How to Get Started with B2B SaaS Marketing

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Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Many entrepreneurs who start b to b SaaS companies are tech savvy. They're software developers or engineers who embrace an idea and then focus on building a product. But what happens when they need to do marketing? How do they establish a brand? How do they even get started with marketing? Today, I'm talking Dave Hurt, who cofounded VerbData, which develops dashboards for b to b SaaS companies. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Dave.

Guest: Hey. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Why don't we start by having you tell me the story of VerbData? How did it come to be, and can you provide some color about what it does and the problems that it solves?

Guest: So I've I've been working with my cofounder and business partner, Oleg Friedman, for about ten years now, and we've always worked in the b to b SaaS space. So building ecommerce applications for restaurants, sports teams. And every time we needed to build a new application, right, customers would ask for a dashboard to share with their boss or to see performance metrics of our software. And that was always always kind of a a difficult challenge to to to build. Right? As the product manager, I would be talking to my customers, and I would understand the value that they would get from these dashboards. Then I would talk to our sales reps who would really want these dashboards for demos, right, to to help sell the software. And then I go talk to Oleg, who is the VP of engineering, and he would say, well, there's so many other features we can build. It's gonna take six months to do this dashboard. How about we do all these other things instead? Right? So we came up with this problem of it it's way too takes way too long to to build a dashboard into your application, and the ROI rarely pays off. But there's gotta be a better way, essentially. So, you know, when we we first kinda came up with this idea, we we actually went out. We we talked to about a 100 people, at the beginning of 2020 in the SaaS space and really took it from a a typical product perspective of, right, what's your problem? And we really started that conversation with understanding, how other people are addressing this problem, how do they see this customer analytics problem. And that's really the foundation of of VerbData. So we we provide developers with the tools to manage their data, but also build the dashboards into their software so that their end users can view their analytics, within their own platform.

Mark Evans: As a marketer who is very much customer centric, I love the idea that you actually reach out to customers to get their feedback to see if there is actually demand and need for this product. A lot of entrepreneurs have a good idea, and they embrace the idea that if we build it, they will come. And then they're disappointed when it doesn't take off, when no one really needs what they're selling, even if they have good sales and good marketing. So I love the idea that you actually went out and did some some real research Mhmm. As opposed to simply scouring the web. When you reached out to me, one of the things that resonated was how you're developing or how you had an interest in developing a minimum viable brand as a founder who admittedly had limited marketing experience. And I'm curious about how you define minimal viable brand.

Guest: Yeah. You know, as and my background, like I mentioned, is in product and the very popular startup, idea of minimally viable product. Right? Thinking about what do you need to put together to test your assumption in the product world? How low of a fidelity of a product can you build and get feedback? And so, right, when I think about I try to approach a lot of things like that, and so brand is one. Right? How do we build something where we can get feedback on a brand to see if it resonates with our our potential buyers? Right? So I think about what can I get in front of people in those early conversations, not just about what's your problem, but how do you buy things? How do you think about the companies that you buy from the brands that you buy from? I think about it as hypothesis testing just in the marketing and brand space and not in the product space.

Mark Evans: Okay. In theory, it sounds like a very solid approach. The question I would have is how do you find those subjects? How do you how do you do the testing? How do you get feedback on your hypothesis? Because one of the challenges facing all the b b to b SaaS companies is they've got a product, but they have a hard time connecting with prospects. Part of the reason is that, a, they don't have marketing budgets, and, b, there's so much competition, so much competition for people's attention. So what was your approach? How did you actually talk to prospects to see if what you were saying, what you thought resonated?

Guest: Yeah. So a couple different ways. One, in those initial product, like, problem focused interviews, I actually was doing brand focused interviews along with those. So if we had thirty minutes, right, fifteen might be talking about the product, and fifteen minutes might be talking about brands that they like, words they use around this this problem set. Right? So when they're talking about dashboards, are they talking about data analytics? Are they talking about data dashboards? Right? Even as simple as what are the words that they're using to describe the problem for the selves themselves. Right? Because that's those are the words that you need to be using in your branding, your messaging that, you know, your competitors might not be understanding or might not be using. Right? So that was one thing that I I definitely did early on as as part of these product and problem interviews. The other thing is we just got something out there. Right? And and that's kind of the the kind of prototyping side of things from, building a landing page, even testing digital ads. So, you know, before we had a product, we spent a couple $100 a month just on a couple different types of digital ads on Google's search, LinkedIn, those types of things and said, okay. This word makes gets a little bit better traffic. That word doesn't work very well. And that was a lot of good hypothesis testing just in that alone.

