s11s

Hello and welcome to the SaaS Marketers Community. If you have just joined and wondering where to start, head over to the <#C02SN04FX4K|> channel and introduce yourself.  Also here are the community guidelines
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<@U02TTEFFU6B> <@U02U94HSBV4> <@U02V5HU4EP2> <@U02PDC6B0HH> <@U02U94APQEA> <@U02UFNZS7NW> <@U02V5Q6P716> <@U02UJBF2Y4C> <@U02UGB8DERY> <@U02UA6D90G6> <@U02V5F2JFME> looking for your Advice as you are expert in respective fields.

Marketing is a vast world. Since you are beginning now, understand the different facets of marketing (branding, PR, Growth marketing, product marketing, digital marketing etc) and read in detail about each function. This helps you to understand where your strength and interest (this is important if you decide to go a long way) is. Rest is all about keeping check points along the way and making necessary changes as you move along.

And your tele calling experience comes a long way. These are first hand customer interactions and helps you to know what they (customers/prospects) think and what they need!

Thanks <@U02UA6D90G6> any certifications or books you can refer

Thanks for the tag Anurag- though I believe I am in no way qualified to answer this question as I am myself a beginner learning more and more every day.

Sounds like a super exciting transition you’re making – and it also sounds like have a great starting point in your experience with tele calling getting some frontline exposure. So that’s great!

Building out an understanding of the full marketing lifecycle and landscape is no small task. Taking a program like <https://cxl.com/institute/programs/growth-marketing-training/|CXL> or <https://www.demandcurve.com/growth-program|DemandCurve> is a great idea, and from what I’ve heard about the first courses, it should give you a really good foundation.

In the same vein, I’d recommend checking out the “<https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro|Growth Marketing Handbook>” by Julian, which is a great read on the fundamentals of marketing, and super actionable. You can also follow Peep Laja and Julian Shapiro on Twitter, and check out their writing. 

However, beyond just starting to understand the basics of the role, I always recommend that try to match up your learning path with your current work context and challenges. There is _so much_ content out there (lots good, even more mediocre, and bad), so it’s easy to get lost without a clear goal for what you’re trying to achieve. I’d recommend thinking about it from two angles:

• What _type_ of marketing and product work is relevant for me right now? “0→1” Marketing, launching an entirely new product vs. Growth work? Super early-stage vs. scale-up? B2C vs B2B?
• What theme/area/phase of the marketing process is most relevant to my current work and the challenges I’m facing? Strategy and planning? Performance? Organic? Analytics?
Based on those answers, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to charter a learning path that helps you be successful in the short term. 

Rest I will leave it to the legends - <@U02PDC4883V> <@U02PDC6B0HH> <@U02TTEFFU6B> <@U02UUCE1ASD> <@U02ULN6EFNV>

You can connect with Design Answers, Praneeta - <tel:99103 88437|99103 88437>. Have worked with her team for couple of years and had the best results delivered for Specsmakers 

Awesome, thank you so much for the recommendation!

Japan - difficult. Had one for Indonesia and Malaysia

Great to meet you <@U02UJEWB5U5> - I am Sid working with <http://Verloop.io|Verloop.io>

Hey Sid, great connecting with you. Where are you based out of.

Hello<@U02UJEWB5U5>  I have started my career in marketing at <http://Yellow.ai|Yellow.ai> looking forward to learn from you.

I would love to learn more about AI marketing. Do you have any resources that can help me as a starter!

First thing I would suggest is to understand what AI is. One of the best resources I recommend is Cassie Kozyrkov's Making Friends with Machine Learning.

<https://review.firstround.com/articles/pr-and-marketing|https://review.firstround.com/articles/pr-and-marketing> this will have you covered for the most bit.

i was researching on this topic sometime back in oct/nov and i had read this slightly dated, but really relevant take by Adam, the VP strat @ drift: <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/should-sdr-function-report-sales-marketing-what-i-adam-schoenfeld/>

imo it should be a diff function which shares goals with both marketing and sales

So in the Venn diagram between Marketing and Sales, the M ∩ S = SDR

<@U02TTEFFU6B> <@U02PDC6B0HH> <@U02ULN6EFNV>

depends on what the SDR team is measured on. if it’s only setting up meetings, let them report to demand generation as they are basically creating MQLs. if they are also conducting discovery calls and/or demos, then keep a separate team and let them have dotted line reporting to sales and demand gen

If your SDR is almost exclusively responding to inbound = Marketing
If your SDR is 50% inbound, 50% tightly ABM focused = Marketing
If your SDR has outbound = Sales.

