Do fewer things exceptionally well
An interview with Ian Adams, VP Demand Gen @ Vendasta. TL;DR: Narrowing your focus & living inside your audience's context = more $$$ long-term
Read time: 3 minutes & 30 seconds
The following is a conversation with Ian Adams, a SaaS GTM leader & former tech M&A investment banker. He's currently leading Demand Gen at Vendasta, a company with revenue exceeding $100 million & a talented staff of 900.
Tell readers about you.
At Yesware (where I led marketing and sales) we successfully raised $50 million from investors like Google, Battery & Foundry Group.
Our sales wins were significant too. We did mostly high-velocity deals around $5-10k ACV but also had those $500k deals.
We’ve done up to $2.4 million agreements with big names like Uber, Snowflake, Stripe, Yelp, Lyft. All of them used our software which is exciting.
These were highlights before Vendasta acquired us.
My present focus is figuring out high-leverage activities to drive Vendasta’s revenue.
What high-leverage activities are you focused on?
Near term, I'm optimizing paid ad programs.
We were spending ~$200k / month across Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Bing & YouTube. Not exactly mastering any of them.
My approach is to experiment with channels until we can confidently acquire customers at our target CPL or CPD, then scale spending until we hit diminishing returns.
We re-started with Google paid search and Facebook ads, mastering these before adding more channels.
The focus now is on doing fewer things but doing them exceptionally well.
What about messaging & creative?
Yes, but before that is audience selection.
Vendasta has a huge product footprint with a vast potential buyer base. So we have to narrow our target customer.
We identified that 90% of our accounts are digital marketing agencies, which is also reflective of our existing customer base.
We tailor our product & message specifically for these agencies, primarily those in the early stages or with ~10 employees.
A 1-2 employee agency cares about different things than a 5-10 person agency. Can’t be a mismatch between market and marketing.
You can’t talk about copy without talking about audience without talking about targeting. It’s nuanced.
I love how holistic that answer is. I asked you about the message but you also have to have the message in the right context. You have to look at how that audience is being narrowed. And how that corresponding message is also being narrowed to match their context.
It has to be done. The best marketing orgs do that. It’s worked out really well for us.
We’ve reduced CPL by almost half. CPD by almost half. We’re now within a 12-month payback period. And for public SaaS CAC payback, it’s still in the 24-month range.
So we have a healthy CAC payback relative to where we were before, and we’re always improving that too.
What data do you use to make good decisions?
To do research on what we should even do, we looked at existing customer data in our CRM. Existing surveys to understand what they care about. A bunch of sales calls and demos.
So quantitative & qualitative.
On an ongoing basis, we track channel spend, lead volume, conversion rate from lead to closed-won. And how much did they pay us? Which plan did they purchase?
Part of that is done through our native reporting in Looker. Some of it is through offline data conversion.
Who's likely to succeed in SaaS's future?
My general belief is that B2B SaaS companies don’t win on the tactical level. Where they really win is building a great product and a great brand and being known for solving a hard problem in a clearly-defined market.
Do the fundamentals well. Educate your market. Be in the market. Understand your market. That stands the test of time. Not some channel and twisting the knobs.
Channels get saturated. Long-term brand investments and community will always pay off long term.