S2E6 – How to do revenue attribution the right way? With Steffen Hedebrandt

How to do revenue attribution the right way? When it comes to achieving accurate and insightful revenue attribution, mastering the right approach is crucial for the success of your business. In this episode, Joran Hofman hosts Steffen Hedebrandt the Co-founder of Dreamdata. In this episode, our guest expert helps us to understand How to do revenue attribution the right way.

Revenue attribution isn’t just about tracking where your customers come from; it’s a strategic process that involves understanding the entire customer journey, identifying successful tactics, and optimizing your marketing efforts. To do revenue attribution the right way, start by implementing a comprehensive data collection strategy that encompasses various touchpoints, from CRM and marketing automation to website tracking and ad platforms. By creating an account-based timeline and connecting it to revenue outcomes, you gain valuable insights into what’s truly driving your sales. Investing in reliable tools like Dreamdata can streamline this process, ensuring you’re equipped with the accurate data you need to make informed decisions and replicate winning strategies. With precise revenue attribution, you’ll be empowered to allocate resources effectively, enhance your marketing efforts, and ultimately drive sustainable growth for your B2B SaaS business.

What is Revenue Attribution?

• Definition of revenue attribution in the context of B2B SaaS companies
• Understanding the customer journey and paths to acquiring new clients
• Identifying replicable tactics for attracting customers
• Importance of differentiating successful strategies from wasteful activities
• Value of revenue attribution in optimizing marketing efforts

Essentials Before Starting Revenue Attribution:

• Simple steps to initiate revenue attribution
• Curiosity about customer acquisition sources as a starting point
• Collecting data through methods like asking customers about their source of discovery
• Implementing tools like Google Analytics for basic tracking
• Setting up data collection systems for digital interactions, e.g., CRM systems or customer success tools

When to Begin Revenue Attribution:

• Balancing between experimentation and analysis in the early stages
• Starting revenue attribution as early as possible to capture historical data
• Benefits of tracking leading indicators and proxies for success
• The importance of setting up data tracking systems before they are urgently needed
• Incorporating customer journey reflection points for effective attribution

 Metrics for Acquisition Attribution:

• Focusing on leading and lagging indicators for accurate attribution
• Early leading indicators like engagement scores and ad performance
• Lagging indicators like demo calls booked and sales pipelines created
• Challenges of attributing revenue in B2B SaaS with longer customer journeys
• Importance of tracking and analyzing data for successful acquisition strategies

Common Mistakes in Revenue Attribution:

• Misleading insights from Google Analytics, ad platforms, and CRM systems
• Limitations of these systems in understanding B2B customer journeys
• Manual updates and inaccuracies in CRM lead source fields
• The need for systems to communicate with each other for accurate attribution
• The critical role of educating marketers on better attribution practices

Implementing Effective Revenue Attribution:

• Strategies and processes for accurate revenue attribution
• Data collection from various sources: CRM, marketing automation, and outbound software
• Storing website interaction data in a data warehouse for analysis
• Identifying and resolving anonymous user identities across devices
• Creating an account-based timeline to track customer journeys
• Connecting the timeline to revenue using CRM data

Key Timecodes

• (1:23) Why you should listen to Steffen Hedebrandt
• (1:58) What is revenue attribution in relation to B2B SaaS
• (3:22) The bare minimal requirements for starting revenue attribution 
• (4:47) When to start thinking about revenue attribution 
• (7:15) The important metrics to check out for attributions
• (10:14) Mistakes companies make while doing revenue attribution 
• (13:50) Effective processes and strategies for revenue attribution  
• (16:52) The benchmarks for what works and what doesn’t
• (18:34) Which review sites works best for B2B Saas?
• (22:27)The importance of aligning sales and marketing
• (24:30) How to grow to 10k MRR
• (25:40) How to grow to 10M ARR
• (26:35) What Steffen Wishes he knew 10 years ago

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Intro

Welcome to Growing a B2B SaaS. On this show, you’ll get actionable and usable advice. You’ll hear about all aspects of growing a business to a business software company. Customer success, sales, funding, bootstrapping, exits, scaling, everything you need to know about growing a startup, and you’ll get it from someone who’s going through the same journey. Now your host, Joran Hofman.