Mark Evans: That's an interesting idea. I'm curious about what you learned in terms of the feedback that you received, the reactions that you got. And and as important, how did that affect the product road map when you're you're getting a sense of what people are looking for or the problems that they you think they have or the problems that they that they rally around? Like, how did that all come together in terms of helping you go from concept, which you had, to product?

Guest: I mean, I would say our our early ads, sucked. Right? So K. It wasn't like it wasn't like we had some magic out of the box, but it was almost like process of elimination. We it was it was what not to do more than what to do, I think, was really what that helped us focus on. And so thinking about in the in the the world of our product, we did some ads around, like, the the the front end user experience side of things, like building beautiful dashboards, build beautiful bar charts, those types of things. We also did some ads more on the, like, data management integration side of things. And what we really found was people were searching and struggling more with the data infrastructure, the data management side than they cared about the the presentation. Right? So that means that we really optimized and spent a lot more time and resources in making sure that our data management side of the the product was more robust and could really solve the problems of the SaaS market that we were going after. So that really kind of helped us hone in on a solution that was very different than the competition out there because most of them focus on that pretty dashboard and not so much the data. And we're saying, we're gonna help you with the data, and, oh, by the way, there's a dashboard too.

Mark Evans: So doing some down and dirty market research by leveraging advertising. That's that's really smart. I I really like that idea. You recently hired a head of marketing, something that I wanna explore in a few minutes. But how did VerbData get started with marketing? Like, after you've done the Google Ads and the Facebook Ads to test your hypothesis, What were the next steps that you took to actually start doing marketing? Did you develop a strategic plan, or was it simply a matter of getting started tactically?

Guest: Yeah. So we did a a couple of things. Early on, we we did kind of define our buyer personas because that's something that you know, it it sounds fancy, but it's really something that anybody can do. And the way we did it was just we took those 100 conversations that we we did early on, and we just segmented them into two or three buckets, right, of of who who we talked to, how they talked, and kinda try to organize. It really fell into how people work in the company. Right? So engineers were very specific kinda set. Then we had product managers in the set. Then we had, like, more of the sales and CEO leadership roles. So it was a kind of executive side of things. So we we took those three buckets, and that's that helped us kind of with that segmentation. And not that we did, like, some amazing stuff off the segmentation, but it's really important so that when you do go after cold emails or you start looking for prospects, it's like, gotta fit into one of these buckets or I'm not gonna spend my time, and maybe that email looks a little different. So that was one thing that we did. The other thing we did is we actually brought on a a low level PR firm, and I I don't mean low level in a derogatory way, but just a like, they have they help you with, you know, smaller projects. So it's not like $10,000 a month. It was, you know, under $1,000 a month for us, and they helped, you know, get some guest articles going, help with some blog posts. And, really, the way I thought about that was laying the foundation. Right? So, you know, you don't have to be on day one, it doesn't have to be the most elegant blog post or the most elegant guest article, but you need a foundation so that when you do start building your team and you do start trying to kind of put fuel in the fire and spend more resources, you have kind of some experience. Right? So start spending a little bit of money to build up that foundation, and that's what we did over the last twelve months. And so that really helped us. We we announced some funding at the end of at the very beginning of 2022 here, but we had twelve months prior to that of guest articles, podcasts, things that we could point to when we wanted to get into, you know, well known publications and say, look at all this stuff we've done over the last twelve months. We have a name for ourselves. And so that really helped, when we wanted to kind of have a bigger bang.

Mark Evans: Let's take a step back because you've mentioned some really interesting vehicles. One is buyer personas. Now I'm a big believer in the power of buyer personas because I think many b to b SaaS companies really don't know their customers well enough, and you could argue that many of them don't talk to their customers enough or at all. So how in-depth were your buyer personas? Are we simply talking engineer, like to do this, spends a lot of time on LinkedIn, or was it far more detailed so that you could have a real granular view of who you were trying to market and sell to?

