SaaS Sales and Marketing Issues with Jesse Ouellette, Part 2

[00:00:00] Brad Seaman: I mean, I, I, so I’m definitely in agreeance with you. Like I w I think where the separation happens is when you get to a certain size and then you hire some, you hire somebody who’s not on the same pay. Whether you have a marketing person, you hire a Salesforce, you have a Salesforce, a marketing person, and they have different beliefs because they came from different schools.

And once you hire two people from two different schools, I have two different thoughts and are aligned and incentivized on two separate things. Then you’ve got division, right?

[00:00:27] Jesse Ouellette: I fully agree with you on that. I mean, the ones that I see really struggling right now and I’ve got data on this, I’ve been tracking you know, I have something that tracks all the, I am tracking every unicorn software company.

But basically what I’m seeing is the ones that are struggling are the ones that have a very kind of like senior level corporate marketer kind of came from that world. D doesn’t understand the kind of data platforming is part of it. And as CRO or usually the CRMs are from the sales side, let’s just call it what it is.

And I’m not, it could be either side, but we’ll see that, that, you know, VP of sales, hard driving, I don’t need any about, I’ll just go get the number. There’s just no way you’re going to hit your number because. Working harder because what’s going to end up happening to you is your number’s going to go three X higher overnight, and you’re not going to be able to hit it.

You’re going to fail. And that’s why these, most of them. Folks are only lasting about four. I’m seeing about 14 months. It’s pretty

[00:01:31] Brad Seaman: tight. So are they are now the guy that comes in behind them? Are they hitting that? Are they, are they succeeding? I mean, I don’t think anybody’s succeeded. Right. So

[00:01:39] Jesse Ouellette: that’s that.

So I’ve been a part of both sides. I’ve been the one that’s coming in to replace the new, the old team. And I was on both sides of it, right where I was the one there. And there’s the, I never got replaced, but

[00:01:51] Brad Seaman: is that in the revenue advisory role? So you were coming in when you had this little window between the product.

[00:01:56] Jesse Ouellette: Just more, just more of my career. I mean, I always was there, like the revenue advisory, I was doing more like kind of consulting to find the problem that I wanted to solve in SAS. But, but before that, when I was in my career, I always had, you know, I was always pretty close with my VP of sales. I always got pulled from company to company you know, and, and that kind of thing.

But what I, what I always see happening is the CRO role. Is the second that person doesn’t understand the marketing. Like I’ve got a few friends who were Ciro’s that I, that I’ve been training on sales and marketing, and they’re at unicorns, the marketing side specifically. They’re like your old school sales leaders, but they’re on the marketing side now I’ve taught them marketing and there’s certain metrics you need to look at from a mark marketing spectrum.

I’m an advisor to three companies right now that I’m doing that. And those companies are getting you know, th the CRO runs marketing to, they wouldn’t take the job, like certain Ciro’s can choose if they can own the marketing department or not. So

[00:02:57] Brad Seaman: w what do you think about, like, why does, I mean, I struggled to separate the two things and I, and I, but, but from a, from like a lead generation perspective, like, when you think about how you’re going to grow the business, Whether you think about it from the sales lens or you think about the margin lens, I really see ultimately you need people to buy stuff.

Right. And I think that’s that’s so, so, so typically when I think about where, where things sort of fall apart is like when a marketer, all of a sudden doesn’t think they need to sell something.

[00:03:30] Jesse Ouellette: Right? Yeah. So I can give you a couple examples that really are obvious around. So data-wise here’s here’s one good one, right?

So when you look at where I really like to look at is programmatic ads and their strategy around that. And when I look around, I mean, you could say you know, I’ve gotta be actually just cause it’s so bad, I’ve got a course I’m watching just, just on LinkedIn ads. But what I’ll see is people running ads and they’ve, they’ve really have no idea what the D there’s like on LinkedIn.

There’s three types of objectives on the ads. And what they don’t understand is they’re like, well, I need more leads. So I’m just going to go run the lead gen ones. What are those three objectives? So there’s the, the three objectives that they have on on, on like Facebook is different, but the three objectives that they have are the brand awareness.

That’s like cold. Like, first of all, if you’re a company, like most people are still cold on your company, unless you. You know, Microsoft drift, you know, somebody’s name, but let’s see. So there’s the brand awareness one, right? There’s the there’s kind of your, your middle one, which is like your engagement one, right?

That’s like, you’re trying to get more engagement and getting to come through your link and everything there. And then there’s the conversion one. There’s three. And they, and LinkedIn tells you this, like when you’re setting up the ad, it physically tells you this yet. It’s so it’s still so complicated to people.

