Podcasts about from impossible

In this episode, we explore How to Create Predictable Revenue for your SaaS with Aaron Ross, a top sales expert and author of books like Predictable Revenue and From Impossible to Inevitable. He breaks down why having a steady flow of sales is a game-changer for B2B SaaS founders and how today's fast-changing world impacts it. Even when things feel uncertain, the core rules of growing revenue never change.Aaron shares powerful insights to help founders tackle challenges and grab new opportunities. He reveals how experimenting, building strong relationships, and staying flexible can set businesses up for long-term success. If you want to unlock the secrets of predictable revenue, you won't want to miss this episode!Key Timecode (0:00) - Introduction: Aaron discusses the limitations of following a template for success in business. (0:37) - Guest Intro: Joran introduces Aaron Ross and his achievements. (1:25) - Importance of Predictable Revenue: Aaron explains its significance for B2B SaaS founders. (2:04) - Challenges in Predictable Revenue: Aaron talks about the changing dynamics of playbooks in the SaaS industry. (4:08) - Misconceptions in SaaS: Aaron addresses common misconceptions about predictable revenue. (5:38) - Evolution of Sales: Discussion on the specialization in sales roles and its impact. (8:50) - Principles of Predictable Revenue: Aaron outlines key principles like specialization and understanding different leads. (14:36) - Importance of Relationships: Aaron emphasizes the role of relationships in business success. (25:03) - Common Obstacles: Challenges companies face in achieving predictable revenue. (27:58) - Future of B2B SaaS: Aaron shares his thoughts on the future of the industry and the impact of AI.

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In this episode, I had the pleasure of chatting with Aaron Ross. Aaron is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and renowned author of "Predictable Revenue" and "From Impossible to Inevitable." He's a father of ten and has an incredible story to share. In our conversation, we dive into the chaos and beauty of Aaron's life, focusing on his experiences balancing a massive family with his professional aspirations. Aaron talks about his journey from working at Salesforce to creating a successful sales system, and how his family motivated him to achieve financial success. Key Points and Frameworks:Hypergrowth Model: Aaron describes his family's growth as hypergrowth, drawing a parallel between scaling a business and scaling a family. Emotional Intelligence: He emphasises the importance of emotional intelligence in navigating the complexities of life and work. Aaron believes that emotional intelligence will be a crucial skill for future success. Love as a Practice: Aaron shares his insights on love, viewing it as a skill to be practiced rather than just a feeling. This perspective has been shaped by his experiences raising a diverse and dynamic family. Constraints and Determination: Aaron discusses how constraints, like having a large family, forced him to be laser-focused and determined in his professional life. He prefers the term "determination" over "discipline," emphasising the importance of doing what feels right and following one's intuition. Nonlinear Path to Success: Aaron's career and personal life are marked by a nonlinear journey, where he often had to jump in feet first and figure things out as he went along. This approach led to many successes, despite initial uncertainties. Memorable Quotes:"We hyper-scaled the family." – Aaron Ross, discussing the rapid growth of his family. (00:03:02) "Emotional intelligence will be one of the defining skills for future success." – Aaron Ross, on the importance of emotional intelligence. (00:08:20) "Love is a skill, not a feeling." – Aaron Ross, sharing his perspective on love and relationships. (00:09:49) "Life is so weird." – Aaron Ross, summarising his view on the unpredictability of life. (00:49:51) "Everyone's doing their best, even when it doesn't look like it, including yourself." – Aaron Ross, emphasising the importance of practicing acceptance and appreciation. (00:50:34) Tune in to hear Aaron Ross's fascinating insights and stories. Whether you're a leader, parent, or both, there's plenty to learn from his experiences!

Jason Lemkin created and runs SaaStr, the world's largest community for B2B/SaaS founders, and is the managing director of SaaStr Fund, a $90 million venture capital firm specializing in early-stage enterprise investments. He is also the mastermind behind two major tech conferences each year—one in the Bay Area, drawing in over 15,000 people, and another in Europe, with a crowd of more than 3,000 SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. Before SaaStr, Jason wore many hats: CEO and co-founder of EchoSign (later bought by Adobe), vice president at Adobe Systems, co-founder and president of NanoGram Devices Corp., vice president of NeoPhotonics, and a senior director at BabyCenter. In our conversation, we discuss:• How far you should go without a salesperson• Signs it's time to hire salespeople• Why you need to hire two salespeople• How to compensate your salespeople• How to interview salespeople• When to hire a VP of Sales• How to prevent their flaming out• How to scale your sales org• How to improve the relationship between your sales and product teams• Much more—Brought to you by:• CommandBar—AI-powered user assistance for modern products and impatient users• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security.• LinkedIn Ads—Reach professionals and drive results for your business—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-a-world-class-sales-org-jason-lemkin-saastr/—Where to find Jason Lemkin:• X: https://twitter.com/jasonlk• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmlemkin/• Website: https://www.saastr.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Jason's background(06:18) The importance of sales in B2B businesses(11:23) Signs that you should start hiring salespeople(14:19) Attributes to look for in early sales reps(19:08) Hiring a VP of Sales(26:43) The role of a VP of Sales(30:06) Interviewing salespeople(45:16) Determining sales compensation and quota(53:34) Transitioning from 100% commission to a smaller percentage(56:58) Indicators of a hard-to-sell product(59:39) Scaling the sales organization(01:05:26) Understanding sales roles and titles(01:10:02) Product involvement in sales, and vice versa(01:20:32) Thoughts on product teams taking on P&L responsibilities(01:27:23) One thing founders can do to become better at sales(01:31:02) The ideal trial length for a free trial sales team(01:39:50) Closing thoughts(01:41:43) Lightning round—Referenced:• Marc Benioff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbenioff/• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/• Yamini Rangan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaminirangan/• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/• Twilio: https://www.twilio.com/• Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/• GitHub: https://github.com/• Columbo: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1466074/• What is Davos and why is it important? Your guide to the World Economic Forum's annual meeting: https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/01/15/what-is-davos-and-why-is-it-important-your-guide-to-the-world-economic-forums-annual-meeti• Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/• Satya Nadella on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyanadella/• Glengarry Glen Ross on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Glengarry-Glen-Ross-James-Foley/dp/B002NN5F7A• The Wolf of Wall Street on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Wall-Street-Leonardo-DiCaprio/dp/B00IIU9FQY• A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/a-step-by-step-guide-to-crafting-a-sales-pitch-that-wins-april-dunford-author-of-obviously-awesom/• Pipedrive: https://www.pipedrive.com/• Sam Blond on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-blond-791026b/• Gong: https://www.gong.io/• Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com/• ZoomInfo: https://www.zoominfo.com/• Apollo: https://www.apollo.io/• Daniel Chait on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhchait/• SAP: https://www.sap.com/• Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe, Behance): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/lessons-on-building-product-sense-navigating-ai-optimizing-the-first-mile-and-making-it-through-t/• VistaPrint: https://www.vistaprint.com/• Procore: https://www.procore.com/• Matt Mullenweg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattm/• Wordpress: https://wordpress.com/• SaaStr University: https://app.saastruniversity.com/collections/20252• From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue: https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Inevitable-Hyper-Growth-Companies-Predictable/dp/1119531691• Pavilion: https://www.joinpavilion.com/• Top 10 Learnings about Free Trials with Tomasz Tunguz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfQNJpnxmMw• The Terminal List on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/The-Terminal-List-Season-1/dp/B09HYNH8TK• Top Gun: Maverick on Paramount: https://www.paramountmovies.com/movies/top-gun-maverick• OpusClip app: https://www.opus.pro/• OnePlus Open smartphone: https://www.amazon.com/OnePlus-Dual-SIM-Unlocked-Smartphone-Hasselblad/dp/B0CHN7M531/• SaaStr conferences: https://www.saastr.com/events/• Marketo: https://go.marketo.com/about-marketo-landingpage-emea.html• Zoomtopia: https://zoomtopia.com/• Money20/20: https://us.money2020.com/• Shoptalk: https://shoptalk.com/• Jeff Lawson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/• Eric Kwan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erickwan/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

The 7 things I wish I knew about sales when I was 30, explained by bestselling author Aaron Ross. Sales and revenue executives often feel overwhelmed and uncertain about driving revenue to meet their goals, facing fluctuating success. Aaron Ross, author of From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue, outlines seven ingredients for creating hypergrowth. First, companies should identify a niche, finding the perfect balance between market problems, ideal customers, and effective communication. Second, they must create a predictable pipeline for generating leads and opportunities. Third, sales should be scalable, with the sales team designed for easy growth. Fourth, companies should focus on fewer, bigger, and better deals. Fifth, it's important to accept that achieving goals takes longer than desired, so patience is key. Sixth, embracing employee ownership encourages a more invested workforce. Lastly, defining destiny empowers individuals within a company, leading to a more united vision for growth. chapters: 0:00 The revenue struggle (That time my business tanked) 0:50 The 7 keys to hypergrowth 1:25 1. Nail a niche 2:04 2. Create predictable pipeline 2:41 3. Make sales scalable 3:20 4. Double your deal size 3:45 5. Do the time 4:27 6. Embrace employee ownership 4:56 7. Define your destiny About Aaron Ross: Aaron Ross is an executive sales advisor, board member/NED, and keynote speaker. He's the co-author of From Impossible To Inevitable (with Jason Lemkin) and Predictable Revenue. Ross is married with 10 children (half through adoption) and lives in Edinburgh, UK. He can be found at www.FromImpossible.com. About Big Think | Smarter Faster™ ► Big Think Our mission is to make you smarter, faster. Watch interviews with the world's biggest thinkers on science, philosophy, business, and more. ► Big Think+ Looking to ignite a learning culture at your company? Prepare your workforce for the future with educational courses from the world's biggest thinkers. Trusted by Ford, Marriot, Bank of America, and many more. Learn how Big Think+ can empower your people today: https://bigthink.com/plus/?utm_source... Get Smarter Faster, With Daily Episodes From The Worlds Biggest Thinkers. Follow Big Think Share This Episode With A Friend Leave A 5 Star Review.... --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bigthink/message Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today's episode of Category Visionaries we speak with Gabriel Bayomi, CEO and Co-Founder of Openlayer, a debugging workspace for machine learning that's raised $4.8 Million in funding. Topics Discussed: Gabriel's background as a Brazilian student of engineering, moving to the US, and working on Apple's then-secret Vision Pro project Why Henrique Dubugras is Gabriel's greatest inspiration as a CEO Why it's hard to test machine-learning software, and how Openlayer makes that easier to do What Gabriel learned from his time at Y Combinator, and why it's important to be humble and ask for help The current AI landscape, marketing, and why product-market fit is not an absolute Favorite book:  From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue

Inscrivez-vous au webinaire du lancement de la formation Yaniro pour un max de cadeaux exclusifs : Ici (places limitées ! )Bienvenue dans le podcast du HUMAN FACTOR by YANIRO, je m'appelle Alexis Eve et tous les mercredis je vais à la rencontre des Startups les plus véloces pour rentrer en détails dans les bonnes pratiques RH qui leur permet de faire du Facteur Humain un levier de croissance plutôt qu'un risque ! Le Human Factor ce n'est pas qu'un Buzzword, c'est aussi le nom de notre premier livre !Les clés de l'alignement entre associé.e.s, d'une organisation adaptée ou encore de la bonne relation à son travail, The Human Factor c'est 100 pages de retours terrain des plus belles startups et de bonnes pratiques actionnables.Vous pouvez retrouver Laetitia sur Linkedin ou la contacter directement par mail : laetitia@greenly.earthSite web de Greenly : https://greenly.earth/fr-frRessources recommandées par Laetitia : Le livre The Sales Acceleration Formula de Mark Roberge Le livre From Impossible to Inevitable de Aaron Ross et Jason Lemkin Le podcast SaaStr de Jason Lemkin Outils recommandés par Laetitia : Mojo pour réaliser ses animationsLe CRM HubSpot

En esta ocasión tuve la fortuna de charlar con Iñigo Rumayor, Co-founder de Arcus, empresa que luego fue vendida a Mastercard. Comentamos los aprendizajes que nos dejó la lectura del libro From Impossible to Inevitable de Aaron Ross y Jason Lemkin.

Today, I'm chatting to Andrew Hollo, Director and Principal Consultant at Workwell Consulting, who shares his unique insights on facilitation and strategic alignment. I've got to say, after we finished recording, I wanted to share this episode with absolutely anybody who runs a facilitation business!What You'll Learn:The importance of organising and summarising information (and how you can get better at it)How feeling under-prepared can sometimes foster agility in facilitationThe power of directing conversations with two or three key questionsHow to maintain visibility and engagement with potential clientsNavigating challenging situations in a leadership development sessionAbout the Guest:Andrew Hollo is Australia's leading expert in getting diverse interests to reach a strategically aligned position. As the Director and Principal Consultant at Workwell Consulting, he works with organisations that deliver societal benefits and are community-invested. Andrew has led over 1000 projects for clients who deliver substantial public value, including government and non-government bodies, privately held companies, and non-profits since 1999. His expertise lies in challenging existing paradigms and driving diverse views to clear, high-value conceptual agreements in the shortest possible time.Links and Resources:Connect with Andrew on his website workwell.com.au and LinkedInGrab Andrew's book "From Impossible to Possible"Sign up for Andrew's weekly newsletterVisit our website firsttimefacilitator.com for more resourcesParticipate in our LinkedIn challenge and stand a chance to win a copy of our book!The 4-Week Workshop Sprint: Let's spend four weeks together, to make your workshop the best thing ever, and something you're incredibly proud to showcase, host, and share with the world. Find out more about the programLeanne's new book: The 2-Hour Workshop Blueprint is out now!Support the show

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mirav and three of her protégés and they have a story. Jane – Lives in England Jola – Lives in New Jersey, originally from Poland Tasha – Lives in New Orleans   Jane Anderson, whose book “Growing up on a Farm” will be released in May 2023.  It details her life growing up, the hardships, etc.  Jola, currently living in New Jersey just published “From Impossible to I'm Possible”, written in 4 days!  It is now a best seller. Her website is: coachingjourneywithjola.com Tasha, a former speech pathologist, currently lives in New Orleans. Tasha has lived in Dubai, New York and other areas. And – of course – Mirav, who arranged this get together. All three ladies are on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.  You will have to listen to get all their details. We had a lot of fun talking. It felt like everyone was at the dining table, sipping wine and just having a great time being together.  And we did!  Our plan is to meet in New York, go out for cocktails and do the town.  Come join us on the journey, and have fun listening to the podcast! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michelemarotta/support

Check out this week's 10 talks podcast episode to hear about From Impossible 2 I'mpossible, Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. Join Head Sports Life Coach® Carlette Patterson and Inclus Vice President & Global Talent at Eastman Chemical Company Eryn O'Brien on her journey for training How 2 Achieve Your Impossible.WINNING STRATEGIES1. Take the plunge. Trust yourself and take action to get to your I'mpossible. What are you doing to generate forward momentum toward your goals? The leap of faith also comes with intentional training and planning in order to set yourself and others up for success throughout your journey. PREPARAT10N is essential to ensure smooth transitions and reaching your desired outcome. 2. How can we prevent burnout? Energy Management is essential to finding what feeds our reusable energy as humans. Energy is a limited resource, just as are trees in nature. If we cut down all of our trees to use as energy, we will run out of our resources very quickly. Humans are the same way; we need to treat our energy as limited and conserve it as much as possible. 3. Flip the script in the way you speak to yourself. Are you using “What would happen if I did…?” or, “I can't do this because…” Being able to switch your perspective of self-talk will allow you to overcome performance barriers and go for what you want.

Check out this week's 10 talks podcast episode to hear about From Impossible 2 I'mpossible, Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. Join Head Sports Life Coach® Carlette Patterson and Sarah Zipp, Deputy Sports DIrector for Sport Studies and developer of Power to Play, Period.WINNING STRATEGIES1. Period products are a big part of the conversation on menstruation but education is where it starts. How can you engage coaches with resources to have and start these kinds of conversations?2. How is the female body working physiologically during a menstrual cycle? You can look at 4 phases: menstruation, follicular phase, luteal phase and pre-menstruaration. What is valued of emotional management during these times? How does this apply to us desiring to be high performers? Focusing on hydration, nutrition and rest can help find balance.3. What might performance berries look like? As women we tend to care for others over ourselves, but finding time to prioritize yourself is important. Routine and education implementation is important with success for women.

Check out this week's 10 talks podcast episode to hear about From Impossible 2 I'mpossible, Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. Join Head Sports Life Coach® Carlette Patterson and Women in High Performance Sport Manager Helene Wilson on her journey for training How 2 Achieve Your Impossible.WINNING STRATEGIES1. Be vulnerable and okay with learning experientially. It's okay to not be okay. Are you intentional with your choices and how you react to their results? Every experience holds an opportunity to learn and grow from, regardless of how the situation turned out. Give yourself permission to own what you feel and accept the consequences of your choices.2. Influence those around you in a positive manner. Recognize how to communicate up, across, and down within the structure of your organization. Are your interactions succinct and purposeful? Ensure those around you know that their time is valuable and you want to invest it wisely. 3. Step into the boiling water. Are you being brave when unfamiliar situations arise? Oftentimes, when you put yourself in these scenarios, you discover your ultimate strengths you never could have found otherwise. Stay tuned next week to hear How 2 INTENT10NALLY Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. What is your I'mpossible?Learn More Here: www.intentionaltraining.life

Check out this week's 10 talks podcast episode to hear about From Impossible 2 I'mpossible, Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. Join Head Sports Life Coach® Carlette Patterson and Members from CHAMP10N Professional Volleyball Team Las Pinkin de Corozal: Head Coach Ángel Perez and his players Raymariely Santos, Brittany Abercrombie, Daly Santana, and Ronika Stone, on their journey for training How 2 Achieve Your Impossible.WINNING STRATEGIES1. Trust the process. It will not always be easy; if difficulties or failures did not occur, you would not grow or learn. Are you focusing on what really matters to you? How are you doing so? Anchor in the purpose bigger than yourself.2. Nobody gets to decide your Possible except for you. What is your Impossible? How are you going to change it to your I'mpossible? The more you realize you have the ability to make decisions for yourself, the more you will achieve in your life. What are your desired outcomes? Nothing is impossible.3. Play to win, not to not lose. Pressure is a privilege, whether you are putting it on yourself or others are putting it onto you. Are you putting your team about yourself? Anchor in the Power of Team to play to win and thrive in the competitive environment.Stay tuned next week to hear How 2 INTENT10NALLY Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. What is your I'mpossible?Learn More Here: www.intentionaltraining.life

Check out this week's 10 talks podcast episode to hear about From Impossible 2 I'mpossible, Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. Join Head Sports Life Coach® Carlette Patterson and Members from CHAMP10N Professional Volleyball Team Las Pinkin de Corozal: Head Coach Ángel Perez and his players Raymariely Santos, Brittany Abercrombie, Daly Santana, and Ronika Stone, on their journey for training How 2 Achieve Your Impossible.WINNING STRATEGIES1. What is your DEFINIT10N of being on a team? A team means being a part of something bigger than yourself. What is your Power of Purpose within your team? How are you giving back to your team?2. As a coach, are you authentically caring about your players? Are you focused on helping them achieve their goals as both an athlete and a person? What kind of culture are you bringing to your team and how are they receiving it?3. It takes courage to share your truth. How does your team receive your vulnerability? Are you creating a culture of security and trust through your words and actions?Stay tuned next week to hear How 2 INTENT10NALLY Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. What is your I'mpossible?Learn More Here: www.intentionaltraining.life

Check out this week's 10 talks podcast episode to hear about our new season - From Impossible 2 I'mpossible, Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. Join Head Sports Life Coach® Carlette Patterson and Barret Michalec, Director of ASU's Center for Advancing Interprofessional Practice, Education & Research (CAIPER) and Associate Professor at the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, on the journey to training How 2 Achieve Your Impossible.WINNING STRATEGIES1. Break your day into 30 minute time blocks. How are you winning your 30 minutes? What is your stat on how you spent your 30 minute golden nugget? Be intentional with what you invest your time in and show up a 10.2. Be honest and transparent with yourself. In reality, what can you do within your 30 minute blocks? If it takes longer and you are not honest with yourself, it will drain your energy. Are you managing your energy by investing it in outcomes that will get you to your 10?3. Think of your 10 Moments. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being fabulous, what are the moments in time you feel are a 10? These give you great focus and anchor you in your best memories. These can often be things we take for granted or happen every day. Give your 10 Moment a name to bring it altogether. Stay tuned next week to hear How 2 INTENT10NALLY Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. What is your I'mpossible?Learn More Here: www.intentionaltraining.life

Check out this week's 10 talks podcast episode to hear about our new season - From Impossible 2 I'mpossible, Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. Join Head Sports Life Coach® Carlette Patterson and Ángel Perez, Head Coach of Las Pinkin de Corozal and Former Professional Volleyball Player, on the journey to training How 2 Achieve Your Impossible.WINNING STRATEGIES1. The Power of Team. Who are you bringing in to help set you and your team up for success? What are your desired outcomes and who can help you reach those goals? Be honest with yourself; asking for help is a sign of strength.2. Embrace your failures. Reframe your perspective of failure as an opportunity to learn and get better. What lessons are you taking from failure and how are you creating actions to change?3. Know Your Why. What is your PASS10N? This will be your anchor when times get tough in the Infinite Game of Life. What is your WHY?Stay tuned next week to hear How 2 INTENT10NALLY Train 2 Achieve Your Impossible. What is your I'mpossible?Learn More Here: www.intentionaltraining.life

In this episode, repeat guest Dr. Leila Dehghan discusses the power of plants for athletes and her new comprehensive Plant-Based Sports Nutrition course that is coming out soon!     Ad-free episode: https://plantscription.substack.com/subscribe     DR. LEILA DEHGHAN https://drleilad.com/     Affiliate links:   Save 15% off your Hamama.com order for a limited time  Use code ‘HAMAMA15'       Disclaimer: The information on this blog, website and podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not meant to replace careful evaluation and treatment. If you have concerns about your or your child's eating, nutrition or growth, consult a doctor.       Mentions: Sign up for Dr. Leila's newsletter: https://drleilad.com/   My previous interview with Dr. Leila, From Impossible to Possible: https://apple.co/3KOX7ye     Learn more about my new special group coaching program: https://doctoryami.com/thrive     Sign up for a FREE discovery call: Doctoryami.com/coachme     Send me an email to yami@doctoryami.com with questions and topics     Sign up for my newsletter doctoryami.com/signup     MORE LISTENING OPTIONS Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/vdritunes Spotify: http://bit.ly/vdrspotify     NEWSLETTER SIGN UP https://doctoryami.com/signup         FIND ME AT Doctoryami.com Instagram.com/thedoctoryami Facebook.com/thedoctoryami Veggiefitkids.com   * * * * MORE FROM ME Read - http://veggiefitkids.com/blog Listen: http://bit.ly/vdrpodcast Watch - http://bit.ly/vfkvideos TEDx Talk - http://bit.ly/DOCTORYAMITEDX   * * * *   Questions? Email me: Yami@doctoryami.com        