If in doubt = sales
default = sales

Big variable is how closely your sales and marketing teams are aligned.

If you are working with an SDR/AE/CSM complex

Personal variable might be the organisational maturity of the sales leadership vs the marketing leadership and their experience with the SDR function.

what challenges do you envision if sdr is an independent function?

SDR(handles inbound leads) should report to marketing function whereas BDR(handles outbound leads) can report to sales

SDR/BDR as a function should always be linked to marketing if the org is following Account based prospecting/marketing

It can work independently only if the org is fully dependant on Outbound

For hypergrowth marketing led growth motions, they should be with Marketing. Sales teams job should only be spent on closing. 

Marketing can own the narrative and positioning in this structure.


Would that mean most of the focus would be on Inbound. How does a Marketing-led SDR function focus on outbound?


Yes. Hyper growth marketing led is a situation where SDRs don't have time for outbound.

Even when you set up separate teams, marketing can own since marketing is responsible for bringing in pipeline 



Should also ideally depend on future path of the rep.

Reporting into sales means we want them to become an AE. (Closing)

Reporting into marketing means we want them trained on ABM campaigns.

Yup - love the heatmap of it.  Easy to use. Used a few tools before this but Clarity does the basic job (session recording and heatmap) well

Cons: segmenting by diff channels type is still slightly cubersome

I used it when it first came out - it was extremely buggy, not sure what the situation right now is.

It's actually one of those MS tools that have got better

<http://s11s.club|s11s.club> has Clarity integrated

Pros - free tool
Cons - Segmentation, UTM tags aren't visible during preview, no options to jump to a particular URL of a recording.

we have been using Hotjar but we keep hitting recording limits so exploring alternatives

We use Smartlook and eliminate our blog pages, which is a crowd puller.

I'd suggest you to have the code snippet placed only on money pages or pages where visitors make meaningful actions.

That way, even if they navigate to homepage or other pages after landing into your blog posts, you can still see the blog url as page referrer.

con - only 3 months of data history :eyes:

Depends on case to case. For example, the founders and you have a great following, maybe that’s why it was successful. :eyes:

I agree. So if that's not the case, would having coverage in a Forbes or even TC, change things much?

I mean is it even a differentiation nowadays?

Depends if your audience actually reads that. If your founder / team is not well known, getting lot of online coverages helps expand the brand perception + to a certain extent legitimises your business

Also makes for a good sales touchpoint

it’s just a standard I guess. helps in SEO too

I agree with <@U02PDC4883V> on the legitimisation bit. I feel traditional PR builds trust and credibility at the rate nothing else can. It ends up amplifying lesser in the short term but a lot more throughout the years! Just my 2 cents :slightly_smiling_face:

<https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1395035231040663555?lang=en>

Thanks Sid and Nikhil for you POVs.

So from here, if I want to use PR the right way, how should I think about it?

You already know where your audience already goes to get their content. 

Depending on that, look at agencies you can help you develop story angles for those publications. 

The keyword here is story angle. A good agency will suggest you a mix of brand, founder and management stories to keep you folks in the news. 

On a side note: Once you start the engine, a peculiar things I have observed at play. While PR did not 'seem' to make an impact, absence of PR did create negative perception.

<@U02TTEFFU6B> I'm sure 9872 views came from your status update! :mega::smile:

Achu has 30k LinkedIn followers. Just saying :stuck_out_tongue:

<@U02UHQYEF70> tum agar sath dene ka vaada karo.. lol

Screenshot_20220120-041049_LinkedIn.jpg

Boom.

