BDTP. Marketing Channels vs Programs with Asia Orangio

UI Breakfast: UI/UX Design and Product Strategy

In this episode of Better Done Than Perfect, host and guest Asia Ranjou discuss the strategic shift from viewing marketing as individual channe

Key takeaways

• Asia Ranjou identifies five fundamental growth levers: awareness, sales, retention, revenue, and operations.
• The 'SaaS Black Hole' refers to the 0-40 customer stage where founders should focus on manual repetition rather than hiring consultants for acquisition.
• A common OKR mistake is treating key results as mere tasks or projects instead of measurable outcomes.
• Marketing programs, such as webinars or ABM, differ from channels because they are ongoing, multi-channel efforts designed to generate revenue.
• ProfitWell's hot sauce campaign serves as a prime example of using a creative program to build brand engagement and demand.

Main topics

• Marketing Channels vs. Programs
• SaaS Growth Levers
• OKRs Best Practices

Notable quotes

If you're hitting all of your OKRs, they're not hard enough.

Conclusion

The episode offers a roadmap for SaaS leaders to transition from trans

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:06) Hello everyone and welcome to Better Done Than Perfect, podcast show for SaaS marketers and product people. Our awesome guest today is Asia Ranjou, founder and CEO of DemandMaven, and we're going to talk about marketing channels versus programs today. Speaker 2 (0:32) This show is brought to you by UserList, an email automation platform for SaaS companies. It matches the complexity of your customer data, including many-to-many relationships between users and companies. Book your demo call today at userlist.com. Speaker 2 (0:54) Hi, Asia. Hello. Yes, I'm so excited to be here. We are thrilled to have you here again after like four years or so. Welcome back. For those who don't know about you, please give us a primer on your background story and what you do at DemandMaven these days. Speaker 1 (1:13) Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I've been running DemandMaven now for about seven years. which is kind of hard to believe, but it's been a minute. And what I primarily do is I work with SaaS companies, their CEOs and their founders. If there are marketing teams or product teams, I work with them primarily on troubleshooting growth. And when I think about growth, I think about the whole business, not just marketing growth or even product growth, but the whole thing, the entire, the whole enchilada. And most of the businesses that I work with, they're struggling with growth in some kind of way. I've worked with over 100 companies during my tenure at Demand Maven, primarily SaaS, primarily software. I know it's... No, you're making it up. It can't be 100. I counted. I counted the other day over 100, which is so wild to think about. But needless to say, I've seen a lot. I've seen a lot. I've worked in a lot of contexts. I've interviewed over 1,000 customers. And so much of our work is, you know, we leverage both qualitative insights gathering and quantitative analysis. So it's really both data and insight. And before DemandMaven, I worked for two VC-funded startups here in Atlanta, both in marketing roles. So I was head of marketing and I was also head of demand gen in another previous role. During my tenure at DemandMaven, I've seen, let's see, two exits. And I also served on the board of Moz. Moz, if you're familiar with it, the first SEO platform headed by Rand Fishkin. And I was on the board of Moz before its successful acquisition in June of 2021. Speaker 2 (2:48) I remember you being appointed. And that was spectacular back then. It Speaker 1 (2:53) was a whirlwind. And Rand and I are still very close to this day. But yeah, that was probably one of the most just remarkable experiences that I ever had. It was very short, but I was so... excited and thrilled to be a part of it. Speaker 2 (3:07) If you can give us a bit more insight into your, you know, daily practices at DemandMaven, like let's say there is a startup that wants to work with you. What kind of activities do you do with them and for them? Speaker 1 (3:20) Yeah. So whenever I work with a company, usually the first order of business is really troubleshooting and identifying like what is the actual root cause of the problem. So back when we first, when we first did, you know, the last podcast so many years ago, I would really look for what was the North Star KPI. Today, it's really more, yes, North Star KPI, but it's also more like what is the most critical growth lever that we can pull? And what is the root cause? Like what's making it not work well? And sometimes the founders or the team, sometimes they don't know what to look for. And so I'm coming in and analyzing, okay, well, what's the overall efficiency of the whole business? So everything from the funnel. I'm putting that in finger quotes because I know all the marketers out there are going to be like, but the funnel is not a pure funnel, which is true. There is still a general flow in the business of how we generate traffic or how we generate leads or how we generate trials, demos, whatever it is. What's the conversion rate of those? How many of those do we retain? And then long term, how much of that do we retain? What's our general NPS? I'm looking for quantitative metrics of understanding performance in general and general efficiency. Anything that's not working well, though, most teams have the intuition for what they think it is. So maybe we're churning too much or we're not retaining enough customers long term enough. Or maybe it's we're doing marketing, but we're not acquiring who we want. Or we're spending all this money, but they're not becoming customers. I mean, it runs the gamut. And sometimes, sometimes it's we don't know why we're not growing. We have no clue. And we really need someone who's seen more and done more than us to come in and just take a look at everything. And so sometimes I'll find out that like they changed their pricing a year and a half ago and that's been tanking their net revenue retention. Like it's things, sometimes it's stuff like that. And, or sometimes it's, you know, we overhauled our onboarding, but it's not, it's not creating customers. It could be, it could really be anything across the full spectrum of when you think about SaaS. So awareness, acquisition, activation, retention. and then revenue, aka how we're charging. So my job is to come in and figure out what happened and what's going on and what are we going to do to fix it? And we have had the very awesome fortune of being able to work with so many different types of companies, all SaaS, primarily PLG, sometimes we work with sales-led companies. But we've had so much breadth of experience, deep experience within the SaaS