Many of you know how difficult and time-consuming it can be to run a tax shop. It's all too easy to get buried under a mountain of tax, underprice services, and be in what feels like a near-steady state of chaos. My guest today is Catherine Ozment. Catherine is a CPA in south Texas who called two years ago now, wanting to get off the hamster wheel and get intentional about creating a thriving practice that is designed and built to sell at a high multiple. We're talking today about what has changed since we spoke last year on the podcast and what she has learned in the year since then, so that you can have a window into what shifting your accounting practice is actually like.  Highlights: — “We have an aging industry. Yet, technology continues to consume our space. Some older and aging senior CPAs are not keeping up with those times, so there's an opening for those who keep up.”  — “When you have your sights set on excellence and you build relationships with your people, those people see that value and they are willing to pay you for that value.”  — “Getting myself out of the tax factory has made it possible for me to start networking in this (ag) space, and has confirmed that the value that we're producing is so well worth it for these people. We are offering a critical service so they can continue to grow in the ag space.” ***Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?*** Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe-main-list   Connect with CATHERINE: Website: https://www.farmandagcpa.com/ Episode mentions: 141 One Year: From Tax Factory to vCFO & Ag CPA with Catherine Ozment https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/141   142 From Impossible to Exponential Growth: The CPA Mindset https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/142   192 Free Time and 7 Figures Net Revenue with John Lee Dumas https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/192

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire and Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Andrew, and I talk about his entrepreneurial journey building MicroAcquire, and some of the insights he's seeing when it comes to buying and selling startups.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world. Accelerating change and its certainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses.Interview Transcript with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Andrew Gazdecki who is the founder of MicroAcquire. And Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Welcome Andrew. Andrew Gazdecki: Thanks so much for having me, Brian. I'm excited. Brian Ardinger: I've got my MicroAcquire socks on. So, thank you for that. I'm super excited to have you on to talk about the craziness that is the startup world. And you've had a front row seat for a number of years as a multi-founder. And now with MicroAcquire, let's talk about what MicroAcquire is and how you got into the business of helping startups sell to other folks.Andrew Gazdecki: MicroAcquire, for those who aren't familiar with it, is the largest startup acquisition marketplace in the world today. We have about 150,000 buyers registered. We've helped over six hundred startups to get acquired that combined acquisition total is 400 million at this point. Almost half a billion. We don't charge any fees. So, you can sell your business on MicroAcquire completely free.So, I started that business, candidly, as a side project. I just felt that needed to exist. I'd previously gone through two acquisitions, and it was just a mess. Everything from finding the buyers to, there's so much education today on how to grow your business. How to learn sales. How to recruit. And how to fundraise. But then there's nothing on the exit. Which is arguably the most important part of the founder's journey.And when I sold my first business, which we can talk about, if you'd like, it was a business called Business Apps. Spelled BiznessApps, and kind of the light bulb moment went on when I sold it. I just got a ton of emails and texts from friends that we're also running startups and they were like, how'd you get acquired?Like, how did you find the buyer? What was the process like? It was like hieroglyphics everyone. Including myself when I went through the process. So, what we're really trying to do at MicroAcquire is democratize startup acquisitions and just make the process easier and more transparent for founders. And also, buyers.Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the types of startups that are being bought and sold on the platform. And how has that maybe changed since when you first launched? Andrew Gazdecki: Well, when we first launched, lots of small startups, you know ranging from, we would sell business, and we still do today, but 5k startups, mostly side projects. And since then, we've really expanded, I guess, up market. So, our largest acquisition is just under $10 million. We have buyers on the platform now that can facilitate acquisitions in the hundreds of millions if the value is there. Yeah, just started with humble beginnings just because I felt this was something that was so needed for the startup ecosystem. Because the other routes to sell your business, unless you're most founders think like Google shows up with a check and hey, you did it. Like you won the lottery. There's this saying most startups are bought, not sold and that's just not true. You know, you really need to sell your business. And so, the other routes were expensive, borderline highway robbery, and that's, that was really kind of like the main purpose of me launching MicroAcquire to really give another option for founders of this other business. And if you're curious about the other options, you can hire an investment banker. They're going to charge a big fee. If your startup is too small for an investment bank, because most investment banks will only work with you if your business is of a certain size. And you know, maybe you can get like eight, nine figure exit. And I had previously worked with an investment bank. And their minimum fee was $800,000 for a successful transaction. The short story there, we got a few offers, but the fee was just, I still had gas in the tank, so I kept going. But it showed me, and I remember telling the bankers, I was like, you guys have the coolest job in the world. I do all this work. And then at the end, you come in and get, you know, a nice payday. So that always kind of stuck with me. And then I stumbled on to business brokers. Business brokers, if your business is doing let's say less than you know 5 million in revenue. You can work with a business broker. They will typically charge 10 to 15% commission to sell your business. So, 10% to 15%. So that's like a small angel round. So, I just saw it. Okay. Business brokers don't do too much. You know, what would happen if we removed the middleman? And we let buyers and sellers connect directly. And we help businesses ranging from SaaS companies. That's kind of our sole focus. But we also sell a lot of e-commerce businesses. Communities. Some crypto companies. Direct to consumer. Newsletters. We like to say, we want to be the marketplace for profitable startups. So that's mainly our focus is startups that have traction. So, we don't list startups that are pre revenue. Content websites. Affiliate websites. Again, mostly focusing on businesses that have, you know, a lot of growth upside. Having a blast running it at the same time, too. Brian Ardinger: I'm hearing more and more about people using the platform, startup founders, maybe looking to buy a side project or a side hustle versus building something from scratch. Are you seeing that trend happening? Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah. Like one story that comes to mind is, there's builders and there's scalers. Where a lot of people love to build a business. They love to think of a new idea and bring something to life. And I think fallen, in both those buckets. Builders and scalers. And so people build these wonderful businesses, but they maybe build it to a certain point where they'd like to move on to something else.Maybe they built it to a few million in revenue and now they're, you know, mostly managing. When they'd really like to be building. And so MicroAcquire is a great outlet for them to meet buyers within like hours. Like the fastest acquisition on my group, where I was within, quite literally hours. Those are obviously outliers. Brian Ardinger: What are you seeing when it comes to valuation trends and things along those lines? How's the market changed or what shifts are you seeing? Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah, good question. It really depends on the business. So, a good business will always trade at really good multiples. SaaS trades at high multiples and e-commerce. Newsletters communities also trade lower than, you know, a typical SaaS business.So, there's so much variability. And when I get asked questions like I have a SaaS company, it's doing a million revenue. What's it worth. That's kind of akin to asking what a car is worth. You know, like, is there a 500,000 miles on it? Does it need a new transmission? Do you have a good team in place? What is your churn? What is the quality of your customers? And then other little things like when you go to sell your business, do you have an understanding of kind of what your business is worth? And on MicroAcquire, we have two different things that we do to help with valuations. One is we have a directory within MicroAcquire where you can hire someone to get a real valuation done.I highly recommend that. And then we also have a tool called MicroMRR. And you should go to micromrr.com and you connect your Stripe billing. And we'll actually give you a data-driven valuation based on what we're seeing from acquisitions happening in the market. So, acquisitions are a moving target. I'd say maybe there could be a slowdown coming.I know the public markets for trading believe like 22X, and then they dropped down to 12X and this is April. Those might climb back. But the last year was absolutely borderline bonkers in terms of. It was record numbers in terms of private equity activity. Just MNA activity in general. So, it's a good time to sell your business if you're looking to. Brian Ardinger: I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you came to create MicroAcquire. I mean, I know early on you even did some interesting marketing. Went viral. You had the Russ Hanneman character from Silicon Valley TV show, do a little viral stuff on Twitter. Talking about MicroAquire and that. Can you talk a little bit about your idea of how you got it started and the execution to get MicroAcquire off the ground?Andrew Gazdecki: Honest answer is, so I like to work within a frame. I'm not a big fan of like mental frameworks. That, you know, maybe other people put forth. But so, I'm always thinking of what worked five years ago or what worked 10 years ago does not work today. And so that's why you'll see, I'm always trying to market in a way that doesn't feel like marketing. But it also adds value and maybe even makes you laugh and stuff like that.A lot of startups today think that their main competitor is XYZ company. But it's really the 500,000 startups out there. So, you're competing for consumer attention. I'm a big believer in that. And so, we focus a lot on brand-building. Just sharing MicroAcquire story. Kind of everything. So, when I first launched it, I was working probably like 4:00 AM to like midnight. And the only way, so going back to kind of like how I think about and what I recommend founders think about when they first launch a startup is this won't come as a surprise. But find something you're passionate about. So, and then also find something that you have a unique insight into. So, I made a bet that entrepreneurship through acquisition was going to be a trend. And that was just through me going through two different acquisitions. And I was actually looking to buy a SaaS company. And I couldn't find anything that was specific to SaaS. I didn't like working with brokers. I wanted to speak directly to the founder because it's a very relationship type transaction. And it's not just here's the keys. You know, I want to know about the founder. I want to know why are they looking to sell? And so, I kind of just created what I feel acquisition should be. And I kind of built MicroAcquire in a way that thinking back on Bizness Apps is a 10 million a year revenue company. What would it take for me to list on a marketplace? So, we implemented things like privacy ability to connect. Financial metrics. You give buyer a good, healthy snapshot into the view of your business. To get it off the ground, I mean, a lot of podcasts. A lot of cold emails. Hanging out on live chat, 24 7. And I don't recommend this to founders, but again, going back to my previous point is before I launched MicroAcquire, I wrote down, what customer do I want to serve?And I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I love startups. And kind of a startup nerd. I love looking at new businesses. And I built this company. And so when I work on it kind of feels like a video game. It's not work. And if you can put yourself in that situation with some unique insights into a market. It's a customer that you love. And then unique insights kind of fall in line with what I describe as founder market fit. So why you. So, I think of why now. Why you. As probably the two most important things. I had a deep conviction that acquisitions are going to be increasing. And that proved to be right. So that was a non-obvious bet to a lot of people, but obvious to me. That became obvious over time. But when you're able to build a startup in a way that you enjoy playing, running, whatever you want to describe it. More than your favorite video game. You kind of want, cause it's really hard to compete against a founder that where it feels like work.My best analogy there is if you, I see a lot of founders creating startups around what I'd call like opportunistic opportunities. Where, you know, it's a good idea, but maybe you build a CRM for dentists. But you hate dentists. And a big part of building a startup is talking to customers all the time. I'm a big believer that your customers have path to product market fit. They have a better roadmap than you do. And so, you need to be able to talk to these customers and enjoy these conversations and really listen to them. Otherwise, there's someone out there who's going to love those conversations and it's just going to be really hard to compete. But it all kind of revolves around happiness. Where the founders that I think go the distance really enjoy what they do day in day out.And that's not to say it's super easy. Like just cause it's fun, it's easy. Like a video game. Just because it's fun doesn't mean it's easy. I think that's kind of the key that a lot of the founders should be thinking about is, is this a business I could run for a decade? If so, why? And kind of dip your toes in the water.Like when I launched my group, I didn't have grandiose visions for it. I just wanted to help other founders get acquired without these huge commissions. And then as the business grew, it became pretty obvious that the market opportunity was fairly large. Yeah, basically kind of grew forth. I knew this was something that the startup community needed, and I just worked.I was doing customer support. Vetting the listings. Writing the newsletters. Managing the product. Going on podcasts like this. Social media content. In a weird way, and now I have a team that helps me with all that stuff, but in a weird way, I kind of look back and I miss those days. Brian Ardinger: Well, it's never really been a better time to be an entrepreneur because you have a lot of these new No-code tools. And ways to spin up experiments. And like you said, dip your toe in the water. And you have access to a lot more information. You know, I think 10 to 15 years ago, the whole VC world was not very transparent. But now, you know, you can read blogs and books and figure out that particular path if you're an entrepreneur. It sounds like you're trying to do the same thing for on the acquisition side. Breathe some life into what that path looks like and that. So, let's talk a little bit about the book you just wrote, Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold my SaaS Startup. What can people expect to find in it? And why did you write the book? Andrew Gazdecki: I started BiznessApps again, spoke B I Z N E S S apps. My mom, this is kind of a funny footnote, but everyone called it BizApps. So, I ended up chasing down owner of the domain, BizApps. When your mom calls your business BizApp, and you don't have the domain, you got to go get it.But I started that business when I was 21 in college. And also going back to unique insights. I had a previous business that helped mobile developers connect to businesses. So, I saw businesses posting the same job requirement over and over and over. And I thought, whoa, they're paying like 50K to 100K for like a project like this?What if I just built a template and the functionality isn't really changed too much. But we just changed the content. Imagery. Which speeds up mobile app creation. Makes it more affordable. There's do yourself website builders at the time. And I thought, what about a do yourself mobile app builder for small businesses?So, the book is just kind of my story. I just journaled through the whole experience because it was very strange and surreal. I was 21 when I launched it. Just to give you kind of an idea of like the growth of it. And it was a right place, right time business. I got completely lucky. The iPhone had just come out. Android wasn't even there. Blackberry was still in the mix. We almost made a Blackberry app. I'm glad we didn't. But it's just my candid experience building that company, from idea all the way to the invested. So, it's not a book of here's how to build a startup. It's more of a book of here's how I built a startup with mistakes. Everything from when I thought of the idea to when I sold the business and everything in between. Brian Ardinger: Can you highlight some of the best or worst advice that you got on that journey.Andrew Gazdecki: I was so young. So, I was 23, 24, and I personally didn't grow up with too much means if you will. And so, I remember there's a specific situation. We needed a marketing hire. And I was handling most of the marketing. And the salary ranges, now I'm two years out of college and they were in like the 150K, 200K range.And I'm like, what am I going to pay someone that. Like you really need, one of my favorite quotes is, you know, talent wins games, but teamwork when championships. It's a Michael Jordan quote. So, I think, you know, hiring smarter people than me, was probably my biggest mistake. Also, a funny story. This is a true story. We had a period where we were again, because we didn't hire a really good marketer that could track in our paid ad spend and stuff like that. We were spending over a hundred thousand a month on Google ads. The business grew from zero to let's call it 7 million in the first five years. So it was just, everything was just kind of like, don't touch anything. We don't know what's working. But it's working. And it was so profitable. And our customer payback period was like 33 days. And for the first two years, our margins were about 90%. So, it was just extremely profitable. But when we finally hired someone to do analysis on how profitable is this pay-per-click ad campaign, we concluded basically we were burning about 90,000 out of that a hundred thousand. So, we call that era blowing up Ferrari's every month. So, every month we were blowing $90,000 because we weren't properly attributing our marketing spend to customer acquisition. And blowing up a Ferrari every month probably would have been cooler. Maybe not that would have hurt my heart because I'm a big car fan. But and I share all of that. I share the ups and the downs. And I think it's just a candid story of just what it's like to build a startup. Mistakes and wins included. Brian Ardinger: So, looking at the world today, what are some of the resources that you would recommend that startup founders be checking out or paying attention to?Andrew Gazdecki: I get a lot of really good insight just talking to other startup founders. I'm not a big podcast listener. I read a lot. Like this was kind of some books I'm reading and there's my book on top, like Play Bigger. It's a book about brand-building. From Impossible to Inevitable, that's a great book on how to build a SaaS company end to end. It goes over marketing, building a sales team, just written by Jason Lampkin and Aaron Ross from Predictable Revenue.And then a Tuned In, which is basically how to listen to customers. You know, you can talk to customers. But how do you really listen and get the insights you need? So, I always say that customers have a way better roadmap to product market fit than you. You just need to talk to them and listen. So, I could give you a number of different books, but I'm an avid reader. That's kind of where I get a lot, but I will say you definitely learn the most when you launch a startup. When you kind of just, you can read all the books in the world, but when you finally launch a startup, that's when the real learning begins.And also like you kind of get in a situation of, I launched a startup. Okay, now I really need to figure out marketing. And so now you're very motivated to figure out marketing and apply some of the concepts that's right, that you might read in some of these books. Brian Ardinger: That's great advice. And I encourage anybody who's even thinking about it. The tools and the resources are out there to try things nowadays that maybe you couldn't have tried in the past. Even if you fail, you've probably leveled up your skills and game considerably than if you just read about it. So, encourage is that as well. My last question is what are you most excited about working on the next three to six months? Andrew Gazdecki: I'd say just helping startups and founders get acquired. We have a goal to help a thousand startups, get acquired this year. So far, we're on track for that. We average about 100 a month. So, we'll probably beat that goal. And what's interesting about startups and you start something, and it goes really slow, but stick with it. And then kind of takes off because we've done more acquisitions this year alone than we did in the first two years of being in business.So, what gets me excited is just helping founders. And we're building tooling to help acquisitions. To really streamline them and really educate founders on what is due diligence. What are the legal steps? How do I transfer assets? How do I do technical due diligence on code if I'm looking to acquire a business? How does escrow work? What are common deal terms? So, if you go to MicroAcquire, click resources at the top. You can literally learn how to acquire a 100-million-dollar business. We have so much content. And that's just kind of like something I felt was so needed because it's such an opaque topic that not too many people write about. So, I definitely recommend checking that out. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Andrew, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. And sharing these stories and giving us some insights and access to some of these resources. I think it's very valuable. I really do appreciate your time. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about MicroAcquire or the book, what's the best way to do that?Andrew Gazdecki: Definitely check out MicroAcquire.com. It's free to sign up. You can browse the startups. And then as a seller if you're looking to sell your business also completely free. You can list your startup. And instantly meet buyers. Sometimes within hours of going live. We do vet all listings. So, we have a process where we work. And we make sure that you are prepared when you go live on MicroAcquire. But follow me on Twitter, @agazdecki if you can spell that. Or just add me on LinkedIn.Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, thank you again for being on the show. And looking forward to staying connected. Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah. Thanks for having me.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

Though Aaron Ross wears many hats, he is perhaps best known for co-authoring the global best seller Predictable Revenue, often referred to as “The Sales Bible of Silicon Valley,” which details an outbound prospecting system that's created more than $1 billion across Salesforce.com and other companies. Most recently, Aaron published From Impossible to Inevitable, a book co-written alongside Jason Lemkin (serial tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and founder of SaaStr.com, the world's #1 resource for SaaS entrepreneurs), which is a "hypergrowth playbook" based on the successes of companies like Twilio, HubSpot, Marketo, and Salesforce.com. In addition to being a sales advisor, board member, and highly sought after public speaker, Aaron also authors his own substack page, Fresh Air, where he focuses on the personal aspects of being a senior executive, including how to best manage anxiety, exhaustion, and stress, all of which are par for the course for substantially all entrepreneurs and CEOs.