[00:00:28.900] – Joran

Welcome back to another episode on the Grow Your B2B SaaS Podcast, where we discuss all topics on how to grow your B2B SaaS no matter in which stage you’re in. In order to grow your SaaS, you will need to know what is working and what isn’t. When done right, you would know which block would actually generate paid clients and what is a waste of money. Sounds easy, but it can be tricky and complicated to do. This is what you call revenue attribution. We’re going to talk with Steffen Hedebrandt today. He’s a CMO and co-founder at Dreamdata, and their tool helps B2B companies and especially B2B SaaS companies to attribute revenue. Before Dreamdata, Stefan worked at Upwork and Airtime where he’s killed the businesses and teams really rapidly. He knows the pains you are going through firsthand. Without further ado, welcome to the show, Steffen.

[00:01:15.850] – Steffen

Thank you so much, Joran, and looking forward to the conversation.

[00:01:20.020] – Joran

Nice. I’m always going to ask this at the beginning. Why should people listen to you today after hearing this intro as well?

[00:01:27.250] – Steffen

That’s a good question. I think I can make a promise that I’m not going to speak about stuff that I don’t know about or haven’t experienced myself. That’s a principle I always keep. When I do podcasts or talk at events or something like that, I’m not going to rant about any theory that I read on LinkedIn. I’ll stay within something I have experienced myself and relay that story as good as I can because it’s the truth as I see it and not somebody’s feathers that I have borrowed somewhere else.

[00:01:54.800] – Joran

Nice. I think that’s a really good strategy. We’re going to talk about revenue.

[00:01:57.930] – Steffen

Attribution today.

[00:01:59.110] – Joran

In your own words how would you define revenue attribution? And then especially with the context, of course, of being a B2B SaaS company.

[00:02:05.920] – Steffen

In the simplest of terms, it’s understanding how your company gets new customers. What path are they taking? Is there a path that looks to be possible to replicate? Is there some cheat codes here that we can use again? I used to play a lot of computer games when I was younger and some games had cheat codes. I look at it as the same way. If we understand what actually took place as we acquired a new customer, it’s most likely that we can replicate the tactic so we can do more of it. You could say the opposite side of the coin here is that we also want to help people do less of the things where they spend a lot of money, but no money comes back. That is some of the revenue attribution. There’s a bit of a fancy word for it, but it’s just many marketing teams do a lot of activities where they’re not able to actually prove in any sense that money came back from their activities. Not that you have to measure anything, but it’s actually just spotting the things that absolutely do not work. Those money could be spent on something else and making it more likely that your SaaS company would succeed ultimately.

[00:03:11.830] – Joran

Yeah, and what you said, the money can be spent elsewhere on the things which are actually working, which you also found out when you know what is working and then you can basically do more of that. Yeah. Before, I guess, companies even want to get started with revenue attribution, what should minimum be in place before you can even think about this?

[00:03:30.430] – Steffen

Let’s start super simple then. There’s nothing you have to do besides asking the questions in your team. Where did that customer come from? Starting to generate some curiosity about how can we tell a story about how this company arrived in our shop? I think it starts there being curious about what is actually going on when we get a customer. Once you start to have this conversation, you can start thinking about simple techniques. On the sales call, you ask them, Where did you hear about us? You can have forms on your website that says, Where did you hear about us? Then you can do simple stuff like installing Google Analytics on your website and measures that are available from one person to many thousands of people. It’s not rocket science that you start caring about where does your customers come from, but it’s I think the best thing you can start to do initially.

[00:04:20.790] – Joran

Exactly. Because in the end, if you know where they’re coming from, you can start scaling that, of course. It doesn’t have to be complicated, as you mentioned. You can start really small with even having an onboarding, asking every call, Hey, where did you actually find us? In the previous podcast, people even said they went through the entire flow with a client. What did you actually type in? What did you search? And how did you actually find us? Which is a bit much, of course, but you can do that as well if you really want to go deep manual.

[00:04:47.560] – Steffen

When do you.

[00:04:48.240] – Joran

Really need to start thinking about this? Would you recommend doing this really early stage already or is there something you might want to do.

