HockeyStack

If your main differentiator is: - free trial - cheaper pricing - easy-to-use - more integrations (unless they are really important ones that others don't integrate with) - being the oldest company in the space Don't blame your sales reps or marketing team for bad quarters. It's all founders', product team's, and product marketing's fault. An excellent demo and great marketing can't sell a non-differentiated cheap product with a free trial. But an average demo and a decent marketing can sell a highly-differentiated product at a premium pricing point Product differentiation and product marketing should be on everyone's priority list in 2024 as the market is more crowded than ever with new SaaS products coming up every single day

It only cost us $5,642 in referral fees to land a $7B tech giant as a customer. Next month, we'll spend 10x that to acquire 8 more customers. Here's why we're going all in on partnerships as a channel: In the classic B2B SaaS funnel, you're: - Advertising - Holding events - Sponsoring events - Hosting webinars - Sending email - Running SEO The goal is to distribute your content. To build brand awareness and trust with your target accounts. THEN you can start a productive conversation. But the process can take YEARS. And sales-cycles can take 6-12 MONTHS. That's where partnerships comes in... There are 1000's of agencies, vendors, and consultants who ALREADY built the trust you need with your target accounts. Honestly, I had overlooked partnerships as a channel. I was overly focused on brand, content and ads. But then agencies/vendors started sending us referrals... And boy, did I see the light! We have a 9X ROI (yes, that's right) on partner-sourced deals so far. - Sales Cycles are shorter - Win rates are higher - CAC is lower You can't argue with the math. So in Q4, we're doubling down on partnerships. You should too.

NEW HIRE FRIDAY 🔥🔥 Alex Choi recently joined HockeyStack as Head of Sales Development. 3 fun facts about Alex: - My baby daughter was born in January - I recently moved back up to SF from LA - My first child is a maltipoo dog named Teddy Welcome back to the Bay and to HockeyStack, Alex!

“My CMO is forcing me to ONLY use Linkedin lead gen ads because I can’t measure the success of other ad formats.” We hear this from DOZENS of marketers a week. Here's why it's a BIG mistake: B2B buyers don't wants to download white papers anymore. They don't want gated ebooks or reports. Yet in Q2, when we analyzed $105M+ in LinkedIn ad spend across SaaS verticals we found millions of dollars a year wasted on lead gen forms. Why? Because CMO's still see Linkedin primarily as a SALES channel... When really it's an AWARENESS/BRAND channel first. HockeyStack became one of the fastest growing B2B SaaS companies using LinkedIn ads & social. And we have NOT invested $1 in Linkedin Lead Gen ads. So, how do we invest our Linkedin Ad Budget? 100% to content, product value, social proof, and thought leadership ads. Which we measure with a mix of impressions, engagements, and clicks using HockeyStack’s attribution & lift reports It's led to multi-million dollars of pipeline for us every single quarter. So stop forcing buyers to download your whitepapers. Just because it drives up numbers on the ad platform. Meet buyers where they're at. You'll win more. P.S. Comment DASHBOARD below and I will send you the exact dashboard we use to track LinkedIn. I’m going to choose 10x people to do free 1:1 audit calls to help you with your Linkedin strategy.

Last week we closed a $145,000 deal when our top competitor pitched $45,000. Here are the 3 strategies we use to win 90% of our head-to-head deals (without discounting): This happens to us a lot... HockeyStack is a great fit, and our prospect prefers us over competitors. But the competitor is 3x cheaper and tires to undercut us on price. This is a HUGE mistake. Yes, it's hard to win over a CFO with a $100K+ price differential... But discounting heavily and being the low cost solution ACTUALLY hurts you. Here’s how we won this deal without competing on price: 1. Deeply understand the company’s needs In this example, the company had $300M in funding and was valued at $6B. They have over 1,000 employees and a TON of needs. We had 3 people in the first demo who came inbound. It was clear from the very first call that two of them were gonna be champions and the other one is going to block the deal. We scheduled 1:1 calls with the first 2 to map out the entire marketing team, how every team would use HockeyStack for their own needs, and why other purchases got blocked before. This allowed us to build a very custom demo for the entire group and the executives, and those 2 champions fought for HockeyStack when the other prospect KILLED the deal TWICE. Each time, our champions revived the deal with the frameworks and roadmaps we built together. 2. Focus ONLY on key segments We are great in mid-market and enterprise - not so much in SMB. So we focus focus heavily on these 2 segments from marketing to product development to sales because we KNOW we can deliver outsized results. In return, the supporting logos we have, references, testimonials, and our sales process works well for our target segment. Giving us the confidence not to compromise on price. Remember: If you sell to everybody, you are selling to nobody 3. Executive Alignment from Day 1 From the very early days of the process, we involved all key stakeholders from 4 different teams and the CMO. Had a separate meeting with their agency where we uncovered how they “really” make purchases, things we need to be careful about, and what we can give when it came time to deal with procurement. This deal could have died 10+ times over the last 6 months and didn’t because we intentionally took the time to build these relationships. My point? Don’t compete on price Compete on building the best product for a specific segment of your target audience Then you won’t need to discount to win deals

Explaining to your CEO that brand ads do influence revenue and why you should invest more in awareness marketing.

