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From Budgets to Breakthroughs: Optimizing SaaS Marketing for Maximum Impact

Marketing director

In this Wytpod episode, Harshit Gupta from Wytlabs interviewed Riley Timmins, Marketing Director at Cacheflow, about managing high-budget SaaS campaigns. Riley emphasized treating small budgets with the same care as large ones, focusing on demo requests over top-of-funnel leads, and proactively reporting results tied to qualified pipeline value. He shared that LinkedIn Ads have been their top channel, targeting a highly qualified audience, while their SEO strategy focuses on high-intent, low-competition keywords. Riley also highlighted the success of a gated content campaign, generating leads and customers through a RevOps audit template. Lastly, he noted AI-driven outreach tools as a key future trend in marketing.

Cacheflow specializes in high-budget SaaS marketing strategies, focusing on targeted outreach and data-driven decision-making.

Riley Timmins
Marketing director

Hello. Welcome to another episode of Wytpod. My name is Harshit gupta. I’m the director of business alliances of  wytlabs. We’re a digital agency specializing in SaaS and e commerce SEO. I’ve got Riley Timmins with me today, the marketing director at Cacheflow. Now

Cacheflow is an integrated CPQ, billing and subscription management platform, designed to close and expand SaaS deals seamlessly. So big welcome to you Riley. So happy to have you with me.

Thanks for having me excited to talk marketing today.

Hello everybody. Now really good luck for, you to start with sharing your journey into the field of marketing and what really attracted you to work in tech startup.

Yeah. Yeah. I it’s funny. I started about. 10 years ago now, when I was 18 just finished like my first year of college and was interning at like a local marketing agency, started writing blogs for local businesses. And then, did it for a law firm at one point and that, that kind of spurred my interest in digital marketing.

So I did a couple other internships and, just learning to work with clients. It was all pretty, local business at that point. And then, yeah, my, my first company after college, it was a pretty fast growing startup in Toronto. So yeah, did a lot of SEO and got into ads during COVID actually a guy in Toronto reached out to me and he was starting like a side hustle.

Paid social agency. So I started working there and then, quickly started working with YC companies and made some connections in Silicon Valley and that space and eventually, ended up going out to LA working for a client and yeah, it was, growing that company and then landed at Cacheflow

I think it was employee number 10. So I’ve always, joined around like employee 10 to 20. I just find the early stage startup super fun and get to learn the most in a really short amount of time. Yeah. And yeah my background, I’ve definitely been a growth marketer kind of focusing on ads and pipeline, but I’ve got enough early stage experience that have, a little bit of expertise in, in most other areas and good at finding  contractors in the areas I know I’m pretty bad at.

Yeah, that’s the quick story.

All right. Now that you have managed like big budget, 6 million ad spend, I would love to know what are some of the key lessons that you’ve learned from managing such big budget projects?

Yeah. Yeah.

That’s an interesting.

Yeah. That mostly came from the agency where I was managing, five or six companies and those companies had, between 10 to 60 K a month budgets. Yeah. Quick lessons that I learned from that one is have the same mentality at 50 K a month that you do at 500 a month.

Like when you start off with that really small budget, you’re trying to, earn that budget and show that you can get a return on it to your boss or whatever. And so you want to treat it like your own money and you have to get it to work in order to get more. You never want to just assume Oh, this is like a use it or lose it budget.

Cause that’s, quickly how things get out of control. And your budget gets slashed. I’d say another one too, is stay as close to a demo request from your ICP as possible. It’s pretty tempting to start to want to. Drive a bunch of MQL and top of funnel leads for the sake of saying, we did a thousands of MQLs.

But when it all shakes out and, you’re only converting those at 0. 5 percent into a qualified deal, it’s just never going to make sense economically. So I’ll always stay as close as you can and max out the demo requests as much as possible, before shifting up the funnel.

And then, yeah, three, I would say is be proactive in showing your results. So you you never you never want to report on here’s all these clicks that we got, but you can report on, Hey, we just launched this campaign. Here’s how many leads, here’s how many demos, here’s how many qualified deals.

And really what you’re trying to get to is the point of Qualified pipeline. So it’s essentially, the sum of all the qualified deals, because most SAAS companies, your deal sizes are going to range quite a bit. Unless, you’re at like a pure commodity where it’s flat sort of pricing.

So yeah the fact that the quicker you can get to, here’s how much, qualified [00:04:00] pipeline and report that proactively so that you’re not just waiting for revenue reports that’s how you’re going to, just continue to keep in and grow your budget and Yeah. Really beyond, the finance team side of things.