In our first Break Room Zoom Party of 2022 the topic was planning. Heather, Basheer and Earlene join me in the conversation about our business planning for this year.We touched on:         ❇️ A new way to plan         ❇️ Getting ahead of it this year         ❇️ Balance and boundaries         ❇️ What by when accountability        ❇️ Word for the year        ❇️ Processes and systems        ❇️ Being flexible in our “new normal”How are you planning for 2022? How do you stay accountable? Want to join the next

Jim Barnish, has spent the last two decades as serial entrepreneur, operator, investor and M&A expert. He runs Orchid Black, a boutique growth services firm complete with serial entrepreneurs and growth experts, who are all accomplished operators and consultants with an investor mindset and a history of value creation and exits. Orchid Black's business model not only accelerates this value, but aligns their own compensation with their partner-clients' success. During this interview we cover: 00:00 The Financial Due Diligence Framework Course 01:02 - Intro 02:01 -  PMF & Nailing Your Niche 05:03 - What is Limiting Your SaaS to Achieve Faster Growth 07:54 -  Content Marketing Growth Hacking 10:49 - Best Distribution/Marketing Channels With Best ROI 13:04 - SaaS Metrics That Matter The Most 16:26 - Grow Smart & Grow Fast 18:18 - Orchid.Black's Growth Hacking Playbook 25:32 - Orchid.Black Target Company Profile 29:35 - Maximizing Exit Value 32:19 - Predictable Revenue & Revenue Growth 36:17 -Jim's  Capital Investment Network 37:44 - Jim's Background Coming From an Upbringing of trials & Tribulations  41:53 - Am I Ready for an Executive Coach?, Jim's Routines & Productivity  47:07 - How's Jim Measuring his Own Leadership Success? 49:38 - Advice Jim Would Tell His 25 Years Old Self 50:23 - Instrumental Resources for Jim's  Success 50:51 - What does Success Mean to Jim 51:10 - Get in Touch With Jim Mentions: https://www.orchid.black/ (Orchid.Balck) https://www.orchid.black/enhanced-case-study/from-vca-to-exit-a-fintech-firm-reinvisions-their-go-to-market-strategy (VCA) https://positivepsychology.com/ikigai/ (Ikigai) People: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-horwitz/ (Steve Horwitz) https://www.linkedin.com/in/howard-joyce-a012a/ (Howard Joyce) Get In Touch With Jim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grow-smart-grow-fast/ (Jim's Linkedin) Books:  https://fromimpossible.com/ (From Impossible to Inevitable) https://www.dalecarnegie.com/en/courses/216 (How to Win Friends & Influence People) Tag us & follow: https://www.facebook.com/HorizenCapitalOfficial/ (Facebook)  https://www.facebook.com/HorizenCapitalOfficial/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/horizen-capital (LinkedIn)  https://www.linkedin.com/company/horizen-capital https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/ (Instagram)  https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/ (https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/) More about Akeel: Twitter - https://twitter.com/AkeelJabber (https://twitter.com/AkeelJabber) LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/akeel-jabbar (https://linkedin.com/in/akeel-jabbar) More Podcast Sessions - https://horizencapital.com/saas-podcast (https://horizencapital.com/saas-podcast)

100: Leadership Lessons from the First 100 Episodes (Patton McDowell)SUMMARYReaching the 100-episode milestone on Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership was a wonderful journey thanks to incredible nonprofit leaders who were willing to share their wisdom and experiences with our listeners. Chris Delisio, our guest on episode #24 on the Path, offered to rejoin the show and interview me about the experience since the inaugural episode on November 21, 2019.  Our discussion lifted up many fantastic episodes and the leadership lessons each one produced. Three categories emerged: productivity and management tips, leadership and career development advice, and of course, the best book recommendations and resources our guests could offer.  EPISODE TOPICS & RESOURCESGet your Leadership Self-Assessment and apply for a free registration in one of the next two Mastermind Cohorts!  Click here for the application.Productivity Hacks: self-care routines including diet, sleep, exercise, meditation, reading and journaling; time-blocking and meeting management; Eating the Frog and methods of prioritization; and weekly review ritualsLeadership Lessons: the value of mentors, the importance of lifelong learning plans, the distinction of nonprofit career stages; the importance of organizational culture; and the heightened awareness of race and equity.Ten Book RecommendationsMichael Watkins’ First 90 DaysJohn Gardner’s On LeadershipIbram Kendi’s How To Be An AntiracistLiz Wiseman’s MultipliersDoris Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent TimesCarol Dweck’s MindsetAndrew Hollo’s From Impossible to PossibleAdam Grant’s Think AgainKeith Ferrazzi’s Leading Without AuthorityRon Schiller’s The Chief Development Officer

“Mon conseil pour une personne qui veut se lancer dans le SaaS ? Fonce, fais ton business plan, multiplie par deux sa durée, la quantité de travail et les émotions que tu auras - car crois-le bien tu t'éclatera deux fois plus que prévu.” En entreprise, faire ou recevoir du feedbacks sur les applications déployées en interne, cela ressemble souvent au scénario de Mission Impossible (sans Tom Cruise et les cascades).  Cela implique des process lourds, des boucles de mails infinies, des formulaires souvent incomplets. Si bien qu'au final, pour les équipes informatiques, il est parfois difficile de comprendre quel était le besoin initial de l'utilisateur final et dans quelle mesure l'amélioration peut réellement servir aux autres utilisateurs.  Mais tout cela, c'était avant WeLoop. C'est alors qu'il est consultant en informatique chez PwC que Victor Arfi se rend compte de ce point de friction immense et de la difficile communication entre les deux parties. De là germe l'idée de WeLoop. Une idée gagnante et une aventure faite de rebondissements qu'il raconte à Anthony Virapin, directeur des programmes start-up France de Microsoft, dans ce 6ème épisode du Morning SaaS.   “Chez WeLoop, on mise sur l'intelligence collective. Avec notre snippet java, on permet à un utilisateur final de faire ses feedbacks sur l'application de manière simplissime, sans quitter l'application, en collant des post-it digitaux, qui sont ensuite partagés à des profils similaires. Concrètement, on ne fait pas "que" récupérer des retours, on les qualifie. C'est ce qui fait que les équipes IT peuvent ensuite comprendre ce qui doit réellement être fait et modifié pour satisfaire les utilisateurs.” Car depuis sa naissance en 2015, cette entreprise en a vécu des rebondissements. Et cela même au jour 0 de sa création, quand Paseuth Thammavong, l'associé que Victor a trouvé grâce à des petites annonces, lui conseille de tout miser sur la collaboration. C'est la première brique de WeLoop.  L'entreprise change ensuite plusieurs fois de noms et commence à se faire une place, doucement, mais sûrement. Mais le pivot qui lance définitivement WeLoop et les propulse sur le devant de la scène (et dans les pages du Gartner !), c'est bien leur passage chez The Refiners, cet accélérateur - investisseur qui les emmène jusque dans la Silicon Valley. C'est là-bas qu'ils décident de : d'abandonner Comète, leur nom de l'époque, beaucoup trop “frenchy”,  de miser nettement plus sur le customer services,  de se rencentrer - exit les nombreuses applications compatibles ! Désormais, l'entreprise se concentrera sur SAP et Salesforce et aura comme cibles les grands groupes et ETI.  de modifier leur pricing - de 90€ par mois à 25 000€ la licence (et le service client !).  Un pari qui se révèle gagnant car malgré un léger ralentissement au début de la crise du Covid-19 (lié notamment à leur volonté de cibler des grands groupes dans l'aéronautique), WeLoop compte aujourd'hui une quinzaine d'employés et un churn négatif qui serait presque insolent ! “Avoir su nous encadrer de gens qui te partagent leurs visions du business, qui t'expliquent comment fonctionne le monde de l'entreprise et la place du SaaS dans celui-ci, ça change complètement la donne !”  Et, au-delà de l'histoire fascinante qu'est WeLoop, Victor nous donne aussi ses meilleurs conseils :  ne pas avoir peur de contacter des personnes que l'on ne connaît pas mais expertes dans leur domaine.  savoir s'entourer de personnes plus brillantes que soi, que l'on peut solliciter à n'importe quel moment. lire, beaucoup, pour s'inspirer des autres. Et pour cela, il conseille l'incontournable From Impossible to Inevitable d'Aaron Ross et Jason Lemkin et Winners Dream de Bill McDermott.  Un épisode qui donne des clés de compréhension pour faire face aux crises. Et pour apprendre à se remettre en question !  Pour suivre Victor et WeLoop c'est :  sur le site web de WeLoop et via leur compte LinkedIn sur le LinkedIn de Victor  sur le compte twitter de Victor (il a promis de s'y mettre sérieusement !)  par mail, à l'adresse victor.arfi@weloop.io, il se fera un plaisir de vous répondre. On a cité d'anciens épisodes du Morning SaaS :  #1 Guillaume Moubeche (Lemlist)  #2 Patrick Joubert (Ponicode, Recast.AI, Beamap), l'un des mentors de Victor !  Le Morning SaaS vous plaît ? N'hésitez pas à le partager à tous vos proches, à le noter 5 étoiles sur Apple Podcast et à laisser un (gentil) commentaire. C'est par ici pour les utilisateurs de Spotify, ici pour ceux d'Apple Podcasts, là pour les partisans de Deezer et ici pour les fans de Google Podcasts. 

David Cancel is a 5x founder, who has scaled businesses in each of the "3 innings of SaaS". In this episode, David talks through his approach for creating a massive new category of Conversational Marketing, and for leading Drift into becoming one the fastest growing SaaS companies in the hyper-competitive world of Marketing Tech. We learn: - Why we are squarely in the "third inning of SaaS", and why Brand and customer affinity are the only moat available for SaaS companies today, - How finding "arbitrage" instead of worrying about what scales is the key to getting outsized returns in the early days, - How hiring, on-boarding and communicating with a focus on principles- rather than a process- is critical to build a team of "counter-positioners". Management books to read, mentioned in the episode:  - This Won't Scale (Drift),  - Managing Oneself & The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker),  - From Impossible to Inevitable (Jason Lemkin)

Jason graduated from Harvard University and Berkeley Law, he started his career as a Corporate Counsel, and then transitioned into various technology leadership roles, eventually leading him to co-founding EchoSign which was later acquired by Adobe. Jason then founded SaaStr, a social community of over 500,000 SaaS founders & executives and over 3M content views each month. If you haven't discovered it already, checkout SaaStr.com, it's loaded with content and resources that's great for anyone in SaaS. Jason also co-authored the book From Impossible to Inevitable with Aaron Ross. This is his story.

Amanda and Ben finally discussed the topic of GMO! The hosts talked about recombinant proteins as food ingredients. From Impossible burgers to sugars, recombinant organisms have produced ingredients in our current food products. Read more about Perfect Day and Impossible Foods Check out previous episodes: https://anchor.fm/food-in-the-hood You can contact us at fihpodcast@gmail.com Give us a 5-star!

If you want consistent, predictable revenue for your SaaS then there’s one thing you’re going to need to build: A killer sales team. Don’t roll your eyes yet… Let me set the record straight. In 2008, when I moved to silicon valley, sales teams were considered evil. Tech companies pursued the unicorn: A product that would “sell itself”. (Yes, I’m using sarcastic air quotes). The likes of Facebook and Instagram fed false hope that you could build a platform with non-existent revenue, burn through rounds of funding and monetize it later for billions. The idea of hiring people to sell for you (aka: a sales team) wasn’t cool. Times have changed. People have woken up from the myth and discovered - surprise, surprise - that you have to work damn hard to make a buck! Today I want you to meet Aaron Ross, co-CEO of Predictable Revenue, author of the book by the same title, and co-author of ‘From Impossible to Inevitable’. Aaron trains sales teams and tech companies on outbound prospecting. He knows the inner workings of a high-performing sales team, and he knows that they ARE necessary. “Build it and they will come” doesn’t cut it. I gave him the microphone on the latest episode of the Escape Velocity podcast and asked him to dispel sales myths and talk through every stage of building a sales team that grows with your SaaS. Whether you love the idea of a sales team or you still feel like it’s evil, this is a great episode where you will learn: Why even introverted founders MUST work sales Why good sales teams don’t just sell How to minimize translation in a sales message How to handle lead nurturing Working teams for a common goal How buyers need help from sales teams Working up from phase zero (non-existent sales teams) The scary side of success The dream of a unicorn tech company still exists today. But as a SaaS coach, it’s my job to help founders grow their business and increase zeroes on their balance sheet. Which means I help you through the hard truth: You need to sell. Tune in the episode here and let Aaron Ross, a master of sales strategy, convince you why it’s what you need to do. -- Dan Martell has advised more startups than his hometown has people and teaches startup founders like you how to scale. (Get the free 3 videos to grow your business here.) He previously created, raised venture funding for and successfully exited two tech startups: Flowtown and Clarity.fm. You should follow him on twitter @danmartell for tweets that are actually awesome. + Instagram (behind the scenes): http://instagram.com/danmartell + Facebook (live trainings + Q&A): http://FB.com/DanMartell  + Twitter (what I'm reading): http://twitter.com/danmartell   

Andrea Baba, FitCo: Digitizing Fitness Centers in Latin America, Ep 125 Andrea’s first experience as an entrepreneur was starting her own Zumba studio when she was 18 years old. Within a year of operating, she started to expand her business, hiring more instructors and gaining more clients. However, Andrea saw that managing her business solely on Excel spreadsheets and notebooks was limiting her company’s growth.    In true entrepreneurial spirit, Andrea decided to find a solution to her own problem. Together with her co-founder Alex, they set out to build a tool that would help fitness centers in Latin America to scale their businesses. And Fitco was born.    I sat down with Andrea to talk about how she combined her passion for fitness and her background in finance to start Fitco in Peru’s budding startup ecosystem. We also discuss their experience at Techstars’ Boulder Accelerator as the first LatAm startup to be accepted into the program and how Fitco has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Becoming Fitco’s first client Managing a Zumba studio meant that Andrea was doing everything from teaching classes to answering Whatsapp messages from clients to managing the payroll. To take the next step in her business, she needed a tool that would help her scale her business in an efficient way. After several mockups, Andrea put her product to the test and her Zumba studio became Fitco’s first paying customer.    Listen to this episode of Crossing Borders to learn about how Andrea built Fitco and found a niche in Latin America’s fitness studios. Catalysts of change in Peru’s startup ecosystem Peru’s startup ecosystem has transformed significantly over the past couple of years. Andrea recalls the early days of her startup and the struggles she faced in finding people to hire for Fitco. Today, she is proud of how far the ecosystem has come. She considers that government led initiatives have played a huge role in giving Peruvian startups the recognition and support needed to grow and attract investors to the ecosystem.   Find out more about how Peru’s startup ecosystem has transformed in this episode of Crossing Borders. First Latin American startup to participate in Techstars Boulder Accelerator program Andrea explains what it was like to be physically on the same block as Brad Feld and David Brown as the first LatAm startup to receive investment from Techstars Boulder program. There, they learned about how to continue scaling Fitco and build a great business from the experience of other founders and mentors in the US. One of their greatest takeaways was Techstars’ people driven approach. Andrea and her co-founder were inspired to bring that philosophy to their team, and focus on people first, which in turn will lead to a better business.    Learn more about Andrea’s lessons learned from her experience at Techstars Boulder program in this episode of Crossing Borders.   Andrea Baba is helping the fitness industry transform its services to meet the demands and consuming habits of today’s customers. Fitco enables fitness center owners to digitize their businesses to better connect with their communities online.   Outline of this episode: [1:50] - About Fitco [2:30] - The entrepreneurial mindset [5:00] - Solving her own problem [6:29] - Focusing on a tech tool [7:49] -  Catalysts of change in the Peruvian ecosystem [12:44] - Techstars Boulder Accelerator [17:46] - Advice for going through an accelerator [21:13] - Responding to the lockdown [24:43] - Being a female founder in Latam vs. the US [27:43] - Books, blogs, & podcast recommendations [28:52] - Advice to Andrea’s younger self [30:23] - What’s next for Fitco?   Resources & people mentioned: Andrea Baba Alexander Mayor Fitco UTEC Ventures Techstars Boulder Accelerator Brad Feld David Brown Culqi Crehana Books: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, From Impossible to Inevitable, The Sales Acceleration Formula, Hacking Growth, Venture Deals    

In our final episode of our limited series, “How Sororities and Fraternities Support Mental Health Awareness,” Dr. Markeith Royster, Delta Chapter member of Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc. shares why it is essential to let go of the Imposter Syndrome. This Norfolk State University graduate co-created a course titled, “From Impossible to I'm Possible: An Analysis of The Imposter Syndrome Phenomenon” to encourage students to use the natural values they possess to combat systems built against them. Through social justice trainings, instructing student development courses and counseling students, Dr. Royster is able to combine his passion for access and retention as Community Director in Student Affairs in UCLA's Residential Life Department. Dr. Royster completed his Ed.D. in Educational Psychology at the University of Southern California. He received his M.Ed. in Education Curriculum and Instruction at Averett University and his Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics at Norfolk State University. After witnessing the disconnect between secondary education and access to higher education, Dr. Royster developed a number of college access programs to assist in the transition from high school to higher education. His goal is to ensure that students are able to understand, appreciate, and value their authentic selves while achieving their goals. To learn more about Dr. Royster's work, go to his IG @markeith.royster or email him at mroyster@usc.edu.

Aaron Ross changed the game for scaling startups with his smash hit books "Predictable Revenue" and "From Impossible to Inevitable." In this episode, we will explore practical ways to develop oneself and theories on where Sales Development is going so you can be ready for the high-tech future that is rushing at us at 200 miles per hour. Skills must improve, outreach must be more human, and Money Ball is real. Subspecialization and converged systems are not going away. There will be a rainbow of flavors of what XDR even means – even Sales Management could become sub-specialized.

What’s the battle-tested method to scale SaaS revenue and sales teams?  That’s what we’re answering today… Zorian Rotenberg, CRO at Infotelligent, joins host of the #Revenue series, John Grispon, on this episode of B2B Growth. Along with the only formula you’ll ever need to scale SaaS revenue, Zorian shares…  3 keys to sales repeatability An unconventional way of hiring the top talent Why LTV-to-CAC ratio should not be 3:1 in an early-stage SaaS company Resources mentioned in this episode: From Impossible to Inevitable Who: The A Method for Hiring (VooDoo hiring method) Recruit Rockstars zorian.com For Entrepreneurs blog This episode is hosted by John Grispon. Founder and Sales Coach at Early Revenue, as part of the #Revenue series on B2B Growth.  You can find this interview, and many more, by subscribing to the B2B Growth Show on Apple Podcasts, on our website, or on Spotify.

We listen today to Natalie Born, she's a strategic corporate innovation expert consultant, she describes her career journey and points of views around the art of corporate innovation to drive organizational growth. She has been focused on creating corporate innovative strategies to drive growth and disrupt industries for almost two decades.  Natalie implements the innovation design process to make a positive impact on leadership's way of thinking about innovation to drive revenue and market share results.Natalie has an incredible career background working in senior executive management roles at leading companies within diverse industries, such as CareerBuilder, First Data, ADP, IHG and now currently as VP of Innovation at Territory.coWe have a very powerful conversation around what organizations can do to embrace and execute innovation, how to approach innovation with a team and futurist mentality, and how to be disruptive in your industry to win. Growing up in the Peach StateGrowing up in a small town of Duluth, Georgia for Natalie, she always felt that she was the only one, she didn't belong, in the '80s there wasn't too much diversity in suburban Georgia. However she took that feeling of being different through her collegiate experience from Oglethorpe University to Maryland's Global Campus for her MBA and during an overseas business education program in India during her MBA, all these experiences began to shape herself to the corporate professional executive and consultant she has become“Noticing that I was different at a young age was difficult, but as I grew older I embraced being different and how  special it is to bring your differences to the table" – Natalie Born. Challenges to break through doors, being the only women and of color at the table in companies and tech Natalie describes and shares how her childhood, collegiate experience, and early corporate experiences prepared her to have a diversity and design thinking approach  throughout her career. “Alot of people talk about luck, I personally don't believe in luck, but rather in alot of hard work, working twice as hard to get ahead” – Natalie Born.What a reverse merger at CareerBuilder taught her about having a superior work ethicNatalie describes how a week after the company she was working within HeadHunter was acquired by CareerBuilder and being fired and hired again as part of the leadership team by CareerBuilder in a span of a week.  She has always had a drive to over-deliver and do much more than the bare minimum, always striving 150%, to wanting to do more to get to the next level. Her Reason Why and Origin of Her Entrepreneurship Journey“My career reached a level after more than 15 years in corporate, where it wasn't about me and I really wanted to help others around ideation, innovation and knowing how to help people freed from their mind ” – Natalie Born. Becoming intentional  about providing diversity and inclusion towards a more equitable and innovative corporate culture."Cheryl Sandberg talks about until you have a diverse set of candidates how can you pull the trigger on hiring that person. You need to bring the elephant into the room and painting it red and having those discussions around diversity and the same opportunities for career advancement." Natalie Born. The Art of Corporate Innovation with Design Thinking and Planning for Future  Growth“Innovation is no longer individual based, it's now very team-based, so it's all about getting the best and brightest team together and then you draw, putting all the ideas on the table, bad and good ones, to let the good  ideas take shape and win.” – Natalie Born.  Most companies will be disrupted by not being disruptive proactively“Too often companies are so focused on how much money we are making today that we are not creating the future. My fear is that large organizations are not disrupting themselves, so they end up being disrupted” – Natalie Born.  Pivoting and forecasting into the future is more imperative than ever“If your a leader you have to be a futurist. Corporations struggle with leadership side or innovation and the ability to create the future."– Natalie Born. Back to the Future with Natalie Born“Don't sweat the small stuff, overempahasis the things that have long-term impact and under-emphasize the things that have short-term impact” – Natalie Born.  Book recommendations to help you get 1% better1. Scaling Up by Verne Harnish2. From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin 3. The Art of Opportunity by Marc Sniukas, Parker Lee, and Matt Morasky Bio:Natalie Born is the VP of Innovation for Territory Global and the Founder & Host of The Innovation Meets Leadership Podcast. As an innovation consultant, Natalie helps her clients move from idea to execution. Natalie has spent the last 15+ years designing and creating products with the goal of creating customer delight. She has contributed to two approved US patents during her career and is passionate about helping organizations leverage the incredible talent they have, to create the outcomes they want.Natalie worked with organizations such as CareerBuilder, First Data, IHG, and ADP, leading major initiatives in the acquisition, integration, and international product development in over 18 countries. Throughout her career, she has authored numerous articles and speaks nationally.* Received her Masters of Business Administration  and International Business from the University of Maryland Global Campus* Received her Masters of Business Administration  and International Business from the International Management Institute, New Delhi India * Received her Bachelors of Science, Business Administration  from Oglethorpe University * She is a Scrum Alliance  ScrumMaster® (CSM®), Project Manager PMI Certified You can connect with Natalie at the following:LinkedIn Natalie BornThe Innovation Meets Leadership Podcast Facebook Innovation Meets Leadership Instagram Innovation Meets Leadership 

"From Impossible...To I'm Possible"

40: What Do I Do With My Nonprofit’s Strategic Plan? (Andrew Hollo)SUMMARYGiven the uncertainty nonprofit leaders are facing right now, it’s no wonder many are dismissing long-range strategic plans as practically useless. However, Andrew Hollo brings a much needed and fresh perspective to this strategic planning dilemma and demonstrates that the work he has done across Australia is very much applicable to nonprofit leaders around the world. We discuss four existential questions every nonprofit should be asking itself, and three rules they should be following for success. Much to learn from this episode, as well as a multitude of book recommendations to consider, including Andrew’s fantastic From Impossible to Possible. ABOUT ANDREWAndrew Hollo is the Founder & CEO of Workwell and one of Australia’s leading experts in realizing the potential of organizations and groups to develop ‘big ideas’ and gain collective results, especially in demanding, complex sectors and where work across organizational and sector boundaries is required. He has high level of skill in getting diverse views to the highest value, and clear conceptual agreement in the shortest possible time. In 20 years, Andrew has led over 500 projects for clients who deliver substantial public value: government and nongovernment, as well as privately held. He’s worked with numerous public value agencies on the alignment of leaders around clearly articulated strategic vision, roles and objectives — with demonstrable outcomes. Prior to founding Workwell, he served as a Director for G & H Training, and as a Consultant for Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting). Andrew received his BA in Psychology from the University of Melbourne. EPISODE TOPICS & RESOURCESLink to your free copy of From Impossible to PossibleAndrew’s Workwell website and Resource Page Harvard Business Review David Maister’s The Trusted AdvisorJames Clear’s Atomic HabitsTim Ferriss’ Tools of Titans, Tribe of MentorsYuval Harari’s Sapiens, Homo Deus Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

My guest today is Aaron Ross. Aaron is the best-selling author of Predictable Revenue, today often referred to as “The Sales Bible of Silicon Valley,” and most recently From Impossible To Inevitable. Both books are based on outbound prospecting and sales systems that have created 100's of millions in revenue for companies like Salesforce.com, Oracle, Red Hat and many other companies.  He's also a highly sought after keynote speaker and Co-CEO of PredictableRevenue.com. And on top of that, he's married with 9 children (half through adoption)!  So I hope you've got some pen and paper with you to take notes, as this is gonna be one of those episodes you'll be hearing value bomb after value bomb! On this episode: The principles of Predictable Revenue 7 painful truths of business growth How to know if your actually ready for growth Why you need both an inbound AND outbound strategy The 3 types of leads and why it's crucial you know the difference Why partnerships are Aaron's No.1 marketing strategy What Aaron would do to save his business in 30 days And much more! Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Visit PredictableRevenue.com Get Aaron's book - From Impossible to Inevitable  Connect with Aaron on LinkedIn Free Video Training! How To Get 5, 10, 15, 25 or More Predictable Sales Appointments Every Month, In Just 30 Minutes A Day (Without Cold Calling, Networking, Relying on Referrals or any of that stuff...) Make sure you grab this and all the other listener goodies by visiting... The Client Catching Podcast Listener Gift Page Happy Fishing!

