S6E3 – How to Build a High-Impact Demand Gen Strategy for B2B SaaS with Clark Barron

Are you wondering how to build a high-impact demand gen strategy for B2B SaaS? In this episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS Podcast, host Joran talks with Clark Barron, CEO of Ronin, a cybersecurity marketing agency, and co-host of the Late Stage Demand podcast. They discuss demand generation, brand building, and how marketing strategies compare to cybersecurity tactics. Clark shares his views on the changing role of demand generation in B2B SaaS, common mistakes in growth strategies, and why knowing your audience is key.

Clark Barron’s View on Marketing and Cybersecurity

Clark starts with an interesting comparison between marketing campaigns and cyberattacks. He explains that both require deep research and precise targeting. However, he stresses that marketing must come from a place of understanding and empathy, especially in cybersecurity. He urges marketers to truly know their audience to create effective campaigns.

What is Demand Generation?

Clark believes the meaning of demand generation has been misused over the years. He argues that marketing cannot create demand from nothing. Many companies focus too much on fast growth, but Clark suggests a different approach. He sees demand generation as a flexible concept that changes based on a company’s needs. He recommends focusing on audience research rather than just numbers.

The Challenge of Measuring Marketing Success

Joran and Clark discuss how hard it is to measure marketing results in B2B. Clark critiques the heavy use of data models to track ROI. He believes good marketing is not always easy to measure and that companies should pay more attention to customer insights. Understanding the buyer’s journey is more important than just tracking numbers.

How to Implement Demand Generation

Clark explains how to build a demand generation strategy step by step. The first step is understanding the product, audience, and competition. Marketers should ask key questions to make sure their strategy is on track. Once the basics are clear, he suggests experimenting with different marketing channels and content. Being open to new ideas is essential for success.

The Relationship Between Brand and Demand

Clark strongly believes that brand and demand generation go hand in hand. He rejects the idea that branding is outdated. Instead, he argues that branding shapes how people see a company, while demand generation delivers the right messages to potential customers. When combined, they create a strong marketing approach.

The Influence of Venture Capital on Marketing

Clark criticizes how venture capital (VC) firms influence marketing in early-stage SaaS companies. He explains that VC-backed startups face high pressure to grow quickly, while bootstrapped companies can focus more on their product and brand. He warns founders to think carefully before taking VC money and to consider their long-term goals.

The Hockey Stack Tesla Giveaway: A Marketing Mistake

Clark revisits the Hockey Stack Tesla giveaway, a campaign that initially gained attention but later failed due to broken promises. He explains that while the campaign generated excitement, it damaged trust when expectations were not met. This case highlights the importance of keeping marketing promises and protecting brand reputation.

Advice for SaaS Founders

Clark shares advice for SaaS founders at different growth stages. For those starting out, he emphasizes the need for self-reflection and setting goals beyond just making money. Founders should focus on building their brand. As companies grow towards $10 million ARR, he advises delegating tasks, refining strategies, and leaving room for innovation.

Conclusion: Building a Strong Marketing Strategy

The episode ends with key lessons on creating a long-term marketing strategy. Clark highlights the need for balance between brand building, demand generation, audience research, and experimentation. By focusing on their customers and planning for the future, SaaS marketers and founders can drive meaningful growth.

Key Timecodes

• (0:43) – Guest intro: Clark Barron, CEO of Ronin and co-host of Late Stage Demand podcast
• (1:31) – Cybersecurity marketing parallels with cyber attacks
• (3:13) – Challenges in cybersecurity marketing with email tactics
• (4:05) – Effective marketing experiments in cybersecurity
• (4:27) – Explaining demand generation and its misconceptions
• (5:52) – Misnomer of marketing generating demand
• (7:25) – Different definitions of demand generation
• (9:04) – Challenges in quantifying effectiveness in B2B marketing
• (13:09) – Importance of qualitative research in understanding audience
• (15:11) – Implementing demand generation successfully
• (18:41) – Experimenting with channels and content
• (21:23) – Brand vs. demand debate in marketing
• (25:02) – VC-backed vs. bootstrapped companies in marketing approaches
• (30:21) – Hockey Stack Tesla giveaway case study
• (34:38) – Advice for SaaS founders at 10K MRR and scaling to 10M ARR

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Clark Barron

Marketing doesn’t generate demand. You can’t create demand out of thin air. That’s not a thing. It’s literally not possible. The main way moving forward is to abandon the notion that it is growth at all costs. That is, how can we 10X this and whatever? That type of thinking is myopic. Learn every single thing that you possibly can about your audience. We just If you do not know that, you have no chance of succeeding at anything at all because you’re not going to know what you’re doing.