So. What, what you have to think of is on the brand one. This is where the sales team needs to be kind of involved, right? Like when you’re picking these audiences you know, I was at one company, they were spending $80,000 a month and not one of the ads was going to anybody in our target market because they didn’t understand that the audience size they picked was too big and they were running it.

It would reset every night at midnight east coast time, but they had the setting. It was on a different time. So it was the wrong settings. So they were just blowing up 80, 80 grand a month on ads. And nobody, nobody even knew. They were like, wow, it’s brand it’s brand awareness, but they weren’t even running brand awareness ads.

They were running the conversion ads trying to get lead forms in, but that’s not the right move either. So they just didn’t understand. You have to use, so the new prospecting is happening through. You know, obviously you’re getting people in and you want to make calls to people, right? Like as you guys, you know, your product does and everything, but also the, a lot of the prospecting is going on.

You want the air cover campaigns running while you’re calling people so they can be aware of it. Yeah.

[00:06:03] Brad Seaman: And I always say that, you know, I think branding market marketing and branding are really super important and phone prospecting because if I call you from LinkedIn, you’re probably going to take my time.

You recognize that, right? If I call you from link me up and we’re in sunny, Sunnyvale, Arkansas, then you probably not going to take right print. I’d taken my, my, or Arkansas or whatever, whatever. I don’t know any tags. My geographic names are going out the door here, but yeah, so I think branding is super, super important.

As opportunities to phone prospecting what is, so let me ask you a question that say, I guess as you sort of talk about the changes that are happening in sales and marketing one of the things that I think is occurring is your see the salespeople who are almost like pseudo marketers, you know, they’re out there.

They’re what do you think about what, tell me, what do you think about that? What’s the future of sales

[00:06:59] Jesse Ouellette: sales rep. So here’s where it gets interesting. So if you’re an hae and you’re having to do outbound prospecting where, so you’re like an AA that’s got, that’s basically like, you know, there’s kind of to stage a lot of the two-stage organizations, you prospect, and then you have the AA, that’s like kind of closing the deals.

The problem is that person that AA that’s closing the deals as these numbers are going up every year, three acts, you know, triple three times doubled twice. Right. So that’s like the Earl, sorry. You know, the little triple, triple twice double three dots. But what’s going on is you’re finding that these AEs are now responsible with their SDRs, right?

They’re both struggling the volume-based sequencing and things like that. Isn’t working unless you’re running ads and you’re working with your marketing team and you’re getting the message out there. Right. The call for the 15 minute meeting is a lot harder to get now. So you need a little bit of air cover for you, right?

Whether calling or emailing the medium really doesn’t matter. I mean, you could do both of them very well, but you just need to be able to do that. And then I think what’s going to change is you’re going to start to see there’s going to be more salespeople who are like moving towards marketing or operations, because there’s not enough of those.

Performance-based marketing people, right? The CRA you know the Chris walkers of the world who are talking about performance and all of that, or the operations people who like, Hey, w we don’t have these systems set up, right. We only have one, this sales ops capacity planning person is not even that important.

Well, they’re important, but there’s, you need somebody to set up all these, we just bought. Tools and we’ve got to go and get them all deployed. Right. So that’s kind of the, the, the thing that I see is happening is you’re going to see a lot more people switching to roles like rev ops, a lot of salespeople or SDRs that like maybe, Hey, and then if they want to play video games, like they might be younger, you know, playing video games.

If they want to get to the second level of call of duty, maybe they want to go do some programmatic ads. I mean, that’s where there’s a lot of. Like, you know, if you do that and make phone calls, like you’re probably gonna want to give your STRs the budget for the ads. Cause they’re going to probably be able to convert them better.

Then your marketing team will be able to, and giving him is not a good idea either.

[00:09:15] Brad Seaman: Well now was that was programmatic ads through an agency.

[00:09:19] Jesse Ouellette: If you think about it, like when you’re, when you’re going out into your prospect and you start out in that brand awareness stage, an agency is going to take some time to figure out.

You don’t want to give it’s such a performer. It’s what I, what I think people are doing in B2B right now is they don’t realize like the performer, you know, we always want to make this a sport or a game or whatever, the real performance you can’t, the stuff that’s like yours. Competitive advantage has to be that right.

That’s the area where you can differentiate against the competition. And I see these companies giving it to an agency who literally is just loading in whatever they think, because the agency doesn’t care, they just want to get their cost structure down. So, so you want to take this prospecting on it’s learning, right?