[00:04:55.150] – Steffen

Later on? Yeah, I think that’s a good question. I would say. Initially, it’s much better to just do a lot of stuff rather than caring about analyzing what you did. Because for any company, you will have to go through this cycle of a lot of experiments in the beginning to find out some sources that works, whether that’s do a cold outbound calls or cold emails, or run newspaper ads or do a podcast or whatever. You’ll have to cycle through a lot of experiments. Before you start seeing those, some of them having leading indicators of something that looks attractive, then I wouldn’t worry about analyzing anything. Initially, it’s much better just to do a lot of stuff. Then once you get to some scale where you need to make a decision on should we double the budget here? Should we hire somebody? Should we raise money, etc, Then I think you should start considering whether you should get a more sophisticated setup. But there’s a caveat here, which is the same with data. It’s the best time to start tracking was when you started the company, because then you have the full history of anything that happened.

[00:05:59.390] – Steffen

Because if you decide today, then you’d have to look through, are we actually generating data of every digital interaction we have with our customers? Then it’s going to be three or six months before the data is going to be valid, because that’s how long your customer journeys are. It’s a kind-of you want to start before you actually need it. So typical advice can just be to think about your customer journey and think about every step of it. Are we generating digital reflections of it that we can go back to at a later point? It could be simple things if you don’t have a CRM system where you work with your sales teams work with it. Or maybe you should start getting a CRM system so you can see you had meetings, you had calls, you sent mails, etc. It can be if you do customer success work in your Gmail inbox, then maybe get a customer success tool instead and so forth. There’s probably many places where you are hand-holding stuff that you can move into a platform that helps you keep track of what’s going on.

[00:06:57.370] – Joran

I think the biggest advice here is if you want to do something later on and if you’re going to scale and you know you’re going to hire CS people, then add something in place already which collects the data. If you’re going to hire sales people, add a CRM in place which actually collects the data so you know what is working at the moment when they actually join the company. When we talk about acquisition, which is of course a lot of revenue attribution, what are the most important metrics in your opinion to focus on when we talk about acquisition? It can be anything. There’s a lot of metrics you can track as a company, but in the end, of course, it goes regarding revenue, like how much revenue are you generating. I guess what do you think is going to be the most important things to track? If you can only track three things, for example, what would you track?

[00:07:41.180] – Steffen

It obviously depends on which role you’re at. But I think for most activities, most experiments, you probably want to both think about what could be a leading indicator, which is something that happens very fast, and then what could be a lacking indicator of something. Let’s say we want to run, set up a new ad campaign on LinkedIn, then some very early leading indicators can be, what is actually the engagement score of this ads? Like when we show it to somebody, are they actually interested in it? Do they start clicking on it, etc. That is probably some of the early signals that you can see that you’ve set the right audience and the right messaging. Now, that is just one thing because it just might be that you’ve made a super nice ad, but does it actually become a sales pipeline later on? That would be then lacking indicators. Maybe you want to establish something that is not a one customer because that might take six months in a B2B SaaS. You might rather just be wanting to monitor, do we get more demo calls booked when we start running these ads? I think in popular terms, any marketer today would say you need to measure revenue on your marketing activities, and that’s true, and that’s what our tool enables people to do.

[00:08:53.660] – Steffen

But you should also have ideas about what is leading indicators of something working. If you’re in doubt whether it works, you can go look here and then quickly spot whether you should change the experiment a little bit and try something else.

[00:09:06.720] – Joran

Yeah, because as you mentioned, revenue can come in maybe six months later. So if something needs to happen before, of course, it actually turns into revenue, which makes a lot of sense.

[00:09:17.430] – Steffen

Yeah, we released these benchmarks last year about our customers’ customer journeys. The average there, which is predominantly B2B SaaS companies, was from first touch to a deal being won, was 192 days in average to more than six months. It does take a lot of patience in B2B if you want to wait for revenue. That’s also why I argue for you coming up with proxies or leading indicators that your activity is taking you on the right path.

[00:09:45.250] – Joran

Is there also any insights as in what is the average deal size then of.

[00:09:48.770] – Steffen

That benchmark? I think that doesn’t make too much sense to look at because companies are so different in that sense. We have anything from $100 subscriptions per month to seven-figure deals coming in as well.

