SaaS Marketing Weekly

In this episode, Ryan plays back a webinar he recently hosted on getting revenue into the business fast. It’s for anyone heading into the end of the year behind on targets and needing campaigns that land in weeks rather than quarters. He walks through six things, and the thread underneath all of them is that the fastest revenue you can get is already sitting in your business.Takeaways:Start in the CRM. Export closed-won and closed-lost with deal value, sales cycle, and close reasons, add the call transcripts, and have an LLM segment by what closes fastest and highest. None of it works without proper sales notes, so fix those firstThat analysis does two jobs. It shows where budget should go and it writes your campaigns, since a win reason like “competitor’s contract expiring within 60 days” points straight at switching offersExisting customers are the fastest revenue there is: an upsell closes at 60 to 70% against 5 to 20% for a new lead. Closed-lost is full of revenue. Chase the contacts who moved on, find their replacements, and try a buy-out campaign. Personalise the outreach with AI, and back the best deals with a founder recorded video.Build a referral system rather than hoping for one: map your champions, pick a trigger moment, write the intro for them, and close the loop.Fix the bottom-of-funnel offer: add a call higher up the funnel alongside the demo, and add risk reversal, because your biggest competitor is the status quo

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Jamie, back in the studio to make the case that your offer matters more than your channel. For most B2B SaaS companies the offer is “book a demo” or “start a free trial”, which is exactly what every competitor is saying and no reason at all for anyone to act. Jamie and Ryan work through what a good offer looks like at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, the psychological principles that make people care, and the rule running underneath all of it: minimal time from them, maximum value in return.Takeaways:• An offer is anything of value you give in exchange for something - their time, their details or their money• “Book a demo” and “start a free trial” are what every competitor offers, so they do nothing to set you apart• At the top of the funnel, you are asking for time rather than money, so build in what makes people care: social proof and results, authority, and scarcity where you can manage it• Specific beats generic. Be more specific about the offer rather than generalising around the topic that any other B2B SaaS company could talk about• The middle of the funnel asks for more time, so the value has to be bigger. Live events, workshops and group consultations work because people come for the room as well as the content• Rocket SaaS swapped “request a quotation” for a free marketing strategy call with the founder. It is still their number one offer, because it sits higher up the funnel where more people are still problem-solving• At the bottom, sell the demo itself. Focus on how long it takes, who it is with, what they walk away with

In this episode, Ryan explains how Rocket SaaS set out to double its revenue in a year, and hit the target nearly four months early. For years, his approach to growth was simply hoping for a good year. Now his strategy is about setting a number and working backwards, all the way down to how many leads the business needs each month. Ryan walks through the exact maths of how this is done and how you can build a strategy to get to your goal.Takeaways:Stop hoping for growth. Set one number and reverse engineer it. If you know how much monthly recurring revenue you need to add, and you know your average deal value, the number of clients you need to sign each month is simple divisionWork the funnel backwards using last year’s real conversion rates. For Ryan, that looked something like: a 42% close rate meant ten sales presentations, which meant 13 MQLs, which meant around 20 leads a monthSet your CRM pipeline up properly so every stage can be reported on each week. It sounds basic, but surprisingly few businesses have it rightUse attribution and self-reported attribution to find what actually drives deals.Double down on what works and cut what isn’t. Rocket SaaS doubled its webinars, more than tripled its live events, and increased LinkedIn ad spend, while pulling back on Google and MetaTrack it weekly. The senior leadership team reviews every funnel number on a traffic-light dashboard and roundtables anything sitting in the redIf you fall behind, lean on social proof: stronger case studies with real numbers, video testimonials, and lookalike audiences targeted with ads

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Sam Gocher, Head of Content at Rocket SaaS, to discuss how you can create top quality content that always resonates with your ICP. For most B2B SaaS brands, they don’t have an idea of what that statement is. Sam and Ryan discuss a ‘What We Want To Be Known For’ statement and how that holds all of your content accountable to your ICP.Takeaways:The logo test: if a competitor could put their logo on your content and nobody would notice, it is not niche enough and you do not have a strong enough voice in your marketMessaging and content are different things. Messaging is the fixed layer that sits on your website, content is the fluid layer you publish constantly, and the second one cannot work until the first is settledThe fix is a single statement defining what you want to be known for. It will feel long and specific, and that is exactly the point, because no competitor could claim itGet the founder in the room. They started the business for a reason, and that reason is usually the answer. In larger companies go to the CMO or CRO, but the founder should still steer itBring salespeople too, since they hear the objections first hand and have to sell against the same messagingFocus on 3 key aspects: why the business was founded, whether your ICP actually cares, and a separate point of view for each ICP that ladders back up to the one statementRyan’s take on AI and what its good for and what you should still be doing manually for your content and ideas.