How do you market a company that is selling something fundamentally new and different? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, John Rougeux of Flag & Frontier talks about category design. It's not a tactic for every company, but when used strategically, category design can drive truly remarkable marketing results. John digs into who category design is right for, how long it takes, what a category design go-to-market plan looks like, and how to gain organizational support. He also shares examples of companies and marketers who've successfully created new categories. Highlights from my conversation with John include: John is an experienced category designer who has also owned and exited a business. He says that compared to traditional inbound marketing strategies, category design requires a much larger lift when it comes to educating the market. Every business has a choice to either compete in an existing market or create a new market.  If you're creating a new category, you have three choices: 1) try to fit your product within an existing category; 2) ignore category in your marketing and focus on the product's features and benefits; or 3) create a new category. John says options 1 and 2 don't work. When considering whether category design is right for you, you need to honestly evaluate your product and determine whether its simply a niche within an existing category or something that has truly never been offered before. If its the latter, then category design is really the only logical solution. Category design takes time. John says you should expect to spend six to nine months just designing the category behind the scenes, and then once you roll that out publicly, it can take another few years before it really takes hold. Category design needs to be a business initiative, not simply a marketing strategy, because it affects product roadmaps, sales and more. When executing a category design strategy, it is critical to focus marketing messaging on the problem that your audience is experiencing and the outcomes that they will experience as a result of your solution rather than how the product itself actually works. The companies that have been most successful at category design have evangelists whose job it is to go to market and talk about the problem and why there is a new solution. Its also important to build a consistent conversation around your new category. That might mean holding a big event (like HubSpot's INBOUND or Drift's HYPERGROWTH) or building a community, like Terminus's FlipMyFunnel.  If your company is venture-backed, it is also important to get your investors on board with the idea of category creation so that you have the funding to support the strategy. There are examples of category design all around us. Some of the bigger and more visible ones are minivans and music streaming services. The category wasn't created overnight, and in many cases, people don't even realize its a new category, but we see it is as fundamentally different from the status quo, and that is what successful category design looks like.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Flag & Frontier website Email John at John@FlagandFrontier.com  Visit John's personal website Purchase a copy of Play Bigger Listen to the podcast to learn more about category design, when it makes sense, and how you can use it to dramatically improve your marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is John Rougeux, who is the founder at Flag & Frontier. Welcome, John. John Rougeux (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Thanks for having me on. John and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah. I'm really excited to have you here for completely selfish reasons. I am deep, deep into the weeds, trying to learn everything I can right now about category creation because it's something that I'm kind of working on for a little project at work. And I stumbled across your name. I think it was in a LinkedIn post mentioned by Sangram Vajre at Terminus, and he mentioned you as somebody who's doing a lot of work on category creation. And I immediately thought, oh, I need to have him in on the podcast. And here you are. I am so excited, so welcome. John: Thanks. Thanks. I actually want to come back to something that you said a minute ago. You mentioned this was a little project for you, so I'm going to pick your brains about why it's not a big project. Kathleen: I think I might just be downplaying it. John: Okay, all right. Kathleen: It's a huge project. John: All right. Kathleen: Yes, yes. It is a giant. In fact, it's probably bigger than I think it is. No, it's- John: Well, Sangram told me a few weeks ago. He said, "If you're not doing something that scares you a little bit, then you're not setting your sights high enough." So I think you're on the right track there. Kathleen: Yeah, no, I think my whole career has been a succession of choices that consistently terrify me. So hopefully, that means I'm on the right track to somewhere. So you have an interesting story. You started out or your career really grew in B2B tech, and you worked in some companies that were looking at category creation as a potential strategy and it seems that that wet your appetite and led you to where you are today. Can you just talk a little bit about your background and how it got you to where you are now and what you're doing now with Flag & Frontier? About John Rougeux and Flag & Frontier John: Yeah. Yeah, happy to. So the thing that I like to tell people is that I always wish that I knew about category design earlier in my marketing career. I think it would have helped me be more successful and make better choices and think through the strategy of what I was working on at the time a lot more thoroughly. So the reason I say that is in 2013, I co-founded a company called Causely. And I won't get too far down into the weeds of what Causely does and the business model, but we were basically using cause marketing as a way to incentivize people to take action. And specifically, we were looking at incentivizing referrals on social media. And at the time, I was looking at marketing through a fairly narrow lens, like a lot of people do maybe when they are kind of earlier in the middle of their marketing careers. We were looking at things like you know how do you improve the performance of an advertising campaign? How can you write a better better blog post? All of those kind of tactical things. And I didn't realize at the time that what we were doing was something categorically new. People didn't have context for what that meant, what they should compare it to, what value they should expect, what things should it replace or not replace? And so we had a reasonable trajectory. We scaled the business to a few thousand locations. It was acquired. But when looking back on it, I know that if we had had this lens of category design of how do you describe something when it's different than anything else out there, I think we could have gone even further. And so when I joined a company called Skyfii in 2018, I had started to kind of understand what that meant, so I had read Play Bigger. I read some, the works by Al Ries and Jack Trout that talk about how if you can't be first in a category, design any category you can be first in. And at Skyfii, that business, it's a publicly-traded SaaS company out of Australia and they found that they were participating in a fairly commoditized space. Or I guess to be more accurate, the perception was that they were a competitor in a fairly commoditized space. And their business had evolved past that and the product did all sorts of other things that were much bigger than the category the market thought they participated in, but they didn't really have a framework for talking about that. And so we went through a repositioning exercise where we defined a new category that better reflected what they were all about and and how people should kind of relate to that. And that was a really, I think, powerful and challenging exercise to think through.We've got something new in the market, but how do we describe that? How do we tell the right story? How do we tell the right narrative so that people know how to relate to it? Why category design is a fundamentally different approach to marketing Kathleen: This is so interesting to me. There's so much I want to unpack here. I guess, starting with something that you kind of started with, which is that there is this typical marketer's playbook, right, where people come in and they think, "Oh, we need to top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. We need to create content and attract people," this and that. And when it comes to category creation or trying to market something that is different than anything else people are used to, that playbook doesn't really work. Because as I'm quickly learning, especially looking just at the top of the funnel, traditional top of the funnel marketing, it's like well what is that problem that people are having and they start to look for a solution. And the challenge you have is that if the solution you're offering is something they've never heard of, it's such a steeper climb to try and gain their attention. It's like they don't know the right questions to ask even, if that makes sense. John: No, that's absolutely right. And I always like to mention a really thoughtful post that Mike Volpe, the founding CMO of HubSpot wrote a few years ago because it lays such a great groundwork for any discussion around category design. And the blog post simply says that look, every marketer has two choices on their strategy. They can pick an existing category and try to carve out a niche within that category. Maybe they can dominate that category. But basically, they have to pick a space and then do the best they can within that space. Or they can try to design a new category. And when you look at kind of the underlying product or business model and you really take a close examination of what it is and whether it's different or whether it's something better, you almost don't have a choice. If you're doing something that is new that people don't have a framework for, you really have three choices. So I want to pack these for you. So choice number one is you can try to shoehorn this new thing you've built into an existing category. And we'll come back to why that doesn't work in a second. Number two is you can just talk about the products, like features and benefits but not really think about a more underlying narrative for that. And then number three is you can design a new language, a new framework, which is called category design. And so here's why number one and number two don't work. So again, number one is if you try to shoehorn something new into an existing category. The reason that works against you is that people will make the wrong comparisons for what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to be priced, how you deliver value. That just works against you. Secondly, if you just try to talk about the product itself but don't provide a larger context, you're not giving people, you're not giving them really any framework, and it makes it difficult to understand what you're all about and why they should be interested in you. I'll give you a great example. A friend of mine works at a company and I won't mention the name of the company, but they combine two different categories kind of in an existing platform. So one of these is VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol communication software, very established, known space. The other thing they do is they have these marketing automation functions that they add to their software to at least in my view very disparate types of software, but they combine them together. And so far, they haven't really given their buyers a context, a category for what this thing means. And so they're basically letting people to their own devices to understand and come up with their own conclusions about what that is. And that just puts a lot of work on your buyers when they have to think about who they should compare you to when they need to think about what department is this even for, or what products does this replace or not replace? That's generally too much work for people when they're trying to understand something new. And like you said, Kathleen, if you're not telling them what questions they should ask, then chances are they're just going to be too confused before they'll even really be interested in having a conversation with you. Kathleen: Yeah, and there's two other aspects to what you just said that I think are really interesting, which I'm beginning to appreciate more with the work that I'm doing. One is that human nature is such that people want to slot you into something that they already understand. They don't want to have to think outside the box. So when people hear about something new, that their natural inclination is to try and categorize it in with things that they already know. And that's a hard thing to battle because you are literally battling human nature. And the second thing is if you do allow yourself to be put into a category that already exists that maybe isn't really truly what you're doing and you are actually successful in selling your product, you will wind up having a lot of problems with churn once you do sell it because people are still going to be thinking that you are like that other thing that you're not actually like. And they're going to be looking for your product or your service or whatever it is to solve for them in the same way that other thing does, when in reality your thing does not solve those problems. So it's like you're setting yourself up for a very long horizon of failures that you might not see at the outset, but it's kind of a you're failing before you've even begun. John: Yeah, that's a great point. And yeah, people do... They tend to... The world is so complicated, and there's so many things that we have to deal with and try to understand that we use this rule of thumb of categorizing things. Sometimes we do it explicitly, like smartphones are a great example of a category we all know about and buy them and we know why they're different than a mobile phone. Sometimes we just do it implicitly. We don't necessarily have the language or the terms to describe that category, but we know that we try to group likes things together because it makes it easier to understand the world. Kathleen: Yeah or we use analogies. So many times, you hear things like, "Well, that's just the Uber of," and then they list a different industry. Or, "That's the Airbnb of something else." John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: And so we're constantly trying to put these things into comfortable mental frameworks, which I think is fascinating. So you mentioned there were three things. The first two, I think you covered. And then the third is really designing a new category. John: The third is designing a new category. That's right. That's right. When does category design make sense? Kathleen: So how do you know... I guess the first question is how do you know when that's the path you should be taking? John: That's a great question because I've heard from some people that they have this idea that every company should try to design a category, and that's really not the case. It applies to some companies. But for many other companies, like if you're developing a CRM, a better version of a CRM, don't try to build a new category around that. So yes, so the way you would look at that is there's no formula you can put into Excel and calculate and churn all this out, but it really comes down to does the thing that you've built, does it solve a problem that has not been solved before? Or does it do so in a way that the world isn't familiar with? So is there a new business model behind that? Is there a new delivery mechanism behind that? It really comes down to those two things. And maybe if you want to look at it at a more fundamental level, you could ask yourself do the existing categories that my market is familiar with, do they accurately capture the type of thing that I'm offering? If they do, then one of the reasons you may want to choose to carve out a niche in an existing category is that people are looking for established products in established categories. People are looking for marketing automation software, they're looking for smartphones, they're looking for video communications tools like Zoom, like we're using today. And so, if you say, "Hey, we have the right tool within this category for this specific market or for this specific need," that can be very powerful. And arbitrarily forcing yourself out of that category just because you like that idea of category design is going to work against you. Now, that being said, again to kind of flip it around, if you find that the categories and the language that are used to describe existing products your market is familiar with just don't capture what you're doing or they limit it in some way, then ultimately you need to find a way to break out from that and that's what the process of category design is all about. What does it take to create a new category? Kathleen: Now, one of the things that I've come to appreciate just the more I look at this is what a big lift creating a category is. As you said in the beginning, this isn't a little project, right? I would love it if you could just talk a little bit about sort of expectation setting. If somebody is listening to this and they're thinking this really sounds like it could make sense for me, from your experience and what you've seen and you've talked to people who've been involved in category design, how long does it take before you can really expect that the market will recognize a new category? John: Yeah. It's a pretty long-time horizon. And so I mentioned Mike Volpe at the beginning of the call and I'll mention him again and Kipp Bodnar, the following CMO of HubSpot mentioned the same thing I'm about to tell you. And they told me that when they first started talking about inbound marketing, it was like standing in the middle of a town square on a soapbox just shouting into the wind with nobody paying attention. And that was the case for two to three years before that phrase really started to work its way into the lexicon of marketers. Salesforce, they pioneered, not so much CRM but cloud-based software. And even today, they still talk about other applications to cloud-based software that's 20 years later. And another example might be... So at Terminus, they talk about the account-based marketing gospel. And maybe this kind of hints to the challenge of how difficult it is to build a category. Sangram used to be there, I think he was their head of marketing if I'm not mistaken. He's definitely a co-founder, but his role is chief evangelist. And so they recognize that to really get people to be aware of and to understand and use this terminology around account-based marketing, they've had to invest very heavily in evangelizing that market or that message out in the market. Kathleen: Yeah. The other story that I've always found interesting... I followed all the ones you just mentioned really closely. And then the other one that's been fascinating to me is Drift because they came on the scene. And if they're listening, they may take issue with what I'm about to say, but look. A big piece of what their product does is live chat, website live chat, and then they have chatbots. Well, those things have been around for a while. That was not anything new, but they were really smart and they coined it as conversational marketing and they really focused more on, not so much the how and what the technology does, as what it enables the business to do, and kind of wrapped a methodology around existing technology in a way that made it feel fresh and new. And it was pretty genius. And I feel like they actually moved really quickly by comparison to a lot of the other examples I've seen. So it's interesting to me why in some cases, businesses are able to gain traction faster than others. John: Yeah. I would have to think that a lot of it has to do with the culture and how quickly or rapidly that business has gone through change in the past. And the other thing we should probably discuss is just the timeline of everything that happens before you share your new category with the world. I was talking with... There's an interview I did with, let's see, Anna and Cassidy at a company called Narrative Science. And they expected just the category design process itself to take about six to nine months. This is before they released language out publicly. And at Skyfii, that was our experience as well. And for that situation, that company, I think they were founded in 2012 or 2013. So they were five, six years into the business and there had already been a lot of discussion around the space that they started in, which was Wi-Fi marketing or Wi-Fi analytics. And so anytime that you're going into a space where the culture already kind of thinks and has a mental model for what their business is, the process of reworking all of that and getting everyone on board, especially the leadership team and perhaps even investors, getting them on board with that new message in a new way of thinking about the business, it takes time. And I would argue it should take time. Because if you rush the process and you ask your team to start using maybe even radically different language about what you do, people need time to really think through that and maybe they need to push back or challenge you a little bit or ask questions or provide suggestions. There's just this change management process you have to go through. And if you rush through that, people are not going to feel like they're a part of that process. And then ultimately, that's going to undermine your efforts in years one, two, three and further as you're asking your team to help you share that message. And at Skyfii, Skyfii is publicly traded in the Australian market and so they have investors and they have a public... They're very thoughtful about the message they put out into the market. And so they really wanted to take the time to make sure that message was right and that it made sense. And so, yeah, it took us, I don't know exactly how many months, but yeah, around six to nine months to really start that discussion and then get to a point where we were comfortable with the category name and the underlying narrative to support it. Why category design needs to be a company-wide effort Kathleen: Yeah, and I think there's... To me, one of the most important things is consistency because you kind of said if everybody is not on board and everybody isn't speaking from the same playbook, all it takes is one or two people to diverge and talk about your thing and language and terms that puts it squarely back in with all of the other things out there that... And it destroys your effort. John: Yeah. Well, and this is probably a great segue into another really important point about category design, which is that it's not a marketing project. Sometimes, it can be spearheaded by marketing, and marketing will often do a lot of the legwork, but it's not something that's relegated or exclusive to marketing. It has to be something that that CEO is involved in. It affects the company vision and is affected by the company vision. They kind of play off of each other. It affects the product roadmap. It affects what the sales team says. It affects what you might tell investors. So if your CFO is in charge of investor relations, he or she, they have to be on board and educated on the message. That's another misconception I heard a few times and it was... Personally, I thought it was a marketing initiative when I first read about it. But the more I dove deep into it and the more people I talked to, I realized it's actually a bit more of a business initiative, more so than a marketing one. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point. Having that buy-in top to bottom, it's really important. John: Yeah. What's been your experience at Prevailion in kind of leading your team in that discussion? Kathleen: So it was interesting because I came in really excited to make this a category design play. And shortly after I came in, we hired a head of sales, who also had some experience with category design and saw that that was a really strong play for us. He and I had both read Play Bigger, and we just kept talking about it until we basically beat the rest of our leadership team down into buying copies of the book. They've all now read it. They're all super excited about it, and it's great because it's given us a common language and framework around which to talk about what it is we're doing. So we're still really early stage, but I think we have that excitement and that buy-in in principle at least is there. And now, we're at the stage where we have to figure out our plan. What does a category design strategy look like? Kathleen: So along those lines, let's talk a little bit about somebody who's listening and they think, "Yep, this makes sense for me. Okay, I'm going to set my expectations. I understand I need to get top to bottom buy-in." What are the elements that you've seen in your experience from the companies that you've studied that have done this that contribute to successful category design efforts. In other words, what would be a part of a company's plan if they were looking to move forward with this? John: Yeah. So I'll mention two things that come to mind. So one I touched on a moment ago, but it's making sure that the CEO and the leadership team are involved and to the extent that they feel like they have a stake in the success of the project. What I mean is it's not enough for them to say, "Sure, that sounds great. Category sounds great, Mr. or Mrs. CMO. Go for it. Let me know how it turns out." That's not sufficient for getting buy-in. So getting them to be a stakeholder and have a real level of participation, that's absolutely key. And there's an interview I did with Chris Orlob of Gong.io, where we talk about that in more depth. So if you want to link to that, I'm happy to- Kathleen: Yeah, that would be great. I would love that. John: Yeah. The second thing is category design, it's all about talking about a problem that you're solving and less about the product. And so one thing I always like to say is that problem... Let's see, so your solution, your product. Solutions don't exist without problems, right? And then problems don't exist without people. And so you have to go back and understand the people that you're trying to work with and serve, and understand the problem you're trying to solve and the language they use to describe that problem, and the context for which they're trying to solve that problem or maybe they're not even aware that it is a problem or they think it's unsolvable. The point is you have to really understand the problem first and use that to lead your messaging. If your category is all around, here's why this specific product is so great and it's called this category, you're kind of missing the point. When you look at the language and the marketing that companies like Drift, for example, do, 80% of it is on the problem. Drift likes to talk about how the buying process has changed. Buyers are not interested in waiting hours or days or weeks for someone to respond to them. They want a response now. And you even see that word, "now", used.  Kathleen: Yes. That word, that one word... I went to HYPERGROWTH. I think it was not this year, but the year before. I went this year too. John: Okay. Kathleen: The year before, their whole keynote at HYPERGROWTH was all about the one word, "now." And it was so powerful, the way they distilled that down I thought, really, really simple but effective. John: Yeah, yeah. And they've written a book around conversational marketing. If you've used Drift products, you can kind of see some tie-ins but it's really about the problem that they're trying to solve. And people smarter than me have said lots of times that if you can articulate that you understand the problem better than anyone else, then people will assume you have the best solution. You don't have to work so hard to talk about every single little feature or benefit that you offer. Showing that you understand the problem creates empathy with your audience, and then again, they'll assume that you have the best solution to address that problem. Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting that you talk about that because I think that's a really easy mistake for marketers to make, which is to say that, especially when you talk about B2B technology, it's really easy to fall into the trap of talking a lot about what the product does, how the product works. And I think many times, that's facilitated or even encouraged sometimes by the customer asking, "What does the product do? How does it work?" John: Right. Kathleen: And yet, I think the challenge as a marketer is to try to really get ahead of that and take control of the conversation and steer it towards not only the problems as you say and really deeply understanding them, but the outcomes that come from the use of the products. There's problems, and then there are what is the outcome for the user? How does it make their life better? How does it change them for the better? If you think of those as two different poles, and in the middle, lies the product and all the stuff it does, if you can keep the conversation more at the periphery on those poles, then I think you can be really successful. But that's tough. John: No, I've never heard it described that way, but that's a really clear way of describing that. And it's funny you mention that because I was having the opposite experience just this week. I was there was looking for a new email client for my computer. And that's a pretty established category. There's a million email clients. And in that context, you don't need to talk about the problem of communicating with people. Kathleen: Right. John: You know what email is. You don't need to talk about the outcome so much. There were a few features I was looking for and I was trying to find a client that had those features. And so you can talk about that a little bit more upfront when the category is established and people know what the category is, what it isn't, what it's supposed to do. But to your point, Kathleen, if that category doesn't exist and you're really trying to sell a vision around solving a problem, emphasizing what the problem is and then emphasizing the outcomes are really what's necessary to get people interested in just having a discussion around this new idea. And then from there, they're probably going to ask, "Okay, this sounds really good. Tell me about that product itself. What does it actually do?" Then you're in a perfect position to go into those details because they're ready for it. And they get the larger idea. Kathleen: Yeah, and that's where I think the traditional framework of top, middle, and bottom of the funnel comes back into the discussion, right? When you do get towards that middle to bottom of funnel stage, you can get into the weeds of how it works. And I know in our case, for example, it might not even be the same person we're having the conversation with. Our ultimate buyer isn't going to ever care so much how it works. They're going to hand that part of the decision off to somebody on their team and say, "Validate this for me." And it's almost like we've talked about it. We just need a spec sheet, but that... It's kind of like when you're going to a conference and you get the convince your boss letter, but in reverse. We're selling to the boss and the boss needs a convince their engineer letter that they can just hand to them and say, "Here, take this. It's in your language. It'll answer all your questions." Right? To me, that's the steps that we need to go through, but if we get too stuck in the weeds of convincing the engineer early, we're never going to get to convince the boss. John: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Building your category design go-to-market plan Kathleen: Yeah. Well, have you seen... So there are those foundational elements of how you talk about what it is you're doing, how you talk about the category, how you begin to gain share of mind. And then there's the actual go to market. And I've seen a lot of information written. For example, in the book, Play Bigger, which we've mentioned a few times, which is kind of like the Bible for category creation and other places. They talk about the concept of a lightning strike, which is just really a big kind of splashy go to market. It could be an event. It could be some other, something else that really makes an impression on the market and gets it talking about your thing. What have you seen or have you seen anything that has worked really well as far as like quick, well, I don't know if quick is the right word, but very high impact kind of strategies for really making an impression on the market? John: That's a great question. I'm not sure that I've seen a ton of really great examples beyond the few that we've discussed. So back to HubSpot, I don't recall a big... They have their INBOUND event, right? I don't recall that having a huge kind of blow up the world moment at the time when that conference first came out, but they've certainly been consistent and they made it a very conscious decision not to call it the HubSpot User Conference or even put the word HubSpot in there. It was about inbound, something bigger than themselves. I've seen Terminus, they have focused on this idea of a community of people who are interested in account-based marketing. Sangram told me they started with a fairly small event, relatively small event. And they've kind of built it from there. But that's more of an ongoing exercise, I guess, an ongoing process. Drift has their HYPERGROWTH conference. They came out with a book called Conversational Marketing. That's probably the biggest kind of high profile thing they did that was explicitly around that category. I think one of the things around lightning strikes is that, at least the way they're described in the book, is that they feel like they could be appropriate for a VC-backed company, or maybe a publicly traded company who's launching a new category and wants to really make that big splash and can afford to do that. I would say if you're earlier on and you don't have millions to drop on a big event or a massive campaign of another nature, it seems like other companies can can be successful with more of a process-driven approach of who are we trying to get to care about this category? What are they interested in? Where do they spend their time? And how can we just have these conversations with them on a repeatable basis? Because, like we were talking about earlier, it's not like once you name your category, the whole world suddenly cares about it and there's all these... Gartner doesn't give you a ring and say, "Hey, I guess we're going to create a Magic Quadrant because we saw your lightning strike. That's good. This is so great." Everyone who I've talked to anyway, who's done it well, has had to dedicate consistent resources over time to really get people to understand it and think about it. Kathleen: Yeah. You're talking about something that strikes very close to home for me because I've looked at those examples too and I had an opportunity... I've interviewed Kipp Bodnar. I've interviewed Nikki Nixon, who was one of the first leaders of the FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus. I interviewed Dave Gerhardt at Drift. So I've had a little bit of an inside peek into some of those companies. We didn't talk about this topic specifically, but what did strike me about all of those conversations and all of those examples is, as you say, consistency but also not just consistency, volume. There's a difference between, "Hey, we're going to consistently blog once a week, and it's going to be a great blog," and that's just an example. All of these companies not only have been super consistent, but they have turned the volume dial way up in terms of the amount of content they're creating around their category. I think every one of them has written a book actually, because Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote the book, Inbound Marketing. You mentioned the book that Drift wrote. Sangram has written a couple of books. I don't know if that's a requirement or it's just a coincidence, but I think it certainly has helped. But it's also a reflection of that turning up the volume. We're not just going to write a bunch of blogs and use this keyword on them. We're going to write the book on our topic and really own it. And to me, there's something to that. If you're going to do a category creation play, you don't necessarily have to have the biggest budget in the world. Maybe you're not going to throw a HYPERGROWTH type conference, which is a cool conference. But you are going to need to really be prepared to just saturate the market with content, flood people with educational content around what is that problem you're solving, why it matters, why it's new, and why the new approach is better than the old one. John: Yeah. And that comes down to having patience and the right time horizon. And like you were asking about earlier, if your expectation is that category design is something maybe you can do for a few months and then you can go about business as usual, that's a wrong time horizon. And it will take months or probably years for people to really get what you do and talk about it, independent of conversations with you. And you have to have the content to support that, whether that's an event or a blog or a book or a podcast. And I think you also have to make sure that your investors understand that vision. They understand that you want to create something big, you want to create a category that you can dominate and design to your favor. And then if you do that, five to 10 years from now, you will be in a very good position. But also understanding that the first few years will have a different trajectory than someone who's just really trying to scale growth right off the bat at a very high level. Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like you just brought the conversation perfectly full circle because we started talking about how important buy-in was, top to bottom. And you can think of top to bottom as like CEO to the bottom of the organization. But honestly, if you have investors, that's really the top. Your board has to be totally bought-in because you'll get a ton of pressure. I mean we do have investors. We just got a series A round, so I'm dealing with this right now. And we're very fortunate that we have a really bought-in board, but I completely agree with you. It's also fascinating, you mentioned earlier analysts. That's another thing. If you're working with the analysts, what are the expectations you should have there? Because I recently read a quote that was like, "Gartner will never create a new market if there's only one player in it." Right? Because what's in it for them to build a Magic Quadrant for one company? They're not going to do it. So by definition, if you truly, truly are creating a new category, your thing is new and different and not like anything else and you "don't have any competition" which is like the bad words to ever say... Because even if you don't have competition, you have perceived competition. There's nothing in it for an analyst to say, "Well, this is a new category because a lot of work to produce a Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave." They're not going to do it for one company. So that goes back again to the conversation around time horizon. So it's such an interesting play and not for everyone certainly. You mentioned a couple of really good examples from the marketing world, Drift, HubSpot, Terminus. Can you think of any examples from outside of the marketing technology world that are really great examples of category creation? So if somebody is listening and they want to kind of look out in the wild and see who's doing this well, who would you point to? Examples of category creators John: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Once you understand what category design actually means, you start to see new categories all over the place. So I'll mention two. So in high school, Kathleen, I drove a minivan. It had wood siding, I hated it, and it was just the dorkiest car you could drive. But at the time, I didn't know- Kathleen: We have to come back and have a conversation about that in a minute. John: So at the time, I didn't know that minivans were actually representative of a new category in the market. And I can't remember when they first came out. I think it was maybe the mid-80s, and I mean there were these full-size work vans, but people didn't conceive of this van that you would use to haul your family around. It was a completely new category. And it continues to be... I've come full circle. We've got a minivan today, another one. And so anyway, that's kind of a great example. You see that in automotive all the time, so hybrid cars. The Prius was a great example of designing that category. Tesla now for electric cars, SUVs as well. So that's one. And then another one is, I was actually thinking about this on the way to work this morning, the way that Apple and Spotify have really created, I guess, a new category around how music is distributed, I think, is another interesting example. And I think it's a... The reason I bring it up is category design isn't so much about a specific name or a specific taxonomy or a word that Gartner has capitalized. It more has to do with the business model and the way people look at a space. So when Apple launched iTunes, they completely changed the way music was distributed from buying a full album to buying individual songs and to needing to have the physical copy of the media to having a digital copy you could take anywhere. And now, I would argue that maybe Apple or iTunes created that category. They are the first to do that. But I would also argue that it's really Spotify, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think their user number is larger than Apple's for Apple Music, they're the ones who have actually designed the category. They're the ones who said, "This is what streaming music looks like. This is what you're supposed to pay. This is about how many artists or songs we're supposed to have available. This is how we're going to curate music to you." And that's a completely new way of using music or listening to music. I don't know what the official name for that category is. Maybe it's just called streaming music. It's not something I'm an expert on, but that was a very long answer to your question but those I think are two that come to mind for me. Kathleen: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I do feel like we're surrounded by category creation. And it's happening even faster than I think it used to because of the pace of technological change. We just don't necessarily recognize it as such. But when you have that framework through which to think about it, you do start to see it everywhere and it's really interesting to watch. And I think it's kind of like the whole frog that boiled in the water analogy, which is actually a terrible analogy when you really think about what you're talking about. But the notion that- John: Who's actually tried that by the way? Do you know anyone? Kathleen: No, God, I hope not. That's like, don't they say serial killers start by torturing animals? No, no, no. Do not boil any frogs. But the whole idea being it's happening to us. We are experiencing category creation. It's just that it's happening at a pace that we don't like see it. It's not like a yesterday it didn't exist, and today it does. That by the time the category has happened and has become commonplace, it just feels like it's been there all along kind of. It's really interesting. I think there's probably a whole psychological aspect to this that hasn't even been mined in a way that it could. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: But all right, shifting gears because I could talk about category creation forever, but we don't have forever. Inbound marketing. We talked about really what the podcast is about, and I love talking about category creation as part of it. Because when you talked about consistency and HubSpot and Drift and Terminus, really they were all phenomenal examples of companies that really did inbound marketing well. So when you think about inbound marketing as it is today, is there a particular individual or company that you really think is killing it? John: I'm going to say that it's really like a style of inbound marketing that I think is starting to get a lot of attention and it's this idea of having an evangelist be a voice for the company. And the reason I think this is so interesting is because, like our world is, there's so many messages we get from brands today, both on the consumer side and on the B2B side, that I think people have a real... They started to see that you can have a brand say anything, right? It's a construct. But when you have a person who's a real human being talking about the vision and the values and what their brand represents and how it might be able to help, to me, that's a much more authentic way and it's just very relevant in the world today because I feel like people just crave more human-to-human interaction. So a three examples of that. We've mentioned a couple already, so Sangram and Terminus does that very well. Dave Gerhardt does that. He doesn't have the title of evangelist, but he's much more of the face of the company I think even than David Cancel or others. And then, Ethan Beute at BombBomb is doing that really well. Kathleen: Yeah. John: I know you had him on a previous episode, and yeah. I know there's others out there, but those are the three that come to mind. I see their content very regularly. They all do a different job. They have their own styles. They have their own voice, but they're very authentic. And I think they're adding a lot of value for the respective companies through what they do. Kathleen: I totally agree. Those are three great examples. And picking the right person or settling on the right person to fill that role is such a critical decision for the company. It has to be somebody that truly, deeply understands, as you said, the problem that the audience is experiencing, but that also can come across as charismatically and passionately believing in that shift that needs to occur to create that new category. So it's an interesting mix of skills that you look for when you try to find your evangelist. John: Right, right. So does this mean you're going to step up and be the evangelist at Prevailion? Kathleen: I don't know. We actually... I'm really lucky. And one of the reasons I joined the company is that we have this amazing team of really smart people, who are also very invested in participating in marketing. So our CEO is unbelievable. He could sell ice to the Eskimos, not that he would. That makes him sound like he's a smarmy sales guy. He is so smart and he really has been in the market a long time and knows it, and he's also incredibly well-spoken. So while I would love to get up and talk about it, I think I'm really lucky that I have an executive team that is full of people who could probably fill that role better than I could. John: And you know what? I don't think it's entirely an either or situation. Some of those companies I've mentioned, they have someone who's maybe has the largest following or the loudest voice, but there's others on the team who can contribute to that. And I think that's what's really exciting, is it's not just one person, but you can have a whole series of people on your team evangelize for the company. And I don't know about you, there's something about when I just see the people behind a product that I'm thinking about using. I feel so much more comfortable having that conversation and and exploring what they do than I would if I was just reading pure brand messages. Kathleen: Absolutely. It all comes down to trust, right? And if you feel like you can trust that person who is the chief spokesperson, somehow or another there's a halo effect from that that shines down on the brand. And it really saturates the brand with that feeling of trustworthiness, that makes you want to buy from them. John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: Yeah. I love it. Well, digital marketing is changing so quickly. This topic of category creation is so fascinating because conceptually it seems like something that will stand the test of time, but then how you implement it obviously will change over time. With everything changing so quickly, how do you personally stay up to date and stay educated on all things marketing-related? John: Yeah. For me, both listening to and hosting podcasts has been a big driver of my growth. And so conversations like this one with you are really helpful because you and I could swap ideas. The episodes I've done... So I co-host a series on the B2B Growth show around category creation. I also did a series on FlipMyFunnel. That's given me the chance to talk to people who have done more category design work than I have and learn from them in the process. And for me, that's been so much more valuable than anything I could read or stumble across in a newsletter, not that those things aren't valuable. But having one-to-one access to experts, there's few things that are... I'm not sure if anything is going to beat that. Some of those conversations have led to ongoing relationships, where I've been able to ask questions and dive deeper into other topics. And so that's where I found the most valuable use of time, is just having conversations. I love to read, love to listen to podcasts, but anytime I could just talk to people and listen to them and then talk through my own ideas, man, I'd do that every day if I could. Kathleen: Amen. I just filmed a LinkedIn video about this, about how I learn. And the number one way I learn is through hosting this podcast, which when I say that to people, I know that that's not something that's going to be feasible for everyone. Let me just spin up a podcast so that I can learn. But it is the most amazing vehicle because you get to meet such incredible people like yourself, pick their brains, really get into detail that you can't get into in other ways. And it's amazing how much I take away from it. Second for me is I love to listen to Audible business books on 2X speed as I do my commute. John: What are you listening to right now? Kathleen: I am finishing Crossing the Chasm. And then before that, it was Play Bigger, From Impossible to Inevitable, and I come back. I'll listen multiple times to books because I feel like you absorb more the second time. John: Right. Kathleen: So yeah, lots of good ones. There's never too many books to read or never too few books, I should say. I always have more. John: Right, no shortage of content, yeah. How to connect with John Kathleen: Thank you. That's what I was trying to say. Well, if somebody has questions about category design and they want to reach out, learn more about what you're doing, or ask you a question, what's the best way for them to get in touch? John: Sure. So you could email me at John@FlagandFrontier.com. So that's J-O-H-N@FlagandFrontier.com. You can also just put in John.Marketing in your browser, and it'll bring up a really simple page with just my contact info. Sometimes that's easier to remember. Kathleen: So smart. That's great. I love that. John: I can't believe no one bought that domain, but it was there so why not? Kathleen: Genius. John: It's easier than spelling my last name. And then you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I won't attempt to spell my name here, but if you want to link to it in your episode- Kathleen: I'll put that in the show notes, absolutely. John: Yeah. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. Well, I have really enjoyed this. I've learned so much. I feel like I probably could have made this podcast three hours long, but nobody wants to listen for that long. If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, I would really appreciate it if you would take a minute, go to Apple podcasts, and leave the podcast a five-star review. That is how other people discover us, and that is how we get in front of a bigger audience. So take a minute and do that. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, John. This has been fun. John: Yeah, my pleasure, Kathleen. And hopefully, we can have another conversation later on as you go further into your own category design process. Kathleen: Yes, about that and also about the minivan that you drove in high school. John: All right, sounds good.

