This episode features an interview with Jen Rapp, CMO at Superside, an AI-powered creative service, trusted by 500+ top brands. Jen has over 20 years of experience developing and executing marketing strategies for high-growth companies, with a particular focus on working alongside entrepreneurial leaders to scale.

She discusses selling the vision and how doing good impacts marketing, sharing her lessons from her time at Patagonia and DoorDash. She also discusses winning on meta through quality creative and driving qualified leads through virtual summits.

Key Takeaways:

• Don’t sleep on meta ads. If your ICP is on Instagram, those ads can be some of the cleanest and most effective ads to drive pipeline, especially if you have quality creative.
• Virtual Summits, or essentially a stack of webinars, are a great way to get emails and drive pipeline if you are truly offering great content.
• Sell the vision, not the product. A focus on features, instead of stories, is rarely the way to go.

Quote:

• “  I would not have said this a year ago, when I first joined the company - number one is our meta, paid meta spend. I came to this company and I saw how much we were spending on Meta, and I was like, whoa, what the hell are these people doing? They're making mistakes left and right. Nope. We drive a majority, or a lot, I shouldn't say a majority, a lot of our qualified pipeline through our Meta spend. Our Meta spend also acts as our top of funnel awareness driver. When we turn off meta, we basically turn off the ability of our SDRs and our BDRs to convert people to SQLs. It is invaluable. So number one, my marketing team is like rallied around creating incredible creative for Meta.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:51) The Trust Tree: Making sure customers have confidence in you

*(12:12) The Playbook: The power of Meta ads

*(33:10) The Dust Up: Standing up to brilliant founders

*(41:01) Quick Hits: Jen’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jen on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Superside
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Steve Rotter, CMO at DeepL, a global communications platform powered by Language AI.

In this episode, Steve shares with us the power of a small uplift to your website when you see large scale website traffic, and the importance of pushing your point of view over your product features. He also dives into the value of brand in avoiding churn.

Key Takeaways:

• Small changes to the website can have a small uplift, and when you are dealing with large-scale website traffic, that can have a big impact on the business. For large enterprises, don’t underestimate the value of small optimizations on the website.
• People churn products, they don’t churn from valued brands and communities. Make sure to invest in your brand accordingly.
• Explaining your POV over pushing your features, allows you to demonstrate the outsized impact of your product more effectively.

Quote:

•  Brand is critical. My general sense is, people churn from products, they don't churn from communities, they don't churn from brands with personalities that they enjoy. So, we spend a lot of time looking at that in terms of, you know, what is the voice, what is the language, what is the identity of the brand?

Episode Timestamps:

*(04:11) The Trust Tree: People churn from products, not brands and communities

*(24:13) The Playbook: Explain your point of view, over pushing all your features

*(39:22) Quick Hits: Scott’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Scott on LinkedIn
• Learn more about DeepL
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Bill Macaitis, Founder & CEO, SaaS CMO Pro, where he shares growth strategies for SaaS and AI companies. His past roles include CMO positions at Slack and Zendesk, and SVP of Marketing at Salesforce.

Bill joins the podcast to discuss findings from a recent survey of over 300 B2B marketers that gives insights into marketing strategies and budgets. He shares what they learned about marketing versus sales budgets, the most common attribution model, and more.

Key Takeaways:

• Companies that are growing the fastest, invest the most in marketing. While cause and effect of that correlation is unclear, it’s an interesting finding.
• Pipeline generation was one of the most tracked metrics for CMOs, which is a nice move away from only looking at MQLs or leads. Unfortunately, awareness was rarely tracked, making it hard for marketing teams to invest in long-term initiatives.
• A lot of companies, 65 percent, continue to use first or last touch attribution models.
  
  

Quote:

•  So, what we learned is a lot of companies, I think especially in their earlier stages - percent still use first- or last- touch.  It's kind of crazy. I'm still shocked by it. I remember my time at Salesforce,  I was running the marketing ops team at that point, along with a couple other teams, and I just did a deep dive into attribution. Like I really wanted to understand like, hey, how many touches are people having with us before they became a lead? And then how many touches before they became a customer? What we would see is people would have 10, 20, 30 interactions or touches with us before they became a lead, and then they'd have like another 20 or 30 before they became a customer. And just imagine giving all the credit to the very first or last thing. And by the way, it's one of the reasons Google got so big was because a very common last touch thing is they will search on your company name. Branded search, right? And it's like, oh, like the SEM guys are like, this is amazing, right? We need to spend more on Google because they're producing these massive deals. And it's like, well wait, what about all the stuff in the middle?

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:48) Marketing Strategies and Budgeting

*(22:31) Attribution Models in Marketing

*(26:44) Top Metrics for B2B SaaS and AI Companies

*(31:06) Marketing's Role in Revenue and Expansion

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Bill on LinkedIn
• Learn more about SaaS CMO Pro
• Learn more about Caspian Studios