That’s nice. All right. Now I would love to hear a bit more on Cacheflow . Focuses on automation basically automating the code to cash process. How do you communicate this unique value proposition and with your marketing?

Yeah. Yeah. So it was a little tricky to figure out, because we’re selling into multiple categories and multiple departments, so we’re, selling in a CPQ and quoting.

Yeah. Yeah. But also into subscription management, which is CS, but also billing, which is finance. So what I focused on initially, and I still do a lot is pain point marketing. So rather than trying to explain this, complicated new thing that we are it’s just relate to the pains that are caused by having all these disparate systems.

It’s a lot of marketing around like. Quoting delays, quoting errors, manual tasks, piling up really slow to make changes, a lot of like consultant fees and long implementation. And then people can attach themselves to that pain. And then you’ve earned yourself.

More of their attention to explain what you do. I’d say another thing that we do is rather than just say Hey, we have a CPQ and billing it’s explaining, what does having a connected CPQ and billing enable you to do? So because, we use the quote as the source of truth.

We’re just pulling, we’re returning static data, which, would typically live in a PDF into dynamic data, which lives in like an interactive quote. So now we can just pull that data straight from the quote and use it to bill automatically. And if anything’s changed in the quote, we have the source of truth, which then populates the billing the billing logs, and then, that populates your CRM.

So you’re not billing based off what might’ve been quoted in the opportunity, which, is a lot oftentimes. A little bit different than what was signed. And then, yeah, three, I would say is tying value to compelling business events. [00:06:00] So we realized we do much better value selling versus feature selling.

So this is probably a bit more so in the sales side of things, but we really try to pull it out in marketing too, like if companies are trying to do things like, scale their sales head count, they probably know that things are going to break down pretty quickly once they add more people.

So we really focus on that. Or, if you want to launch new, like a whole new pricing model that’s something companies want to do, or if they want to test out PLG, but they know it’s like a huge lift to build all the quoting and billing infrastructure to do it. Now, instead of saying Hey, we have.

Billing, features that allow you to do this. We say like Cacheflow  can, enable you to do this sort of thing. So yeah, I’d say those are a few examples.

So mainly pain points and the benefits for that customer, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Now I’m going to be a little bit biased, and ask you about any specific.

Inbound strategies that have been really working well for you, any organic [00:07:00] growth that you’re able to drive within your company within your site that is helping you out with your legion.

Yeah. Yeah. So we’re mostly inbound probably like 90 percent of the deals.

We just hired a BDR who’s actually doing a really great job and it was definitely a gap we had. But. We don’t really run too many like one off campaigns. They’re typically like always on campaigns and we optimize over time. But yeah, something that’s worked good. We just did this from the beginning was allowing people to like, book their own demo on our website and then.

Also having a ton of calendar availability. Like I figured out even at other companies that one of the biggest things for optimizing the inbound flow is actually the demo scheduling part of it. And the more availability you have and the earlier people can book, the much more likely they are to actually do it and the shorter your sales cycle will be because now you can do two demos.

In the same week versus, having to do the intro one week and then the technical, the second. So that’s if I recommend one thing to people, it’s typically optimize your actual booking process and make it a lot more. Like buyer centric. And then the big thing is what about qualification?

It’s a lot easier to actually just remove the unqualified ones from the calendar than it is to try to go and add the qualify. Cause you’re going to lose out on a lot of percentage of people that just are no longer interested.

All right, not talking about the winning channels for you. What are those when it comes to specifically, for your region?

Yeah. So our biggest channel is a paid social and primarily LinkedIn ads. That’s where the majority of the budget and focus has gone. Luckily it’s a pretty passive channel, right? So I’ll spend a couple of days each month creating a new set of ads. But we pretty much have our targeting dialed in.

Now we have a pretty strong sense of our account from a graphics we want to go after. So it really comes down to a matter of like just keeping the creative fresh and educating our audience over time. And also, figuring out which messaging works for us and then deploying it. But yeah the typical lead we get, they’ve been seeing our ad for Two to three months.

They have a pretty good sense of what we do. And then, when they have that compelling event, like they’re just too frustrated with their current CPQ or their scaling sales headcount or something like that they know who to come to us. And they typically come to us, first versus, coming to us at the end of an evaluation cycle where they might find us in a Google ad or something like that.

And technically, like how big is your audience size when it comes to your marketing?

