Brief:
what should a saas marketer be prepared for?
A window into the experiences (good/bad) that you’ve had as a marketer.
What needs to be done when the going gets tough? What’s the hard part? What’s the struggle?
Struggles involved in SaaS marketing.
I never set out to be a SaaS marketer but I’ve been one for almost 4 years now. I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job – I’ve increased our blog traffic from 2,500 to 100,000 pageviews a month. I’ve been through quite a bit. I’ve seen peers enter and exit the industry, bounce around between companies, seen companies IPO, get acquired. I’ve also seen some businesses shut down despite having seemingly decent products.
Your mileage may vary, but this has been my experience.
Let’s work backwards from the most trivial to the most difficult.
Keeping up with the reading and various communities
I often wonder to myself if marketers have more to read than anybody else in any industry, because our peers are collectively producing an insane amount of content. In 2014, Mark Schaefer triggered a lot of discussions around the idea of Content Shock – the notion that the volume of content being published
There are then countless communities to participate in – GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, /r/marketing, /r/entrepreneur, the list goes on and on. Your regional groups, Twitter (follow me!), email… you could in fact spend all of your time catching up on this stuff, and you’d never have time to get anything else done.
What do you do?
1. You need to recognize that you’re never going to be able to read everything and that’s okay. We do live in an age of information overload / surplus, and nobody’s going to be able to read everything. You want to practice/develop the habit of filtering stuff out. If some new piece of news is really important – say, Google’s about to introduce a penalty on popups – you’re still going to hear about it one way or another, maybe just a few minutes, hours or days later. It won’t end the world – you’ll be able to focus.
2. You need a system, and you need to stick to it. Labels are important. Social signals can be useful – if you can find about 5-10 people on Twitter that you trust to share good quality content and links, then you can just defer the search to them. I find that it’s useful to have labels in Gmail.
Continually developing your skills
I’ve joked with peers before that I have an entirely new job every 6 months or so, and reflecting on that I think it’s actually quite true. I started out doing a little bit of everything – forum engagement, social media, writing blogposts from time to time. When the blogposts started having the best ROI, I switched to focusing on writing more of those. We hired a couple of other writers, and I had to work together with them to plan our content calendar. As we figured out the next steps for that, I had to learn about how to do lead capture and how to tinker with the backend of the blog. After that, I grew into more of an editorial role, hiring and managing freelance writers to contribute to our blog.
There’s a general point to be made about career advancement – you don’t want to be stuck doing the same thing over and over. You might enter SaaS marketing as a freelance content writer, or as a social media manager, but you’ll probably go a little insane if you do nothing else for years on end. You want to get your foot in the door, but then you want to grow in your role to do more. This is good for you at a practical level because it makes you more employable, and it allows you to negotiate a bigger salary for yourself so you can provide for yourself and your loved ones. But it’s also fundamentally satisfying – to grow and learn and to be able to do more than you were able to do before.
Even if you have the best managers in the world, ultimately, nobody can prioritize your personal development more than you.
Do regular reviews of your skillset. It took me too long to really sit down and do this (and probably because it was so easy for me to just depend on my teammates to challenge me)– every month (every week, ideally), sit down and do an audit of yourself. What are your skills? What are your accomplishments, what have you achieved? Next…
Managing yourself and others
Ask a million children what they want to be when they grow up, and not a single one will say “I want to be a manager”. And yet it’s one of the most common jobs or roles, one of the most important and significant things that anybody can do, and it’s one of the most misunderstood. As Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra likes to say – the conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. His job is to make music come out of others.
I like what Venkatesh Rao has had to say about “leadering” – about posturing and whatnot.
There are fundamentally two parts to management – motivation and training. If somebody (this includes you) isn’t doing something well, there are two possible reasons. Either they’re unwilling or they’re unable. Willingness is a function of motivation, and ability is a function of training. So the two parts of management are motivation and training.
Motivation isn’t about giving rah-rah speeches, although those probably have their place. Motivation is about aligning an individual’s wants with a team’s or organization’s wants.
I won’t pretend I’ve perfectly solved this challenge. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, despite having great colleagues and a great work environment, and I just don’t feel like going to work or doing anything at all. Doesn’t everyone? But that’s life, and that’s a job, and even people who’re “living their dream”, people who are financially independent, etc – sometimes they wake up and they don’t really feel motivated.
Training – it’s important to be very clear about the specific tasks that you want to accomplish.
Recommend reading Andy Grove and Ray Dalio
http://www.anafore.press/management
Having to ask someone to leave the team
It happens. Even if you do your best, you may find that someone simply can’t perform in their role. It can happen in SaaS particularly quickly despite everyone’s best efforts – the product evolves, the company’s needs evolve, and someone who was doing a great job at something might have trouble adjusting to something new– or they might not want to. This is always painful to do. You may have become good friends over the months or years that you’ve worked together.
