From Data to Dollars: AI-Powered Growth & Partner Marketing Mastery for SaaS

Great to be here.

Yeah a startup, which always makes it much easier to be on top.

So I joined EverFlow six years ago as employee number 15 to lead the marketing team. And I joined Everflow after being a customer of Everflow. So I was one of the first customers, built a pretty scaled up mobile affiliate network on top of Everflow. I’d used a lot of the competitor products.

I realized that in terms of just tracking and attribution and managing all my affiliates, all the platforms are very outdated and hard to use. So using a platform like Everflow that I knew was very easy to use, it was very Like, clearly I could tell the market potential there and the opportunity.

So when I had the chance to join Everflow I joined and then basically we’ve just grown from there. So I’ve always been in charge of the marketing, but as that team is skilled, my title has gone with it. So I think now in, as of two weeks from now, it’ll be like the marketing team will be like 16, 17 people.

And that’s because it’s like a mix of marketing and all the partnership team.

Yeah it’s the natural scaling of companies. So in the very early days, it was me doing everything.
And then it’s slowly me getting a team member for each thing, delegating more responsibilities, having people take ownership of it.

And now it’s more about management and making sure that we’re focusing on the big picture things that matter. And for a business like ours, there’s a billion things you can do in marketing, but at the day, happy customers referring business to us is how we really grow.

So that’s the main feedback we focus on. It’s just like, how do we make sure that our customers are both very happy and are being asked at the right times to send business our way?

Yeah. So partner marketing is a very broad category because there’s many different types of partnerships. So it depends on the company, but. You basically break it into a couple things. So one is like referral partners, where it’s basically like people that know your product well, that can refer business.

So I recommend you should always have any happy customers that are giving you say, like high net promoter score, things like that. You should have them, you should ask them if they’ll refer business to you. And some of them you want to incentivize by paying them on the qualified lead. And then on the customer, because For some people like that’s enough to move the needle enough for them to take action and really with a referral It’s about beating inertia like it takes time and effort to make a referral even if you really like a company So anything you can do to make them feel like hey if I spend another five minutes I get 250 like recommending it to a friend or a peer The money is enough to just move them slightly over the edge so that they actually do it.

So that’s the referral side. Then you have like your strategic side, which is like agencies, tech partners, anything you’re integrated with. There’s a lot of back and forth referrals, especially if like you’re better together with two technologies. And then the third bucket is the traditional growth channels of things like e commerce and legion, which is affiliates and influencers where you’re basically paying them a performance basis.

And in that situation, like. If you want to scale affiliates, they need someplace where they can log in. They can see how much money they’re making, get the tracking links to promote and then get paid. And that requires having a dashboard where they can see [00:04:00] that stuff and receive payments. Like it doesn’t work without that sort of like transparency and feedback so that they know if they’re promoting to actually seeing success quickly.

Yeah, so we have one big advantage, which is even though it’s competitive market a there’s it’s a very high.

There’s a lot of revenue flowing through that market and like our next nearest competitors almost 15 years old. So it’s a very like our competitors are ageing there. There hasn’t been much change on their side. But they’ve found something where they, because it’s performance, like I’m talking specifically about like affiliate networks and that side, like it’s a performance business model.

You pay the affiliate like 10 percent of what you earn. Like you’ll do that all day, every day. So there’s a ton of money that flows through it and very little innovation from these like older competitors. And so just being a newer company, With like experience, like founders who were from the industry and then build a very scalable platform that is built for the modern world and modern data analytics.

Like that by far already makes it much easier because if you’ve used a competitor, you know how much of an improvement our platform is. And that wow factor is the kind of thing that drives you to make referrals and stuff. So again, like I think. Our growth is really that referral engine of happy customers referring business.
And the reason we can do it is because if you compare us against our competition, like there’s a clear difference.

Yeah, so we talked about this a little bit before we started the podcast, and like from my perspective a lot of SEO like you either focus on SEO or the best way if you wanna have SEO and not focus on it, is just focus on strategy.

So our entire content strategy is like, how do we create really good content? That is unique to us, but also serve some other purpose. So we really focus a lot on like webinars and fireside chats where we will have like strategic partners, agencies, publishers hopping on a call with us. Because even if no one sees the webinar and The SEO value of it’s pretty low.