[00:00:43.460] – Joran

Today, we’re going to talk about demand generation for your B2B SaaS. My guest today is Clark Barron. Clark is the CEO of Ronin, a cybersecurity marketing agency and co-host of the Late Stage Demand podcast. I came across Clark when he wrote an extensive article on the Tesla Hockey Stack Giveaway, which went completely wrong. So we’ll touch upon that a little bit. Before starting Ronin, Clark has been in multiple marketing roles where the last year’s mostly focused on demand gen. When researching Clark, I found this quote, At the end of the day, we’re all launching legal cyber attacks at people, trying to get them to take an action they wouldn’t otherwise take without our influence. Let’s find out what he means with this. Welcome to the show, Clark.

[00:01:24.080] – Clark Barron

Hey, man. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

[00:01:27.020] – Joran

Thanks for coming on. Let’s start with your quote. What do you mean with this quote?

[00:01:31.980] – Clark Barron

Yeah, it usually is a foreign concept to those outside of the cybersecurity industry, the IT industry. One of the things that I noticed once I got into the cybersecurity industry is that a lot of what we do as marketers looks exactly like a cyber attack. I started to investigate and make comparisons. If you take the high-level architecture of a cyber cyber attack and step by step and put it next to a marketing campaign. Each step is almost exactly the same. For example, malicious actors, bad guys, criminals. If they’re wanting to exploit a vulnerability. They’re wanting to exploit a person and commit a crime. They’re going to do recon on that target, learn everything about them. Just because we call it persona building, it doesn’t really make it any different. The next thing they’re going to do is they’re going to see which vulnerabilities they’re able to exploit, and then they’re going to develop a very targeted payload to exploit that vulnerability. Whereas what we do is create ICP-focused content to hit pain points of our prospective buyers. It’s all the same stuff. This is one of the things that I was able to really shake up in the cybersecurity industry is just that level of self-awareness that we need to have because our buyers in cybersecurity are the ultimate skeptics.

[00:03:13.020] – Clark Barron

We have organizations that are still doing email marketing where they’re trying to get someone to download a PDF attachment and sending these to people that are world-class experts at defending against and educating other people to defend against attacks that look exactly like that. We’re expecting the marketing to work. Intent matters, malicious actors trying to commit a crime or fish someone by getting them to download something. But it still looks like the same thing. Their brains are hardwired, let alone the insane levels of security they have on their email. If you can even hit their email inbox, it’s this level of empathy and self-aware awareness that the more technical industries have to adopt in their marketing.

[00:04:05.200] – Joran

Nice. Both industries run experiments to see what is working. In the end, they’ll probably exploit the things which are working and continue with it as well.

[00:04:14.640] – Clark Barron

Exactly.

[00:04:16.340] – Joran

Nice. We’re probably going to touch more in the rest of the podcast, but let’s start with talking about demand generation for B2B SaaS. If we start at the basics, how would you explain demand generation?

[00:04:27.980] – Clark Barron

I get this question a lot. My answer Usually changes by the week. Demand generation is one of those things. That term alone has been so bastardized over the years that a lot of people associate it with performance marketing and paid ads and this stuff. A lot of people get really abstract with it and start incorporating field marketing and brand and things like that. Then it eventually just devolves into this homogenized soup of basically being a catch-all for all the good marketers that are just specialists and happen to be good at everything because the first person that’s going to be asked to do something in marketing organization is generally the demand generation person. Unless you’re running very specific field marketing, like in-person events only or something like that. But when it comes to demand generation itself, one of the things that I think we have to learn to accept is Marketing doesn’t generate demand. You can’t create demand out of thin air. That’s not a thing. It’s literally not possible. And so the name itself is really a misnomer. And demand gen marketers were really screwed from the very beginning because we’ve spent the last five years trying to figure out what they do.