Aaron Ross is a global keynote speaker who specializes in helping people and companies make money in sustainable, predictable ways. Aaron is the bestselling author of “Predictable Revenue” and the co-author of “From Impossible to Inevitable,” detailing various best practices for companies to grow faster with outbound sales systems. In this episode, we talked about outbound sales, business growth, predictable revenue...

Aaron Ross is a global keynote speaker who specializes in helping people and companies make money in sustainable, predictable ways. Aaron is the bestselling author of “Predictable Revenue” and the co-author of “From Impossible to Inevitable,” detailing various best practices for companies to grow faster with outbound sales systems. In this episode, we talked about outbound sales, business growth, predictable revenue...

Impossible to Inevitable How can salespeople turn the impossible to inevitable?  Aaron Ross is the author of the book Predictable Revenue and a proud father to nine children. The book Predictable Revenue is called the sales bible of Silicon Valley. It changed how the fastest-growing sales teams are designed. The book talked about outbound prospecting which can be a very predictable way to drive appointments and if you have predictable appointments, you can create predictable revenue. It also talks about sales specialization instead of letting the sales reps do the prospecting. Managers must break the sales team into specialized groups to assess where they excel.  Impossible to inevitable  His new book called From the Impossible to Inevitable is the growth bible. It's more for C-levels:the managers, executives, and the leaders who understand the few key reasons why a company gets stuck and won't grow. The book answers three questions: Why aren't you growing as fast as you can? How can you grow faster? How do you keep it up? This book touches on sales models and expands to lead generation. From Impossible to Inevitable will teach you the ways of the fastest-growing companies in the world such as SalesForce and Twilio. The first section of the book is called Nail a Niche as it addresses the hard truth that most companies are not ready to grow and that's the reason why they don't grow as much as they want.  You can't paddle downstream if you're not even in the stream.  Nailing the niche When beginning a business, there's the tendency of selling everything to everyone. But that doesn't work. What it does to you is that you either have no customer or you have a bunch of customers who are a little bit of this and a little bit of that. An entrepreneur may sit back and ask which of the customers are easiest to close, or who is the audience that really needs me? It is important to define who needs you.  Aaron was part of Salesforce, where he built an internal sales program. He left the team in 2006 and did what he wanted to do. He went into adventures and went to do other things. He worked in a venture firm, then on a thing called Unique Genius, then on CEO Flow. He was exploring and then he got married. He realized that he had to start making money.  He needed to focus on a niche and figure out where his expertise lies so that he could  deliver the most value for his customers. He then thought of outbound prospecting. I wasn't the general sales consulting. For us salespeople, this can take a lot of testing, talking, and experimentation with companies to get the right package and the right pricing programs before you nail your niche and start to grow faster. Sometimes it can take a long time because we have all these unrealistic expectations on how fast it should happen.  Do it like Twilio does it Twilio is a platform company that provides a bunch of technologies. Twilio is used by many companies that build software or iPhone apps to power their message alerts and phone calls. For example, Uber uses Twilio to make an Uber phone call and text because it's difficult and time-consuming to build it themselves.  Simply put, Twilio is a platform that companies can use to do many things. The challenge when you are marketing something like Twilio is that it's difficult to pinpoint the exact help it can offer to a company or a client.  A salesperson must paint a specific picture for people to get it. Twilio researched to get into the minds of their customers, to understand and build empathy with their customers.  The common corporate value which is to walk in the shoes of your customer is something that Twilio really lives by. The company put much effort into walking in their customers' shoes to know what they want and what they are looking for.  Salespeople need to remember this value at all times, whether you're writing an email or making a call. You need to know what they need to get your message across. Another secret of Twilio's success is to let all their employees have a taste of what it's like being the customer.  Specific targeting Turning the impossible to inevitable is also a result of specific targeting. You need to be more specific in choosing your audience. It's important to talk to fewer people that are relevant to your products or services.  Having fewer people to talk to doesn't decrease your number of opportunities. Your goal is to become the big fish in the small pond and specific targeting is the perfect way to do that. It's harder to change your products and services but you can do the easier part: you change your targeting instead.  Types of leads Lead generation is the main driver for your growing business. There are three kinds of lead generation: seeds, nets, and spears. The seeds are relationship-driven leads, these include referrals, word of mouth, and friends/families. Since these are relationship-based leads, they are faster to close and with a higher rate. The downside is that it's more difficult to generate. Word of mouth is hard to grow.  The second type is the nets. These are the marketing. You are casting a wide net which means you're broadcasting one too many. These leads include a podcast, billboards, or online marketing. You get more leads in terms of quantity than in quality.  The last type is spears which are prospecting. It's when you have typically a targeted list. It's smaller in number but you get better opportunities out of it.  Businesses almost always start with the word of mouth but as you start to grow, you will want to venture into content marketing and prospecting. As a company, you need to know the kind of leads that bring in clients. Figure where you excel and put more effort into that first before you move on into other types of leads.  Pick the one that's right for you at first and do more of it. Do not do all the three leads at once unless you're a huge company with millions of funding. It might take years for you to figure out what works best, it might take years for your sales design team to come up with a plan that works, but it's all worth it in the end.  One section in the book Impossible to Inevitable is a lesson from Mark Roberge, the CRO of HubSpot. He has hired hundreds of people and the number one thing they look for when hiring is coachability. It's an individual's ability and desire to learn and their ability to connect, change, and adapt.  Companies who are expanding and hiring people should look at the coachability of a person. Aside from that, as a company, you also need to know the kind of roles you need.  Small steps If you are a startup business, start with the basics. The CEO starts selling, then he hires a junior person to do prospecting and appointment setting. After a few months, you can promote that person to closing or you hire a closer. You look at your company and you see that there are now two people selling, the CEO and the newly hired close. You also have the junior person to do the lead generation.  Think of smaller steps instead of going too quickly and hiring the wrong individuals in the process.  The social media is always surrounded by stories of fast success but the reality in sales and in business is that it takes years before you get to the top.  Everyone is struggling especially entrepreneurs because it's your job to struggle and solve problems. So the next time you are discouraged, just remember that many others are in the same boat. #Entrepreneur “Impossible to Inevitable” episode resources Connect with Aaron Ross on LinkedIn and check out his website Predictable Revenue.  You can also reach out to Donald for your sales concerns and interesting stories via LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.  This episode is brought to you in part by TSE Certified Sales Training Program. It's a course designed to help new and struggling sellers to master the fundamentals of sales and close more deals. Sign up now and get the first two modules for free! You can also call us at (561) 570-5077. Our next semester starts on November 8 and we would love to have you.  The episode is also brought to you by Sales Live Miami. It's an event put on by a group of friends and it's designed to help sellers and sales leaders improve their sales game. It's going to be this November 4-5, 2019 in Miami, Florida. Come and join us. You can find more about this event on The Sales Evangelist website.  We want you to join us for our next episodes so tune in to our podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and Spotify. You can also leave comments, suggestions, and ratings to every episode you listen to.  Read more about sales or listen to audiobooks at Audible as well and explore this huge online library. Register now to get a free book and a 30-day free trial.  Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound.