Yeah. So our audience size I’d say in total, it’s probably. About 70 to 80, 000 people, so it’s not very big. And then within each campaign, like our biggest campaigns would probably be 25, 000 and our smallest would be, like three or 4, 000.

Yeah. So I actually prefer to keep it pretty sort of small and tight. I just found it. It works better. Like you have a better sense of what to turn up and down and just typically works out better on LinkedIn.

All right. And how many touch points basically it takes for a user to perform your desired actions and just to become a marketing qualified lead?

Yeah, so the, essentially our big trigger is when they book a demo that’s our like MQL. And in order to do that, we see companies with like 10 plus impressions and two plus people convert at a much higher rate. And yeah, we also have tools where you can monitor account impressions over time.

And yeah it’s very common if it’s like at least two or three months they’ve been seeing our ads. Sometimes it’s like a year plus. But even in the early days we would have people, like we have people all the time tell us, Ads usually don’t work on me, but there was something like very specific that kind of motivated me to go out and book this.

We make very relevant ads for a pretty small amount of people, but we’re just, pretty hyper focused on that portion of the market right now.

Oh yeah, ads should resonate, the message should resonate, and that’s the reason, they’ll be performing that desired action.

Yeah.

Makes sense. All right. Let’s talk a bit on the SEO front. Any specific strategies that have been like, really helpful when it comes to just increasing your organic presence on Google.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I’ve been, slowly building SEO for the last year and a half or so. Pretty early, like I wanted to get the ads engine going.

And then once it was time to start. And we start, we started slow probably a blog per month. And then now we probably do, 1. 5 to two blogs per week publishing. But yeah the strategy was start a pretty bottom of funnel and then just slowly work our way up.

But we try to find the not super high volume, but pretty low competition, but high intent keywords. And yeah, we actually found like I’m surprisingly quick to rank against even some pretty big competitors just by making, slightly better content. And keeping it fresh and updating it like once a year or so.

The other thing too is because when we sell the SAAS companies, we would add the For SAAS modifier at the end, which was a really good hack to rank quickly. Like obviously it limits our volume, but it also helped qualify in our audience. Cause we only really market to SAAS companies. And I think in terms of the tactics, yeah, we found alternative pages work pretty good.

We waited a while to do it cause we actually wanted like our product parody to and you want to be pretty careful about which competitors you target, I would actually recommend doing the bigger ones first who, aren’t really going to be bothered by it, but they have the volume.

If you choose your smaller, but more direct competitors, you just have a lot more to lose there. If they, want to get involved doing it back. Yeah, that’s another tip I would say. And then yeah, the other thing too is the A versus B, so we would do what’s the difference between Salesforce CPQ and revenue cloud and just providing the specific answer there, but also people searching that are very much in our target audience.

So yeah, things are like, even if it was a billing term, like one of our things is difference between unearned versus Unbilled revenue. And just making it a little bit easier to understand. Yeah can work pretty well.

All right. Now come talking about the challenges. What are some of those the biggest challenges that you face so far in marketing? It was initially Cacheflow .

Yeah. Yeah. So I’d say it’s probably a benefit for marketing because there’s more people to market to, but it’s actually a challenge for sales because we saw in the multiple departments. So sales, rev ops, finance, and CS sometimes. So you have to get all four sign offs, right?

Like it’s not like you can bypass one. So that’s been a little difficult. Now we have found ways to deal with it. Like we can just sell the CPQ on its own, so we can get You know, into the sales department and then eventually bring finance on. That was something we had to figure out over time.

Also there’s actually a pretty high amount of competition, even for startups in their categories. So we’ve got. Like three pretty direct competitors that all started around the same time and, are all going after the sort of CPQ for SAAS market. And then the other thing too, is, just selling into CPQ and billing in general, it’s very technical.

We’re, Often running into just like one or one product gap, but if you can’t do that thing, it’s almost more worth it for the company to stick to the status quo. So yeah, we, we have like high competition for direct, but also lots of alternatives and then lots of status quo.

Once you get in it’s relatively sticky area, but because it’s just so technical and cross departmental, it’s a little tough to get in sometimes.

Are you doing anything when it comes to outbound marketing for your company?

Yeah. So we’ve started using so those new age AI tools just to identify who’s on the site and then who are the contacts at that company.

So we have a BDR that, that does that. He does a lot of our closed lost deals and he’ll do some net new outbound as well. Net new outbound is like so difficult now. There’s just so much noise in the market. So we found you really have to have some sort of signal to go off of.