[00:05:52.920] – Clark Barron

By they, I mean me and other marketers out there that either specialize or dabble in or have or are complete fanatics and have devoted their entire lives to demand generation market. But a lot of people are now starting to realize that, and this is what will apply directly to B2B SaaS, is a lot of people are starting to realize that the main way moving forward is to abandon the notion that it is growth at all costs. That is, how can we 10X this and whatever. That type of thinking is myopic. It just becomes an extension of sales, and that’s it. At that point, there is no creativity, there is no craft, there is no psychology behind it, there is no qualitative research, because a lot of the things that are actually effective in marketing, and specifically very effective in B2B marketing, can’t be quantified. When B2B SaaS, these Oasis have a big problem with that. Roi can’t be proven. You hear a lot in this industry that, If I put in a dollar, how many do I get out? You always have to stop somewhere. Those are the types of questions that demand generation marketers get asked on a daily basis by people that don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to marketing.

[00:07:25.380] – Clark Barron

If we’re looking to define it, that’s going to change every single day. It’s going to be completely and utterly predicated on the organization at which you’re working at. Do you have the headcount to spread responsibilities? We early stage SaaS startups, sometimes it’s usually just marketing hire number one. It’s one person. They’re doing literally everything. And so that trend goes on for so long, and there are so many B2B SaaS startups, and you have an entire generation of marketers thinking that marketer number one, combined with the fact that everyone is using the term demand generation, that person doing everything demand gen still being the very in the zeitgeist, They’re associating demand generation with literally being able to do marketing, all of it. And so that’s why I say it doesn’t matter what the definition of demand generation is. It’s dependent on your in a specific situation and what you’re being tasked to do. Because as a discipline, demand generation changes by the second because it’s all whatever, whoever decides to associate with it. And that’s going to be different. If you talk to 100 people, 99 of those people are going to have different definitions of demand generation.

[00:08:55.280] – Clark Barron

So if you have that many people contributing to conversation and none of them can agree on anything, then why does it matter?

[00:09:04.670] – Joran

Then one thing you said, the fact that things can’t be quantified and can’t be proven. How do you know something is effective? If you can’t quantify it?

[00:09:15.600] – Clark Barron

A lot of that narrative is perpetuated by VC culture, the advent of the CRO, things like that, a lot of things in B2B, specifically. B2c will throw money at anything, and they can control the masses. When it comes to B2B, everybody wants to quantify everything. But as it turns out, that’s not the entire picture. Because if we were able to go buy specific attribution models and we could contribute everything to last touch, and that’s what would get us our next funding around or look good in a slide deck, things would be all unicorns and rainbows. But that’s just not the case anymore, because when you’re trying to figure to figure out whether or not you can attribute every single dollar you make to one specific touch point or campaign or ad or landing page or whatever. If you’re assuming that your buyers are jumping into the funnel that you’re assuming so much about your audience and your potential customers when you really don’t know anything about them. We call them educated guesses, and essentially, we say that what everyone is letting slide under the table is that you have no clue when the actual first time that person heard about what you do or who you are.

[00:10:45.900] – Clark Barron

We don’t have access to private Discord servers, Slack channels, or the restroom at a conference when someone’s talking trash about one person, but really saying good things about you or vice versa. We don’t I know. A lot of people call that the dark funnel, but it’s just anything you can’t attribute. We’ve learned the buyer journey is not something to be controlled because you can’t control what people do. The entire concept of the buyer journey and attribution and things like that, those concepts are based on the fact that we have to keep our jobs. We have to secure that next round. We have to please the board, our boss, whoever. But when we’re in a position to where the only things that we’re allowed to do as marketers are the things that we can 100% Either whether it’s a zero or a one. If you can attribute it, that’s what we’re doing. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t, but I have to know. I have to know for an absolute fact whether it worked or not. I have to be able to prove it, show it to other people because our lives are on the line.

[00:12:04.080] – Clark Barron

That’s not how buyers operate. That’s not human nature. A construct developed by the corporate world, by VCs. There’s so much to getting someone’s attention that you’re completely ignoring by just, we’re only going to do things we can attribute and nothing else. The qualitative is what we need to be spending our time on because if we’re actually talking to our customers, if we’re doing real in-depth qualitative research, then they will tell us where they are, and then we can start to get a clearer picture of how our audience, potential customers, and buyers operate. At that point, we can start to build some models that attribute a little bit further down the line than we could have seen before. But you can’t just go Go from the very beginning and go, I don’t know if that’s going to work, so I’m not going to do it. Until you do it, you don’t know.