Lots of marketers talk about the importance of backlinks, but few have solid processes for earning them at scale. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Liam Martin digs into the details of the backlinking process he's been using to 10X organic traffic to his business websites, including Time Doctor and Staff.com.   If you're serious about SEO and understand the importance of backlinks, this episode is for you. Liam gets into a lot of specifics about how he hires his team of researchers and linkers, what they're paid, how they're incentivized to get links, and how he tracks performance. He also shares the copywriting formula he uses to convince other sites to link to his.  So many actionable takeaways that anyone can use to build their own backlinking strategy! Highlights from my conversation with Liam include: At the time Liam started building his backlinking strategy, he'd been blogging for three or four years and had a domain ranking of around 60. Today, his sites have a domain ranking of 80, which is a significant improvement and an impressive ranking in its own right. They had been focusing on on-page SEO for quite some time and realized that if they were going to get serious, they'd need to do more off-page SEO.  Liam rebuilt his entire team to be able to focus on off-page SEO and today, he has a sales team focused specifically on getting links.  Liam is the CMO and has two people (an Editor and SEO Manager) who report to him. Under them, there are writers, researchers and linkers. Once they identify keywords they want to target, their researchers try to find the content that current ranks at the top of the search engine results pages for that keyword, and identify the email addresses and names of the authors of that content. They will not carry out a backlinking campaign unless they have at least 500 emails. Once the emails are identified, they are sent to the team of linkers, who are the people that conduct the outreach to the authors that they would like backlinks from.  His team has a 15 to 20% conversion rate on the emails they send out. To incentive his team, Liam developed a compensation system that rewards linkers based on the domain authority of the links they get. He has found that listicles and statistical articles get the most backlinks. Because his team is remote and located all over the world, Liam spends time each quarter auditing some of the emails they are sending out to make sure they are on-brand.  In the two years that Liam and his team have been executing this strategy, they've gone from getting just a few links a month to getting hundreds of links a month, all while improving domain authority and organic traffic considerably. Resources from this episode: Check out the Time Doctor and Running Remote websites Subscribe to the Running Remote YouTube Channel Connect with Liam on LinkedIn Follow Liam on Twitter Join the Running Remote Community Group Follow Liam on Instagram Get in touch with Liam at liam@timedoctor.com or liam@runningremote.com  Listen to the podcast to get the step-by-step backlinking strategy that Liam Martin and his team use to build domain authority and grow organic traffic. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. This week, my guest is Liam Martin, who's the co-founder and CMO of Time Doctor, Running Remote Conference, and Staff.com. Welcome, Liam. Liam Martin (Guest): Thanks for having me. Liam and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: I am excited to talk to you because I got an email from somebody who said that you had increased your organic traffic from 12,000 to 120,000 in under two years, which is a big jump. When I hear things like that, my first thought is "I want to talk to this guy and find out how he did it." About Liam Martin Kathleen: Before we jump into that, though, I want to hear a little bit more about you and your journey, and how you wound up where you are today, and talk to me about what these various companies and events are all about. Liam: Sure. Well, first of all, before we get into that, I didn't do it. Other people did it, which is actually the only way that you can do this, which we can talk about later on. So, human being, more specifically, human being on Planet Earth, more specifically in Canada, I am a co-founder of, as you said, Time Doctor, Staff.com and Running Remote, and those all kind of tie into a singular concept, which is we really want to empower people to be able to work wherever they want, whenever they want. So, we personally have a hundred remote employees in 32 different countries all over the world, and we believe that working remotely makes people happier. It reduces global suck on Planet Earth, and that's really why we do everything that we're currently doing with Time Doctor, Staff and Running Remote. Kathleen: I have to just say before you go on to the next thing, I so wholeheartedly endorse that because I have been working remotely for the last two years at a company where 60% of the team is remote, and I manage a team of eight people, and I think five of us are remote. It has not been detrimental at all to our effectiveness. So, 100% agree. Liam: It will even get better once everyone goes remote. There is a, what in the industry we call a double silo effect, or founder magic problem, which is if you have a physical office, and then you have remote employees, a lot of those remote employees feel disempowered to be able to make the same decisions as the local employees, because they're closer to the decision maker. That's actually really problematic, which is why I'm in one of my crash pads right now. We used to have eight. Now we have two because they were just so ineffective for us in terms of having office space. Even when there's four to five people in this office, and we're going to do a meeting, we all do meetings on our own Zoom accounts. So, we all meet separately to be able to make sure that everyone has the perception that we are all separate, because those remote employees will definitely feel left out if everyone's kind of around me, who is the decision maker. It creates significant long-term problems in terms of your business. Kathleen: I love that, because it puts everybody on an even playing field, and as somebody who has been remote, I can speak to that, the power of that, absolutely. It makes a huge difference. Liam: But we're here to talk about SEO. Right? Kathleen: Yes. Liam's SEO strategy Liam: So, basically, the entire SEO content strategy came from our belief that you can effectively build a content team with remote workers, and they can be as effective, if not more effective than an in-house team. So, we had basically been kind of playing around with blogging for maybe three to four years, and we had built up to maybe a DR, I'd say 60 sites, and for everyone that maybe people don't know, DR is domain rank on Ahrefs and SEO Moz. You'll be able to- Kathleen: 60 is really good. Liam: Yeah. 60 is pretty good. I think we're an 80 now, so we definitely moved up a few pegs, and it's all exponential. So, a 60 to a 70 is 10 times harder than a 50 to a 60, as an example. So, we had built that site up to about a 60, and then we realized, well, we need to get really serious about this. One of the things that we weren't paying attention to fundamentally was our off-page. So, we were doing a whole bunch of on-page. We knew how to optimize for that, and again, for anyone that is not really knowing what the heck I'm talking about, on-page is basically where you change the on-page factors of a website, and off-page is where you bring in new backlinks to a particular web page. So, we had basically rebuilt the entire team off of that premise. So, we built a sales team, which instead of getting deals, they would get links. We implemented a technology stack behind that. So, fundamentally, the way the team is structured right now is I am still the CMO, so I review two individually that directly report to me, which is the content editor and the SEO manager. The content editor has a team of about 20 writers that we all have on contract. Me, the SEO manager, and the content editor, we meet every quarter to be able to define all of the different keywords for the next quarter. We identify those keywords through Ahrefs. That's what we use to be able to do all of our SEO research. Then those particular keywords are sent out to the writers. We pre-vetted all those writers, so we know exactly what kind of quality of work they can produce. Those articles come back to the SEO manager. Then the SEO manager has his team, which is we have linkers and researchers. So, usually we'll have one researcher to every two linkers. The researcher will identify... Let's say I'm trying to rank for online collaboration tools, which we're number one for, which is about a $36 click. We also identify very clearly when we're trying to figure out our quarterly numbers or our quarterly keywords, what are we looking for. So, we may not be looking for the end traffic number. So, if we really wanted to, we could probably get a million clicks coming to the website per month, but they'd be really non-valuable clicks for us. So, online collaboration tools is a $36 click, which is very expensive, and I think it has about 2,000 searches a month. That one keyword probably does $60,000 to $70,000 worth of traffic value to the website per month. We identify that keyword. We get our researcher to basically go in and identify who are the top people in the SERPs, and then who are those top people in the SERPs that other people are linking to. We do not proceed on a keyword unless we have about 500 emails that are contextual, that are all set up. The email then goes to the linkers. So, the researcher basically researched the data, and then the linker is kind of the closer. They'll go out and say, "Hey, I need to... Hi, Kathleen. This is Liam from Time Doctor. Really excited about chatting with you today. I saw this article about X, Y, Z, about online collaboration tools. I saw that you linked to it in this context. I think I have a better link that I can redirect to you, or I would love it if you linked to my website as well, to this web page as well. However, we've looked through your site, and we've identified that you're really trying to rank for Starbucks coffee cups," as an example. "It looks like you're ninth for that, and we just happen to have an article about Starbucks coffee cups, and we put you in it. Here's the link that we gave you." Then that is really the big jump that we basically had, which was I get about 40 to 50 of these a week, of people that are just doing cold outreach emails. Fundamentally, the success rate on those, because we used to be doing those, were about 2% to 3%. Now we get about 15% to 20% success rate, because what we've done is we're actually giving out a link. So, we're telling them, "Listen. We've given you a link. Here's the context of that link, and more importantly, I'm going to make this super easy for you. We'd love to be able to be in this article. Here's the paragraph that we've already pre-written for you. So, if you want to just cut and paste and throw that in, you can absolutely do it. If not, you can write something else." Those definitely work for what I would define as the DR 50-plus range, because there's two different categorizations of the way that we do outreach. So, if someone has a domain rank of above 50, it's probably a multi-email exchange, so basically, those linkers need to act like salespeople. So, they need to be able to communicate very clearly through email. The average exchange for us is seven email exchanges before we actually end up working on a partnership. So, it's pretty intense, but it definitely works. As I said, it's a 15% to 20%, basically, conversion rate. Kathleen: Wow. All right. I have so many questions for you. This is really interesting to me, and to back up, backlinks is a topic that I think is fascinating as a marketer. I've been in this business for a long time on the agency side. I've worked with some really savvy marketers, and it has been very surprising to me how many of them give little to no credence or effort to backlinking strategies. They either discount- Liam: I mean, they're in trouble then. Kathleen: I know, I know. They discount the value of backlinks altogether, or they understand conceptually that they're valuable, but they don't put any effort into it. They just sort of wait for backlinks to happen organically. In some cases that happens, depending upon the type of content you create, but in other cases it doesn't. It's always been interesting to me because when you read online about backlinking, there's a ton of content about why it's important. There's not a ton of content about how to actually go about doing it well. So, this is why I'm really interested to dig into this. Liam: The other part that's really important that's connected to this is you can run these campaigns, but at least in my experience, I see the majority of them fail. So, if you go to an agency, a DR 50 link is going to cost you about $500, generally, $300 to $500. Our cost is, I believe last month it was $36 per DR 50-plus link, so a significant cost reduction, and that's just, basically, I know that agencies are running these links, and they're acquiring them for $36, but then they're selling them on for $300 to $500. So, it's actually very profitable to be able to do this type of work, but you're right. There's isn't that much value inside of it because I think a lot of people try and fail. How Liam holds his team accountable for backlinks Liam: So, what we did, which was different, is we didn't just implement these processes. We also made everyone accountable to these processes. It was very difficult to be able to get the right measure in place because, as an example, let's just say I said, "Well, I need to find out how many backlinks you're going to get. I'm going to measure your success by how many backlinks you get." If you're a linker, what you're going to do is you're going to approach a whole bunch of DR 10 sites, because those are really easy to be able to get backlinks on. We just got a backlink last week from Salesforce. It's a DR 89 site. It's very, very powerful as a backlink. It's probably worth a thousand DR 10s, as an example. So, how am I supposed to reward someone for working on a month-and-a-half to be able to build a really, to be able to link to a DR 89 when instead you could probably, in that same amount of time, get 10 DR 10 backlinks? Well, what we implemented was cumulative domain authority. So, in essence, what happens is at the end of the month, we count up not how many backlinks you got, we look at that measure as well, but then we also measure the amount of DR you got inside of all of those links. So, if you got a backlink from Salesforce, which was 89, you'd get 89 points, and then if you got a regular website that was a DR 11, you'd get 11 points. So, 89 plus 11, that's now your new score. You got 100 points, and let's keep going on through the week and the month. Then we just pay that out based off commission. So, literally, the top linker for that month gets a cash bonus, which they're always fighting for. What type of content is most likely to get backlinks? Kathleen: I bet. So, I want to back up for a second. You start, you identify the keywords that you want to rank for. You're creating all this content. Are there any particular types of content that you find perform better in terms of other people being willing to link to them? Liam: Yes. So, as an example, Time Doctor is a time tracking tool. It's pretty boring. No one really wants to link to time tracking blog posts, so it's very... We also have another category, which is our golden list. So, we usually have a floating list of five pages that if someone owes us a favor, we'll ask them to link to that. So, it might be something super boring, like maybe one of our integration pages, and we want to rank number one for Asana time tracking. That would be an example. No one really wants to link to the Asana time tracking page, so we would throw that up there. But outside of that, listicles, those are the ones that end up converting better than anything else, and they're very easy to be able to get links for if you're doing direct outreach. Outside of that, however, there are the statistical articles, which are basically just link juice. So, we do a lot of articles, like we tracked 10 million work hours, and here's what we found, that type of stuff. You don't even really need to do link building for that, primarily because, number one, they're going to acquire links on their own, and number two, it's very difficult to be able to optimize them for a particular keyword that we would end up seeing as a purchaser's keyword, as a buying keyword, which is a little bit unfortunate. But you can write those types of articles to basically raise your general domain rank, but you're not necessarily going to rank for anything in particular. So, you might write 10 of those, as an example, and maybe your domain rank will go from 80 to 82, whereas if you had written 10 very focused keywords for conversion, you might get an extra 50 customers a month, but your domain rank is not going to go up. Kathleen: Yeah. That makes sense. It's interesting you talk about kind of data-packed articles, because in my experience, the type of content that we've seen perform really well from an organic backlinking perspective is infographics, and that tends to be because they have a lot of data behind them, and they're easy to share, and people like to pop them into other articles and things like that, but yeah. Building a backlinking team Kathleen: So, you create this content, and then you have this team of people. You mentioned having researchers and linkers. Can you talk a little bit more about how you found those people, and what kind of a profile are you looking for? Liam: Sure. So, for anyone that kind of wants context on this, I would suggest you read From Impossible to Inevitable... Aaron Ross is the author. From Predictable to Inevitable. Darn, can't remember the name of it. Kathleen: One of those two. Liam: Just Google Aaron Ross, and read his book. He was the guy that took basically Salesforce to a hundred million a year, and his model was to divide... His big kind of aha moment was dividing a sales rep from a lead generator. So, that was a big, huge sort of moment in sales, which was people that talked to other human beings should generally not be doing the research to be able to find those leads, and by dividing those two tasks, he was able to significantly improve the productivity of his team. I'm just implementing the same thing for SEO. So, we have a researcher that literally goes out and identifies not just, as I said before, let's say the top 20 on SERP results for a particular keyword, but we'll use a tool like Ahrefs to go into those SERPs or into those links, and we'll see who linked to those people, and that's where we amass our list. We do not proceed with running a campaign unless we have a minimum of 500 emails to work with. Kathleen: So, let me pause you for a second. Let's just, for argument's sake, say your keyword is remote work. I'm just going to make this up. So, you have this keyword, remote work. You've created content, and then you say to your researcher, "Go do your thing," and they take the words remote work, and they're looking at who is already ranking for that keyword phrase. Is that accurate? Liam: Yeah. So, I'm just going to use the direct example that you just sent me right now. Kathleen: Awesome. Liam: So, the first article, or the first URL for remote work is We Work Remotely, who's actually... We know these guys. They're good friends of ours. They have a DR 74 site, and they have about $250,000 of monthly traffic value. So, they have to their main page 1,200 referring domains. Kathleen: And you're seeing this all in Ahrefs, correct? Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, all I would do is I would then grab that list, I would identify everyone that has actually linked to that base domain from that list, and then I would load it into another tool that we have called BuzzStream. BuzzStream is basically the tool that we use for outreach. So, we load everyone into that, and then it gives you the context of all of the conversations that have occurred. So, once we load those new 1,200 people into BuzzStream, we might identify that we've already actually spoken to about 273 of those people, and here's the context of one of those linkers that interacted with them. So, I can also give you context, which is, "Hey, Kathleen. This is Liam. I know that you spoke to John a couple months ago about link X, Y, Z, but I would love to talk to you about link A, B, C," so that people have that context, and they know, "Oh, okay. I'm actually being listened to," and that just allows us to be able to automate the process a lot faster and easier. So, once that's actually all loaded in, then we'll usually have some templates that we've already worked from, but usually inside of those templates there's customization that goes into every single link that goes out. We do not let a non-customized email go out for anyone that's below a DR 50. We've just found there's kind of... That's the line that we've drawn, which is there are people that get these emails all the time, like me, and there are people that don't. Usually, the ones that don't are pretty easy to be able to knock off, and the ones that are a lot more difficult, you need to have context, and you need to be able to float above everyone else, because think of... I'm that person. In my inbox today, there were probably about... I think I saw about a dozen of these types of cold outreach emails, and none of them really work because they're asking for something, and they're not giving me anything in exchange. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm that person, too. I get a lot of those emails, which is part of the reason I was excited to talk to you, because I'm like, I want to talk to somebody for whom this is actually working, because I know most of the ones I get, it doesn't work. But to back up for a second, you get the list from Ahrefs of domains that are linking to, in this case, We Work Remotely, and you're putting... Am I correct that you're putting those referring domains into BuzzStream? Liam: So, what we'll do is we'll find out who is the author that actually linked to that particular article. Kathleen: Oh, okay. Liam: So, did it come from a blog post, or did it come from a base domain? Wherever the link came from, we try to hunt down who the author was, because we want to talk to a human being, and then we redirect that back over. So, that takes a while. That's why you need researchers to be able to do that. I would probably say a good researcher can knock out something... Let's say we're just going to take all that data and crunch it into BuzzStream. Out of those thousand people, BuzzStream will probably only figure out about half, and then the other 50% will go through them and will throw out people that are DR 10, as an example, because it's just fundamentally not worth our time. We'll pay very special attention to everyone that's a DR 50 and above, and we'll do two to five minutes of research per person, and we'll just identify who they are, what we think their email address is, and then we'll do that outreach. Kathleen: So, talk to me a little bit more about how you find these researchers, and what kind of experience or background or profile are you looking for? Liam: Sure. So, we generally find these guys all over Planet Earth. Our researchers don't necessarily need to be good in the English language. They need to be good at doing research, so a lot of attention to detail, data entry people, data work, those are the people that we really look for. Fundamentally, we're looking for people that are excited about the grind, because it's a grind. I'm not going to tell you anything different. If you go to any sales floor, you'll have closers and you'll have SDRs. Right? SDRs are the people that are basically developing the lead for the closer, for the actual salesperson, and they're doing the research on that. Those people grind out every single day. Usually, they'll do that for a year or two, and then they get upgraded to being a closer. So, we do the same thing inside of the company. Everyone has a passion for SEO, and that's actually another big just basic requirement, is a lot of people will come in and kind of say, "Well, I know how to do SEO, and I ranked this local," I don't know, "this local coffee shop for coffee in Timbuktu," or something like that, and they come in a little bit cocky, but then within a week or two, we just realize very quickly that they're somebody that should be a researcher, and not necessarily a linker as of yet. So, they'll spend about three to six months... Generally, some people, if we're trying to develop them as a linker, we'll usually have them be a researcher for the first three months, just so that we can see that they can do the grind, because if they can't, they're generally not going to stick around that long even as a linker. Then some people love to stay there for... We've had people that have worked with us for years as linkers. They love the job. Kathleen: If somebody's listening, and they're like, "I want to do this," how much should they expect to pay for a researcher? Is this an hourly job or... Liam: So, it really depends. We pay a base, and then we add a commission structure to the amount of researched individuals that end up actually converting, not converting, but that are actually legitimate. So, we'll do this research, and then someone will say, "Hey, it's definitely Kathleen, and this is Kathleen's email address," and it will end up bouncing, so that counts against their rate. So, generally for us, our researchers are all above 95%. I believe no one starts to get into commissions until they're above 97%, but that's generally the way that we run it. Those people would be anywhere from, I would say, 500 to 1,000 US per month per linker, and those guys are generally going to be found in the Philippines. You're going to be able to find some in Indonesia, maybe some in Bangladesh. However, in my opinion, you're going to pay a little bit more for people in the Philippines, but they are way more effective than people in those other countries in Southeast Asia. Kathleen: So interesting. Thank you for sharing all that detail. That's really helpful. Okay. So, we've talked about the researchers and what they do. So, they identify the opportunities, they find the email addresses, and then they turn that over to the linker. Correct? Liam: The linker, yeah. Kathleen: Got it. Liam: So, the linker the is very different from a researcher. They must have a very solid grasp of the English language because they can't just send a template. They have to be able to edit those things and communicate in the way that our target market, our target demographic, would actually communicate, which are generally people in Western countries. So, they would not say something like, "Hello, ma'am, Kathleen." They would say, "Hey, Kathleen. What's up? This is Liam from Time Doctor. Saw this article, thought it was really cool. Listen. You made a huge mistake. You didn't link to my article. No problem. I can totally solve that for you. Here's a paragraph of exactly how to link to me, and by the way, we saw inside of your site that you really want to link to Starbucks cups, and we know that we can totally figure that out for you. We already set up that link to be able to send out. Hope you're having a great day. Would love to be able to chat with you about the link," as an example. That would be the way that you would communicate, and that's going to get a much higher response rate than the over-formalized communication that generally you'll find with individuals from Southeast Asia in particular, and to a degree, sometimes in Eastern Europe. So, that team is actually a lot more distributed. We have some people in Southeast Asia. We have some people in Eastern Europe. We have some people in California. We actually have just implemented a much more serious team in Lagos, in Nigeria, for any of you that maybe have gotten this email a couple years ago or 10 years ago. You know, the Nigerian prince emails? Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. Liam: So, that doesn't work anymore, but these guys are email ninjas. They're absolutely amazing operators at figuring out how to be able to get a response from someone and communicating clearly. So, they're amazing, and a lot of them kind of want to go legit. So, they will work for a company like ours instead. Kathleen: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those guys did get people to respond to those Nigerian prince emails, so- Liam: Generally, it would be a .004% response rate, but that response rate would end up being something- Kathleen: Paying for the whole thing. Liam: Exactly. So, that's something that... Even with these direct emails outreach programs, they still do work, but they only have a conversion rate of about 2%. You want a convert rate of 15% to 20%. We found that we're a lot more cost-effective. I've spoken to some agencies, and they probably work out a link to about a hundred dollars per person, and it's because they just don't take the time to be able to build context. The other added advantage to building context is you don't just get one link from that person. You may get five or six over two years, because you have that personal context, and I've got all that context in BuzzStream, so I can bring it up whenever I want, and Kathleen remembers this interaction that we had seven months ago, as an example. How to conduct backlink research Kathleen: So, you talked about when you do this outreach to... Let's say I'm your recipient, and you do this outreach to me, and you say, "I know that you're trying to get found for terms like Starbucks cups." Who is doing that research, how are they doing it, and how are they identifying that that's the goal of the recipient? Liam: So, I would slot your domain directly into Ahrefs, and I would identify what are the top links that you're trying to work for, and there's two categories. There's kind of like a top three. So, usually people that rank first to third, you're not really going to be able to change their lives in any significant way in terms of that particular keyword. It's usually quite competitive, or it's a branded term. The ones that we really like to go after are the seven-to-10 space. So, those are the keywords that they're probably working on, and maybe they actually only launched that article three months ago or six months ago, and they're trying to work on it, and we can see they're trying to work on it, because let's say there's five or six referring domains into it, and we'll say, "Yeah. We'll just put a link in there. We'll just link from our site to your site." They understand the value of a DR 80 link, which is actually quite funny because a lot of the times we get outreach from, let's say, a DR 65-plus website, and my first response is, "I'm interested, but I'd love a link back." The smart ones say, "Of course," and the stupid ones say, "Well, I don't have the authority to be able to do that." Well, just for anyone that's listening, do that, because that's going to convince me... You're talking to an SEO person, and I'm not going to link to a DR 60 if I'm a DR 80, if I'm not getting anything back. Right? So, that's really something that I just don't understand that's not happening in the industry, because for us, we're very happy to be able to give out those links. We see that as kind of just... We do it before we ask for anything back. In that introductory email, "By the way, here's a DR 80 link. Really happy to see if we could work in a deeper way," and if they don't want to work with us, that link stands. Asking for backlinks Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. So, there's that element of reciprocity. Okay. So, they have this data, they know what they're trying to link for. You've talked about how these emails are crafted. I'm curious. You talked about sometimes it's seven emails back-and-forth. What's happening in those seven emails? Because it seems like the way you're putting these emails together, it's fairly straightforward. You've laid out all the context. You've given them the paragraph of text. I mean, at that point, it would seem to me, as somebody who gets these emails all the time, that they either say, "Okay. Yeah, I'm going to drop it in. Here it is," or, "No." So, what happens in that back-and-forth? Liam: So, there's a couple main kind of categories of things that happen. One of the things that happen, particular on really powerful sites, is, "Hey, Kathleen. Not a problem. Links are $500 a pop, and here's the context." Then we have to go back saying, "Listen. We don't pay for links. We're just looking to be able to have you link to our website, and we've already linked to your website. Here's our stats." So, we literally pull in, "Here's our Ahrefs data. We'd love to be able to see if we could work on a deeper partnership together." That's one major category. Kathleen: Got it. Liam: Another one is no one really has the authority to be able to make that decision. So, sometimes we actually contact someone who is, let's say, a blogger that's maybe done piecework for that blog, and they say, "I don't care because I wrote that article six months ago, and thanks for reaching out, but I don't really care." Well, then we have to say, "Well, do you know who's in charge right now? Could you let me know?" Then we're going to get access to that person. Then we, in essence, send the same email. Then the other ones end up actually just turning into larger partnerships. So, we'll actually say, "Well, maybe we shouldn't just work on this link exchange. Maybe we should also do a webinar together, or maybe we should do something else together." So, all of the linkers have full authority to be able to build at least the framework for those partnerships, and then it gets approved by me. Keeping the team on-brand Kathleen: Okay. So, this is super interesting. You have all these people distributed all over the world, and you're giving them, really, a lot of leeway in terms of the way they communicate with these other domain owners or authors or bloggers, et cetera. My first question is, do you ever worry that the way that they communicate or the things they say are going to kind of go outside of your typical brand voice or have some kind of negative ramification on your company or your brand? Liam: Absolutely. So, we do spot-check auditing on all of the emails that are going out, and we're really fast and responsive to... We have a lot of linkers on the team. I think we have dozens on the team altogether at this point. So, a friend of mine said, "Well, do you know who this person is?" I said, "No, I don't know who that person... It doesn't ring a bell to me." "Oh. Well, they just emailed me from Time Doctor saying they want a link." So, we need to be mindful about that, and he actually said, "This is probably one of the best cold email outreaches I've ever gotten," which was great for us, but I need to be able to be mindful of that context to make sure that there aren't negative implications on the brand. So, the way that we do that is audit the process. So, I'll even do randomized auditing of just... I'll look at every quarter maybe 10 emails from each linker, and that doesn't take me more than a minute or two to kind of float through, and then our SEO manager also makes sure that all of this stuff is being monitored properly. We're also really looking at... So, we're always trying new things, new titles, new copy templates, and we share that information amongst ourselves. So, in that process, a lot of this... We had an article just recently, or an ad just recently that went out that got really good attention. It got a really fantastic click-through rate, but it also got a lot of hate. So, we have to understand what's the difference between trying to get someone's attention and trying to get someone's attention and then hating it. We need to be able to draw that line. Tracking backlink performance Kathleen: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, that was going to be my next question, was how do you keep track of it all, but it sounds like you've got processes in place, you have a team in place. Liam: Yeah. We do the quarterly audit. We make sure that our SEO manager is managing all those linkers very quickly and efficiently, and then we're always exchanging information. We literally do a weekly meeting about what's all the new split tests that we've tried. So, every linker is also responsible for implementing a test every week, I believe, inside of their copy. So, they're basically always optimizing their outreach, and then we come back, and we do some more learnings. We also make sure that everyone's reading all the industry news for SEO and all that kind of stuff, so that if there are some interesting new insights, we can implement those as well. The impact of backlinks on SEO and traffic Kathleen: Interesting. So, I'm fascinated by this whole process, but I want to shift gears for a second and talk about results. You've touched on this a little bit in terms of response rates and things, but let's just go back and recap now. So, this is a process you've been doing for how long? Liam: We've been doing it for about two years. I think if anyone actually wants to jump into Moz or Ahrefs, you'll pretty much see the exact point in which we started doing it because we were going from getting, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred links a month to getting, or sorry, getting a couple dozens links a month to getting a couple hundred links a month. So, we literally just- Kathleen: Can you send me a screenshot of that? Because I would love to put that in my show notes. Liam: Yeah, sure. No problem. Kathleen: That would be awesome. So, you've been doing that for that amount of time. Talk me through, again, your response rates, what this has done to traffic, how the links have grown. Liam: Yeah. So, the bigger thing that we've really seen is general increase in domain authority. That's been the thing that's allowed us to... So, as an example, if we talk about remote work on Time Doctor, Google's generally going to give us the benefit of the doubt. So, they're automatically going to say, "These guys blog about this stuff all the time. They really are a trusted source in that particular niche, so we're going to give it more traffic than we would a DR 10 site that's never written about remote work or outsourcing ever before," and that's really the huge advantage, is a lot of this stuff is quite disingenuous when I discuss it because we're currently at the point in which the snowball effect has really taken hold, so Google already really trusts us. If you're a brand new person with absolutely no links whatsoever, I'm going to tell you, this is going to take about six months before you really start to see dividends, but however, I would say, and this is a bold claim, but I would say over a 10-year period, so if you plan on owning a business for more than 10 years, SEO is the absolute best cost-per-dollar advertising method known to mankind. It is better than, in my opinion, viral traffic, because those are spikes, whereas this is continuous long-term traffic that is going to be so cost-effective, it is probably 60% of our overall funnel, and we spend as much money as we possibly can on Facebook ads and everything else, and we just constantly come back to SEO because it's just such a return on investment. Kathleen: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, and I would agree with that. That's one of the things at IMPACT that we're really fortunate... We have a tremendous amount of organic traffic, and it has saved us a lot of money in not needing to advertise. Liam: I almost see it as it's an investment that produces dividends, whereas a Facebook ad, as an example, is you're going to get conversions now, and those are going to be great. You're going to get a conversion this month. Those numbers will probably work, right? You put in a hundred bucks, and maybe you make 110 bucks. But with SEO, you're going to put in a hundred bucks this month, and maybe you're going to get a dollar back this month, but then next month you're going to get two, and then four, and then eight, and then 16, and if you continuously put in that hundred dollars every single month, you're going to start to create fantastic dividends. Kathleen: Yeah. I always talk about it as the difference between renting a house and buying a house. When you rent your house, you stop paying rent, you get evicted, and you got no value. Liam: Yeah. Well, you're renting the traffic. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah, exactly. So, fascinating. All right. Well, so interesting. I could talk to you about this forever, and I love the amount of detail we've been able to go into, but we're going to run out of time. So, two questions that I always ask all of my guests, the first is... We talk a ton about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really doing inbound well right now? Liam: Yeah. I thought about that quite a bit, and my original response was HubSpot, just because their SEO game is so strong, and they blog about everything. If you throw them into a tool like Ahrefs or Moz, which is generally how I see websites today, they will blog about kitchen utensils, as an example. They just want traffic with a big capital T. So, I've recognized that has been really interesting. The other website that I would talk about, which is relatively new, and it's not really a website, but it's more like an app, is Wish.com. So, I don't know if you've ever encountered that e-commerce site before, but they've, in essence, built an app that's gamified e-commerce. So, think of it almost like an Amazon, but it's a video game. So, it's Amazon, but it's a video game, and what they're doing is they're doing a lot of SEO traffic to be able to bring in a free lead, and then they are doing a lot of retargeting into the game again. So, they'll say, "Hey, webcams are 95% off today only," and it's a Facebook ad, and when you click on it, you're brought into the Wish app. So, it's a very interesting process, and they've, in essence, taken the architecture and the mechanics of the video game world for mobile games, and they've moved that into an e-commerce platform. When I look at their numbers and how much money they're spending, it boggles the mind. I think that they are doing the same thing that Amazon did back in the early 2000s where Amazon bought... I mean, they were the number one customer for Google, I believe, Google Search, for eight or nine years. They did that because they knew there was such a massive arbitrage opportunity to be able to shift all of that traffic off of Google, which honestly should've built their own e-commerce platform, and they're moving it into Amazon, and now they've built one of the largest companies on Planet Earth. So, I would check out Wish.com, even just install the app, and then just see how they interact with you, because I think it's genius. Kathleen: So interesting. I can't wait to check that one out. Second question, the thing I hear from most marketers is that the world of digital marketing is just changing so quickly, it's really hard to keep up. There's so much information coming at you. How do you personally stay up-to-date and make sure that you're still kind of on the cutting edge? Liam: I hire experts in every domain who think about this stuff morning, noon and night, and I pay them a ridiculous amount of money to talk to me for about an hour or two a month. Kathleen: I like it. Liam: So, I have one client, I have an SEO consultant, and I pay this person $2,000 a month, and we have a one-hour conversation a month. Kathleen: Oh, my god. Can I get a job doing that for you for one hour? Liam: This guy is the guy that does- Kathleen: That's a great deal. Liam: ... industrial-level SEO. He's built sites that you would definitely know of. He's managed teams of hundreds of SEOs in single shops, and he's someone who's very passionate about this particular subject. So, for me, I can then take the context, and I usually have myself, my SEO manager, and my content editor on that call, and then he looks at what we've done over the last month, what the goals are for the next month and in the next quarter and in the next year. He's also able to make course corrections that we are not mindful of. So, as an example, let's say our yearly goal is we want to get 10,000 referring domains. Let's throw that out into the air. I think we've got about 5,000 active referring domains, and we have 11,000 historical referring domains right now. So, we want to do 10,000 active referring domains within the next year. Well, what do you need to actually get to that target? Then we identify what we need to do to get to that target. Okay. Then at the end of the day, he'll boil it down to, "Well, you're currently doing 10 blog posts a month. You need to ratchet up to 68 blog posts a month if you want to hit that particular target." So, what's the architecture that we need to be able to implement to be able to hit that target? That's the kind of stuff that I am somewhat not very mindful of, and I should actually be a lot more. As the CMO, I should really be directing the ship in that type of direction, but these consultants that have done it before, they're the ones that I really go to for that type of expertise. Kathleen: Yeah, makes sense. Liam: Yeah. How to connect with Liam Kathleen: Well, this has been fascinating. I have learned so much. If somebody is listening, and they have a question, they want to learn more about you, the work you're doing, or they want to check out some of the companies that you're involved with, what's the best way for them to do that? Liam: You want to check out Time Doctor, go to timedoctor.com. If you want to talk with me, this is another kind of side idea that I have, which is I think that YouTube is actually probably going to be the next place for SEO, so I'm doing some experimentation on YouTube. So, if you go to youtube.com/runningremote, you'll be able to find me, and you'll be able to find a whole bunch of videos. All of our stuff from our Running Remote Conference is free, and we just post everything up there, so you can consume as much as you want from it. But if you put in a comment, I will interact with you within the hour. So, that's the source that I really want to kind of put all of my eggs into because I believe that YouTube is Google 10 years ago, and there's a massive opportunity right now. It's the second-largest search engine in the world, and people actually, instead of just getting a blog post and someone looking at it for 35 seconds, even if they're looking at my stupid face for 35 seconds, it gives you more context, and it allows you to know, hey, this is who I am. You might want to buy some stuff from me in the future. Kathleen: I feel like next year I'm going to have to reach out to you again, and we'll do another interview on the results of your YouTube experiment. Liam: For sure. Kathleen: Awesome. Well, thank you for all of that. I will put all those links in the show notes, so if you're interested in reaching out to Liam, check out the show notes, and you should be able to get in touch with him there, or check out Time Doctor. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening, and you've learned something new, you liked what you heard, please leave the podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That is how we get found by new listeners, and if you know somebody who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, please tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. Thanks so much. That's it for this week. Thank you, Liam. Liam: Thanks for having me.