Guest: The the main focus of our buyer personas was the problem we solve for that persona. So with the engineer, it was very focused on, I have I have core phone I have a lot of different stuff I have to to build. Right? And the opportunity cost of dashboards is far greater than all these other things. Right? There's so many other things that I could be doing while building a dashboard. Right? So that's how we thought about it in on the engineering side. On the product side, it was like, well, the problem we're solving is there's a feature you wanna build for your customers, but you can't get it past the gatekeepers of the engineers. Right? So how do we give you the tools to be able to do more without the technical resources? And so that's and then we thought about it really from that side of things is we're solving what type of problem for what type of person. And and I think, like, we didn't go as far as, okay. We're gonna go target engineers on LinkedIn and product people here and things like that. You know, that's kinda evolved, and that's where that minimally viable brand comes in is, like, we didn't know those things. And I don't know if we felt like we were gonna utilize a lot of that information on day one. So we said, look. Let's get the problem identified. We will evolve this, dig into it as we go and add to those buyer personas over the next six, twelve months. And so now we're starting to add those things as we bring on more people to help with that.

Mark Evans: A couple questions about the PR agency that you brought on board. Were they local, or did you outsource them? Because a thousand dollars a month sounds pretty inexpensive, all things considered.

Guest: Yeah. It it's it's outsourced. It's, I will say, you know, they're they're really good at relationships. So they know all the publications. They have writers. Their relationships with writers are a lot of the publications that we would wanna be in, and that's really where their value add was. We have a very complex product. So writing blog posts about data analytics for somebody who's never worked in data analytics is quite difficult. So it it took a lot of work for us to get them kind of comfortable with writing about it. So we really felt that their value was that kind of connection to the publications and kind of that thought. Like, they they had been through the motions, which I'm not a marketer. I hadn't been through those kind of steps before.

Mark Evans: Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, one of the biggest challenges facing b to b SaaS companies when it comes to marketing, especially content, is trying to take complex technology and make it user friendly, to make it accessible to tell stories. And many even good writers will have a hard time really understanding the nuance of a product. I think it frustrates a lot of entrepreneurs because they think they can simply outsource it. And what inevitably happens is they gotta spend a lot of time with the writers to get them up to speed to make sure they understand the language, the buyer persona, the key points, and come across as thoughtful, insightful, and and the real deal. How did you get those writers up to speed? How much time did you spend with them? And did you get ever get them to a point where you could let them write an article and you didn't have to worry about it other than giving it a check mark at the end of the day?

Guest: No. Definitely. We're we're not there yet, to be honest. There's a couple a couple things that we did. One is and I don't know if this is necessarily the the best advice, but I would say what we did, and you can you can correct us, Mark. But we found topics that were more approachable. Right? So our strategy of these early blog posts in the first six months was not creating the world's best content. It was to create content. And I think that's really where I struggle a lot is I want it to be the best all every single time. And to do that, plus doing all the other things that you need to do as a a cofounder of a startup is very difficult. And so I felt like creating the content, getting it out there so that we could get feedback so we could see what did resonate, what didn't resonate, was actually how you're gonna then eventually create the best content. Right? So we really focused on more thought leadership type things, that weren't so specific into how data analytics works because that's what they could help me with. So I identified the types of articles they could help me with more than trying to force them into writing some sophisticated article.

Mark Evans: Think the conundrum facing many b to b SaaS entrepreneurs is that they're super smart. They know their product inside out, and they wanna communicate that to the world. But it takes time and effort to do that in a really good way. So what they need to do in the short term, and I think the approach that you embrace was that people are gonna hate me because there's so much emphasis on high quality content these days. It's content that's good enough. It's content that gets your story out there, your message out there without being perfect. Because if you're waiting for perfection, if you're if you're trying to make that happen, it's gonna take forever to do. And then you've got no traction. You've got nothing in the bank. There's nothing you can leverage to attract prospects and customers. So I like your approach. It's a little unorthodox to the marketers in the crowd. It's probably sacrilegious, fact that you've put out content that you admit wasn't very good, but that's marketing sometimes. Marketing has to be down and dirty because if you don't do marketing, then then you're sort of you're sitting still on the water, and that's not a good place to be. You've hired a I recently hired a head of marketing. I really would like to get your view, and this is a big hire for a lot of companies. I mean, they're very product based, then they hire a salesperson, and then they finally get around to hiring a marketer, and it's it's almost as seen as a necessary evil. At what point did you finally realize or accept that you had to hire a head of marketing? And how did you start that process? How did you take step one in terms of making sure that you hired the right person? Because if you hired the wrong person, then you've wasted a lot of time and effort, and then you gotta start all over again.