[00:13:09.130] – Joran

I definitely don’t disagree with you here because the podcast is like an example for our company I’m doing it now for two years. Can I measure what comes out of it? Not really. Metrics are gone. Everything is on Spotify, Apple. We can’t add tracking. Can I say it’s effective? Yes. But can I measure it? No. I know. Sometimes I hear they come from the podcast or started listening to the podcast after I had a sales conversation, which builds up the trust. I definitely agree here. I was just curious. You have to do things. You can’t quantify that they’re effective.

[00:13:42.800] – Clark Barron

What you’re doing by not Allowing marketers that level of experimentation is forcing marketers into a box that they were never meant to go in the first place. It’s why demand generation ended up running teams of BDRs for some reason. Find me one single marketer that got into marketing that really loves marketing, the craft. They had that curious nature. That’s when they got into marketing. Find me one of those people that’s good at it that got into marketing because they wanted to run a team of BDRs. I’ll wait, but somehow those are just the things that we’ve accepted along the way that that have led demand generation marketers to wake up one day and realize, Oh, I’m in sales now. How did that happen?

[00:14:37.280] – Joran

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[00:14:55.500] – Clark Barron

Want to learn more?

[00:14:56.580] – Joran

Go to getReditus. Com. If somebody wants to implement demand gen successfully, what would be your step-by-step approach? You already mentioned talking to clients. They will tell you where they are, but maybe even take it all the way from the beginning. How would you implement?

[00:15:11.100] – Clark Barron

A lot of that is predicated on things that, unfortunately, marketers don’t control. Is the product good? If we’re talking early stage SaaS, does the product work? What messaging can we develop around that product? Who is our audience? All of the things that are demand gen, demand gen adjacent, getting into product marketing and nail fundamentals. Specifically, who is your ICP? You need to have competitive intelligence, be almost 100% nailed down in the thought that you actually have product market fit. Because a lot of marketers walk into situations where they’re marketing higher, number one, that in any early stage company and realize, Oh, what did I I get myself into this thing sucks and doesn’t even work. Or no one wants this because there’s no way to shoehorn this into an already flooded, oversaturated market with players that have been in this space for years. If you’re the marketer in that situation, the first thing you’re going to have to do is ask a lot of questions internally. That is going to give you the idea of what path you should start to not go down yet, but the path that you need to look for. Early stage, you need to be having conversations with your marketing leadership, if that exists at that point, your CEO, just everybody, anybody and everyone.

[00:16:45.320] – Clark Barron

What’s the plan? What’s the actual plan? Because way too often marketers get in positions to where they’re just told, Hey, bring pipeline in. Just sell stuff. Just do a marketing. And they go, Okay. That’s one of the things that I hate about demand generation in this day and age is that, unfortunately, a lot of demand gen marketers are set up for failure, and they’re not even afforded the luxury of being able to get their own function up to speed before they’re shown the door. This happens all the time in SaaS, all the time. When you work your way up market, it happens a lot less. Their tenure is going to a lot longer. I think there’s a lot to in terms of organizational maturity. For the most part, if you want to implement a demand gen program, the first thing you’re going to have to do is learn every single thing that you possibly can about your audience. If you do not know that, you have no chance of succeeding at anything at all because you’re not going to know what you’re doing. You’re not going to know what they respond to, what they like, what they absolutely do not, which is just as important.

[00:18:01.560] – Clark Barron

Having those conversations up front about demand generation, product market, whoever, being able to do that qualitative research and lay that’s needed to really lay a good foundation for a solid demand gen, motion to take shape and thrive, get that function up to speed, that is where 100%, as a marketer, that’s where 100 % of your focus should be before you ever sign Sign up for LinkedIn ads or put a bunch of integrations into your HubSpot. Anything. Have those internal conversations or anything else that you would have done is not going to matter because you’re going to get fired.

[00:18:42.020] – Joran

Let’s assume the foundation is in place. You know the fundamentals, you learn everything about your audience, what would be the next steps in your opinion?