In this episode, Ryan argues that the biggest difference between founders who scale and founders who stall is the speed at which they make decisions. He actively tries to never to let a decision leave the room. Ryan covers the decision tree he built at Rocket SaaS and the worst-case scenario test that shrinks the risk.Takeaways:The speed of decision-making is what separates founders who scale from founders who stallThe maths favours speed: twenty decisions with sixteen right beats five decisions with five right, as long as the wrong ones are not catastrophic.Slow decisions kill activity.Build a decision tree: set monetary thresholds and named sign-offs so people know exactly what they can approve without asking. Fewer meetings, less Slack, and far more trustUse the worst-case scenario test. The risk is usually far smaller than it feelsAudit your own decisions for a month, logging what each one was, what it was worth, and how long it took, then move faster on the ones you dragged your feet overKill “let’s circle back” and replace it with “let’s decide now and adjust later”. Speed beats perfection when you are trying to scale

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Sam Gocher, Head of Content at Rocket SaaS, to work through the 5 traps that stop content driving revenue. Most B2B SaaS companies are producing content activity, but when the CEO asks whether any of it is actually generating pipeline, nobody can give them an answer. Ryan and Sam cover why guessing your topics never works, how to extract real thought leadership from time-poor founders, why content and paid teams must stop operating separately, and if your content is not boosted and not helping SEO, you should probably stop making it altogether.Takeaways:Even if you genuinely know your market, asking a thousand of your ICP will tell you far more than a team guessing in a roomIf your content is written purely with AI, any competitor could put their logo on it, and in-house teams or agencies will never know the industry like the founders doGet founder buy-in with a small ask: a 15-minute interview every fortnight gives you a transcript that becomes blogs, newsletters and posts. To scale it, pitch one 60-minute studio session a month, which is two episodes and a fortnightly podcastUse the thought leaders inside your business who match your audience, because buyers trust their peers far more than a vendorContent and paid should never run in silos. Your content team produces something they are proud of, and nobody ever asked whether the paid team intends to put a penny behind itIf your content is not being boosted and is not helping SEO, almost nobody sees it. Either realign it with paid and SEO, or stop and put the resource elsewhereDon’t let all your content sit at the bottom of the funnel. Your top-of-funnel content is super important, and adding a thought leader to the mix gives you plenty tofu content to work withBatch your recording, keep a content calendar, repurpose relentlessly, and revive old content that performed well rather than going quiet

In this episode, Ryan steps away from the usual marketing tactics to share the eight books that have had the biggest impact on his career and his business, Rocket SaaS. He covers what each book taught him and how he applied it.Takeaways:Profit First (Mike Michalowicz): Take a set percentage for profit, tax, and your own pay into separate accounts every fortnight, rather than hoping something is left at year-end. Ryan ran this for around a decadeThe Pumpkin Plan (Mike Michalowicz): A pumpkin farmer rips out the rotting pumpkins and replants seeds from the prize winners. Your draining, unprofitable, scope-creeping clients are the rotten onesThey Ask, You Answer (Marcus Sheridan): This is demand generation before it had a name. Stop hiding pricing and competitor comparisons behind forms and give buyers what they actually wantDeep Work (Cal Newport): Focused, undistracted work is the only thing that actually advances your career, and it will never happen by accident. Ryan treats it as a ritual - calendar blocked, Slack off, phone in another room, and focusing on one task at a time onlyKey Person of Influence (Daniel Priestley): This book focuses on the five Ps: pitch, publish, product, profile, and partnerships. Ryan credits the accompanying course with saving his business in the early daysObviously Awesome (April Dunford): The ten-step framework for positioning and messaging, and the first step towards a genuinely strong marketing functionTraction (Gino Wickman): Introduces EOS, a system for running a company around its vision, people, data and processes. The part Ryan rates most is the weekly leadership meeting: pull up the numbers that matter, colour-code them, and roundtable anything sitting in the red until you have actions for that weekThe Elon Musk biography (Walter Isaacson). This one focuses on finding the single biggest bottleneck holding the business back and going all in on it, then moving to the next one

