the jump, decide, you know, whether you have the stomach work, you have the hunger and the desire to do it. And then also make sure you're carefully vetting where you're going and the environment's going into.

I was thinking this little way in song, I'm going to like this quote, I wanted to weave this in. But he always says, he has this life in the song that I love. And it's like, we will have the same path, but we're different shoes. And so whether you're in SAS or not in SAS, you're still walking the same path every day of trying to command your customers or your audience's attention and building up the identity for your brand and make life easier for your sales team at the end of the day and make sales easier for your company at the end of the day.

And if that is what gets you up in the morning and tries to, you have the innards, you know, the will to do really good. It sounds hard. Question for you. Can you do a little Wayne voice to go with that quote?

Because I would love to hear that more. Maybe after we turn off the recording, I'll see if I ask you. Okay, so I think you said a couple things that were particularly interesting. But one of them that I really want to kind of hit on here is that you really need to be ready to embrace a lot of challenges that might just not exist or might not exist to the same extent in some of these other industries with some more kind of old school traditional marketing.

And so when I was kind of thinking through ultimately what makes SAS marketing different than some other forms, I did write a just a kind of short list here off the top of my head of challenges that I think are unique to SAS marketing. And so for anyone out there that is considering making this move in, I think these are some things to really kind of think through and try to kind of get your head wrapped around because these are challenges that you would ultimately need to address. So the first one I think that is unique in SAS marketing, right, is this the need to focus on implementation and integrations. That is something that I think so many clients that we talk with today, you know, when we ask them like what is the biggest challenge that your clients face or what is the biggest holdup in the buying process?

It's almost always something along the lines of implementation. There's beliefs about implementation that's really hard. It's going to be really long and strenuous, it's going to take a lot of people and resources. And so we want to make sure that we're speaking to that and that we're answering that.

And so I think it ultimately makes for kind of great campaign fodder to address some of these challenges. Working with a client right now where, you know, we're getting quotes about their implementation team from their clients to just kind of provide that confidence for someone that we're presenting to these people as a retargeting campaign once they're familiar with the brand to try to put them at ease a little bit. Another one of the unique challenges is the pricing model, right? We talked about the pricing model, the monthly recurring revenue, the annual recurring revenue.

Effectively, this translates to the need to continue marketing and selling that value beyond the actual purchase and the acquisition. The third one is just client support. And this can kind of tie into the implementation stuff. But many times these SAS offerings, they're not easy to implement, they're not easy to use.

There's a significant learning curve. And so almost needing to kind of sell the customer support that comes along with your product as one of the features, one of the benefits, that's ultimately a really big selling point and not something that I think many other industries address or need to address. And then the last one I'll hit is probably the biggest challenge in SAS marketing and when I would love to get your take on. But it's that there's no tangible product.

I can't touch what I am selling and marketing. It's almost like it's this make-believe offering. And so it's that much harder to figure out how to market it, how to point out the features of the product without getting to feature heavy, the benefits of the product without overselling them. And then really kind of needing to provide this continued focus and education in order to retain these clients.

Because again, it ties back into that whole revenue model. You need to consistently provide this value and help someone understand how to best utilize your product and how to get the most out of it in order for them to be happy and continue being a paying customer. So any thoughts on really any of those main challenges or if you want to add another one or even kind of double down on the fact that we're all kind of marketing these intangible offerings here. Yeah, I'll touch on the intangible ones and I have another one to add because it's actually one thing that I struggled with a lot when I made the transition.

So first off, I agree on you're selling a physical product because when you sell physical products, those things that you want to highlight, you can touch, look, point out, feel. And a lot of it comes down to how durable it is, how much it resists some sort of stimuli against it, how comfortable it is to use physically. That's another big thing, how ergonomic it is, how much reach or access it provides in a pen tooling. If you work in something like manufacturing, they're different.

They're very physical benefits that you are features and benefits that you're pushing. And then there's also a lot of specs that happen with it too. I mean, it's actually not a lot of specs. It's more so like save time or do this.

You have this capability, industrial especially, very spec driven, what's your access to the tooling? What boreholes do you have access to do wire liners and wires through and stuff like that? So it's a different sort of thing that you have to adjust your mindset to. It's selling something intangible.

And I think that's also why you need to understand your customers really well in order to do that. But yeah, I do agree that that's something that's an adjustment that it takes. I think probably the biggest adjustment that I had to make in the move into a SaaS sort of setting. That's probably the biggest reason that it didn't work for me at gravy.

I'll be really honest here. I was like, no, I came from a place where I wore a lot of hats and I had to do everything. I had to do content ads, CRM, trade shows, I had to do sales enablement. Everything was under my plate, media buys the whole thing, a website.

I even took out the CMS. Everything was on my plate. And so I did it all. And I was happy to.