[00:18:51.130] – Clark Barron

Start experimenting with channels and content. If you’re well-informed at this point about what really resonates with your audience, you’ve looked at, competitors have done, you’ve done some qualitative research, you’ve got enough variables there to throw in the soup, start experimenting. Don’t assume that just because someone says their channel doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Always keep in mind, if you don’t try, if you don’t take a risk, if you don’t experiment, you’re never going to know. For example, one of the things in cybersecurity, everyone assumes And that just because it was security, and we were marketing to not only cybersecurity buyers like CSOs in the C-suite at the VP level, we’re also marketing to the practitioners, the people that are actually using the tools daily. Those people are very skeptical. They’re very security conscious. And so no one ever thought in their… Everybody for the longest time was just like, TikTok’s dead. Don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about it. But you have to experiment. You have to try channels that you wouldn’t otherwise do. If you think 40-year veteran CISOs aren’t in the bathroom scrolling TikTok, you’re wrong. They’re humans, and humans do weird shit.

[00:20:12.890] – Clark Barron

So just make sure that you’re casting a wide net first in order to get enough in grand. We said, we’ve done our qualitative, and now it’s time to start actually getting some numbers in the door. Have a game plan to cast a wide enough net on different channels experiment with different creative, different formats, different messaging until something hits. Don’t give up on any specific motion or channel or whatever you want to call it or campaign. Don’t give up on any of that until everyone on the team and a few key players cross-functionally are happy with the data set. They’re convinced that we can actually make a decision. Now, obviously, within any organization, it’s going to vary who’s actually in that conversation. But if when you’re talking to the right folks, make sure that you have buy-in and you have given it your best shot to see what works and you actually have some data to work with. That’s why I say experiment because you don’t know if you don’t know.

[00:21:23.740] – Joran

Yeah. Really start with an open mindset, no assumptions, try everything. There’s There are quite a few contrary intakes already here. What is maybe another popular belief which really is out there right now in the space where you completely disagree with? What is one contrary take?

[00:21:42.060] – Clark Barron

To clarify my take, brand is 100% not dead. Brand is very much alive and needs to come to the forefront in a huge way. A lot of people do find controversial is how much I index on brand. I’m a creative at heart. I got my They start in digital creative agencies doing brand work for big brands, everybody from Exxon to Jimmy Buffett and everything in between. I love those big flashy campaigns. I know they work. You come in to B2B, you get a little humbled, sure. But again, we’re talking about humans. But I digress. In terms of demand generation, a lot of people are starting to realize that, oh, maybe it’s not just cranking out ads and trying to quantify every single thing to hit an arbitrary KPI that someone that doesn’t know anything about marketing made up for us. People are starting to realize that maybe we shouldn’t think like that. You see some of the the lower part of the scale of organizational maturity, you see a lot of those startups really focus on brand, which is awesome. That plays into your demand generation program. Brand is demand and vice versa. One is about perception and how your brand is perceived by an audience that knows you, doesn’t know you, may know a lot or a little about you.

[00:23:09.920] – Clark Barron

And demand is the vessel to get to those people, whatever the content, the message, whatever that may be. A lot of people are having this debate right now that is brand versus demand. That is very incorrect. That is just an objectively incorrect way to think about that. That’s not a debate or an argument that anyone needs to be happy. Brand and demand generation should go hand in hand at all times. Because if you’re not aware of the principles that go into brand building, and I do want to clarify, I’m not talking about branding assets like sales collateral, your logo or your website. Don’t care about any of that. Brand, as in shaping the perception of your audience at scale. Brand is what people say about you behind your back. Marketing and demand generating, things like that, are the ways that you try to influence. With that analogy, you can see how they have to work hand in hand. So many people are just caught up in this. We have to attribute everything, so we’re going to go 100% performance, a performance-based demand generation program. Then you have other people on the opposite end of the spectrum going, Everything needs to be fluffy and just It’ll work if it works.

[00:24:31.470] – Clark Barron

That’s also incorrect. They have to realize there is one shared goal, and both of them working together can accomplish that.

[00:24:40.410] – Joran

You mentioned already, growth at all costs is dead, right? You also mentioned the VC where they focus on attributing revenue towards marketing channels. Do you see a really big differentiator between bootstrap companies, focusing more on brand, focusing more on the long-term growth channels versus VC-backed companies which have to spend money to get the revenue in to grow to get to the next funding route?