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Joe McLaughlin, Rocket SaaS’s Director of Strategy, for a run through the ten things they most often see going wrong with LinkedIn ads. Plenty of B2B SaaS brands have tried the platform, seen no return, and switched it off, while others are seeing a great ROI. Ryan and Joe work through everything on what not to do, from budgets, to targeting, all the way down to the creative that doesn’t convert. If you fix all ten things mentioned in this episode, your LinkedIn goes from a channel you gave up on to one of the highest ROI channels.Takeaways:Poor budget allocation is the most common problem. LinkedIn is expensive, and a large audience with a small budget means you don’t show up regularly. It’s time to shrink that audienceLinkedIn’s native filters are too broad, so build an account list from the companies actually buying from youTargeting the wrong decision makers wastes budget. Check your CRM for who actually requests demosToo much bottom-of-funnel activity limits you to the 5% of your audience that are ready to buy. What about the other 95%?Busy creative kills performance. People spot an ad instantly, so aim for ten words or less, a big header, and no clutterPoor messaging is causing your audience to leave. Name the problem you solve in plain language and skip the buzzwordsThe wrong ad format costs you. Carousels take ten times the effort and rarely stop the scroll. Single image ads drive pipelineNo retargeting means leaving the fastest conversions to fade away. Sploit your budget roughly 70% cold audience and 30% retargetingWhat happens after the click decides everything. The landing page is where the conversion happens.

In this episode, Ryan shares that LinkedIn Ads are not a lead generation channel. Google Ads is, because people go there actively searching for a solution. Nobody scrolls LinkedIn hoping to find a B2B SaaS vendor. LinkedIn is a place where people consume content, and it should be treated as a content amplification channel.Takeaways:LinkedIn ads are not a lead generation channel. Leads come off the back of them, but that is not what they are forGoogle Ads is where people are actively searching for a supplier. So LinkedIn and Google Ads should never sit in the same categoryTreat LinkedIn as a content amplification channel, and it changes how you approach it, how you measure it, and what you createTargeting on LinkedIn is the whole point. Focus on industry, headcount, revenue, location, job title, even hand-picked companies, so your content reaches exactly who you wantThis is a demand generation play. 95% of your audience are not in market and nothing will force them, so build familiarity now and be the name they think of when they are

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Joe McLaughlin, Director of Strategy at Rocket SaaS, who now oversees all Rocket SaaS clients and spends half his time on Rocket SaaS’s own marketing, to walk through exactly how an expert reviews a marketing strategy from top to bottom. Joe starts with reporting and attribution, because until you can see what is really driving pipeline, you are just guessing. From there it becomes a simple exercise of deciding what to scale, what to fix, and what to kill. Along the way they cover the outbound rethink that dramatically lifted conversions at Rocket SaaS.Takeaways:Until your reporting and attribution are right, you are guessing. HubSpot is what let Rocket SaaS see which touchpoints actually produced dealsGood attribution shows you where the funnel leaks, so you know whether the problem is lead quality, the sales deck, or the sales team, rather than guessingRun a simple exercise on every campaign: what do we scale, what do we fix, and what do we killKill what cannot be meaningfully differentiated. Fix what is close but underpoweredEvery campaign should earn its budget, and that means a time allocation as well as a spend allocationNew markets and bigger clients are tempting, but there is usually more room in the ICP you already win inDo more of what already works. Attribution showed events, webinars, podcasts, and LinkedIn thought leadership drove almost every deal for Rocket SaaSPut process behind thought leadership. Have a dedicated testing campaign for promoted posts, and a recurring task so the weekly post always gets boosted rather than occasionallyIf the business is plateauing, it’s time to carve out dedicated time and people to grow your business through marketing efforts.