SaaS Talk with Varun Uday

This episode of SaaS Talk features Craig Davis, who's spent over a decade and a half selling software to enterprise Life Science companies worldwide.

Varun and Craig talk about what it takes to be a successful sales rep in today's market, the importance of networking, and building trust, Craig's stint in stand-up comedy, and how that has helped him become a better salesperson and more. Tune in to find out!

Varun Uday had a chat with Nick Bennett, the Director of Field and Account-Based Marketing at Alyce about the buzz surrounding ABM in SaaS. 

The conversation touched upon aspects of ABM and Field Marketing such as - Targeting, Personalization, Collaborating with Sales, Events, Gifting and a whole lot more! 

Swpely spent $0 on their marketing and in less than a month of their launch, have about 1000 users in their kitty!

Tech and Marketing people bring very different ideas to the table so when Jay Desai, a marketing genius launched Swpely, I just knew that I had to talk to him about it and he was kind enough to hop on to SaaS Talk!

What we spoke about:

• How Jay’s audience building on LinkedIn helped him in launching Swpely
  
• What’s Swpely and where did the idea stem from?
  
• The research process and how he knew Swpely was it
  
• About Swpely’s $0 marketing spend this year
  
• How the Beta stage will affect Swpely’s product roadmap
  
• About Swpely’s referral program that accounts for 20% of their signups.

We've all heard of SaaS. But Micro SaaS? What's that? Varun Uday uncovers the smaller world of Micro SaaS with the CEO of DelightChat, Preetam Nath. 

What we spoke about: 

- What is Micro SaaS and what is it not? 

- How do you come up with Micro SaaS ideas?

- Is revenue generation not important here? 

- What comes first? Minimum Viable Audience or Minimum Viable Product? 

- How to get the first 10 customers and then moving on to 1000

- Does Micro SaaS have a glass ceiling? 

- Cool Micro SaaS products out there that Preetam likes

Check out DelightChat

And Preetam Nath

Audience first of product first? New age SaaS founders are finding themselves in a soup when it comes to this part. Although, after talking to many people, I’ve come to realise there’s no right way to do it. Each approach brings its own goods with it.

To find out more, I spoke to Stewart Hillhouse over the weekend about taking the audience-first approach and the merits of it.

We covered quite a lot. Let me break it down for you -

• Stewart's views on building an audience first as opposed to a product
  
• Areas to focus on while building an audience
  
• Why do companies take this approach?
  
• Why consistency is key
  
• Metrics Stewart tracks as the Head of Audience Growth
  

Emily Kingland, the Lead Content Writer at Sweet Fish Media talks to Varun Uday about podcasting in the B2B space and the intricacies of it. 

Matt Aird, the CEO of Sales Science talks to Varun Uday about the science behind a sales cold outreach campaign and best practices to make it strike gold for you.

In this episode of SaaS Talk, Varun Uday talks to Rohit Srivastav, the Head of Growth @ Netcore Solutions about how to go about conquering the Southeast Asian market.   

Topics discussed were:

4:55 Why are billions of dollars being invested in the Southeast Asian tech sector in recent years?  

6:39 How do you ensure scalable growth given the diversity in the region? 

9:33 Do sales teams deal with a language barrier?  

10:44 Do you treat Singapore as a gateway to SEA? 

13:43 Importance of having a local presence 

15:46 Rohit's advice for startups looking to enter SEA

Content marketing is extremely important in SaaS businesses and it oftentimes acts as the sole lead generation channel in many startups. Here's Varun Uday having a conversation with Sam Grover, a SaaS content strategist, and ex Global Messaging Specialist at Xero about the following topics:  

2:39 How does content contribute to the marketing pipeline?   

6:25 Nurturing leads through different stages of the funnel

8:29 Importance of a content calendar and how to go about it 

15:30 Distributing content  

17:30 Measuring the ROI of content marketing 

22:26 How to keep the content engine running

In this episode of SaaS Talk, Varun Uday talks to Ashwin Krishna about getting started with growth marketing in an early-stage startup. 

Topics discussed in this conversation are: 

@3:45 What is growth marketing and at what stage of a company does a growth marketer get hired

@6:50 How does a startup at level 0 start off with growth marketing?

@17:52 What is your typical day like as a growth marketing head?

@22:28 How do you go about planning for growth and who else is involved?

@26: 43 Experimenting with new channels for growth

@31:28 Expanding into new geographies

@36:10 Metrics for growth marketing