“We were on a hyper-growth trajectory and going through multiple acquisitions a year,” recalls Lacey Ford, former Senior VP of Marketing at insightsoftware, a financial reporting solution provider. After 14 acquisitions in the space of just a couple of years, "what we needed was to build the foundational elements to scale the business as quickly as possible,” Lacey explains.
From a marketing perspective, there were three fundamental areas insightsoftware needed help developing: getting the team structure right, building the data infrastructure, and scaling the demand gen engine.
Read on to hear how Lacey and insightsoftware managed to:
Plus Lacey's advice on how to get the most from a How To SaaS engagement.
Increased price transparency helps everyone win.
Most importantly, efficiency increases because far less time is spent on having customers jump through hoops to get a pricing 1-pager that they cannot afford.
Even if you're a B2B enterprise company with a $100K offering. Boldly put your starting price point on a pricing page for the world to see.
Your whole Go-To-Market motion will improve and your buyers will trust you more.
Most PE-backed businesses aren't getting the full value from Marketing as a growth lever.
To start changing that for your portfolio companies, take a look at Shiv Narayanan's new book, Post-Acquisition Marketing: How to create enterprise value in the first 100 days. Here's what you'll learn:
One of the key areas the book covers is how to effectively shift Marketing's accountability. Below is an excerpt from Post-Acquisition Marketing that reveals:
“I need to know the truth, and I need to know it fast.”
Those were Henry’s first words on his first call with me, shortly after Fleetsync, his fleet-management software company, was acquired by the private equity firm North Star Capital.
Henry was...
“One of our biggest challenges was the fact that our entire lead flow was single-channel,” David Setzer, Founder and CEO at Mailprotector explains. “We work in a community environment, so it's a very event-driven lead flow. That was working great, but after raising our series A, we needed to expand the inbound lead channels to more than just relying on one channel. It can be cyclical at times, so being able to have a consistent lead flow and also tap other potential partners that aren't at events or in these communities was just absolutely critical for us.”
With their new funding, Mailprotector was poised to grow. But they had been playing zone defense on marketing, and they knew they needed some support here to help them build their pipeline in a data-driven, scalable way.
David first met Shiv Narayanan, Founder and CEO of How To SaaS, at a private equity entrepreneur event. He soon realized that they completely aligned on their philosophy of the...
If your business already has a mature marketing function that delivers a steady flow of leads, it's tempting to let marketing continue on autopilot while you focus on improving other functions. But, chances are, this approach means you miss out on even higher conversion rates, lower CAC, and more closed-won deals that are easily within reach. As security and automation software company Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) discovered, businesses in this situation are in an ideal position to make low-effort but high-ROI adjustments to existing campaigns and processes.
Although Fortra already had an effective marketing engine in place, they wanted to further increase the number of quality leads they were generating. “While we were continuously patting ourselves on the back for all the great things we were doing, we wondered what else we could be doing,” recalls Mike Devine, CMO at Fortra.
So, when Fortra began an...
Increased sales volume breaks internal processes.
As you close more deals, your organization has to figure out a way to deal with increased complexity.
This is where questions like the following become increasingly important:
These kinds of questions only become relevant and evident as sales volume crosses certain thresholds.
This is one of the most undervalued contributions of sales: As more deals are closed, the organization is given an opportunity to examine key strategic questions that would otherwise remain unaddressed.
As those questions...
Rethinking meetings for mental health and productivity is more important now than ever before. Here are 12 principles worth following:
Scaling companies would be a lot easier if companies behaved more like sports teams.
Training in most companies halts after onboarding. This is part of the reason why tenure in a lot of roles (especially executives) is below 2 years. In a market where the demand for talent far supersedes the supply of talent, internal training can be a competitive advantage.
Hire high potential employees and invest in them by:
Each of these empowers team members to come back to the company with capabilities to contribute even more.
As they level up based on your investment, reward them with higher compensation to recognize their increased ability to contribute.
If your business model doesn't allow you to invest in team...
Increasing team member tenure can be one of the keys to unlocking growth long-term.
Each time you lose someone, you take on the added tangible costs of onboarding and training replacements + the intangible costs of lost institutional memory.
This is why employee satisfaction and retention is not an HR issue. It is one of the biggest growth priorities for companies yet unfortunately not treated as such.
People leave companies for a variety of reasons. These include:
Level 1 - Salary, Title, Benefits. What do I financially gain from working here?
Level 2 - Safety, Security. Can I trust this company / leadership to take care of my needs?
Level 3 - Culture. Do the values of this company resonate with me personally?
Level 4 - Opportunity. Do I see a path for personal and professional growth here?
Level 5 - Alignment. Does this align with my long-term goals?
Each leader in a business must be fully attuned to these questions and proactively engage team members to ensure all 5 levels are...
Immature organizations view growth as a Sales-only problem. These are the organizations where:
Mature organizations, by contrast, view growth as a holistic problem, owned by everyone in the organization. To scale, they ask themselves questions like:
Immature organizations miss all these growth avenues because their conversations are one-dimensionally focused on sales just working harder.
What these organizations don't realize is that putting less pressure on...
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