But yeah that’s been a help just, becoming a bit more proactive with your website traffic. So yeah, that’s, it’s relatively new to us in the last three months or so, but it’s working pretty good.

Sure. When it comes to your key performance indicator which specific parameters that you’re looking to which you prioritize?

Yeah, so my number one each quarter is qualified pipeline value. And what goes into that as number of qualified deals, but really the pipeline value we care most about, and then outside of that, so like for each lead we get we’ll either rank it bullseye, like the best buyer bend or outside.

So essentially a score of one, two or three. And then I’m looking at, percentage of bullseye leads. So I aim to be like, okay, we want at least 50 percent to be like a really good fit lead. And percentage is important because, even what I find with SEO is we technically, we tend to get more unqualified than qualified leads, but that’s okay.

Because as long as the number of qualified is still going up, like it’s all passive work. But on the ad side, if our percentage of unqualified is going up now that’s really wrong because, we’re directly paying for that and have much more control over it. And then, yeah the final one would just be close one revenue.

What’s the. Dollar amount and the percentage from inbound. Of the close one revenue that was sourced.

And if you have to share any one specific campaign that’s really close to your heart, awesome results.

Yeah. Yeah, like we we typically run always on campaigns, but I did launch a gate, so I’ve never been a huge fan of gated content.

Like I always think you should just, give it out for free if it’s really good. But I realized on our site, like our only offer was to book a demo. And there was then we started running webinars and I saw okay, there is clearly a level above that wants to engage with us, but just doesn’t need a demo right now.

Or, they’re like consultants or influencers who could tell people about us. Like we should still probably market to those people. So we did a webinar on how to run a RevOps audit. And we worked with like a really good RevOps consulting firm. And then we just. Basically took the lessons from that and turn it into a, like a Google sheet.

And so it’s a really good template on how to structure and run a rev ops audit. And then I just put like a web flow banner, download the rev ops audit template on the website. And then also ran some LinkedIn ads to it, but it was all pointing to a landing page. And yeah, so from that, we got 120 leads, eight demos.

Five qualified deals and actually two customers. So it was really surprising to me that it was actually like converting, quite a bit higher than any gated content thing I’d run in the past. And actually the conversion from like deal, the customer was even higher than almost any other channel.

So yeah, now that’s something where, once a quarter, I launched a new gated asset mostly just to have one sort of higher offer. And then it’s got me thinking too, about building out, a few other offers that we can give people. Yeah just have a bit more like, Top of funnel marketing and it’s good to nurture people with too.

No, there’s a brilliant magnet idea. And plus it’s pretty relevant. So yeah, people do go fill in the details to get all of those useful templates. So it makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah.

I would love to understand any specific trends that you foresee shaping basically, the future of marketing and SaaS flesh and any specific things.

That you’re planning within your organization to evolve your own marketing strategies to adapt basically to these new trends.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I’ll start with, this is, probably years away or maybe a year, but the AI outreach tools, like clay and, common room, things like that they’re definitely becoming a lot more prevalent and they’re working pretty good.

So I think. Websites are going to shift from like conversion machines to signal farms and like first party data, like signals, essentially. And, the tools are only as good as the signals, but what I’ve noticed is, they’re basic it’s just okay, did they visit?

Our pricing page or demo page for a certain amount of time. And then everyone has the same technographic data or sorry, like techno and firmographic data. So what other signals can you get? So I think websites will change in ways so that, you can understand as much about the visitor as possible that you can’t necessarily find in data tools and then use that for.

The sort of AI outreach or other AI marketing tools. This will probably, even feedback in the ads eventually too. Like how do you make ad audiences and sets more and more smart? Yeah. Yeah. And so I, I think the way I’m not exactly sure how it’ll work, but it will probably be, just, Trying to understand based on, what they click on or what they really read on like best guesses on who this person is, but what they really care about and what they might be doing today.

So yeah, I think that’s probably where it will go. And then I think another one too, is just companies will start to un ungate their software more. So even if they don’t switch to a freemium I think they’ll still be much better at allowing. Users to, try it. A big thing too, that a lot of companies, like more and more people are demanding, POCs or demos.

But a lot of tools it’s like very time consuming to set those up. And very expensive. And so a lot of times you just have to say no or pass on the deal. Yeah, I think people that can figure that out and make that a little easier we’ll probably have a good business. But yeah, like I’d say outside of that it’s still shifting more to be customer centric.