Moz and Buffer have both had to let go of team members recently, and they’re both A* examples of how to do it right. They even went through the trouble of trying to get their employees hired at great companies.
This is a great signal to everyone else about the integrity and culture at these companies –
Netflix also has a great approach to this and brings it up pre-emptively in their culture doc, which I think is a great idea. It’s important to set expectations right, so that nobody gets blindsided. “We’re like a pro sports team, not a family or a recreational team” and “fire respectfully”. Nobody should be fired by surprise
Make sure they see it coming
Be respectful
Networking and building relationships
Theoretically, you could market a SaaS business while never leaving your cosy office. You can interact with customers via email or Skype…
If you’re an introvert, or you’re just really nervous/anxious around people, don’t like stepping on people’s toes, inconveniencing people, etc… this can be painful. But it’s necessary. You’re going to have to talk to your customers and prospective customers to find out what they really care about, what their pain points are. What would be BEST is if you could talk to them at in their natural environment, while they’re at work – but at the very least you’re going to want to email, and that can be a little scary.
You’ll want to have good relationships with other people in the same industry –
Focussing means saying no to things that seem good and easy to do
Have you ever run out of ideas of things to do? I’m not sure if anybody really does. It’s always a quick google away – “SaaS marketing ideas”, “content marketing ideas”, “how to come up with ads”, whatever – coming up with more things to do is easy. Picking what to do next, deciding what to do next, that’s the hard part. Every decent team out there has a massive backlog, and could expand on it infinitely if not for the fact that they’re already too busy working on the most important thing.
Intercom feels so strongly about this they put together an entire standalone site about it – ProductStrategyMeansSayingNo.com – saying no to things.
It’s kind of counter-intuitive. And you need to learn to be okay with having an incomplete to-do list. I can’t remember who it was who said – your todo list will be incomplete at your moment of death. I find that a sobering reminder.
Making difficult trade-offs
This is the case with all… if you shipped something perfect, you probably spent way too much time on it…
In the practical world you’ll have to make compromises. I have not been great at this. Looking back, I see lots and lots of instances in which I deliberated way too long on something. A colleague had a great point – sometimes the time you spend deciding between two things is time you could’ve spent doing both of them.
It’s not always that straightforward, but it’s important to have a bias for action. A good way to do this is to limit the amount of time you spend making decisions.
Minimizing bullshit
Let’s be honest – there’s a lot of bullshit in our industry.
Hiring/job desc related BS:
An annoying thing about job descriptions is that there’s a lot of bullshit. People tend to ask for perfect candidates – you need to be young and fresh and ready to learn, and yet you need to be a genius with more years of experience than you have on this earth.
The reality is that anybody who’s that perfect is going to be wildly sought after and commanding a massive salary. You won’t be able to afford that person. The challenge is to hire people who are decent, and then grow with them.
Staying motivated in the face of the long slow SaaS ramp of death
One of the recurring jokes / gags in the HBO TV series Silicon Valley is how silly it is for people working on esoteric, obscure pieces of software to claim that they’re changing the world. “We’re making the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols.”
Part of why that joke is funny is that the founders focus on the technical specifications of the product, rather than what it does for the customer. But the core of the humor is – you’re trying to feel good about yourself when you’re working on something that nobody really understands or cares about.
Managing your own psychology, staying focused on the job is the hardest part. Ben Horowitz talks about this from the perspective of a CEO – and of course, CEO’s have it the hardest:
There will sometimes be long periods of time when things don’t work. I remember there was a 4 month period at the end of 2014 when our blog traffic just kept falling month after month. I remember being very demoralized, feeling imposter syndrome, etc.
Doug from Velocity also talks about this. Finding meaning in B2B marketing – http://www.slideshare.net/dougkessler/the-search-for-meaning-in-b2b-marketing – it can be done.
But you have to be honest about it with yourself. You have to understand your own utility profile – what is it you care about?
How much do you care about money, exactly? Yes, obviously it’ll always be nicer to have a little more, but what are the tradeoffs you’re willing to make for a little more or a little less? People tend to have thresholds.
How much do you care about having a nice place to work?
How much do you care
Ultimately, we’re all selling software. If it’s good software, it makes someone else’s life a little better. In our case, we sell referral marketing software, so we get to see business owners increase their sales, and we get to see friends referring friends to their favorite products and stores. If we’re lucky, and we get to keep going, we’ll earn the opportunity to do more things at a greater scale. But in the meantime, I think what motivates me is the opportunity to contribute to a team of peers that I respect and admire.
Gail Goodman, the CEO of Constant Contact, has a great talk titled The Long Slow SaaS ramp of death.
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