Like at least we’re building important rapport with a partner and we’re giving a platform where we distribute it on social, which always gets a lot of views, etc. So like that Core Loop works really well. And then the other piece of that is like we use a webinar tool called sql.io, and it allows all of our fireside and webinars to be on our website.

So all the traffic is going straight to our website and it automatically creates an AI transcript. Of like a blog piece after the webinar. So we take that AI transcript, we edit it to make it actually like, and then we’ll pop it in underneath the, that video content. So it creates like a full unique piece of content with video.

That’s very low lift on our team and can be a steady thing that we do every week or every two weeks.

Sorry, what was that?

Yeah.
So in terms of content, I’d say mainly we focus on like our newsletter and product newsletter, just ways to inform our customers, keep them up to date. We do a lot of Conferences and events. So we’re always like promoting stuff on there, promoting the webinars, brewing everything. So it’s just the regular dialogue of communication is like the main thing we focus on for content.

Cause other than that, it’s really just building out all of the little micro feature pages. Start with the value of this feature and why it helps potential customers. But I’d say like content is actually like pretty low on our like goal base. Once we do knock through the webinars and the newsletter.

Yeah. So because we have full tracking and attribution and our platforms built, so it, Tracks all partners, but all other marketing channels too. We have everything in the same place. So basically everything we do we get a look at through a performance lens where we can see okay for all these partners, all these ad channels, all of our organic traffic, etc.

Like how many of them are driving demo requests? how much those demo requests are progressing from demo to like qualified lead to opportunity to customer. So all the CRM stages, we can see whether they visited our pricing page or blog first. So we know did content lead to people signing up for demos.

And then finally, we can see what happens afterwards. So you became a customer. Great. Are you a customer a year from now? So we have attribution on all of those things back to any of our channels. So we have a pretty good picture of it. And I would say that with that stuff is once you have, it’s like, Oh, that’s nice.

It’s good to have, but really the best way to think about attribution is like, how do I understand that there’s at least some impact for my efforts? So I’m not just wasting my time and B, how do I make sure that the people and. Channels that need credit have a shot at credit. So this is usually like a top of funnel stuff.
So you think about influencers, review websites, content websites, et cetera. A lot of times people start there. That might be the first time they heard about EverFlow is they went to a content website talking about the best five partner marketing platforms. If they never heard about us and they go to EverFlow, they’re not going to just go request a demo.

Like we all know you request a demo sales is going to start hitting you up right away. So most people are going to be like, actually, This is interesting. This solves some needs. Now let me go do research. And so usually the user will go from like a content piece to a website and then leave for a week.

Where they’re like asking friends or going to communities or going to other things, and then they come back and then they sign up for a demo, though, the way that normally happens in most people’s like tracking attribution setups is that when they come back, it’s being attributed usually to a paid ad or something else, because they went back to your website.

The first thing that shows up is that sponsored ad for your brand. They clicked on it. They need the ad actually had zero impact in that situation. They just weren’t really thinking about it. And they clicked on the first thing they saw cause they were ready to sign up. Most systems would say like the ad drove this.
New demo request, but really it was that content side at the beginning. So when you have everything, your partners, your content, and your marketing all in the same place, you can use first touch attribution to say Hey, if they start from any of these. Demand generation sources, these top of funnel, like getting new people in the door sources for the next 45 days.

I don’t care what other channels they came from. I’m going to give it to the source that started the conversation. And so I think that’s where it really matters is like attributions really good for making sure that the things that need the most help to get credit. have that window where they can get credit.

Yeah, so churn is obviously like a huge piece of what we focus on.

So what’s interesting with Everflow is, two things. So one, we’re a bootstrap company, so there’s very few bootstrap companies that are up to a hundred people. And that means that we’re at least doing [00:12:00] some stuff. For sure. And the second thing is that our biggest team is customer success.

So most orgs, customer success is small, like literally is the largest part of our company, because it’s really important that Customer onboarding is super smooth. Customers are getting to value really quickly because we’re competing against competitors that are much older basic platforms. That means that we have way more features, which is very overwhelming.

Again, you need to do a lot of training and support for that. And that customer success, like that is the things that keep down churn is because they are solving. Problems right away inside the platform. You can talk to them at any time through the chat. We do a lot to support that thing. And so yeah we focus on churn all the time because again, like getting customers in the door is great, but if they’re all leaving, it’s not going to, you’re never going to grow.