<https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brianedean_semrush-acquires-backlinkocom-adds-500k-activity-6889683228114874368-x-xL|https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brianedean_semrush-acquires-backlinkocom-adds-500k-activity-6889683228114874368-x-xL>

IMG_20220120_091859.jpg

Wondering if we can practice such brevity in business emails or it's just for legends who proved themselves? Steve jobs would write such emails.

poured money into category creation. Became a textbook example of category creation in SaaS. Eventually sold the company to Vista.

Seems like creating category didn't work

The insight about creating category in terms of $$. A lot of folks love to talk about category creation but when it comes to funding it - lets do it organically

More like, we will create a category at .0001% of that cost but only relevant to people staying in Indiranagar 8th cross.

Careful there <@U02PDC6B0HH> , you might just end up creating `Category Inception`

I think the first time it stuck gold with conversational Marketing. Revenue acceleration was a huge dud.

Similarly with Gong, conversation intelligence was accepted but no one really got on the revenue intelligence bus.

I think while defining a category, the undercurrents in the market need to be there as pre-requisite, which you need to own and name it.

Which Sangram did beautifully with ABM.

connect slack with Twitter app - so this unfurls

Screenshot 2021-07-12 at 4.29.04 PM (1).png

read something interesting:

&gt; *SEO Analogy: Google is a Librarian.* 
&gt; 
&gt; Analogies can be powerful teaching tools, whether you’re passing your pedagogy to a protégé or bootstrapping it from the beginning. You just have to be careful that the analogy really does fit your situation (and that you don’t overstretch its usefulness).
&gt; 
&gt; That’s true for any subject, but today’s find is focused on SEO—an especially slippery subject to explain—and it’s a pre-vetted analogy for helping people (including yourself) understand how Google’s brain works.
&gt; 
&gt; _Imagine Google as a librarian who gives you their ten best books for any question you might ask them._
&gt; 
&gt; That is... a usefully concrete image.  
&gt; 
&gt; Not only does this analogy give you an entire framework—you can expand from ten books to the rest of the library—but it also keeps you focused on the query (i.e. the human being’s question) and not the vast, intricate machine that even Google’s experts barely understand.
&gt; 
&gt; Last but not least, a chart of parallels between book features and webpage features!


<@U02PDC6B0HH>’s thoughts
<https://s11s.slack.com/archives/C02VCEU9V0Q/p1642607595006100>

Branding - quite interesting. Have seen pseudo metrics (organic lift, mentions, engagement, velocity rate, direct traffic growth) + recordings. Would love to hear others

for branding, we measure
• increase in brand keyword searches q-o-q across geos (especially focus markets)
• number of mentions/article approvals in publications with a certain traffic threshold
• increase in brand mentions on social platforms from non-brand accounts (these are mostly customers, but sometimes we also see organic influencers)

<@U02U94HSBV4> do you use tools to measure share of voice etc on social?

we use sproutsocial for social listening and ahrefs for backlinks, but there are certain touchpoints that i feel fall through the gap (like radio mentions or organic mentions of our content on publications that don’t give us a backlink)

Very interesting insights. Thanks for sharing <@U02U94HSBV4>

Also it leads to improvement in second level metrics like sales cycle (decreasing) or conversion rates of the main website increasing. (But off course if measured in long term horizons)

Another perspective that I am looking to understand is what could be the possible metrics for Product Marketing for a Platform service that is not really a stand-alone offering or monetised but something that powers all the other monetary product offerings

Any example of that product <@U02U94APQEA>?

Something like a Platform. Eg: Zendesk Sunshine, ServiceNow Platform, Atlassian Forge etc

Not sure about Twitter but they don't work for Linkedin

Does not work for Twitter or LinkedIn AFAIK on Chrome.

RevGenius will be acquired by one or the other player in the SalesTech space soon

Not sure if you have seen this handle - SaaS Satire. SaaS focussed VC’s buying satire handles like it

How much is Laxman spending on RevGenious?

Peakcommunity will be acquired by Sangram Vajre

i really :heart_eyes: their posts - like absolutely genius

<@U02TTEFFU6B> not sure only senior leadership can answer that

On a series note, I agree with <@U02UGB8DERY>. Communities will be bought now

Have to consistent to be popular. That guy should try microblogging websites like twitter

Communities should be an obvious taregt. I agree.