world. And we've been able to see and do a lot. And it's been a lot of fun. And I really can't complain. I have such a fun job coming in and troubleshooting. That's what I do. I really envy your professional confidence Speaker 2 (6:07) in. putting together these resolutions why something is the problem. Because we as business people definitely lack the confidence by now of knowing our own business. I'm curious, where does this confidence stem from? Because for early stage startups, the numbers are just not enough to make statistically significant conclusions. Well, I'm probably phrasing this wrong, but like... With 20 customers, you can't say like, this is what happened a year ago. It's just too little. So how can you be so confident? Yeah. Where's the secret? Speaker 1 (6:47) Yeah. I don't know if there's a secret, but what I can say is the more that you do this type of work, not, I mean, not, not many consultants probably can say like, you know, I've worked with, you know, over a hundred companies, but because so much of my work is consultative, I'm, I'm coming in. I'm helping them identify the root cause and identify solutions. And if I'm fortunate enough, I actually get to help them with it. We do have retainers that we then go into sometimes, all the time. Not everyone has a budget for that. But I don't know if there's a secret as much as the more that you do this work, the more that you can see, okay, well, in these scenarios, this worked and this didn't. I think volume creates confidence in a way. I think about... With every new company that I work with, I think about the 20 others that I worked with who were just like them. So I'm like, I remember what went well and what didn't. And so I'm using that to inform my model. Basically, I have an algorithm that I have in my brain that happens every time I meet a new company and pattern matching. I mean, that's the more companies that you work with, the more that you can pattern match. But what I can say is, yeah, like when you're a super early stage and you've got like 20 customers, depending on what the problem is, like let's say it's churn or let's say it's... activation, then there are absolutely ways to figure out like, how do we improve that? But if someone comes to me and they're very early, they don't have that many customers and they're worried about acquisition. Usually what I say is don't hire me yet. Like hiring us right now, it doesn't make sense. You have to just go through the repetitions. Like you, you will learn so much more trying to sell your product at this stage than just tumbling on your own. On your own Speaker 2 (8:26) pattern, basically. Speaker 1 (8:27) I actually have a podcast. I have an episode about this on my podcast called In Demand, and I call it the SaaS black hole. You're in the black hole, and the only way to get out is to fight your way through it. And for better or for worse, every founder needs to go through that. No consultant. Speaker 2 (8:42) Where Speaker 1 (8:43) does it end? Speaker 2 (8:44) What's the range? Like, where does it stop? And the white begins. Speaker 1 (8:50) Honestly, it's like zero to 40 customers. That's like the black hole range. You could certainly hire us at 30 customers or even 20 or even 10, depending again on what the problem is. But if you're suffering from acquisition issues and you're in that range, the only way through is just like really like trudging through it. And a lot of people, a lot of founders don't like to hear that. But when they tell me their process and how they're thinking about it, I'm usually like, you're on the right path. You're going to crack this case in like six months. Hiring a fancy consultant isn't going to make that go faster. Because you have to get the repetitions of selling your product and figuring out what is missing or who are the right buyers. We can certainly help support this process, again, depending on what the challenges are. But if that's all you're suffering from, you just need to, you've got to work through this ass black hole. You have to get through this period of time. And a consultant, I mean, we probably could help, but... you need that experience. And I can't, I don't want to take that away from you. You know what I mean? So it doesn't do you a favor. It doesn't do you any favors. Like it doesn't help you build your business acumen by hiring us in that frame, in that timeframe. So I usually don't recommend it. Not anymore, at least. But some, you know, sometimes we get people who are like, they're in that range, but they need help with product. And that's very different. Or they need help with go-to-market strategy. Very different. It's not just... Oh, I've only got 20 and I need, I need like 30 now. And it's like, okay, well go do hard work to get the extra 10. You know what I mean? Speaker 2 (10:24) No one ever wants Speaker 1 (10:25) to. Speaker 2 (10:25) I know exactly what you mean here. I think I low-balled by naming 20 customers because this obviously super early, but even like 50, a hundred, I thought these are like milestones when you're, when you figured stuff out. And I think actually the doubts even. multiply instead of being reduced. So the stakes get higher. You're now afraid to hurt what you already have and so on and so forth. Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:54) Just wait until you have 5,000 customers and then you're like, I don't know who anyone is or like what they want. And it's really interesting. Speaker 2 (11:02) Before we dive into the main topic of channels versus programs, I recall, I think it was you and I love you. listing the growth levers a typical business can pull to unlock their growth, which is charging more and so on and so forth. Could you please, for our listeners, recap those and just overall give us a big picture of what levers you typically can pull and influence with those marketing efforts? Speaker 1 (11:29) There are five growth levers in any business, and these are relatively agnostic to the department. But when you think about growing a SaaS business, You can grow awareness, aka how much traffic you're getting or how many people are searching your brand. You can grow sales, meaning you generate more trials or you generate more deals. You can retain more customers, which just speaks to retention. Then there's revenue, aka charge more or charge differently or adjust how you're charging, when you're charging and where you're charging to maximize. revenue for each type of buyer. This is where, you know, different types of plans come into place. This is also where you may charge for different aspects of the product. You can introduce add-ons. And then there's operations. So processes, how we work together as a team, the goals that we choose actually have a huge impact on how we grow as a company. I know you already have a