[00:10:02.170] – Joran

Yeah, because I think the assumption is always that the smaller the deals, the.

[00:10:05.460] – Steffen

Quicker they go. Actually, now that you said, I think we did bucket the revenue size also compared to the time it takes.

[00:10:13.930] – Joran

Yeah. If we go towards that companies are already doing revenue attribution, what is the most common mistake companies are making while doing this?

[00:10:22.150] – Steffen

If we look at the landscape today about what are marketers doing, I think there’s three places that they are looking and they’re being misled. One is Google Analytics, which has been around for ages now, and it’s completely misleading people because it’s absolutely not built to understand what’s going on in a B2B company. If you’re selling simple transactional e-commerce stuff, it might be valuable. But in B2B, we’re facing these 6-12 months journeys, multiple people involved in the deal, and anywhere between 30 and 100 sessions on the website before you buy. That means that Google Analytics can’t help us in any way understanding what’s going on. Then there’s all the ad platforms where we buy our ads. They are completely blinded beyond telling us you bought a click, and at best that click converted in the session when they arrived to our website. But what can we really use some email converted on a website for? We need to understand who is it, which account that they part of. Did that account become sales pipeline, etc, and ad platforms have no clue about this. And then the last in this rant, the CRM system is also regarded as some place to find the truth.

[00:11:33.870] – Steffen

But it’s very useless as well for B2B marketers. But a lot of them have this original source or lead source field that is updated when a conversion comes in. The problem though, is that one that field can very typically be updated manually. The BDR can say, Hey, that was my call, and might turn out that it wasn’t the truth. An example is that when we have a demo call booked, there’s an average of four sessions involved before the call is booked. The CRM will say, In this session, the conversion happened, and you came in directly. So all right, the original source was direct. But what typically happens is that journey doesn’t start out of nowhere. It starts with a marketing activity, whether that’s an affiliate or paid marketing or organic search or something else. The CRM is always bound to over-represent direct visits or BDRs that says, I call this person and I got a meeting booked. But the situation right out there, if you ask me, is very critical. I think what we’re trying to evangelize through podcasts like this is what people don’t know what they don’t know right now. We need to help them understand how they can do it better.

[00:12:43.750] – Joran

Yeah, because in the end, these systems now currently don’t talk to each other. And as you mentioned, they’re really focused towards their own metrics, like the ad platforms, and of course, Google and Lytics not being fully ready to be a bit SaaS. And then you’re relating on manual work from the SDRs, which of course, like is bound to.

[00:13:00.650] – Steffen

Make mistakes. It’s the same for your affiliate business as well. If the customers become aware about a company through you, but don’t convert in the first session and then they come back four or five times directly or through retargeting or something else, then you get zero credit for it, despite the first time that the client heard about you was through some affiliate collaboration. Yeah.

[00:13:23.030] – Joran

In our case, we still work with first-party cookies, so they will get attributed because we set a cookie period and then that’s what the SaaS can decide. That still works really nice. In the end, we even recommend our clients to run retargeting ads, so they actually retarget the traffic an affiliate generates. It might be like a combined effort. In the end, it wouldn’t be a client if they have not done that. That’s one thing. But when we talk about, I guess this is a process which isn’t working. Can you share some strategies, processes you’ve used to attribute revenue correctly? And this can be a bit more towards, I guess, what you guys do at Dreamdata as well.

[00:13:59.900] – Steffen

Yeah, you can say we do it as a service, but I can describe the components you need to get in place if you want to do it yourself. B2b, go-to-market is complex, and there’s a lot of data we need to capture. Ideally, you want to have as much data about your customer journey as possible available. That would typically involve what takes place in your CRM system, what takes place through marketing automations, what takes place through outbound software, and customer success software. That typically text that you need to cover. Then you need to track anything that is going on your website and store that in a data warehouse where you have access to it and you own it first-party. Then you need to understand all the marketing activities you did on all the ad platforms. Once you’ve set up tracking on all these places, then you need a way to identify anonymous people with who they actually are. You can say that’s one of the first places it gets tricky. One thing is that you need to understand whether this anonymous ID has a computer, a tablet, and a phone, that those you need to resolution to the same person.