Like, How do you help the people get what they want to see before they have to book a demo? And even once the demo is live and happening, like how do you make it more relevant? Like I think most companies know okay, you don’t really need a BDR qualifying inbound leads.

Like you should be able to qualify it before you talk to them. So yeah, just going more in that route and like just making it a more customer centric way and customers will choose the vendors that have the most buyer centric approach, I think.

Yeah.

All

Now, outside of work you really enjoy sailing and any I would love to understand how these hobbies.

Basically influence your work life balance and creativity in Mark?

Yeah. Yeah. I was I used to do a lot of sailing. I don’t get to do it too often anymore, but that is probably my favorite thing. Yeah I do a lot of biking though, so just going for like a bike ride in the morning, I’m always feeling a lot better for the day and a lot more clear headed.

Also, with marketing is like ideas will just come to you at the most random times. So I, I always have a notes app or, Slack is great. Just send yourself a Slack message. And yeah, that, that will usually come if I’m exercising or. Just get back from a workout or something like the worst thing you can do is have like a brainstorming meeting and just be like, okay now brainstorm.

Like it’s very tough. So I think just, yeah. Helping to get me in good mind spaces is probably the best thing.

In fact, like I enjoy motorcycling a lot, right? Oh yeah. Yeah yeah, completely agree with you.

Yeah

now if you have to give one piece of advice to aspiring marketers looking to enter basically, tech

startup space, what would that be?

Yeah, I would say study the marketing psychology fundamentals. Cause that’s what AI really won’t be able to replace for a while at least. Like the David Ogilvy stuff and the book influence from the fifties understand why people behave irrationally and illogically And then understand like how to use that to your advantage, because marketing it’s part of it is science, but there’s always an art part to it because people have this psychology side that, forces them to act irrationally.

So I think when you can figure out like triggers for people on that side, you can then deploy it. With ads and on the technical side, but I think that’s the part that will be really tough to automate or replace.

We’re coming to an end now. And let’s have a quick rapid fire round.

Are you ready for that?

Okay.

If you could soap roll with any other department in your company for a day. Which would it be?

Sorry. Was it start a war with?

If you could swap roles with any other department within your company for a day.

So if I could swap roles with any other department, which one would it be?

Yep. Probably sales. It’s just the most similar, right? Yeah.

Do you enjoy sales? Have you tried it in the past?

No, I went straight into marketing. I definitely talk with prospects and customers a lot. Occasionally I’ll jump on a demo. I do a lot of emailing with them.

But yeah, I just found I was always better at marketing and it was I could see where growth was going and wanted to be there, but yeah, I would say sales. I would probably be the best at sales. I don’t know if I’d be great in any other department.

Now, if you could magically if magically you were a, say, marketing budget gets 10 fold what would be the first thing you would do with those extra funds?

I would probably produce a really high quality, like a YouTube ad, like a commercial style. And then, yeah, be able to like chop that up into a shorter LinkedIn ads. But I think having a really high quality commercial style ad that you can run on, like connected TV ads and YouTube.

I think that will go a long way and it’d just be like a fun thing to work on too.

Now what’s the most unexpected lesson that you have learned from failed campaign?

Most, yeah, so,

I guess I’ll start by saying what I’ve learned with marketing thing is you have to do the work, but it has to work too. So you could be the best at project management and doing all the work, but if it doesn’t work then no one really cares. So I would say I learned that from failed campaigns.

The other thing I would say too, is learning that you can’t. Just two X budgets, right? Like there, there’s a very real drop off point. And yeah, I’ve learned, like only increase your budget 15, 20 percent of the time. Cause even if you two exit, it can actually work worse than it did at the previous budget.

You just throw things off so much. So yeah, I would say scale. Cautiously.

Yeah. Gradually.

Yeah. Gradually. That’s a better word. Yeah.

What’s a marketing tool or app that you can’t live without?

Yeah, I would say metadata has a product called meta match. I just use it for targeting. It’s pretty, I essentially just can get really good targeting so I can type in specific job titles and you don’t have to rely on the LinkedIn sort of job title bundling.

So yeah it’s pretty straightforward, but that tool has been really helpful for LinkedIn ads.

Your very last question. If you could use only one social media for your personal use, of course for the rest of your life, which would it be?

I would say LinkedIn because it’s the one where I can make money from.

I see. Alright. Thank you and I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for taking time out for this sharing a wonderful experiences about the company and . Thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Had a blast.

Lemme pause. Yeah.

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