You’re going to have to learn how to run ads. It’s a pain like I’m humble. Like it’s, it humbles me just like the sales job did as well, because running ads is a, is a pain in the ass. Like it is when they don’t convert, you get so angry and you just, but it’s fun. I mean, that’s what the SDRs probably should be doing instead of.

You know, doing both right. The combo making calls with products like yours and just, I think it’s a really big opportunity that people are SDRs are trying to figure out what they’re doing. How, how would you execute that?

[00:10:40] Brad Seaman: Like how would that how’s that work? If you were going to push down programmatic advertising through the SDL.

How do you envision that to be ex like how physically would you execute that?

[00:10:52] Jesse Ouellette: Yeah, so, I mean, you know, the perfect example, and I know we were talking about it before. It was, you know, these pod structures that do these ABM campaigns, right. You might give that SDR a budget and you know, you probably want to have somebody in the organization that knows.

You’d probably want to get somebody certified to have them do like a CXL you know, PR performance, you know, ads certification. But what you’re going to find is you could do groups, right? You can do ad groups. So you can say, Hey, this, this team gets $500. Let that team own it. Don’t give it to one marketing person who already has way too much on their plate, but also is not the sales part of that.

When you’re trying to close the ad and you’re trying to get that person to convert. It’s the same process you use in a sales process. When you’re asking somebody for the sale, you have to push urgency, you have to test your performance and your brand at the intersection of like, I don’t want to go screw up my brand, but I got to get this deal in and I gotta make it.

So it’s an opportunity. I think so

[00:11:54] Brad Seaman: it’s through my mind is I just think about so there’s podcasts that I follow called the founder’s podcast and the guy interviewed, or basically reads books on entrepreneurs and sort of regurgitates all the information to a really tight hour conversation where he’s pulling out all of the great you know, kind of the great entrepreneurial bits.

And the one thing that comes up time and time again is guys start businesses. And at some point they get decentralized. So the organization takes over. So maybe that’s because the founder does. But there’s but decent generalization typically is a core theme of the, on the ups when they’re going up, when they’re growing the business, you know, before it gets taken over by the second generation of a family it’s very decentralized.

And when I hear you talk about more, it’s almost like the decentralization of marketing, right marketing initially like early 19 hundreds, it’s going to be really combined with sales. It’s gets decentralized. So it’s all being, we’re going back down where it’s going to get, it’s starting to get broken up too for pushing that back then.

Yeah, well, you

[00:12:55] Jesse Ouellette: will, the what’s going to end up happening. I mean, this is the reality there’s there’s you know, I was looking at it the other day that it was 18,000 is of SDR, some of these unicorns, right. And the, and the companies themselves have a tremendous amount of money set aside for their, for their ads and prospects.

Right. The SDRs are part of that, but if they want to be successful, they’re going to want to do both and they’re going to want to align them both. Right. And what you’re not going to be able to do is work across a CMO who runs this Marc one marketing person who decides which salesperson they light and runs the ads.

And they’re not measured. You know, those marketing people have a 90, usually a 90 10 comp plan, right. We always say incentives drive behavior, but the 10% is not about. One ad change is not going to make a difference to them, but it has to in your business to be successful. If you’re spending 50, 60 grand a month on ads, it’s not even just the 50, 50, 60 grand a month, whatever, blow it out the window.

But what about just taking that? And you’re losing the opportunity costs to run the ad. There’s no other way to do it. The reps can’t do it. I mean, I, at one point I almost just grabbed the ads account and just started running them myself because I could have made an ROI on that. Like, I definitely could have done that, you know, ROI.

I knew what my sales process, so that’s why I basically went the way I did. And you know, I understand audience matching very well. I understand the data part. I understand how to get a message across. You don’t want to always get everybody in that funnel either. You want to get the people who have the problem, then you want to go press the urgency on them.

And most people can’t even set up the pixel on their website, which is the number one thing you have to do first. Right. And this is where I think SDRs could be used much more strategically this and calls, you know, combining the two would be a very interesting.

[00:14:50] Brad Seaman: Well, awesome. Well, super is, do I have so little you know, understanding of like what ad spend looks like at a large a large business.

So I love hearing you talk about how that’s executed.

[00:15:02] Jesse Ouellette: I have, so I’ve, I’ve actually been monitoring it for so I have the data for all of the kind of SAS, unicorn companies. And what would scare you is what, what their cost was. If you were to look at their cost in 2016 versus now, and you understand why these companies are doing, you know, like the ad, you know, the programmatic ads, but I can give you an example, like if you want to give me yeah.

