On Episode 12 of the How To SaaS podcast, Shiv Narayanan interviews Mitch Solway, the former VP of Marketing at Freshbooks, on how to deploy and measure radio ads as an avenue for acquiring customers.

“Businesses are more likely to die of indigestion than starvation. When you try to do too many things and not one thing great, it can be difficult.”
-Adam Fried, CEO of Simply Color Lab & ShootQ

Episode 11 of the How To SaaS podcast with Shiv Narayanan features Adam Fried, CEO of Simply Color Lab and ShootQ, on how to layer a retail business and a SaaS company on top of each other to create synergies and generate additional streams of revenue.

“This is a quote from David Ogilvy: ‘Don’t count the people you reach. Instead, reach the people that count.'”
-Jon Miller, Founder & CEO of Engagio

Episode 10 of the How To SaaS podcast features Jon Miller, founder and CEO of Engagio, on how to plan, deploy and measure an Account-Based Everything strategy.

The interview is timely considering Jon was the former CMO of Marketo, which recently sold for $1.8 billion. We touch on that topic in the conversation before moving on to Account Based Everything.

In this episode, Jon and I cover the following:

• Why Account Based Marketing as a term should be changed to Account Based Everything
• What an Account Based Everything strategy and campaign looks like in practice
• How the KPIs around Account Based Everything are completely different than the KPIs around companies that deploy a “fishing with a net” strategy

We cover lots more in the conversation. Here is my interview with Jon:

“I want our customers to feel like they are our only customers.”
-Heather Foeh, VP of Customer Advocacy at Vision Critical

Episode 9 of the How To SaaS podcast with Shiv Narayanan features Heather Foeh, VP of Customer Advocacy at Vision Critical, on how to use Advocate Marketing as a land and expand strategy.

In this episode, Heather and I discuss how Vision Critical leverages existing clients as advocates to land future clients within the same company, including:

• How to find out who your advocates and product champions are
• How research the needs of advocates and tailor your content and messaging
• How to deploy Account Based Marketing principles in your Advocate Marketing initiatives
• How to operationally plan out Advocate Marketing campaigns with sales, customer success and marketing

Here’s my interview with Heather:

“You have to adjust constantly.”
-Heather McCloskey, Inbound Marketing Manager at Uservoice

Episode 8 of the How To SaaS podcast with Shiv Narayanan features Heather McCloskey, Inbound Marketing Manager at Uservoice, and we discuss how to run your blog like a product manager.

We at Wild Apricot are clients of Uservoice’s powerful software and are using it to understand our users and prioritize our roadmap better. Given the application of their software, who better to talk about bringing product management to the realm of managing a blog?!

In this episode, you’ll learn the following:

• Different avenues of user research you can use to learn more about your users
• How to turn those insights into actionable items within your content roadmap
• And how to measure the performance of your content, once deployed

Here’s my interview with Heather:

“I think a lot of people get funding when they don’t even know for sure if the product is worth selling.”
-Omar Zenhom, co-founder of the $100MBA and Webinar Ninja

Episode 7 of the How To SaaS podcast with Shiv Narayanan features Omar Zenhom, co-founder of the $100MBA & Webinar Ninja, on how to bootstrap a SaaS company using content marketing.

While listening to the conversation with Omar, you’ll learn the following:

• Why most SaaS companies make the mistake of taking on funding too early
• How to develop your product through the bootstrapping phases through controlled launches
• How to leverage content marketing to build an audience that can be leveraged to reduce your Customer Acquisition Cost

Show notes:

• Omar’s $100MBA podcast — a must-listen podcast for any aspiring entrepreneur
• Omar’s software Webinar Ninja — If you’re using Citrix/GoToWebinar as your platform, you need to check this out. Sign-up for Webinar Ninja...

“Do I want to be drinking a piña colada in a basement that is dingy, damp and wet or do I want to be drinking that piña colada on a beach in Hawaii?”
-Hana Abaza, VP of Marketing at Uberflip

Episode 6 of the How To SaaS podcast features Hana Abaza, VP of Marketing at Uberflip, on pioneering the Content Experience conversation and how their webinar strategy is helping them distribute the message to the market.

What’s fascinating about Uberflip is that they are trying to bridge an education gap within the market about Content. As Hana explains in the episode, 3 key stages of the content marketing process are well known: ideation, creation and distribution. The 4th, often neglected stage, is what Uberflip focuses on: the Content Experience.

While listening to the conversation with Hana, you’ll learn the following:

• Why the Content Experience is crucial to meeting your marketing objectives
• How Uberflip uses webinars to educate its prospective...

“We want people to know that our training really is going to help them regardless of whether they use LeadPages or not.”
– Tim Paige, Conversion Educator at LeadPages

Episode 5 features Tim Paige, Conversion Educator at LeadPages, on how to create a multi-channel education strategy for SaaS companies using webinars, podcast, courses and more.

LeadPages is one of the biggest SaaS companies around — they have $38MM in funding and are growing so fast that their hiring really can’t keep up with it. In fact, their 3-year growth rate currently sits at roughly 2000% and they’ve been ranked #220 on Inc’s 5000 fastest growing companies in 2015.

We at Wild Apricot have many times looked to LeadPages as a model of what we are trying to accomplish with our own education strategy and believe that all SaaS companies should be following a similar model

In the conversation with Tim, you’ll learn the following:

• Why education is at the core of how...

“Every interaction with your company creates a holistic impression with the customer…And most companies are structured in the wrong way to optimize the customer experience.”
-Joey Coleman, Founder of Design Symphony

Episode 4 of the How To SaaS podcast features Joey Coleman, Founder of Design Symphony, on onboarding users in the First 100 Days® of their journey and turning initial experience into an advantage to increase retention and referrals.

Some background on Joey — my interaction with his message began with his concept of the first 100 days and how companies lose up to 50% of their customers within that time period. We at Wild Apricot have taken Joey’s courses and seminars and have really invested into incorporating his ideas into our initial user onboarding.

We believe in it so much that we created a cross-functional onboarding unit in our company that transcends your traditional departments of marketing, sales, customer success,...

“You need to focus on how you treat existing customers as much as you do on net new customers.”
-Jim Williams, VP Marketing of Influitive

Episode 3 of the How To SaaS podcast features Jim Williams, VP of Marketing at Influitive, on the strategy behind their Advocamp conference and how it is helping them create the category of Advocate Marketing.

Influitive is one of the darlings of the Toronto SaaS community — they’re growing rapidly, they’ve raised 5 rounds of funding that total to $50MM and they are trying to accomplish something unique, which is the building of an entirely new category called “Advocate Marketing”.

Influitive enables companies to go way beyond referrals to create and empower product champions/evangelists as the core way to grow a business.

We’re going to be speaking with Jim about the creation of Advocamp — their annual conference, which just finished in San Francisco — and it is helping Influitive to...