Mastering SaaS Marketing: Insights from Philippe Ruttens

Thank you. It’s tight indeed. We work for engineers, architects, and developers to unify centralize, and secure their API platform, gateway, and everything around API management. So pleased to meet you.

Sure. It’s been a journey. It is still a journey. I’ve I started working in 1992. So I am older than I look and always in B2B marketing. I’m still learning every day because of the tech, MarTech, Mar Ops, AI, data analysis, and the shift in terms of B2B marketing to measurable and sales and revenue focus, which is why I’ve changed my career. If you want to evolve, I should say, originally from Marcom into research, knowledge, lead gen, digital marketing, demand management, and in the last few years, obviously in the SaaS world, especially everything around data markets, revenue marketing, PM. In a way, The fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed in my three decades of marketing, but the way you execute, the way you transform, the focus, obviously the customer, buy a journey inside data tools, and processes, that are constantly changing.

Sure. We do tech marketing and developer marketing. A lot of SaaS companies are probably involved in that. We have different personas, and different ICPs, going from a developer user, if you want, to an influencer, to a buyer, and then the C-suite. We have four levels of personas. Like most companies, there’s no rocket science there. But of course, as always, it’s all in the details of how your product and market fit, what sides, what pain, what gain, what value, what problem, what job to be done, GTBD you’re trying to focus on. It’s a mix, and it keeps changing. A way of marketing, as most B2B marketers fundamentally inbound is most relevant. In terms of helping, I always say help, don’t sell. So guiding, educating. We have a platform maturity model. We have a blog, we have a documentation website. We have a community where all our tech audiences are researching and informing themselves. So as we know, developers, and engineers, hate marketing. They hate sales. So SEO is super important. Content marketing is super important. The insights, the buying intent signals, the user signals from the product analytics, the ABM, the account-based marketing, and of course, how you can forecast or actually I should say measure, predict, and then scale your content to the right persona at the right touch point of the journey, which is a spaghetti, not really a sequence.

A lot is going on there using tech, using data, fine-tuning your content, your messaging, or every day.

Totally. I didn’t answer completely your question in terms of what our company does, but it is connecting data and services. If you look at the internet, I think it’s the number two-thirds, at least, of the internet is driven by machines, not people. Its services, microservices, are services internally in a company between the developers, the engineers, and the tech teams, but also their partners, and their customers. You produce APIs, You consume APIs in the company or outside with partners. If you look at Google, they have Google Maps, for example. There are all kinds of partners. If you look at booking.com, taxi, flights, hotels, et cetera, you name it. You have so many multi-sector partners. AI is coming into the picture with machines, more machines, and more data. So we love that. We help customers make sense of it. Security, and cybersecurity, as we know, are also an additional layer of needs. You need to secure, govern, centralize. But then you have the internal element, which is developer experience, and engineer experience, where you need a platform. Of course, you have gateways, you have platforms, you have portals, you have dashboards. But the experience as a person, whether you’re a marketer or product manager, API product manager, because now you have the API as a product and even platform as product trends, is supercritical.

Having a platform like a tag, allows you to do it faster, to not suffer the pain of trying to recruit developers, to automate it, or to monitor, obviously, through a dashboard portal, et cetera, to avoid hacks to make sure that your rate limiting, obviously, your design strategy also has to be faster and better. But everything that is rate limiting and all the hacking that’s happening could be mission critical or mission destroying, if you want, in terms of your business and your customers not being able to use your apps or your APIs or their data. As we read in the news, big banks, especially regulatory sectors, See their data between apps, APIs, transfers, and everything are just being stolen. So it is volume, it’s increasing, complexity is increasing, security is decreasing, is throwing also a lot more into it, too. So it is a great place to be for TARIF to help customers manage, whether you’re a traffic company in the US, or whether you do retail, telecom, or banking more and more apps must be talking to each other and need to integrate and get secure.

Without going into the details of our strategy, we have, like most companies, a research or Insight team. We have data scientists, we have platforms and tools allowing us to do it and to predict scoring, for example. We have a pretty strong tech stack, being a very tech company, allowing us to gather the data from behavior, thermographics, and product analytics. We have a cloud, and we have an on-prem, high-rate, and cloud version the cloud is where most of the data sits because on-premise, self-managed, it sits with our customers. We have also quantitative insights, obviously, from a range of sources, including the demos, debriefs from our salespeople, our product team or product managers, even customer support, and the tickets. We have Slack telling us live chat information, customer success, product information, and all that we read in marketing. So we don’t even have to do market research because a lot of it comes every day. What is their use case? What are the problems they’re trying to whether they’re customers or prospects? There’s a gold mine of information. I think the trick for the market here is using AI, first of all, to respect data privacy because we have ISO and all kinds of standard compliance.

We cannot use ChatGPT. We may not because of compliance. We have our own AI tool for internal confidential sources. Chatgpt is only used for content, but we cannot plug our CRM into it, obviously, and other things because it’s not compliant with our data security. We do have our own AI, which is called Montag. Ai, which is available as a beta on top of what we do internally. We collect all kinds of data. We use tools to analyze, to produce AI inside. We use people, obviously, you always human analysis. Every day, we look at what our customers are saying, and asking. We do workshops, we do webinars, we do hangouts. We attend events. It’s a collection, it’s a constant collection. There are simple processes to report back, discuss, etc. It’s important to keep it simple.