[00:25:02.420] – Clark Barron

Yeah, 100%. The difference is night and day. If you are early stage SaaS, don’t take VC money. That might not be your opinion or the opinion of anybody else that’s on here. That is my opinion. It will ruin your life. I’ve seen it time and time again because once you cash that check, it’s not yours anymore. It’s not the reason that you got into this in the first place. You are beholden to what Whatever they say. If you don’t hit it, you’re out. Or the whole dream is dead. So many founders out there, is that really why you got into this? Is it really why you tried to solve the problem that you set out to solve? That’s why you put your blood, sweat, and tears into building something like this from the ground up, only to have someone just turn it into a factory? At some point, you have to realize that if you have taken VC money Then it’s not about you or the dream or the mission or whatever. It’s not about that anymore. At that point, the only reason that any of you are there or to buy those assholes another boat.

[00:26:12.880] – Clark Barron

That’s it. When you see bootstrapped companies that refuse those types of checks, is there explosive growth? No, of course not. You can’t expect that to happen when there’s not just a fire hose of money going directly into a fire. The amount of money wasted by VCs trying to pump and dump as much cash into these startups, hoping that if you get one out of 10, you win, which, sidebar, If you accept VC money, which of those 10 do you think the VC that gave you money thinks you are? When it comes to bootstrap companies, they have time to experiment because they have nothing to lose. They can put everything into product. They can put everything into brand. That’s why you see those. It is a slow and steady race, but they come out with better products with a clearer vision of what they’re trying to accomplish, what they’re trying to say, the things that they’re trying to change within a certain industry, a problem they’re trying to solve. You see that all the A lot of people think they don’t get the attention. It’s not as sexy because we raised a $20 million A round.

[00:27:39.320] – Clark Barron

Okay, great. Talk to me in six months and we’ll see how much of that you got left and what you have to show for it. The issue at VC-backed early stage SaaS startups, when you have that level of money, we both agree, we want explosive growth. We want 10X returns on this. That doesn’t account for all the things that if you were bootstrap and you could take your time and figure it doesn’t account for all the things that going slower could actually accomplish, knowing whether or not you actually have product market fit or whether or not your product actually works the way you think it does or if your audience wants it. There’s no time to experiment. There’s no time to get to know your audience, make more intimate level and actually speak with them about what they need, the problems they’re trying to solve within their groups, their organizations. And once you get into late stage demand gen, it is just, I don’t care how much money I will cram a million dollars into the engine. As long as I get a million dollars and 50 cents, it’s wild. And once organizations like that find one single thing that accomplishes that, then your marketing team is only going to be responsible for doing that one thing and nothing else.

[00:29:04.740] – Clark Barron

You’re going to neglect brand. Churn is going to go through the roof because you’re not working on retention. You’re not going to be able to get the same amount of opportunities that the organizations that are bootstrap are going to get because they spent time actually building a brand that is recognized. Because in B2B, specifically, a lot of these early-stage VC companies are not realizing that you absolutely must focus on brand if you’re working in tandem with the demand generation program. You absolutely must do it. It is well-documented. It is proven that B2B buyers, when they decide to start their actual buyer journey, and if they’re problem-aware and they’re going to start to evaluate solutions, the second that that happens, they already have three names in mind before they ever go to anyone’s website, click on anything, see an ad, click on an ad, fill out a form before any of that happens. Three names. If you are not in one of those three names, you’re done. The only thing that can accomplish that is brand, period.

[00:30:22.000] – Joran

Yeah, funny thing. You reminded me of something I mentioned in my intro because I came across you when you wrote this extensive article on the Tesla Giveaway from Hockey Stack. I thought it was an interesting case, and you’re making it here now as well. It’s a random act of marketing in a way. It went completely wrong because of the way they dealt with it. Tell me a little bit what happened, how they messed up.

[00:30:43.720] – Clark Barron

They messed up by not giving away a Tesla when they said they were going to. That’s the only mistake they made. That’s it. Now, once that didn’t happen, and just to give everybody a little bit of the information about what was going on there, Hockey Stack had a contest going to where they wanted you to read through all of the market research papers that they had done, and then they had a quiz, which like an open book test. It was good for their engagement. They got a lot of eyes on all their stuff. It was actually, on paper, a very good play. Before I learned of all the nonsense that ended up going south with that, I had actually praised them for not explaining exploiting their community, their audience. Because before that, on my page and on our channels, we were talking about how ZoomInfo had founded a community and then not 30 days later, they were already exploiting them and trying to get them to push Zoom info. Here, HockeyStack comes along with this contest, and I, like an idiot, gave them the benefit of the doubt. And said, This is how you do it.