We chat to Founder Coach, Dave Bailey, on how he helps CEO’s move their companies from scale-up to success. First published at https://www.get5.io/podcast/14-dave-bailey-what-it-takes-ceo-scale-up-companies Timestamp notes: 0.23 — Dave introduces himself. 1.00 — How Dave got into the Coaching business. 2.59 — What is Dave’s №1 regret? 3.12 — Dave’s coaching process. 3.39 — When is a good time to get a coach? 5.00 — Why every startup needs a Chief of Staff. 10.55 — The bias against HR. 14.23 — What to look out for when hiring a Chief of Staff. 18.10 — Dave’s view on company culture. What stops companies from innovating? 23.25 — How to increase self-knowledge. 30.50 — An average day for Dave. 31.56 — What is Dave reading? From Impossible to Inevitable (Ross & Lemkin), The Success Formula (Andrew Kakabadse), books about mental models. His best recent read is Attached: The Science of Adult Attachment(Levine & Heller). 35.00 — Software he uses daily? Productivity tool: Rev.com (audio transcription). Automation tool: Zapier to automate manual tasks. Recording tool: Loom as a low-friction, asynchronous alternative to text, and great for a remote team. 40.18 — How to reach Dave: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn, Website

Predictable Revenue co-CEO and founder Aaron Ross joined host Greg Moore to talk about how building an SDR model using inside and outside sales guides sales leaders to growth that's scalable and sustainable. Aaron also talks about how he's implemented a 25-hour work week to spend more time with his family, including nine kids, while running a company, writing best-selling books, including From Impossible to Inevitable, and speaking about sales all over the world.

From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue 2nd Edition by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin  Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/impossible-inevitable-2nd-edition-aaron-ross Break your revenue records with Silicon Valley’s “growth bible” “This book makes very clear how to get to hyper-growth and the work needed to actually get there” Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth. From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like Hubspot, Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company), and EchoSign—aka Adobe Document Services (which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records. Pinpoint why you aren’t growing faster Understand what it takes to get to hypergrowth Nail a niche (the #1 missing growth ingredient) What every revenue leader needs to know about building a scalable sales team There’s no time like the present to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster. Find out how now!

From Impossible to Anything is Possible with Croix Sather "Dream so big it inspires you. Act so big it inspires the world."Are you ready to be inspired? Are you ready to live your dream?100 days a marathon a day from San Diego to New York City. Croix Sather ran across America. "Anything is possible. Each one of you has a gift. It is a seed of greatness." "If you give up on your dream you are giving up on your self."There is no way you cannot be moved by this podcast. I stopped breathing listening to his story. I did not want to miss a sentence or a word. You will be in awe of his story - more of his spirit. It is my honor to present this podcast to you. PLEASE share this and rate it in iTunes. Listen over and over again. You will be inspired everyday to do something amazing.Free book from Croixwww.freedreambigbook.comwww.CroixSather.comhttps://www.facebook.com/croixManifest Your Dreams with Emotional Freedom Techniqueshttps://www.udemy.com/manifest-your-d...www.JoanKaylor.comLIKE Joan on Facebook: http://bit.ly/JoanFacebookSUBSCRIBE to Joan on YouTubehttp://bit.ly/YouTubeJoanKaylorFOLLOW Joan on Twitter, Instagramhttp://www.twitter.com/@joankaylorhttp://www.instagram.com/joankaylor

Subscribe to Selling With Social Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Play | Google Podcasts Most B2B companies receive both inbound and outbound sales leads. But in most cases, those leads are being handled by the same team. My guest on this episode of #SellingWithSocial insists that assigning your inbound and outbound sales leads to two distinct and specialized teams will produce an amazing increase in qualified leads that translate into closed sales. Aaron Ross is the author of two incredibly helpful books, “Predictable Revenue” and “From Impossible to Inevitable.” He’s been teaching companies how to double or triple new sales for many years and he’s got the track record to prove he knows what he’s talking about. When he worked as part of the Salesforce team, he helped the company grow from $5m to $100m. Join us for this episode where we talk about common mistakes sales leaders and CEOs make when it comes to sales management, the biggest improvements you can make to your sales cadence, and how to separate your inbound and outbound sales teams to create higher closing ratios. Don’t miss it! , This episode is brought to you by Zubtitle. Automatically add captions to any video in minutes. Don’t let your videos get passed over on social media. Visit https://zubtitle.com/vengreso to get started. The Most Common Mistakes Sales Leaders Make Since Aaron has a great deal of experience working with highly successful sales organizations, I knew he’d be able to give us an overview of the mistakes most commonly seen among sales leaders. I asked him to highlight them for us. SALES MISTAKE #1: Salespeople in most companies are required to do their own prospecting, manage their own accounts, follow up on leads, schedule sales conversations, and close the deal. Aaron says that’s too many jobs for one person and what winds up happening is that the salesperson does some of them well and others only marginally. His solution? Create a sales team of specialists by creating specific roles that enable your team members to use their particular skills more effectively. Some examples of what he means... The people who are strong at prospecting should only prospect Those who are proven closers should only close Proven customer relationship managers should only manage accounts Those who are good at follow up should only follow up Do you get the point? Aaron likens this mistake to a soccer coach who says, “Ok, everybody score and everybody defend.” It simply doesn’t work, yet sales leaders do the equivalent with their teams and expect them to win. Apply Aaron's advice to set your team up for success. Why Your Inbound And Outbound Sales Teams Shouldn’t Be Combined As Aaron spoke about the mistakes sales leaders make that prevent their teams from closing more deals, he observed that most B2B sales organizations throw their inbound and outbound leads into the same bucket. This is what he characterizes as SALES MISTAKE #2. When inbound and outbound leads are combined you’re forced into handling them as if they were the same thing, but they aren’t. Aaron explains that the expectations you have of each of those types of leads are vastly different, therefore the prospects and metrics from each need to be separated so you can handle them differently. When you make it a point to organize your team around specialties, service and effectiveness rise throughout the buying cycle. Separating your inbound and outbound sales teams is part of how you do it. How To Create Distinct Inbound And Outbound Teams Aaron says the separation of inbound sales from outbound sales is just about as important as having a good CRM. As he walks through the explanation of what each of these distinct teams should be assigned to accomplish, I can see his point. The inbound team should be designated to handle all the inbound leads that come from website forms, 800 numbers, etc. - and they have a very specific job. They review prospects, make contact with them, and do the important work of qualifying them. Once that’s done, they only pass the legitimate leads to the sales team. This can happen in a relatively short amount of time. The outbound team has a very different job. They are expected to generate new incremental business through prospecting. This could be drumming up entirely new work for the company or discovering new ways to serve existing customers through additional products or services that complement what they are already doing. This team identifies targets, secures appointments, and passes the scheduled sales conversations to the sales team. This cycle takes 2 to 4 weeks to get a good appointment set up. As you can see, inbound and outbound are doing two entirely different things, so they should be broken into two teams that function in unique and independent ways. In Aaron’s words, “The two don’t mix.” Sales-Related Mistakes CEOs Often Make There are a number of phases every company goes through, but in every phase sales is the life-blood of the business. Aaron says that in both start-up and established companies, CEOs bear a great responsibility to ensure that sales are happening. He sees a handful of mistakes that CEOs make when it comes to sales... During the STARTUP PHASE, Aaron often witnesses CEOs who are not hands-on with sales cycles. This causes them to be unclear about what customers want, what they are buying, and how they are buying. When a top leader makes this mistake, it trickles down into the decisions they make about who to hire for sales roles. Closely related to that is that many start-up CEOs hire a senior salesperson too soon. His suggestion is to go slow, hiring a junior person first. Train them, get a few things in your sales cycle working well, then expand from there. Take smaller steps to get the sales team built. For LARGER COMPANIES, Aaron says that executives often fail to stay in touch with the metrics that inform them regarding how the sales process is working. One of the most important areas is that they often are not tracking whether a qualified pipeline is being created. In the end, Aaron admits that the problems change as you grow, but in every stage, you need to ask yourself, “Do you have the right people in the right roles - and are you getting metrics on how things are working?” Join us for this practical conversation. If you apply what Aaron shares you’ll experience positive changes in your sales organization. This episode is brought to you by Zubtitle. Automatically add captions to any video in minutes. Don’t let your videos get passed over on social media. Visit https://zubtitle.com/vengreso to get started. Outline of This Episode [1:53] Aaron Ross, CEO of Predictable Revenue, Inc. [7:20] How Aaron wound up at Salesforce and what he learned working there [10:38] The common mistakes sales leaders make [16:42] Why the customer success manager is becoming more and more important [20:45] The biggest mistakes CEOs make: Startup stage and Established companies [29:12] Why inbound and outbound need to be kept separate [35:02] When should your company create an SDR team? [39:08] Aaron’s homelife: 9 kids and another about to be adopted (and 4 dogs) Resources Mentioned Predictable Revenue, Inc - where Aaron serves as CEO Aaron on LinkedIn BOOK: Predictable Revenue BOOK: From Impossible, to Inevitable Aaron’s all-time favorite movie: Memento Salesforce Modern Marketing Engine Podcast - Bernie Borges Connect with Mario! www.vengreso.com On Facebook On Twitter On YouTube On LinkedIn Subscribe to Selling With Social Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Play | Google Podcasts

You‘ve got a problem. There are a lot of fantastic, important marketing books out there, but you don’t know which ones you should read next. You need to hear our next guest. Douglas Burdett is the host of The Marketing Book Podcast. (Forbes called it one of 11 podcasts that will keep you in the know.) We asked Burdett which books he’s recommending to marketing and business leaders right now and why. Buyer Personas by Adele Revella. “There are just five insights you need to understand your customer well,” said Burdett. “You don't have to do it perfectly. You just have to do it a little bit better than your competition.” They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. This is the story of a failing Florida pool company that saved their business by answering every pool question on their website. From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross. There are three types of lead generation activities that every fast-growing company should be doing. Ross calls them seeds, spears, and nets. The Convenience Revolution by Shep Hyken. The more you can do to reduce friction for your customers, the more successful you'll be.