[00:15:10.860] – Steffen

You also need to be able to, once that they then convert, push through a form, you need to be able to take their identity who you now know who is, and resolution that with all the other visits that they had on your website before converting. Now we have one user knowing who they are. Then you need to, in yourdata model, you need to then sort the user to the account that they belong to. Because ultimately, we want to build a timeline of every account and not just of every individual. We can go into every account and look like, when was the first time we heard about this account and when did the account buy? This is the process you need to go through finding a mechanism where you can build an account-based timeline and not a timeline of individuals. Once you got that timeline established, then you would want to connect the whole timeline to money, to revenue. And that typically is done through the CRM system where you take, What did we close one here? Because that enables you to take the account-based timeline and say all the touches we have here, does that yield money or does it not yield money?

[00:16:17.640] – Steffen

That is the, I think, the non-technical description of what you technically need to do.

[00:16:22.390] – Joran

Yeah, and I think this is why a tool like Dreamdata exists, because if you have to do this yourself as a SaaS founder, as a marketer, then probably you wouldn’t be able to do this, or you need so much development time that you’re actually building the tool probably like Dreamdata.

[00:16:35.570] – Steffen

Yeah, and to be honest, it also takes very specialized people that actually know what they’re doing and they know what problems they’re going to run into and so forth. That would be our argument for buying a service to keep this in place for you rather than doing it yourself. Yeah, nice.

[00:16:52.040] – Joran

You mentioned, I guess, the benchmarks, and of course, you have access or you have a lot of clients where you can see exactly what is working and what isn’t working. When we talk about what is working really well, is there something you can say based on any of the data you have?

[00:17:07.120] – Steffen

Yeah, I could mention a few of the things that does well and doesn’t do well across many accounts. One thing could be to mention review websites in those benchmarks that people can go look at. You’ll see that the journeys that start through review websites tends to be around 65% faster than other journeys. So if you come from a review website, then it’s a lot faster. So that means the takeaway here for you is to think about what industry am I in? Are there review platforms? Are we actually ranking nicely? Does our profile there actually look nice? Because it’s people who are in market that are checking these review websites. And if we’re not doing well there, we’re missing out on some very hot leads that we could be capturing to our company. I think that’s component one. Then if we take something that is really crappy, then Google Display and network. Any activity there that is not retargeting tends to be just a complete waste of money. I have at least not come across anybody who have done any acquisition tactic, often going to cold audiences there and actually succeeding, getting some metrics that looks attractive.

[00:18:20.330] – Joran

That’s interesting because it does work, but purely for retargeting.

[00:18:23.750] – Steffen

Of course, it’s not categorically true, but I’ve at least not seen it.

[00:18:29.420] – Joran

One question maybe regarding the first point you said, the review websites go 60% faster. When you look at B2b SaaS, do you also have the knowledge as in which we view sites work really well? Of course, you have G2, Trustradius, Cephtera, are there any platforms for B2b SaaS companies working really well?

[00:18:47.600] – Steffen

Yeah, we use Cephtera and then G2 ourselves. Cephtera has that advantage that they have a PC model, so you can buy your way on top of the rankings, which, you can say, is somewhat contradictory to what the purpose of it is. But if you’re completely new in a market or on Cephtera, then it’s a way to get some action quickly. We can see, I think I took a look here the other day on the deals we win, I think 50% had been on our G2 profile. So it can have a massive impact on your business if it’s something that you actually put some efforts into.

[00:19:26.150] – Joran

Nice. Yeah. It’s overall good practice to ask your clients to leave you a review, so definitely make sure you always do. It’s one of the things we personally do, for example, when people come and chat and they’re happy, then it’s an easy ask as well. Hey, would you mind turning 10 minutes to give.

[00:19:41.100] – Steffen

Us a review? It’s all about making the next sale a little bit easier. If there’s just one more review, then the next sale that you’re going to go for is just going to be a little bit easier because there’s one more person voting that you can be trusted that you’re a good partner. I think that’s like when we talk about B2B marketing in general, I think people tend to forget that there’s only one success for B2B marketing, and that is when we sell more in our company. So we need to do anything we can to make their life easier for money to come into our business. Exactly.