[00:32:02.240] – Clark Barron

It was great. We’re giving away a great prize, heavily incentivizing checking out the content. It’s engaging because I can actually take a quiz. It was great. There’s nothing wrong. Could it have been better conceptually? Sure. But for the most part, it’s damn good play. When you’re talking about brand building, and when I’m defining brand as what people say about you behind your back, how effective effective did that particular contest, that campaign, become once they just didn’t do it? Then we got this whole rigmarole about their delaying it here and there. Then people that had seen my post, people came out of the woodwork, started to ask me and tell me all these stories about their experience with Hockey Stack. Some had former customers, some were participants, finalists. We’re supposed in the drawing to actually get the car. It’s long story long, six months later, they finally did it. They followed through, I guess you could say, a half year later and announced a winner. They made a wire transfer because it wasn’t an American winner, so they couldn’t accept the car. They had a cash alternative. They did that, coincidentally enough, on the day I released my article.

[00:33:22.860] – Clark Barron

Who knows? But to tie this into something we can actually learn from, that’s a demand gen play. It is the correct way to incorporate brand because you have things you can attribute, which is the engagement on all the content. You get those folks identified, run them through your machine That’ll satisfy all the people that are looking for hardcore attribution. But in the meantime, you’ve also got all the PR and the brand building that comes along with saying that you’re giving away a Tesla. So it’s It’s so weird how they managed to nail exactly what I’ve been preaching about brand and demand going hand in hand. It’s weird they nailed the strategy of the campaign itself and then just completely shit the bed when it came to actually coming through on it. But in theory, yes, that’s a great way to do things.

[00:34:23.360] – Joran

We’re going to start wrapping up. I’m going to ask two questions which I always ask at the end. When we talk about growing a B2B SaaS, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who’s just starting out and now growing to 10K monthly recurring revenue?

[00:34:38.280] – Clark Barron

If I were to have that conversation with a SaaS founder going from scratch, trying to help them understand how to get to 10K, MRR from zero. The first thing I’m going to say is, why is that your goal? Why do you want to do that? We’re going to have that conversation and just really evaluate, figure out your own motives, dig deep into who you are as a person and how motivated that you truly are to make this happen. The reason I say that, and that may have nothing to do with marketing, but it has everything to do with marketing. I’ll explain why. Because I know it sounds like I’m a therapist right now, having these deep, meaningful conversations and seeing what you’re really made of and confronting what you actually you want to do with yourself, your life, your company, your baby pet project. You really need to have a tough look in the mirror and have that conversation where, do I really want to put in what it’s going to take? Because what it’s going to take, and this is why we have to do so much introspection, is it’s going to take you being the brand.

[00:35:53.380] – Clark Barron

It is founder-led growth. It is founder-led sales. You’ve got to be able to Take care of everything because in the beginning, it is you. You might have brought on a partner. You might have built whatever the thing is with someone else. But for the most part, it’s you. If you’re the founder, it’s you. You’re not going You’re not going to have money to throw at traditional demand and stuff. You’re not going to have money to throw at huge stunts and spectacles that are big brand plays. You’re not going to be able to do of that. You have to get scrappy. You have to have a lot of technical marketing in sales experience, but you also have to be able to take care of your mental health. Honestly, as a marketer that has seen so many different marketers and founders in multiple industries burn out so quickly that they just hate themselves and they don’t know why they do it anymore, whether they took VC money or not or whatever. But in the really found foundational, like early stages when it’s just them or just a couple other people. The most important thing to do is take care of your mental health.

[00:37:07.230] – Clark Barron

Everything else will come. I know you’re going to have a lot of people answer that question. They’re going to give you a lot of technical answers. They’re going to tell you to hire someone to spruce up your LinkedIn, hire a ghost writer, build an audience on LinkedIn. That’s what they’re going to tell you to do. And guess what? That’s going to work. But if you haven’t done the work on yourself yourself, then you’re not going to be able to sustain that, which means it doesn’t matter what the monetary goal is. You shouldn’t have monetary goal in the first place. I know not everybody’s going to agree with that. You should be able to set healthy goals for yourself, whatever they are, but it shouldn’t be money. It should be a problem. It should be steady growth along the way, whatever it has. I’m not comparing myself to someone someone else that has already accomplished that, and that’s where I got that arbitrary number from. All I’m trying to do is be better than who I was yesterday. That is how you take over the world.