Aaron Ross is the author of the award-winning, bestselling book Predictable Revenue. He has been teaching companies how to double or triple (and more) new sales since he helped Salesforce add an extra $100M+. In this episode, Aaron shares his breakthrough selling methods, key takeaways from his book and why salespeople should stop prospecting!   Here are some of the topics covered in this episode: How to specialize your sales team and create predictable revenue Sales metrics you need to track How to effectively use the referral technique How to structure your lead generation and closing funnel Aaron's 3-step lead generation strategy The ‘Layer of the Onion’ principle     You can listen to this episode on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you get your favorite podcast!   About the Guest: Aaron Ross is the Co-CEO at Predictable Revenue Inc., the "Outbound Success Company”. He is helping businesses build an outbound prospecting program that creates sales growth and scalable revenue. Before starting his company, he worked at Salesforce where he built a new tele-prospecting inside sales team and process (Cold Calling 2.0) from scratch that sourced $100m in recurring revenue for the company. Now he’s turned his attention to building the software platform that will power the next wave of Cold Calling 2.0 teams. Aaron is the author of the bestselling books “From Impossible to Inevitable” and “Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com”. As a highly ranked international speaker, Aaron speaks at conferences, Sales Kickoffs and Private Equity events, known for combining 'big picture' breakthrough and inspirational ideas with giving audiences hyper-tactical actions to take with them after. His speaking topics include scalable sales teams, creating predictable revenue, growth and innovation.   Website: https://predictablerevenue.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronross Twitter: @motoceo   Listen to more episodes of the Outside Sales Talk here and watch the video here!  

Tune into this episode with Aaron Ross to learn about the concept of employee ownership and owning, rather than renting, jobs. Whether you’re a business owner or an employee, this conversation provides valuable information about lifestyle design from a true expert on the subject. Aaron manages his time so well that he meets his financial obligations and professional commitments with a 25-hour work week. Join us, and learn how to go to the next level in your life. Find Out More About Aaron Here: Predictable Revenue Predictable University Aaron Ross on LinkedIn Aaron Ross on Twitter From Impossible to Inevitable In This Episode: [01:40] - Aaron starts off the conversation by talking about his background and his many children. He also addresses how much of his time he spends away from home versus with his family. [05:15] - It’s taken Aaron a lot of years to get to the point where he can make the money he needs from relatively few hours per week, he explains. [09:00] - We hear more about Aaron’s book From Impossible to Inevitable. [12:13] - Aaron elaborates on the concept of renting a job that he has been talking about, comparing it to the experience of owning versus renting a house or car. [14:39] - What does Aaron do when he has employees who are just there putting in the minimum not to get fired? [16:53] - We hear Aaron’s recommendations for careerists and CEOs, setting aside the clockers and complainers for the moment. [18:49] - Stephan and Aaron discuss some things that managers struggle with. Aaron then digs into what he calls forcing functions. [22:27] - Should you get rid of the complainers in your organization? [25:12] - Leaving your job because you’re working for a toxic person isn’t always easy, Aaron points out, and acknowledges that there are certain circumstances where you may need to stay for a while. [27:49] - Stephan talks about a recommendation that he got from Dr. John Demartini for the hiring process. [30:15] - Aaron talks about the StrengthsFinder test. [32:09] - We learn about the difference between earning money and creating money. [35:23] - What’s better: trying to do your side hustle and turn it into a business while you’re still employed, or quit your job and throw yourself into your business venture? [40:02] - Aaron discusses one of his exercises for increasing your deal size. [42:11] - We hear three pieces of advice for someone who is looking to go to the next level in their life. [44:37] - Where can listeners get in touch with Aaron to learn more about him or work with him? Links and Resources: Predictable Revenue Predictable University Aaron Ross on LinkedIn Aaron Ross on Twitter From Impossible to Inevitable From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler Salesforce Ephraim Olschewski on the Optimized Geek Tony Robbins Dr. John Demartini on the Optimized Geek StrengthsFinder DiSC Grant Cardone The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone

Aaron Ross, co-author of "Predictable Revenue", along with Mary Lou Tyler from episode 14, is back with a new book, "From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth companies create predictable revenue". Learn what Aaron had to learn the hard way about sales, and how he manages to write books, consult, and raise 12 kids.

Douglas Burdett Show Notes Host of The Marketing Book Podcast, Founder/Principal of ARTILLERY Douglas Burdett is Founder and Principal of ARTILLERY, a business-to-business marketing agency in Norfolk, Virginia, and is the host of The Marketing Book Podcast, which was named by LinkedIn as one of “10 Podcasts That Will Make You a Better Marketer.” Prior to starting his own firm, Douglas worked in New York City on Madison Avenue for 10 years at ad industry giants J. Walter Thompson and Grey Advertising. Before starting his business career, Douglas served as a U.S. Army artillery officer in Germany for three years and then earned an MBA. Most passionate about  I have a small marketing agency; used to be advertising oriented, and now it’s mainly content and Internet marketing oriented. I’m also the host of the Marketing Books Podcast, where each week I interview an author of a sales or a marketing book. What is your next step ? We would like to get more quality clients. That’s something we are always looking for, finding more ideal clients rather than any clients. And we create a lot of content. I’ve been listening to podcasts for many years. And I listened to marketing podcasts. It seems like podcasts are becoming a very strong tool and I was always very fascinated by authors. And one day, I saw on GoDaddy that the domain marketingbookspodcast.com was available and I took that as a sign from on high, and about two months later I was able to launch the show. I met some of the early guests of the shows at some book signing events. I made 11 videos to these authors, pitching them about become a guest on my show. To this point 10 of them were guests on the show; regarding the 11th, I’m still waiting for him to write another book. Who your Customers are ? The customers are usually small to medium sized businesses that sell premium products, in companies where a number of stakeholders are involved in the decisions and it’s a bit longer sales cycle than the average. It’s the complex Business-to-Business sales that we are looking to help with, through writing content for the sales people and helping the company to generate leads. I’m not using the podcast so much to generate business, although it helps; more for a professional development. I read each book before the interview, so it’s more than 150 books now and it’s like getting a Master’s Degree in sales, marketing, and modern business… I love doing it and I hope that enthusiasm and interest go through to the listeners. The people that listen to the podcast are quite a broad audience; I talk to people in all industries from many countries. There isn’t a full overlay between my company’s audience and the podcast’s listeners. In fact, there are a lot of startups and entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast that I don’t work with. Douglas’s best advice about approaching the customer I’m going to answer this question, of course, but I must sprinkle a lot of book recommendations through my answer… One of the best things a startup must do is understand who their customers are. A lot of startups maybe even approaching the wrong customers.  There is a terrific book about that called, The Buyer Persona (http://amzn.to/2vJx052) by Adele Riviera, it’s one of my favorite books. In marketing these days, despite what marketers will tell you, there isn’t a secret sauce any more. But I think your buyer is probably the closest to that. The book talks about the 5 rings of insights that you want to understand about your buyers. It has nothing to do with the product you are selling. Another book I recommend is by Aaron Ross, called From Impossible to Inevitable (http://amzn.to/2vJUkzI) . In the book, he talks about the 7 things that every business needs for hyper growth. He actually helped to take Salesforce from zero to the first hundred million dollars. And he has never been a sales person. One of the things he talks about in the...

Ran Korber. He’s the CEO and founder of BreezoMeter. His ambition is to improve the health and quality of life for billions of people across the globe by providing accurate and actionable air quality data. It’s truly the leading air quality analytic company and one of Israel’s top 10 promising startups in 2015 with millions of daily users. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Zero to One What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Slack and HubSpot How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Keep going, you’re doing well”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:10 – Nathan introduces Ran to the show 01:57 – BreezoMeter helps companies to increase user engagement 02:38 – BreezoMeter makes the invisible visible by providing highly accurate, location-based, air quality which includes data that can be integrated to any device or technology 03:08 – Using BreezoMeter’s data, the Dyson air purifier turns on whenever the air quality outside is substandard 03:16 – A notification will be sent to the Dyson app as well 03:29 – Dyson is BreezoMeter’s customer and BreezoMeter tells Dyson’s customers about the air purifier 03:58 – The air purifier turns on automatically and, as an owner, you want to make sure that the product you bought is working 04:37 – BreezoMeter provides a license to their APIs 04:53 – Customers pay on a monthly basis 04:58 – BreezoMeter is data as a service 05:14 – All of BreezoMeter’s customers are enterprises 05:23 – The customers use BreezoMeter’s data in big volumes 05:49 – Average monthly RPU is higher than $1K a month 06:04 – Ran just read Jason Lemkin’s From Impossible to Inevitable 06:29 – BreezoMeter broke a million in sales last year 06:34 – Ran hopes they’ll break $10M in sales this year 06:54 – Ran is an environmental engineer 07:05 – In 2012, Ran was searching to buy a house for his family 07:10 – Ran’s wife has asthma and Ran knows how air pollution can have severe health effects 07:45 – We all want to protect our families 07:51 – Ran asks the bureau of protection and environment in Israel about the place with the cleanest air and they don’t have any data that can answer the question 08:08 – Together with Ran’s colleague, they built the app 08:19 – BreezoMeter was founded in 2014 08:26 – Team size 08:39 – BreezoMeter has raised $5M 08:48 – The last round was in July 2016 08:57 – The first round was a seed round with $2M 09:54 – All of BreezoMeter’s investors are approachable and they share the same vision 10:12 – Total number of users 10:46 – Dyson has an air purifier and you can download the Dyson link app that will show the air quality data 12:00 – Customers pay depending on the combination of the features they use and the volume of API calls 12:20 – BreezoMeter earns more from their features 13:03 – BreezoMeter doesn’t disclose their pricing because of their enterprise clients 13:48 – BreezoMeter caters to different industries 14:13 – CAC 15:51 – BreezoMeter raise funds to expand and increase their revenue 16:21 – For every sales rep, the revenue is $500K to $1M in annual revenue 16:37 – BreezoMeter has 4 sales rep 17:01 – The churn is due to some of the companies having medical devices 18:30 – BreezoMeter’s customers are paying at least $3K a month 19:32 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Air pollution directly impacts our health—therefore, knowing the air quality around us can inform our decisions regarding what products to use. A SaaS company that serves mainly enterprise businesses has a possibility of scaling faster. Keep on going and believe that you’re doing well.   Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Rob Dionne is a certified personal trainer and nutrition expert, and -- with his wife -- half of the team behind Open Sky Fitness. He’s the creator and co-host of the Open Sky Fitness podcast. He’s been featured in Men’s Health and on Wellness Force Radio, and, at 39 years old, is in the best shape of his life. It hasn’t always been like this. Like many of us, he was athletic and active growing up. After college, though, he stopped working out and gained 30 pounds. It wasn’t until he was 30 that he realized he needed to make a change, and experiencing this himself led him to what he does now: help men and women over the age of 35 lose weight and live healthier. Find Out More About Rob Here: Open Sky Fitness: About RobOpen Sky Fitness - Rob Dionne on Facebook@OpenSkyFitness on Twitter In This Episode: [01:35] - Rob walks us through the beginning of his transformational journey. We hear about the specific moment that he realized he had let himself go physically. [04:29] - What made the biggest impact for Rob during his transformation? He explains how he began getting more physically fit, and how that led to changes in his views on food and eating. [07:54] - Stephan mentions his previous Marketing Speak podcast episode featuring Aaron Ross, who discussed the concept of having a “forcing function.” He applies this to what Rob has been saying. Rob elaborates on this, agreeing with the concept. [14:00] - Rob talks about listening to Louis CK talking about how what stops most of us is the fear of failure. He then gives an inspiring speech about how important it is to say “yes” to new experiences. [17:10] - Stephan discusses his goal in joining the gym, but reveals the problems with having no social pressure to follow through. Rob asks a question with the purpose of reframing the issue for Stephan. We also hear about the difficulties of being trained or taught by a loved one, and the importance of accountability. [23:48] - We hear more from Stephan about accountability, both in how hard it is to have only for yourself. He and Rob then talk about learning lessons from the universe, with Rob using the examples of his sister and niece. [31:57] - When you pay, you pay attention, Stephan points out. Rob agrees with the concept, and explores more complicated aspects of the issue. He also elaborates on two kinds of people who hire him as a personal trainer. [37:38] - Stephan points out that investing alone isn’t enough, and gives an example of how people behave in the office and at the gym. Putting in time (without effort and goals) doesn’t lead to results. [40:37] - Someone who just clocks in and clocks out is called a “clocker” in the book From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross. Stephan also talks about his interview with Cal Newport about his book Deep Work. [44:46] - Rob gives advice for how to reconnect to your body, if you’ve been disconnected from it. We also hear about the importance of focusing on the journey instead of the destination. [49:25] - Rob talks about the problem with being accustomed to immediate gratification, and how it can lead to jealousy and doubting yourself and your path. Instead, try to be gentle with yourself and accept your own path. [51:14] - Social media can be counterproductive and make us narcissistic and insecure. Tim Ferriss suggests going on a “low information diet,” but Stephan suggests we need a low social media diet instead. [55:30] - Rob points out that some people are excited to follow or join in, while others (like himself and Stephan) need to lead to feel empowered. [61:46] - We hear a final pitch from Rob about his podcast, Open Sky Fitness, and the related Facebook group. Get Optimized! Find one physical event that will be challenging (but not impossible) for you and sign up to take part. If you aren’t ready for a full marathon, start with a half marathon! Figure out what you want physically, then write down a list of your top priorities. Is your goal to look good? To be able to run a certain distance, or lift a certain weight, or achieve a certain speed? For your top two physical priorities, commit to specific related events (a race if your goal is speed, or a physique competition if your goal is appearance). This will help keep you accountable. Links and Resources: Open Sky Fitness: About RobOpen Sky Fitness - Rob Dionne on Facebook@OpenSkyFitness on TwitterOpen Sky FitnessOpen Sky Fitness podcastAaron RossLouis CKTony RobbinsFrom Impossible to InevitableCal NewportDeep Work“Like a Boss” by The Lonely IslandTim FerrissMark SissonOpen Sky Fitness Podcast Facebook Group

We’re Talking to You Professionals Nicole chats with Aaron Ross, best selling author and founder of Predictable Revenue.com. Check out his latest book, From Impossible to Inevitable. All growth uses the same principals: including professional services. Nailing a niche: where you’re truly unique from others. Become a specialist: approach the market with a specialty. It’s about focus: who needs you and will pay for your services. Real growth: comes when you get business from people who’ve never heard of you. They have a need in your ‘niche’. Build a system beyond your current network. Doing great work is not enough: you can learn how to grow your business, but you can’t hide. You need to do it over and over as long as it takes until it works. Grit:   will separate the people who double or triple their income versus those who grow 5% per year. From Impossible to Inevitable: Frustration is part of it. If you’re not sobbing in a corner or pounding on the floor at some point your probably not doing new things and pushing yourself. Aaron Ross Bio

Fred Stevens-Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Rainforest QA, which if you listened to 20VC with Byron Deeter, you will remember he discussed them and their amazing trajectory. So for QA first, it is essentially QA as a service making it fast and easy to test your webapp in multiple browsers and they are backed by some of the best as we said there Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, our own Jason Lemkin, Y Combinator, previous guest Kris Duggan @ Betterworks and Marc Benioff just to name a few. As for Fred he is the man at the helm as Co-Founder & CEO and absolutely smashing it I might add. In the show Fred mentions his favourite reading material to be Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross’s new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here! In Our Discussion with Fred You Will Learn: How did Fred come to found Rainforest QA? What was his origin story to YC? How did Fred look to establish the pricing model with Rainforest? Why does Fred believe most software companies undervalue their software? What are the challenges of going upstream? How does it affect product? Sales cycle? Does Fred agree with Mark Organ that in a new category, the company CEO must be the category CMO? How much of a role does content play in Rainforest QA’s education funnel for customers? Why does Fred believe you should spend the most time with your best people? Similarly, the least amount of time with your worst people? How has Fred gone about building out the sales team? What did Fred look for in sales reps and Heads of Sales? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Fred Stevens-Smith

Matt Garratt currently runs Salesforce Ventures with the mandate to build out salesforce’s ecosystem of partners with equity investments. Matt has led key strategic investments at Salesforce in companies such as former guests Gainsight, and Invoca as well as Anaplan and Insidesales.com just to name a few. Prior to salesforce Matt was a VP at the prestigious SaaS investor Battery Ventures. Also in the show today we mention Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here! In This Episode With Matt You Will Learn: How Matt made his entry into the world of VC and came to run Salesforce Ventures? What did Salesforce do right to give Matt the ability to formalise the fund? What did Matt learn in the less formal stages of investing? What are the benefits that startups receive from being portfolio companies of Salesforce Ventures? How does matt view Salesforce Ventures in the early stage investing landscape? Does Matt like to co-invest with other prominent funds? How does M&A work within Salesforce Ventures? Are you willing to sell to your competitors? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Matt Garratt

I am delighted to welcome my first ever Harry to the show today in the form of Harry Glaser, Co-Founder & CEO @ Periscope Data, the worlds fast analysis suite providing data analysts with the tools they need to improve their analysis by over 150X and an astonishing fact here they have doubled their revenue every 3 months ever since launch. Periscope’s investors include Ellen Pao, Matt Ocko @ Data Collective, Chad Byers @ Susa Ventures, Wes Chan @ Felicis, Benjamin Ling at Khosla and many more. Also in the show today we mention Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here! In Today’s Episode with Harry We Discuss How Harry came to be the founder of Persicope Data and what the a-ha moment was for him? How did Harry look to establish a pricing model with Periscope Data as a first time SaaS founder? What are Harry’s learnings of hiring and building out the initial sales team? How did Harry build out the institutonal training program to allow non technical people to sell a very non technical product? What are the inherent pros of having an inbound heavy model and what are the fundamental problems? Why are companies suddenly seeing the need for data analysts and what are the opportunites that data analysts present? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings Saastr Harry Glaser

Aaron Ross joins Helping Sells Radio for Episode 14. Aaron, with co-author Jason Lemkin, recently published a new book, From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue, which is a follow-up to the widely read and implemented book Predictable Revenue, which has been called the sales bible of Silicon Valley. Sarah and Bill talk to Aaron about two main topics. First, we talk about why we should not tell people what we do for a living, but describe how we help people. Second, we talk about the new book.  Get on the email list at helpingsells.substack.com

Aaron Ross is the bestselling author of From Impossible to Inevitable and co-author of Predictable Revenue. He worked at Salesforce.com, where he created a revolutionary sales process and team that increased revenues by $100 million. He co-founded Carb.io, a software company, and has a predictable revenue certification program called Predictable University. You can find Aaron on Twitter @motoceo.   EPISODE Scaling business should be a top goal for entrepreneurs, and one that won’t happen overnight. In order to create reliable income and a client base that is always growing, sales has to be a top priority. Aaron Ross shares how to meet customer expectations, find your next rockstar employee, and focus on turning leads into lifelong fans who will refer for you. We Discuss: The biggest issues that companies face in terms of their sales, and how to overcome them. Why a CEO should nurture employees who own their job, and how to become that employee. How to find your niche and become a 'need to have' product or service. How to double or triple your client base through referrals, lead generation, and sales. For complete shownotes and more, please head over to www.marketingspeak.com/aaronross   LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue Predictable Revenue Carb.io Salesforce Predictable University Nail Your Niche Workshop   STEP UP YOUR MARKETING GAME! 1) Put a dedicated employee in charge of a new task or program within your business. You will nurture a potential leader and take some of the decision making off of yourself. 2) Use the 10x Exercise-envision what it would take to find the type of customers who would sign up for a $10,000 deal, or a $100,000 deal. Why would they need you? 3) Check out Aaron's predictable revenue certification course, Predictable University. This program teaches prospecting, leveraging time, resources, and selling success.   THANK YOU FOR LISTENING! As always, thank you for tuning in. Please feel free to drop by the website to contact me or leave a comment. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it! -Stephan STAY CONNECTED 10 Point Facebook Ads Checklist - Free eBook | Twitter

Best-selling author of From Impossible to Improbable Aaron Ross joins us to talk about strategies for reaching CEOs that don't involve circumventing or alienating executive assistants or putting executives on the defensive with unwarranted pitches.  Best of all, his techniques involve simply picking up the phone and connecting.

Not just a book review,Hear Aaron Ross highlight the seven parts of his new book, "From Impossible to Inevitable". Aaron tells Matt,  the different parts are really the template for growth that a lot of the fastest growing companies in the world follow. He also explains why "if you give up too soon, or if you don't keep taking the steps, that's the problem people face—or basically unfair self-criticism.You need to struggle. You can't create something great without the struggle.It's okay. Everyone goes through that." I will say, this book is not a culture book. This book is not a management book. It'snot even a sales book. It's a growth book." Listen to learn why Matt says he can't recommend this book enough.From Impossible To Inevitable. You can learn more about the book right now at the website www.fromimpossible.com. You can pre-order a copy.There's a great set of gifts available to those that download the book in advance. There's a chance to get some free tickets to the SaaStr conference,there are some other awesome resources available online. So go to www.fromimpossible.com to check it out.

Aaron Ross, Award winning author of the SaaS Sales Bible, Predictable Revenue, guest on the show to discuss his latest book about Growth, From Impossible to Inevitable, out now.

In this episode, Aaron Ross, discusses the lessons that sales leaders have learned about building a predictable revenue machine since the publication of his best-selling book, Predictable Revenue. He has captured many these lessons in case studies contained in his new book (written with co-author Jason Lemkin), From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue. In this information-packed episode we discuss his new book and other topics including: The steps required to plan for sales success. How to increase you chances for success by Nailing a Niche Why you can’t prove your sales model by selling to friends of friends. How to avoid being trapped in the Trust Gap The vital role that Customer Success plays in driving revenue growth And much, much more! Want to learn how to accelerate predictable revenue growth for your company? Don’t miss out on this episode!

Have you ever been told that what you wanted to accomplish is impossible? Well today's guest on the show was told her idea was impossible by countless numbers. At the age of 23, Molly Ola Pinney wanted to start a global non-profit that served the autistic children of the world. Yes, this is a big undertaking that had many challenges yet Molly would not accept that it was impossible. She kept focused on a vision that would empower a generation to understand and accept autism. I truly believe this is a story of the seemingly impossible to a journey that will inspire many to think big. Get the show notes for 122 | From Impossible to Inspired with Molly Ola Pinney Click to Tweet: Listening to an amazing episode on Leaders in the Trenches with @GeneHammett #Challenges #Inspire #Episode122 #Podcasts Give Leaders in the Trenches a review on iTunes!