Guest: Yeah. It it's that is very tough, and hiring has taken us a long time. And we haven't gotten it right every single time, and and this this new head of marketing is is fairly new. And so far, we're we're really, you know, happy with with his progress and what he's been helping us do. And I think, really, like, you know, I thought about marketing in a couple stages maybe. Right? The first was foundational, and that meant, like, getting that content out there that might not be perfect, but it was getting content out there. It was starting to build the muscle of marketing inside the company, getting some traction, shoot seeing what worked, that kind of stuff. So as I started as we started, you know, getting that muscle building and flexed or whatever you wanna call it, said, well, okay. Now we've we've got this going. We've got this kind of figured out, like, the process of couple blog posts a month. This is working. That's not working. Ads. This. Then it was like, well, now we need somebody to refine this. And that's where I really thought about the head of marketing. It's not necessarily somebody who starts from scratch, but then somebody who helps us refine what we have. Because I think if you say say have somebody come in with with absolutely nothing, with no foundation, I personally think that's that's very difficult for somebody to come into a startup that's only a few people, and there's been no marketing done before and then say, hey. Go do this. Because there's no standard set. There's no kind of there's nothing to measure you off of. There's no baseline. Once we got to a point where we I felt like we had enough to begin refining and kind of chiseling it, that's when I started feeling like, okay. This makes sense to bring in somebody. So that's that's kind of how I thought about it. And he really is is his his role early on is really to help shore up that foundation, and then we'll, you know, kind of leverage it and kind of put fuel in that fire. But right now, these first couple of months is really making sure the things that we did were that we said were good enough at the time are truly good enough, and maybe that might be a couple new tools, you know, revisiting some convert customer conversations, things like that to make sure that we're on the right path with that brand messaging and things like that.

Mark Evans: I like that approach. Many of the clients, b to b SaaS clients that I work with are doing no or little marketing. They've got product. They've got sales. And my job is to come in and establish that foundation. So for me, it's positioning and messaging, getting a marketing strategy in place, and actually getting some marketing started. So when you have a full time resource, they're not starting from scratch because that's a big job starting from scratch. They they they can come in. They can leverage their specific skills and then enhance or amplify what's going on. I am interested in the process. You'd said it took a long a long time, perhaps some false starts along the way. So what were the steps that you took? Did you just put an ad on Indeed and ask people to reply? Did you go ad probably not? Did you go out to your network? What were you like, what were the different ways that you found prospect, interview prospects, and how do you do eventually decide on the person that you hired?

Guest: The first thing is is, you know, identify trying to identify the role as as well as you can and define it, I guess. So, because it you know, you it's hard to go write a job description without having a good definition of what you think you need and what you don't need. And so we're I actually started with some advisers who have strong marketing backgrounds or or at least hired strong marketers and really just asked you know, at that's at the stage that we're at in their experience, what are those skill sets that we need? Right? And so I think it overall, it kinda came around it it focused on some of it was as simple as, like, familiar with getting the tools up and running and really getting some of that tactical stuff going. Right? So there's definitely a baseline of tactical work that this person needs to do. Then the other thing that was helping define the acquisition funnel and these things that are a little more strategic. Right? So is the brand positioning resonating or not resonating? Somebody that can answer those types of questions. So that's where I started was advisors clear definition. And then it it was, you know, going to the network first, trying to work that angle. This we started looking in in August 2021, but we didn't make the hire until the very November. So that was, you know, three months later, which is all in, that's not too bad of a of a time frame to find somebody. But we ended up finding somebody through LinkedIn, like a LinkedIn post, You know, working the network, trying to work LinkedIn, that kind of stuff was was really how we we did that. And we felt like he had the right level of tactical experience, but also clearly showed that he could think at the strategic level at where we are today. Maybe not a Fortune 500 company, but, you know, where we at, where we need our strategy to be. He he had kind of done that before.

Mark Evans: A lot of b to b SaaS companies hire a marketer. It's very exciting to get somebody with marketing expertise and experience on board because as an entrepreneur, you say to yourself, this is awesome. They're gonna do amazing things, and they're gonna take us to the next level. The reality is it's it's another person that you've gotta onboard and make sure that they do the job. What were those initial couple months like? Like, what were the first steps that you had to do with them, and and what were the steps that they had to do to make sure that they knew the product and that you were actually forming a partnership in which one plus one equals three. What were those first months like to really get the ball rolling?