And I would say that like the one thing. That people don’t really think about it with it is that customer success is often thought of as a cost center, but we really see that you give someone a delightful experience. That person is the kind of person who will refer other business to you. So a lot of our like marketing growth actually comes from customer success, giving a really good experience.

Yeah, let’s see. So I’d say one challenge is just like scaling paid ads is very difficult.
We’ve spent a lot of time on it. We run Google ads profitably, which Is a lot of effort and a lot of choosing the right things, passing the right data into Google ads and making sure you turn off all of the bad stuff they want to send you. So there’s a lot of pruning out of keywords that are not the right intent.

So it’s great, but it’s very hard to scale the next level without like just basically getting demo requests that are not serious about buying a product or will never be ready. So trying to find those next [00:14:00] things is very hard. And then trying to take it to other channels like the social channels, et cetera.

It’s really hard to get that traction of these are people who actually become customers because it’s really easy to get leads. It’s very easy to get qualified leads. But it’s very hard to get qualified leads that actually are the type of people that become customers. Scaling paid ads is a challenge.

And then obviously like constantly keeping momentum going with your referral program so that your referral partners don’t just send you a customer and then move on. Like you need to keep that relationship going, get them to go over and over again because you can always get new referral partners as long as you’re growing and have customers that are happy because you turn the customers into referral partners.

But keeping that momentum is actually pretty difficult. So I’d say those are two of the biggest challenges.

Yeah, I think like anything, it starts with like community podcasts, things like that, seeing what other people that are succeeding with.

So you know Oh, Hey, if I’m hearing a lot of people succeeding with a specific tool, like for instance, like we had the RB to B, which is like all over LinkedIn, like that guy was very loud. A lot of people started talking about it. And they started talking about that and Clay, and then Clay spread all over LinkedIn, so we built that loop of okay, RB to B into Clay, let’s do this like automation of detection of users going to your website that don’t sign up for demos, passing that to Clay, enriching all the data with Is this the right type of person for us?

Do they have the things that we need? Like in our case, like affiliate marketing, like people with affiliate brands is like a very good category for us. So we have enrichment that looks up whether they have an affiliate program by searching for it, by going to their website, et cetera. So like that enrichment into outbound thing, like we started testing it and it Took way longer than we expected because anything with AI and prompts is has so many ways that it stops working or slightly breaks.

So you have to spend a lot more time than you think. And now we’re starting to see like how successful this will be and does it justify ongoing efforts? But I think it always starts with that. It’s just basically does this make sense? Does this solve a challenge that we need? And then it’s spending the time Once you get validation that other people actually are making this work, that there’s some meat on that bone, then you can start really testing it internally.
And some of the stuff doesn’t work out. We’ve turned off a lot of tools because sounded good, but it didn’t work out. But. That’s the best way. It’s you always start with your peers and those kind of recommendations first. Gotcha.

I would say for performance marketing, like the great thing about it is how little it changes, like it’s proven it always makes money. It’s very cost effective. So the more you can grow it, the better. But there’s new channels. There’s new types of partners succeeding. There’s new flows and stuff, but it’s it’s evergreen.

So that’s what I like about it is that there’s nothing too trendy there. I would say that like the biggest changes are obviously with all the AI stuff and really this ability, once you figure out how to use some of these AI tools like you can literally find every contact who’s in your ICP at every company in a few hours of effort and basically fill entire spreadsheets with it.

So now you can always find the right person. Very quickly. And then it’s about okay, like what next? Like, how do you not just immediately burn through your list and blow out your reputation and not really succeed there? It’s really about figuring out how to do it the right way. Once you have the right information and you can be pretty focused on who you’re going after.

I think that’s where the emerging trends are really interesting. And it’s like using AI, right? Because I think most people are going to do it wrong. And because it’s easy, people are going to just spam it and then people are going to turn out. Yeah.

Yeah, so there’s like a bunch of pieces to that. The first one is just being really aligned on what the company goals are like. We’re extremely transparent company. Everyone in the company knows how much revenue we make. They know how much we’ve grown, all those things. So that helps is everyone understands where the company is at.