Tyk, yeah. I’ve managed the teams, so much marketing, and business development. I’ve transformed, usually from a mark on to revenue marketing, a few years ago, it was digital. Now it’s done. Now, the biggest challenge is, how can you move a marketing team from marketing, branding, let’s say, the more creative side to a more measurable data sales revenue focus. I’m lucky to have a great team, and I had to transform the team, obviously, with my colleagues and ensure that we have a strong bar-up person. And true, tech stack is critical. That you have the training, that you have the stakeholder’s management, product, sales, customer success, the board, obviously, the investors as a CMO. To be honest, it is difficult still. After 30 years. I still make mistakes, but I can course-correct faster than before. I can use the mix of data, always say 60%, 70% data, and 30% remains your gut feeding. Or actually, I should say your experience, your maturity. So that’s the advantage of being older, is that you’ve seen it before and you can spot more quickly, Oh, these people, they have the attitudes, the aptitude, the skills. You can train, you can always train skills.

That’s not a problem. But if you have the right mindset as a marketer to be curious about the data, to ask questions, Oh, I’d like to know more of this. It doesn’t have to be somebody, Oh, I know how to get the answer. But asking the right questions to improve the pipeline, to improve engagement, to convert. The velocity and the conversion are supercritical. I can give you my two or three versions of marketing teams, whether you have product messaging content or content production channels. It depends. In all companies, it depends on your commercial goals and your go-to-market motion. Are you product-led growth? Are you sales lead growth? On your type of customers, on your size of customers. If you sell to an enterprise, different from a mid-size or small market. If you sell a product that is self-served, different from a sales-led growth, where you need a longer journey, more complex journey, which can be 12 months as opposed to one month. It is also about connecting the dots with products and sales. Super important. The more you do that, the better team you’re going to have, and you’re going to find out, Oh, we need somebody for product messaging inside or outside.

It could be an agency, it could be a freelancer, You need that type of person to plug the gap between different teams or at one stage of the process if you want.

Totally. I’ve learned from my experience in the last few years. Everybody knows that MQL leads are done now. Lead gen, outbound, SDRs, replaced by AI or not, okay, you can argue that. But the key focus for not only Tide, and for, I would say, most marketing teams, for me needs to be The deals or opportunities created, The ARR created two. That’s the ARR revenue, three. The velocity combined, I would say, with the conversion because you can go fast but have low-quality SQLs, let’s say, or low-quality deals and waste a lot of time. Or you can go more slowly but aim for higher quality. So it’s a balance between velocity and conversion. But the North Star is the number and amount of deals created for us, for, I would say, most marketing teams in the SaaS world. Investors, the board, they’re not interested in the clicks or the shares or even How many deals? Sorry, how many leads do you get as an MQL? Even SQL, contacts, or demos don’t matter to a board. It’s, okay, what’s in the pipeline? Is the pipeline coverage from marketing four times? Is your ROI from your budget eight times, for example, in terms of pipeline created versus budget spent?

So it always comes back. Usually, I would say 80% for a board is the deals and the value of the deals. Of course, let’s not forget customer satisfaction, and churn, and renewal, but that’s part of it. On the pipeline, you have the partner pipeline, the new sales pipeline, and the customer pipelines.

Of course, I’m talking B2B. Let’s keep that in mind. In my B2B experience, I’ve worked in banking, in manufacturing, in all kinds of services, professional services, and SaaS. It always comes back to the same mix of channels. Again, content is the fuel, if you want, the foundation and the messaging, obviously, or the value proposition, I should say. It comes back to inbound coming from the SEO website. Maybe 50, 60% of the whole inbound machine, or maybe more for some companies, supplemented by paid, indeed, PPC, as we know, Google keeps changing the rules, I should say. You have the cookies or lack of cookies situation. You have the data aspects which are becoming more and more difficult. Of course, you have paid social, you have third-party content syndication, important. But Usually, I would say for marketers or ROI, it would be 10-20% of your budget and delivery on ROI. So 50, 60% easily, SEO website content, 10, 15, 20% paid. And then what’s left, you have about 20% or a bit more. What we see, and what I’ve seen, is that events, physical, hybrid, virtual events, remain or are coming back since COVID is really important in terms of relationships, development, in terms of connecting directly people to people, because B2B is P2P, people to people, educating them.

Events are great for educating people on their specific gains, and values, not selling the company, but talking about how we can help them just training in a way. So I see a website, a bit of paid. Events, 20%. If you’ve got that right, of course, content has the basis. I would say, I would dare to say 90% of marketers are making their pipeline through these channels. Let’s not forget social. Social it’s a delivery channel. It’s good to have great content. You need to activate it. And of course, some companies, and some sectors might have other ways to drive the pipeline. So hopefully I answered your question.