Guest: Yeah. We I'm I'm a big fan of of writing up a a thirty, sixty, ninety day plan, as the this purse that that role starts. No matter what role it is, it's, you know, after the first thirty days, what are those milestones we wanna hit? Sixty days milestone, ninety days milestone. So that's something that, you know, I might outline when we when the person first starts, but it's a mutually agreed upon kind of this is what we're working towards each of the first three months. And the first month was with this marketer was get familiar with the product, get familiar with the foundation that we've set. So that's the blog post. That's the PR company. You know, really understand what what we've been doing last twelve plus months. And then also go validate what our positioning is today a little bit. Talk to our customers. So we introduced him to five or six of our customers, and he did interviews with each one of them to say you know, to to hear from them specifically what pain points we're solving, how they think of us, what are the words they're using when they talk about us so that, you know, we like like I said, we are we have our brand and our position that we we kinda worked on before he joined. And that could be wrong. It could be bad, but it's kinda it's where it is today, and I wanna get his input and him do the research and get to where he wants to get with that position compared to what we have today. Right? So really kinda testing our initial hypothesis. So that's that was the first kind of month of his time. We're we're actually in his second month right now ish. And so now it's really starting to lay down the foundation for some new content. Some improved content is really what we're working on. So working through, like, a brand guide and some of those pieces. We don't we didn't have anything other than those initial buyer personas. So turning that into some more of a a brand guide so that he can kind of we can agree on that, and he can then use that and and go off and kind of work for it. So that's where month two is. Month three is more kinda gonna be like, off to the races, get going. Let's see what you can do. But that's how we've been thinking about it. I don't know if that's necessarily how you've done it or or how you think about it. But, in our in our nonmarketing simpleton minds, that's how we've approached it.

Mark Evans: It's pragmatic, and it's and it's the way that I work with clients. Messaging and positioning is important. And talking to customers, I love the idea that they went up and talked to five or six customers because they'll tell you the truth. Entrepreneurs are really good at telling a story, but it's completely biased and subjective and from their own personal experience. But customers will tell you the truth, and they'll often tell you things that you that you don't know or things that are surprising. And then giving a marketer time to put together a plan to get some of the processes and frameworks together, that's great. And then they can do tactical execution because a lot of companies wanna do tactical execution out of the gate. And if a marketer doesn't know the product or the customers or the landscape, they're operating with one hand behind their back. And I like your approach. Seems like you've hired the right person, so that that's very encouraging. Curious about what marketing looks like for the rest of 2022. I don't know whether you're planning on going to conferences or whether that's off the table given what's going on. What are some of the things that you'd like to see marketing do for you and or for for data this year?

Guest: Yeah. Some of the stuff that that he's yeah. Our our new marketing is he's really digging in on is more partnerships. Right? More partnership marketing is a big one for him. So that might be working with, like, industry groups in b to b SaaS or for product managers or engineers or product marketers. So partnership marketing is one that that he's he's really interested in kind of doing some initial legwork on. And the other stuff is really right now, we're we're like, the foundation that we're working on is optimizing thing like, our web kind of properties, our websites, how we're managing our ads so that we can do much faster iteration and and work through those more. So, you know, we've set up our ads. It's not something that we previously touched so frequently. Right? We would track them, but we wouldn't necessarily optimize high performing and drop off low performing things and maybe play with landing pages as much as we should. So that's really what we're we're looking at is building a a nicer front door to verb data, which is verbdata.com. Right? Build a nice doormat and build the content around that and kind of give the experience to people before they're buying and joining Verb. So that's really where we're focused, is that partnership side and and building that kind of welcome mat to to verb out a lot more. That might be through content, through shared publications, that kind of stuff as well.

Mark Evans: That's great. This has been a really interesting conversation. I think a lot of entrepreneurs need more insight into how marketing happens, how you get started with marketing, how you build a marketing foundation, and then eventually how you hire a marketing person because it's a journey that you're on. It culminates with hiring the marketing person and eventually hiring a marketing team, which is a huge step for a lot of companies. So I hope they've got some firsthand insight into how that happens. Final question is where can people learn more about you and VerbData?

Guest: Our website is our our our welcome mat. It's verbdata.com. You can also see us on social at verb data, and that's on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. So those are our main properties.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks for listening to another episode of marketing spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@MarkEvans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you next time.