Second, like we all have shared KPIs towards like revenue growth on top of the team specific KPIs towards like higher retention or lower churn or more new customers or more product upsell revenue. So that helps that everyone’s, Focused on the same things of growing the company either through more revenue or less churn.

And then the other piece of that is just because we use the product ourselves, we can be one of the voices to product of like how to improve it. So that always helps us that we have a reason to talk with them and they have a reason to talk with us because they get benefit from hearing us.

there’s so much opportunity there to support them and give them a better solution. That’s going to be our growth path for the time being. And then I think in terms of like technology, I do think that AI even for us will be super interesting because there’s one thing that AI solves that I really like.

I really think generative AI is a lot of that’s going to blow up because, If AI is generating, say a blog piece, and it’s copying a bunch of stuff or anything, or saying things that are completely wrong there’s huge consequences to that, and also it very rarely writes it correctly.

Good enough to pass the test of feeling like this is authentic content. So the generation piece of AI is actually pretty weak without like human editing and improvement. But on the other side of AI, like something that I like for our own platform is just AI is a really good way to make it easier to use your platform in terms of as an experienced user, okay, I go to this report.

I look up this data point to figure out that question. Whereas AI, where you have it very constrained, where you’re like, Just use this data and here are the questions that are okay to ask. You can be like, Hey what are my top five influencers in the last month? And it pulls it like, that’s great for a user who’s like very novice or new, very easy for them to understand without having to Figure out your UI, et cetera.
So it’s friendly to everyone. And I think that there’s a huge benefit from there.

It’s AI sometimes can make it really easy to get things that are not that hard to get anyway, but are much easier to get through AI. And it doesn’t require building UI. Like you don’t have to have a specific experience designed where you show this report of just influencers, which is not useful for an enough people to build out for a product, but is something that really helps that one person really needs it.

So I think AI making it simpler to understand basic questions within platforms and within data sets is where it’s like most interesting.

Yeah, how we got here like our, the reason we were able to build like a very like high functioning, very sophisticated platform was because our basic feedback loop in the early days and more and more like we don’t need it as much as we did in the early days, but in the early days it was all about customer success is always talking with customers, always helping them and collecting feature requests from those customers.

And then they would basically figure out which of those features are most needed. Is there a workaround? Is this going to be useful for other people? If all those things were true, that there was no work around and was useful for other people that went to product and then product started prioritizing building that.

So we very quickly built our platforms. Based on what customers actually needed and the features that were missing to our customers. So that helped a ton and like we’ll continue to do that. But at this point we’re sophisticated enough that there is less of that ongoing feature request for the features that exist right now.

And so it’s only more with like new features. But then you have to be like, okay, like Outside of what our customers know, like what else could we do to solve for them? So you start going beyond just what your platform already does once you’re up to a certain level. So I think that customer feedback loop is the biggest one.

And then from the marketing side, I would say it’s more about the fact that like we’re customers and we can be like forward thinking towards who our future customers can be because if we use our platform and we know the pain points that we need to solve with the platform, we can keep building stuff that way.
So it’s really easy for us to understand how other people can use it.

LinkedIn.

For building what?

Oh, I don’t know, but I’d say that Like the RB to be like their attention B to B guys were talking about how they used to troll people on Facebook and that actually built like a huge amount of audience by just trolling people because they get these huge comments and people would start following them and that actually built their like initial following.
All right. What’s the weirdest

I can’t think of any place too much. It’s usually just like a shower or walking or being like, Oh shit, I should have done that.

There’s lots of weird places like bathrooms, et cetera, but I don’t think they’re very effective. I’ve never seen them be effective.

Yeah, I do sometimes think about it.
I don’t think there’s that much value from having a ton of money when marketing for most things. But I think that if I were actually having to deploy 10 times as much, I would really just focus on go to every industry conference and be the biggest booth. Because I feel like that’s the one place where the money actually has some direct impact.

Another department?

Oh, swap. I would definitely do customer success because it’s pretty no, I would do sales. Sales is pretty fun. So I would do sales for a while and just be like, Hey, can I close more than these salespeople?

And the answer is no, because it takes way too much follow up.

My last Gen AI prompt was probably for something like corgi in space wow. With our brand ever Flow against the world, just to share with the team. So silly pictures to share with the team. What’s my last gen ai?

oh, cool.

Yeah, no, my pleasure.