So it’s, it’s always interesting. So if we look, if we thought about a company like To some degree there’s there might be a tender. I got to preface it with that, but most likely it’s pretty much spot on. So if you were to look at like, let’s just say somebody and now HubSpot’s got a amazing execution.

They they’re are unbelievable, but let’s just talk about that 2016. They’re probably a small company, you know, Mark’s their CRO, but they’re 38,000 $38,000. Let’s see. Yeah. $38,000 a month. Now, if we go to today if we looked at March 311,000 a month, they did a 10 X increase over that, that month I’ve been tracking all these companies for awhile.

And if you were to look at, I have it on every, every SAS like unicorn, if we looked at a company like RingCentral, back in 2016, there were spending $475,000 per month. And now they’re spending. Like 1.6 million per month, a month. And that’s just on Google. That’s not including if I don’t know, I actually don’t know what they’re doing on Facebook.

You can always, I can always go figure that out, but I’m basically taking their data and I’m watching these, these companies and I’m seeing what they’re spending. And if you only have one person managing that or an ad agency that doesn’t even really know your business and doesn’t know the story, that is an opportunity for a group of people to come.

And somebody who’s measured on that. I don’t know who that is. Maybe it’s somebody, your marketing team. I don’t know, but it’s a performance. It’s somebody who’s measured on performance, not. So are you, are you

[00:17:04] Brad Seaman: sort of saying that, Hey, you feel like a lot of these marketing heads are, you know, programmatic advertising is just falling to the wayside and they’re just throwing

[00:17:14] Jesse Ouellette: money.

It’s amazing. When I look so well, I’m able to, so the nice thing about marketing is you can see most, if you want to measure marketing, you actually don’t even have to work at it. The best way to measure your marketing is to do I have a strategy? What I do is I do an end point analysis. I basically analyze the entire surface of their marketing and I figure out exactly how many visitors they have on every single platform.

And I benchmark it. I’ve been benchmarking these companies for a while, so I have a lot of this data. So,

[00:17:41] Brad Seaman: so that data is that stuff that you just collected yourself,

[00:17:45] Jesse Ouellette: that company. Yep.

[00:17:50] Brad Seaman: Are you, are you going to put that out in one of your one of your LinkedIn posts, like share all the,

[00:17:57] Jesse Ouellette: the ad one pretty soon here because I’m releasing a course on LinkedIn ads and me LinkedIn is like 12 to 15 bucks, you know, a, a thousand views.

So, you know, if I get a hundred thousand views on one of my posts, I already know how much that’s worth. So yeah. Calculate a pretty quickly, right. In anybody who has an audience?

[00:18:18] Brad Seaman: Yeah, no no, it was, I’m looking forward to it. So you’ll have to give me a heads up when you’re getting ready to post it. When you get rid of it.

[00:18:24] Jesse Ouellette: Maybe I’ll send you the preview. I’ll send you just you the preview and then we can, yeah. Everybody else will have to keep watching your your podcast to learn. We’ll do a lot

[00:18:32] Brad Seaman: for the show. I love it. I think that’s great. I think that’s great. So well, cool. Is there anything specific that you want to cover that we didn’t

[00:18:38] Jesse Ouellette: talk about?

No. I mean, I think the, the, the key, the key thing that I’m seeing is what is working. I can tell you, like what I see, we’re only working and for me, and we’re doing, I’m doing a lot of growth experimentation, right? So I’m seeing the, there, there there’s somebody in your organization that might not always be getting like one of the most important people in your org is this marketing operations person and how good they are and their skill and the really good ones you’ve got there.

There’s going to be such a demand for those, that role, that role could be. And these, some of these people might be smart enough to figure out that they got to change their title, probably to like a VP. But that role is probably the most critical role in a, in a SAS organization right now. And that’s the part, that’s not the person who’s doing the CRM, that’s the person who’s doing more of the email marketing automation or kind of all the customer data they’re, they’re dealing with all your customer data.

That person is incredibly important. And that’s where the opportunity is because w w what’s happening with these companies. You’re if the second it becomes an MQL in anybody’s mind. It’s way too late. You have to figure out where your audiences way before that, because that’s where they’re still trying to, if you want your sales team to ever be involved, they gotta be involved way back, like way before they ever fill out.

If they touch an ebook or anything like that. It’s it’s too.

[00:20:07] Brad Seaman: Like, you know, Y Y I mean, I agree, but why do you think it’s too, it’s

[00:20:11] Jesse Ouellette: too late because the person’s been doing so much research on your company and they’ve pretty much got an idea and it depends on like the skill of your salesperson, right?