Since blogs are more directly measurable witb ToFu, it's easier to justify that decision.

true - but now with slight push towards brand, communities will be hot targets.

I have an interesting domain but it's too long 
<http://Fullstackrevenue.com|Fullstackrevenue.com> might start something with this lol

We got an acquisition offer just before s11s launch btw. It was to manage a community of a company. And not start this. We chose not to.

That reminds me, we need to say No to him

Right or wrong - no one to judge. Maybe she saw that angle in his post and decided to talk about it. 

I loved Mahesh's response. 

As for editing, I do agree that it would be good to update the original post to reflect the other opinion.

I believe even Mahesh's tweet had the clarification

That LinkedIn influencer's urge to take the higher moral ground.

The fact that she isn't willing to post the whole truth tarnishes her own reputation.

<https://ventureinside.com/where-did-consumerization-of-the-enterprise-go-d2259cc7427d|https://ventureinside.com/where-did-consumerization-of-the-enterprise-go-d2259cc7427d>

Like <@U02PDC6B0HH> said, it would be a move to hire the best of brand builders (B2C) and then layer SaaS knowledge on them to take a crack. Interesting play

Hey Siddharth/<@U02PDC6B0HH>, when does a SaaS/B2B brand bring in brand builders ideally? After they have reached a certain size in terms of revenue and recall or should they ideally be doing that from early stages?

In B2C, brand building is at the heart of everything, usually. Curious to know how it plays out in B2B?

This is a damn good question! Personally I think India SaaS firms has not yet hit the maturity or revenue scale to focus on branding (apart from a few one-time hits here and there).
From my POV, i think Product marketing is your early branding team and once you are able to hit the $250-300K MRR it’s time to time to focus on branding. Reason being, before that marketing would be focussing a lot on demand generation.
Once you cross 300K MRR, you have a little bit of budget (hopefully) that you can afford to spend on branding.

With you on this siddharth. Companies that’re scaling up today such as freshworks/chargebee/razorpay can be examples for branding exemplaries in indian saas. 

But then before you hit certain revenue target, i think product marketing can takecare of positioning and messaging of brand as well.

Also, as I understand there are many SaaS companies with similar looking products and features (correct me if I am wrong)... won't a distinctive brand narrative help you stand out, which one can start building from day 1 / early stages?

And maybe it doesn't need to be all paid. Content, Community and Organic can also do wonders with some well thought-out strategy.

Just my two cents. What do you guys think?

I agree Tushar. I feel communities are going to be :fire:

I agree to focus on brand from Day 0 - and to a certain extent Product Marketing does the same. User research, positioning, pain points etc.

depends on your content

if you’re planning to write four articles, will they contain the same mistakes/errors or do you have, let’s say, 40 mistakes that you’re planning to split into 4?

i would suggest one article if the number of mistakes/errors is small

you can find which of the four phrases have the highest return rate/ctr and use that in your meta title and description

the phrase with the highest volume can go into your h1 and the remaining can be added to your h2, image alt text, and sprinkled throughout your content

also a small tip: add your mistakes/errors as “Mistake #N: XYZ” in a h3/h2 tag to increase the chances of google picking it up as a featured snippet

if you’re writing multiple articles, don’t forget to link them to each other with the appropriate anchor text

One method I used to test this was searching for these queries and seeing the results. If the results were vastly different (including different blogs and domains) then I would defer to creating different articles.

If the same articles popped up for multiple queries, i would try to see what is ranking in the top 5 (listicle, QnA etc.) and then try to make that better (either skyscraper, pillar post, or interactive)

Answers:
1. No
2. Yes, typically follow the hub and spoke approach here. Make one pillar page and then for any offshoot/LSI keywords you can build individual posts which can then be linked from the main article.
3. Not keyword cannibalization. There is no such thing but from Google's perspective you're confusing the algorithm as in the googlebot doesn't know which article it should show for these related keywords. The bot is smart enough to understand these are related keywords.

Image from iOS.jpg

Hey <@U02V8K0FVMH> can you share the link to original post?

<https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lmREpH0=/>

sorry, was AFK, here's the link to the post - <https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/hiring-growth>