And I was good. I was confident in all of those things. When you make the transition to SaaS, you find your roles being very specialized. So you end up going from doing a lot of things and being proficient at them to doing just a couple of things and being expected to master them.

And for some people, that's a big adjustment. And for me, it was a huge adjustment because I went from being a director of marketing for North America to being a content director. And all I had was charged with doing was doing content. And I found myself a little lost because I was like, wait, I'm going to make the content, but I'm not going to run the ad.

I'm going to make the content, but I'm not going to run the ad and say, oh, it doesn't seem to be CRM. I'm not going to have any input into the audience targeting that. So getting removed from all the steps that you once were responsible for and were used to having control over is big things. So I think for a lot of people who are used to wearing a lot of hats and they want to move into SaaS, it's something you need to think about.

Because if you go to a series C or a series D company where they have larger marketing teams, you're going to find yourself in a specialized role doing a specialized set of things on a day to day basis. Whereas if you really like wearing a lot of hats, you probably are a better fit out of C or series A if you can get that position in wearing all of those hats and growing into that role until you're able to hire out. So that kind of goes back to the environment. But I found that to be a huge adjustment.

And it honestly really crystallized for me the things that I liked to do and the things I didn't like to do if I had to specialize. And so the things I love to do and love to specialize in is I love the strategy aspect of it. That's why I've applied to be a DDG or not a performance marketer. I like the big ideas, the strategy, the measurements, the efficiencies and the goal modeling.

Those are not only things I was very interested in. They're also things I really wanted to improve on. Whereas the performance marketing style, while I liked it, I didn't love it. It was just sort of a means to the end of what I really wanted to do, which was create a revenue outcome.

That's awesome. So I think I want to kind of shift gears here a little bit and start to wrap up the conversation with a big broad question. I'll answer it first, give you a little time to collect your thoughts. But I think the big takeaway here that any of our listeners can really put into action is for those people that are not in SaaS marketing today, but would like to be what can you start doing and how can you really prepare to make that jump.

And so for me, I think the biggest thing is it has to do with the metrics, but it also has to do with this kind of post acquisition marketing and getting yourself into that right frame of mind. So in terms of the metrics, in all industries, it's important to understand your cost to acquire a customer. That should not be news to anyone. And if it is, get familiar with that metric because it's a really important one.

Now, in the SaaS space, I think the one that might even trump that would be the LTV to CAC ratio. And so understanding the lifetime value of a customer as compared to how much it costs to acquire that customer. And in particular, the ratio that you need to be figuring out how to calculate. And this might take a little bit of digging.

You might not have LTV for your clients, just readily available in Salesforce. I promise you, it'll be worthwhile if you do start to dig through, talk to people in finance, understand what that LTV is. It'll tell you a lot about who your best customers are and where you should be spending most of your time and energy. But also, when you can start to calculate this LTV to CAC ratio, here's the things to keep in mind.

When you're looking at a one to one-ish ratio, you're spending too much money. That means that your cost to acquire a customer is too high in comparison to that lifetime value. If you're looking at, let's say, a five to one ratio, you're probably not spending enough. You've got a ton of untapped opportunity, the amount of money you're able to profit off of each one of these customers as compared to what it takes to acquire them.

It's out of balance. And you should be spending more because there's more opportunity, you could be acquiring more customers and say in that good range. And that good range, I think, is typically a three to one ratio. Three to one LTV to CAC ratio.

That, I think, is the sweet spot here when you get to the one to one. Probably spending a little too much on tapped opportunity. Go start making some requests to the finance team or the head of marketing that you need more budget. And here's why.

And they're going to listen, if you bring some evidence like that to the table. So I'll put the question on you now. What do you think that people who aren't in SAS marketing today, but would like to be what could they start doing today to prepare to make that change? Well, I had getting obsessed with your CRN is one thing that I would say, like understand how to work in a sales force and or hub spot, understand how to do reporting, have conviction around it.

I think the biggest thing I would say for most people who want to do that is don't overcomplicate how you report a lot of the times that what you're filtering and making this criteria should be pretty simple, unless the CRN is very complicated in which case you need to make some decisions. I think another thing to keep in mind, you know, you talk about CAC and LTV, and I think those things are super important. But I also recognize when somebody was with the life outside of SAS that those are sometimes nearly impossible metrics to find. CAC is much more possible.

But LTV to CAC is very difficult. But I will say, because I actually did this even during my interview process with you, because I actually went through the trouble of doing this for one of my clients at Gorilla, it starts to measure your results even if executive leadership doesn't care about it in a SAS context. So if you can start to dig in your CRM, talk to whoever knows the most about the lifetime value of a customer, because maybe your CRM doesn't measure it, but maybe you can even project it out to get directionally accurate. That would be enough to at least give yourself to give yourself some measurement of SAS context.