Like, so then it’s like that skill part at that first call. And most people, even the best salespeople it’s actually the best salespeople are usually hard to get two at a time. Usually you get to some of the, like, not the worst people, but the, maybe the more junior people or like, this is what buyers are afraid of.

So the companies that figure out how to get their buyers in, get them the aha, or get them, you know, you think of it as a store. There’s thousands of people every day coming into your website, right. Do you know who the other 999 people are that aren’t filling out their form? Huge. You should know their personas.

That’s not that hard to do now that you should have an anonymous name for every single one of those people. And you should look for patterns and what they’re doing, you know, you can track them across every single touch of any piece of your content, if you know what you’re doing. And that’s why that growth role is going to be so important.

And I’m starting to see some see, or I’ve got a couple of zeros that I see they’re building these growth organizations where they, they come in, they’re the CRO, and then they hire a more tactically focused. Head of growth or something like that, because the same playbook, the COO, the CRO, are they fighting today or not?

That playbook is dead. Like it will be dead for, I mean, you’re just the second somebody comes into that market and has a product that’s easier to get installed and ready that person’s going to win, you know, fast it’s how fast your buyers can get in and get past the trial process. Like, okay. So,

[00:21:55] Brad Seaman: so I had, so I had this conversation with S homemade somebody yesterday, Jonathan handoff from the juice here in Indianapolis.

So it’s a, it’s a high, alpha funded business. So basically they have a product that allows you to come in and get all the sales and marketing collateral without having to fill out the forms. So it kind of cool. They’re trying to D you know, get rid of you. Haven’t felt a forum and stopped the phone call from happening.

And so you can log on here, look at all the content. If you want somebody to call you. Change your profile to call me, or you can say, Hey, I’m just browsing. And then they’re sending a little analytics package. So I asked him, I said, do you think you’ll buy enterprise software? Like you buy network. And you sort of alluded to that.

You said, Hey, I think, you know, the ability to get a kind of a frictionless sale. So what’s your, what’s your thought on that? Like do you think the enterprise sales team goes away? No.

[00:22:47] Jesse Ouellette: So I think what’s so that’s the, that’s actually the opposite of what’s going to happen. So what’s going to happen. W what you’re seeing happen is right in the more mature organizations or the companies that are like, really figuring this out, like I get, I get a couple of companies I’ll give you like, Datadog.

So you look at Datadog, they have like a nine month payback to their sale. All the numbers look really good. They go out, they build another product, they get another 50% of the, you know, sales penetration on it. But it’ll be what the sales rep will do is they’ll handle customers that have already installed the product.

They’ve already started a relationship. And that’s how the, like the companies that figured it start to figure this out, right? You obviously, there’s a technology shift that has to happen, right? You can’t just become a PLG company overnight. It’s not easy. Trust me. I’ve had to, you know, this is part of my there’s stuff that I’ve had to struggle with on this too.

And I’ve been advising people on this, but you do have to make it so they can interact with your brand and possibly buy something. There has to be some something that they’re doing with you, whether it’s, I don’t know, do a training or something, something that they feel that they’ve interacted with your brand before your sales team’s going to be involved because that, that helps keep that cost out.

And then that outbound team, you better just make sure that that team is so aligned. Has all the tech working, they were using products like yours, their ads are running exactly over the right people. All those things. Like if you’re going to do an outbound team, quote, unquote, outbound, you gotta ma there’s so many things you have to email delivery you know, phone number, data, all that, all the connect stuff that you need for monster connect, that kind of stuff.

So that’s what you really got to make sure all this stuff is wired and wired for, for, for sound. Right? So if you’re running those outbound teams, but if you’re, if you want a lot of de-risking is going to go down. You come in, you buy some little subscription and then you start the discussion where the right funnel clouds is, where you’ll see this right now, cloud market, like, like the ADA.

Like if you look at companies like tackle that enable companies to go to the cloud marketplace, you’re seeing a lot of these, like on-prem products start to get to the cloud and they’re putting their products. You know, managed ECE too? Or is that like, is

[00:25:08] Brad Seaman: that

[00:25:08] Jesse Ouellette: what like tackle IO or something? Yeah. So like tackle that know, they kind of get you to the they get you into the, the, they get you right into the the cloud marketplaces and they do it like in a way that,

[00:25:19] Brad Seaman: okay.

I’ve never, I’ve not heard of those guys. Super, super interesting. Well, Jesse, this has been really fun, man. I love following you. I love your stuff. Great conversation. I hope we stay in touch, so all right, man was awesome. Love talking to you.