[00:20:16.690] – Joran

Nice.

[00:20:17.740] – Steffen

Maybe a last thing to pick is that when it comes to search, most of the times it’s a waste of time chasing really broad keywords, because people that search for these really broad keywords have zero intention of acquiring a tool like you do, and that goes both for search ads or for organic search. You’re much better off going what you would call long tail or very deep into the customer journey and do some content there that is super strong about that, rather than picking that very broad keyword that has zero purchasing intent behind it.

[00:20:54.630] – Joran

Yeah. When you look at it really practical and make sense, right? Because your ideal customer profile is looking for something really specific and the more wider you go, I guess the wider you make your… Not your ICP, but you’re going to go out of that bucket. You’re going to have people on your side which are not actually looking for what you’re offering.

[00:21:13.080] – Steffen

Yeah. And then if you’re not careful, then those people also fill up your targeting cookies and then you’re going to be spending money on retargeting these people who have no interest in buying your product. Then it’s just a bad spiral from there.

[00:21:27.330] – Joran

Yeah, because in the end, retargeting and then they might even book a demo because they think it’s going to be relevant and then they’re going to take up sales time. We had this at the beginning ourselves as well where we had a lot of unqualified things and we made some changes because I was doing the demos and we’re just taking myself way too much time to jump on those. So definitely be sure for everybody’s time.

[00:21:46.780] – Commercial Break

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[00:22:26.240] – Joran

When you talk about marketing and sales alignment, as in there’s, of course, a hot topic always. But now you’re basically doing revenue attribution, right? So you’re doing the attribution, where is it actually coming from? How does it also help to align sales or marketing to make sure that you actually attribute the revenue towards.

[00:22:44.960] – Steffen

The right channel? Yeah, I think here it’s actually about enabling marketers to look beyond the first conversion so they can analyze what they’ve done in a perspective of, did it generate sales pipeline or customers that we want? Instead of being super tightly focused on marketing, just generating more email addresses, you can help them move their scope to, Let’s do more of the activities that generated a sales pipeline. That shift becoming focused on generating revenue makes marketing do activities that are focused on providing high-quality demand for the sales team rather than just being stuck measuring how many emails did we collect this month. Coincidentally, that makes the sales people very happy because the marketing team is focused on bringing really qualified demo calls that are more likely to buy your product.

Ps. This is also called revenue marketing

[00:23:38.570] – Joran

Yeah, in the end, it’s super simple. I focus on the same metrics, have the same goal in mind, and then people are going to align naturally.

[00:23:45.560] – Steffen

Exactly. I think so. That’s at least one metric, I think, in general. It’s something that any company should strive to do better and better. That means you cannot complain and say, Oh, the salespeople are stupid, or The marketing team is stupid. You need to get off your seat and then walk into the room and tell them if you’re a salesperson, this is how a good lead looks like. This is our best customers. This is the easiest. So the marketing team knows. Or if the salespeople is not showing up, then as a marketing team, you walk into the room and ask, Is there anything we can help you with or anything we can do better or something you think we do wrong? Or Let’s go drink a beer and learn how your work is being done.

[00:24:22.670] – Joran

Talk to each other. I think that’s the main clue here. We are coming a bit to the end, and I always like to ask these two questions at the end. When we talk about revenue attribution, what advice would you have for SaaS founders in two different stages? Starting with somebody who’s starting out and growing to 10K monthly recurring revenue?

[00:24:41.230] – Steffen

Starting out, I would just focus on doing a lot of activities and run on a critical gut feeling. Just do some stuff and look at what are the leading indicators here that this is probably true. If there’s something where you’re in doubt whether it works or not, then it’s probably not working.

[00:24:58.280] – Joran

Exactly. Do a lot of things and then figure out what is actually.

[00:25:01.600] – Steffen

Working and what is- Just based out of your gut feeling and scratching the surface because it’s much better to keep an high activity level at that point.

[00:25:09.240] – Joran

Yeah, and I think the one thing you mentioned at the beginning as well is make sure that you do ask, for example, in the sales calls in the form, in the form where you’re coming from, so at least you have some begin data to start with.

[00:25:20.380] – Steffen

It’s also a good conversation topic for any sales call. Why are you here? How did you hear about us? And so forth.