So you can understand and have a huge head start of figuring it out once you get yourself in a SAS environment. So I would say, you know, start to try to measure your impact of your programs in a SAS context if you possibly can. So that includes CAC and CAC, LTV and identifying sales qualified opportunities and doing the quote request to opportunity ratio, like just get really into a ratio analysis. Like that'll help you quite a bit.

The other thing I would say, like let's get kind of like move a little bit out of just the numbers in the CRM, get to know your customers, understand how to talk to customers, understand how to talk to prospects in your market. I mean, this is where the trade going to the trade show was a huge advantage for you. If you're going to the trade show and your only job is to be the sales admin, you are using a huge opportunity for yourself to get good at talking to your customers. I'll tell you a great story for my time at Denzel.

So the first year I was at Denzel, a welding company, I had to run our huge North American trade to self-attack. We spent a quarter million dollars on the show every single year when you consider booth costs, drage, all the equipment we ship more. And then if you consider even what we spend, it should be blind. It was over this, 300,000 dollars.

First year I was there, I was about five months into the job. I went to Las Vegas to do the show and I was determined to try to sell products. Well, I was determined to talk to customers. I was determined to try to understand the products.

I knew I was only going to get good by failing. And so I went to try to sell the products to customers and I failed. I don't want my face a lot. They would ask me questions like so, so simple in retrospect, and I didn't know the answer to them.

And every single time I got hung up, I'd go to my sales and I'd ask them, all right, this was a question that he asked whether I'd do wrong. What should I thought about or said? And then, you know, ultimately, that's how you learn the product that best and learn about your customers and the best and the kind of questions that they ask. And so I basically, over the next year, got more proficient about our products and I got to know our customers better because I would go visit them, right?

Go spend a week with my sales team on the road. And then by the next year, I was much better. By the next year, I was much better. And then my last year, no one even had to shadow me.

I was able to sell everything and talk to customers myself there and also work on content collaboration and stuff like that. So using those events that maybe you don't like to do to your advantage and for your development, I think, is another strong thing. You can do it's another, it's a soft skill you can really bring to the table when you get into a SaaS environment. The two other things I would say is start networking, start using LinkedIn to start spreading your ideas and your thoughts, connecting with people who you maybe would like to work with in the future.

Your network is literally your network. I have not had to formally apply for my last three jobs or submit a resume. I have to literally just be able to DM people and say, hey, I'm looking. Is it, are you guys hiring right now?

And given the interview process, it's strictly by investing in my network over the last three years. So start posting on LinkedIn, sharing things that you're learning along the way. You don't have to be an expert to be a thought leader. There are plenty of people who are in the same stage of their careers.

You are who would gladly love to see how someone else who is in that same stage is doing and what they're learning and how they're applying it. So sometimes we think we're grander how smart we are doing demand gen and having done it for six, seven, eight years and just how many people are one, two, three years into the job and you're speaking literally a four language to them. So if you're like someone who's new and looking to break in, you know, start sharing the things you're learning. You're going to find people on your level who are going to be incredibly attracted to the things that you said.

And that is a good thing. Also, get involved in communities, get your success at five, resilient, whatever, share your successes, but more so share your struggles and share your thought process because more people hire for how you think than they do for what you've done a lot of the times. And then the last thing I would say is approach the journey like a surgeon, go identify, go find the kind of companies that you want to work for. And you know, approach it with a surgeon's approach like don't look to apply to 30 companies, find 456 that you really think you want to work for and you know, think about how you're going to get them to be interested in you.

Awesome. Well, it sounds like based on some of that background noise you've got your after hours job as a dad is calling you right now. So I think a good time for us to wrap it up here. This is a fun conversation getting sassy here talking about breaking into SaaS marketing.

Matt, I know you've got another podcast as well. You want to just kind of give it a quick plug here before we say goodbye? Yeah, yeah sure. So I do have my own podcast that I do with former refined labs, VP of growth, MJ Peters, who's now the head of marketing at CoLab.

She is an absolute all star. You follow around LinkedIn, but our show is called the industrial marketing show. And while we do focus and have a slant on industrial marketing, what really what most of things we talk about apply to a lot of traditional style of marketing organization. So if you work in insurance or consumer or maybe not consumer processing, anything that's B2B hardware or anything like that, there's plenty of stuff there for you guys to learn.

We at this point are doing two episodes a month, but we had almost 100 episodes under our bell. There's a ton of stuff we talked about that's very tactical and so what we want to check it out if you're interested. Yeah, good stuff. So the industrial marketing podcast with a bunch of SaaS marketers.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that's a marketing show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.

Awesome. Good stuff. Well, cool. I think that about wraps up the conversation.

This was a fun one. So thanks Matt for coming on.