First, let’s define the difference between a marketing strategy and marketing plan. For your best shot at success creating a strategy, we’ve gotta do what every strategist does before defining anything: data-gathering. We’re going to need information first and to take...

“Well I only want to invest in growth when there’s a guaranteed result.” “We’d be willing to spend more if we knew that it would generate results.” I’ve heard this concern from SaaS founders more times than I can count. I heard it when I was in-house as a marketer,...

I've been a mentor and an advisor now for quite a few SaaS accelerators, incubators, communities, and VC funds — from Atlanta Tech Village and TechStars to TinySeed and GrowthMentor (and more recently MentorPass). After running hundreds of calls for both early-stage...

It’s the most common onboarding and activation approach for early-stage founders: 1. Create self-serve sign-up 2. Show a bunch of pop-ups and modals of the features 3. Send a few emails I guess? 4. ???? 5. Profit! And in the early days, this is perfectly acceptable....

So you’re staring down a list of experiments to run and you have no idea which ones to prioritize. There’s a million channels, tactics, and things to try, but nothing really sticks out at you as the thing you need to do first. In order to know what to do next, we...

Truth: If your brain can learn it, there’s usually another brain that can learn it. It’s a fundamental truth that took me years to learn, and blocked me from growing the company a lot faster than if I had just accepted the truth. What delayed me for so many years from...

Was just taking a look at Xero and I noticed that we did two things at DemandMaven: 1. We reached our revenue goals for the year back in August. 🤯 2. We grew 36% from last year — and we still have a whole quarter to go. 📈 Considering the past two years we've had, I'll...

Many people think strategy is a glorified plan — to most, it’s a list of goals and action items to help you accomplish certain objectives. It may have deadlines, specific outcomes, and potential requirements for executing that strategy (think like budgets, tools,...

Before you throw tomatoes and come with the torches, hear me out. *audience lowers tomatoes for a brief moment* As marketers, it’s really easy and tempting to focus on just the KPIs that matter to us and our CEOs, sales leaders, colleagues, etc. We obsess over the...

The process of surfacing strategic insight relies on our team’s ability to do two functions fairly well at the same time: 1. Asking the right strategic questions — related to the customer journey, the business model, the product, the market, the competitors, and so...

I talk a lot about growth and the work we do with SaaS companies, but I don't think I've ever broken down just how deep our projects can go. Right around Spring 2020 when the pandemonium sh*t hit the fan, we took on a B2B SaaS client that was facing a few challenges...

If you caught last week's post, you learned about shifting the types of questions you ask customers from product-centered ➡️ psychology-centered. The below are some of my absolute favorite questions to ask that will enables us to extract further strategic insight....