[00:25:26.270] – Joran

Yeah, I still do it often, and often they forgot it already or they say, I saw your face on LinkedIn, but I also saw your product out there. I also saw you there. So it’s hard to put it back. But it’s always a good question to ask saying you know what is and whatnot. When we move on, so we go past that 10K MR and we’re going to make a huge step towards 10 million ARR. What advice would you give SaaS founders to?

[00:25:49.740] – Steffen

Yeah, and then I would give SaaS founders, particularly, I would tell them to ask their teams about how what they are doing in their team is helping your company make more money and continuously challenge this narrative or this explanation. So if you’re a sales team, then ask them, How are you generating money? How is the marketing team generating money? So the whole company gets curious about how this process looks like. And then hopefully some of the smarter cookies out there would then say, I must be some technical solution to this question. But I think the most important thing is just being super both curious and ambitious about understanding how do we generate revenue and what can we do more of to generate more revenue.

[00:26:33.940] – Joran

Yeah, nice. I guess the final question, and this could be more general, what is one thing you wish you knew 10 years ago?

[00:26:42.160] – Steffen

I think it’s the fact that most marketing tactics stop working at some point. That means that when something works, you really need to double down at that very moment because it’s going to stop working at some point. Most things work like an auction, so the more competition there is, the less it starts working. That goes from Google ads to Facebook ads to LinkedIn ads to podcast, etc. It has its honeymoon days and then people tell each other that it works and then it doesn’t work anymore. There’s one thing, go super deep while it’s working, but also make sure to plant a few seeds here and there so they’re ready to prosper once the original source stop working.

[00:27:25.580] – Joran

Yeah, and I think that’s a bit the Hustle phase you mentioned at the beginning. Keep trying new things or keep trying things, so don’t always.

[00:27:31.310] – Steffen

Stick to it. But it’s a fine line because also when you find something that works, you also really need to pay attention and double down on it because that’s what’s going to pay for all the other experiments. You can’t just run away once you find something that works and try other stuff. You really need to keep drilling once it’s working. But just be aware that it’s going to stop working at some point and then you would wish that you had some small experiment running on the side. Exactly.

[00:27:56.870] – Joran

Nice. Cool. If people want to get in contact with you, Stefan, and what would be the best way.

[00:28:01.790] – Steffen

To do? Yeah, that would definitely be LinkedIn, so they can just connect and I’ll be happy to answer most questions.

[00:28:07.970] – Joran

Make sure you probably mentioned that you’re going to come from this podcast because otherwise.

[00:28:11.910] – Steffen

You might not accept it. Yes, please.

[00:28:13.560] – Joran

Mention that. Because in the end, I have not to brag, but 200 open invitations with people who wants to offer all their services to me. Make sure you mention something in the invitation. Cool. Thank you for coming on. I think for people who really want to get started with this, Dream Data does have a free trial where you can track up to 30,000 monthly users. Before I jumped on this call, I actually signed up this week to get Dream Data started. So for us as well, this is a topic I wanted to address because we’re actually experiencing right now. So I guess I’m doing the pitch for you, sign up for Green Data if you want to get things started. Thank you again for coming on to the.

[00:28:50.080] – Steffen

Show, Stefan. My pleasure. Thank you, Yoron. No worries. Bye-bye.

[00:28:53.740] – Commercial Break

You’ve been listening to growing a B2B SaaS. Yoron has been ahead of customer success before founding his own startup. He’s experiencing the same journey you are. We hope you’ve gotten some actionable advice from the show, and we hope you had fun along the way. We know we did. Make sure to like, rate, and review the podcast in the meantime. To find out more and to hook up with us on our social media sites, go to www. Getreditas. Com. See you next time on Growing a B2B Sass.

Meet the author

Joran Hofman

Back in 2020 I was an affiliate for 80+ SaaS tools and I was generating an average of 30k in organic visits each month with my site. Due to the issues I experienced with the current affiliate management software tools, it never resulted in the passive income I was hoping for. Many clunky affiliate management tools lost me probably more than $20,000+ in affiliate revenue. So I decided to build my own software with a high focus on the affiliates, as in the end, they generate more money for SaaS companies.