[00:38:14.080] – Joran

Let’s talk about taking over the world. Let’s assume we hit 10K MRR and we’re going to make a huge step towards 10 million ARR. What advice would you give a founder here?

[00:38:25.360] – Clark Barron

Delegate. Know your team better than anyone. Know your entire organization in and out. Don’t hover. Don’t keep your hands on everything. Don’t micromanage and whatnot. We’re starting to see organizations that are accomplishing those bigger numbers with fewer and fewer people. You can do that, but those teams are the ones that are so comfortable in who they are and what the organization is at that point, where it came from, how it evolved to get there. That’s how you do that because a lot of the plays, and I know there are some very canned answers that you could say for a question like this, but the way you want to look at it is take what you have done along the way to get from. And I know we made a huge leap there, and a lot of things have changed there. You could have been on round two if you wanted to, or it could have been 10 years in that gap. At that point, you should have it pretty dialed in as to what works and what doesn’t. And so getting to that, like actually scaling means operationalizing everything that is already working and leaving room for experimentation, changes in the market dynamics, having a better sense of things that are going on with competitors and whatnot.

[00:39:43.740] – Clark Barron

Your optics should be wide open all the time. At that point, you should have built a brand that is not the top fuel drag racer that could, if you wanted to, get 10K MRR. We’re talking about the diesel that just won’t stop. It goes a little bit slower, but it won’t stop. That’s the brand and demand machine that you should have built. And of course, I’m just relating all these things or just speaking about marketing stuff. But There are so many other things to consider when you’re trying to hit a number like that. A lot of it doesn’t involve marketing and sales. Your product should have nailed customer service and other things. If I’m giving advice to founder, it’s keep doing what you’re doing and make sure you’re delegating and employing people that you trust, that you know what you’re doing. Because once we start to get beyond that, then you don’t have to answer to anyone, even though you may have previously answered to someone. It’s a pretty important milestone. The thing is, just stick with what you’re doing while allowing for experimentation. Nice. Love it.

[00:40:57.120] – Joran

Let me see if I could try to summarize. A marketing campaign is is equal to a cyber attack. If we talk about demand gen, what it means is dependent on your situation. It is evolving every day. Abandon the growth at all cost thinking. Effective things can’t be quantified. You can’t control the buyer funnel. A lot of demand gen marketers are set up to failure at the moment. If you are looking to implement demand gen, start at the foundation, so nail the fundamentals, ICP, product, competitor intelligence. Ask a lot of questions internally to define the path forward. You learn everything about your audience, so do proper qualitative research. Then go into experimentation phase. Make no assumptions. Start experimenting on different channels, messaging, etc. Don’t assume anything. If you don’t experiment yourself, you wouldn’t know. Don’t give up until everybody agrees on the available data to go forward or not go forward with a channel. Brand is not that. On the contrary, brand is demand and vice versa. When bootstrapping, you can actually focus on product on organic growth. When you do a giveaway, make sure you actually give away the price. When we talk about growing to 10K MR, why do you want to get there?

[00:42:08.610] – Joran

Ask it yourself, because in the end, you need to do everything yourself. You should be setting healthy goals, but not monetary ones. 10 million AR, delegate, optimize what is working, keep experimenting, build a brand which doesn’t stop. So really become a diesel. And that’s it.

[00:42:25.380] – Clark Barron

There you go. That’s it.

[00:42:26.660] – Joran

There you go. If people want to get in contact with you, Clark, how can they do so?

[00:42:32.040] – Clark Barron

Linkedin. That’s it. Clark Baron on LinkedIn. Feel free to check out my very methodical, yet sometimes unhinged content. Yeah, I love for anybody to slide in the DM’s. Let’s chat demand gen brand marketing or taking down Martech vendors. I’m always available.

[00:42:56.680] – Joran

We’re going to link to your LinkedIn profile. I’m going to link to the latest Edge demand podcast as well. We’re going to link to the article from Hockey Stack so people can find you in any way possible. For people listening, please leave us a review to beat the algorithm so we can rank higher and let us know what you thought of the podcast. If you’re listening on Spotify, we’ll add a poll to it. Thanks again for coming on, Clark.

[00:43:20.260] – Clark Barron

Absolutely, man. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:43:22.130] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your BDBSAS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you liked this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show, if you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.