Absolutely. I started getting serious about ABM already before I moved to Tyk just over two years ago. Absolutely. Whether it’s ABM, or ABX, as an account-balanced engagement, It is critical unless you only sell to SMEs. I would say if you sea a ll mid-size enterprise, yes, you need that pyramid, one-to-many, one-to-few, one-to-one. We have four tiers, for example, for ABM. Obviously, on top, the top account, 20, 50 accounts, whatever it is for you. And then you go down the list. The last bottom of the pyramid is the colder account, the wider which you might want to push to outbound. But I call it all bound, A-L-L. Inbound and outbound, integrated is the way to go for me for ABM. And of course, we know marketing and sales, having to work together is not always easy. In our case, it does work. There’s a process, there’s different tiers, there’s a scoring, a heat map, you name it, where and content and workflows. We try to semi-automate. We don’t sell to hundreds of thousands of accounts. We can still use a fair amount of manual. If you sell, again, to SMEs, you might want to go more automated, especially if you do self-serve PLG.

You need the shape of ABM, but I would go more towards order-bound as opposed to the old-fashioned way of ABM if you want. You need to start a small pilot and then optimize using as you do in a way, you interview me for a podcast or on social, you do some studies and you get your accounts into your pipeline that way. I think it’s a good way to do it.

Oh, yes, for sure. If you look at people being influenced by people, they will look at your IE, your AM, your engineers, and your peers. When I look at thought I look at other CMOs, for example, or I look at specific agencies or gurus. I think thought leadership, not from a company page, but from people, what they share, the demos. For example, we have great experts sharing demos about how to solve something or a demo with an opinion. So being opinion and injecting some facts, some examples to solve a case study, to put a use case together without trying to say it again. I think it’s critical. So the third leadership that I’m interested in, for example, are the templates and the benchmarks and any report that is based on concrete practical information, not McKinsey reporting because it’s too fluffy, too high level, let’s say, or academic, even if it’s quality. But I think third leadership is critical. Having an opinion about an industry trend and proving it with examples is part of that content machine, if you want.

Yeah, I guess, I mean, marketing or revenue marketing challenge. I think it’s, as you could read, probably hear from your colleagues, that the SaaS world is a roller coaster. If you look at SaaS and all these guys, B2B, C-marketing is going reasonably well. B2b marketing is not in trouble, but it’s really hard, more and more, because of the tech stack The tech budget, I should say, has not necessarily shrunk, but a bit of it is taken by the hype around AI, which is still to deliver revenue. We know that a lot of companies are pumping money into AI, but it takes money away from other SaaS, other tech stacks, and software. So as a B2B market here, you need not only to educate, but also to focus on the value that they’re getting from your software or your professional services early on, even before you sell, obviously, but also all through the journey. And it’s not about, Hey, we’ve got a new release and we’ve got the nice case study. But what for them, specifically, linked to their pain, what is value, again, they can get from your product, obviously, and you need to measure that, and you need to work with your colleagues in products and sales, but also anything else, both leadership that can help expand, amplify that value, or maybe make them realize, Oh, okay, I have that pain, but actually, I have another pain here or another pain here.

That’s why we do a maturity model where there are different levels, design, team, process, et cetera, and say, Okay, I am benchmarked as a here and a two here. And being able to help prospects understand where they are, and how they can go from A to B or A to Z, depending on where they are. I think we’re there as a guide, as a partner, All right.

There are amazing tools out there. There are thousands of tools. We just generate new data, for example, from our website, where you can see the behavior nearly live. We can go into more refined detail. The power of the tools and the data to understand the customer behavior and journey or visitor journey is amazing and is crucial to determining who’s scoring, and where you should place your bets. I think it’s really important. Keeping in mind, that you need the qualitative side. I think for me, as an older marketer, it is making sure that you got your basics right and not being shiny objects here and there and changing direction, you need to keep the focus on your content, your website, being your shop front, on making sure that the right educational content is at the right place, showing the right people. And the tools can help. But fundamentally, the value proposition, the messaging that you have as a brand has to resonate and be personalized, customized, Again, ABN. Well, we use HubSpot, for example. You can go quite far in terms of smart content with other tools break down in terms of making sure that if you respect, obviously, the cookies and everything, that you’re doing you to show, Okay, what content is going to help on that topic for that person?

And then shifting to a new one, if that person indicates a different need. And that’s the best we can do as marketers are serve them the menu, the meal that they want, and Hopefully, they will share it with their colleagues or they will show, Hey, boss, I’ve got this great content. And the success of a marketer is they do the marketing for you, but you have to give them the seeds, the food to make that recipe if you Yeah.

Yes, go ahead.

The habit of forgetting what the data is telling you.

Admin, like budget.

Everything around the dashboard and reporting.

I am quite into sports, so something around sports, athletes.

Fitness. Anything around fitness.

I have to think about that. It was typically for making a program, a structure of a program, or a presentation, actually, a keynote presentation. So what would be the structure? For example, an ABM one that you would use headlines and all that stuff.

No problem. Thank you for your insightful questions, too. It was easy and very insightful. Thank you too.