Last week we closed a $145,000 deal when our top competitor pitched $45,000. Here are the 3 strategies we use to win 90% of our head-to-head deals (without discounting): This happens to us a lot... HockeyStack is a great fit, and our prospect prefers us over competitors. But the competitor is 3x cheaper and tires to undercut us on price. This is a HUGE mistake. Yes, it's hard to win over a CFO with a $100K+ price differential... But discounting heavily and being the low cost solution ACTUALLY hurts you. Here’s how we won this deal without competing on price: 1. Deeply understand the company’s needs In this example, the company had $300M in funding and was valued at $6B. They have over 1,000 employees and a TON of needs. We had 3 people in the first demo who came inbound. It was clear from the very first call that two of them were gonna be champions and the other one is going to block the deal. We scheduled 1:1 calls with the first 2 to map out the entire marketing team, how every team would use HockeyStack for their own needs, and why other purchases got blocked before. This allowed us to build a very custom demo for the entire group and the executives, and those 2 champions fought for HockeyStack when the other prospect KILLED the deal TWICE. Each time, our champions revived the deal with the frameworks and roadmaps we built together. 2. Focus ONLY on key segments We are great in mid-market and enterprise - not so much in SMB. So we focus focus heavily on these 2 segments from marketing to product development to sales because we KNOW we can deliver outsized results. In return, the supporting logos we have, references, testimonials, and our sales process works well for our target segment. Giving us the confidence not to compromise on price. Remember: If you sell to everybody, you are selling to nobody 3. Executive Alignment from Day 1 From the very early days of the process, we involved all key stakeholders from 4 different teams and the CMO. Had a separate meeting with their agency where we uncovered how they “really” make purchases, things we need to be careful about, and what we can give when it came time to deal with procurement. This deal could have died 10+ times over the last 6 months and didn’t because we intentionally took the time to build these relationships. My point? Don’t compete on price Compete on building the best product for a specific segment of your target audience Then you won’t need to discount to win deals

Two weeks ago Rand Fishkin said attribution is dying. As the CEO of the market leading company in “attribution”, I think he's completely right. I just went through our entire customer list and counted the number of customers that initially said they wanted to use HockeyStack as an attribution product. I counted 86%. I then went and counted the number of customers that actually use HockeyStack as an attribution product. That number is down to 0%. Here's the feedback I'm hearing: - We use single-touch attribution for our goal setting and reporting - We cannot convince our leadership to stop doing that - We don't use our standard attribution for decision making - We don't believe that our attribution models are correct - We just don't care anymore that a marketing sourced deal was sourced from google or linkedin. We hold a marketing sourced pipeline number and everything else is unimportant They did not use HockeyStack to run their attribution. They used HockeyStack to: - Find commonalities, frequent and popular touchpoints in customer journeys - Find out what channels, campaigns, assets have actual effect on conversions. - Do deal retros for the largest deals to understand what to focus on - Find out the baseline # of touchpoints required to convert - Segment conversions in different ways to understand the different approaches for different segments - Investigate questions like "How do we improve win rates”, "How do we add more enterprise users”, "Where do we get our highest quality leads” - Launch key workflows like audience syncing, lead scoring, outbound sequencing, enrichment So I guess attribution is dying... But marketers crave data more than ever. Not to claim credit, but to make better decisions.

In July, HockeyStack created more qualified pipeline than in all of Q2. Here are the 4 important changes we made to our GTM (and why we FINALLY invested in cold outbound): HockeyStack has been an inbound-first company since Day 1. I built our marketing engine, and we scaled from 0 to millions in pipeline. Honestly, it was (somewhat) low maintenance. But those days are gone... Like all fast-growing SaaS companies in 2024, pipe gen slowed down. We were over-reliant on marketing and underinvested in outbound. And for a few months we were paying MORE to generate the SAME demand. Not anymore. Last quarter we made some nuclear-level changes and 2x'd pipeline: 1. Set Up Our First Cold Outbound Program I hired Alex Choi as our Head of Sales Development. He built the best-performing SDR teams at Carta (with 90% promotion rate). We migrated to a new SEP, created new sequences with messaging that we know works from sales calls, and relentlessly tested new things. This may be shocking if you spend too much time on Linkedin (like me), but...It turns out that cold outbound still works! You just need product market fit, a clearly defined ICP, and good messaging. Cold outbound is now our #3 best pipeline source after inbound and referrals. 2. Killed Every Program Not Generating Enough Pipeline I stepped back into marketing and stopped literally everything that was not generating enough pipeline. Ad campaigns that wasted thousands of dollars, content that worked really well on organic but never distributed, and processes that slowed us down. 3. Made Pipeline Generation a Team Sport We made it a company-wide initiative that qualified pipeline generation is our #1 priority. Everyone from AEs to SDRs to engineers knew it and focused on building pipeline. We got great referrals from our employees, SDRs focused 100% on qualified pipeline, and AEs revived previous opps. They crushed it! 4. Captured Existing Demand with Outbound We have a lot of high-intent triggers. Due to our marketing, HockeyStack is a very visible brand in B2B. But we never acted for signals like interactive demo visitors, product page visitors, company page followers, etc. So we started running semi-automated campaigns to convert the existing demand. We still have a lot of work to do, but we are at a good spot. 5. Pivoted to Partnerships Although we don’t have a formal partnerships program (or team), we generated 12% of our pipeline from agencies, other vendors, and consultants. We will pay $50K+ in fees for closed won deals in August for these deals, and it will be very profitable So, what's next? - Doubling down on influencer marketing - New events & community in 4 major cities in the US - And getting back to SEO with Gaetano Nino DiNardi I’m taking a page from the Adam Robinson playbook. Will be doing monthly updates of what’s working (and what’s not) in our GTM. Join along for the ride. P.S: We’re hiring SDRs. Know anyone world-class? Tag them below!

NEW HIRE FRIDAY 🔥🔥 Nevin Liang recently joined HockeyStack as a Backend Engineer! 3 fun facts about Nevin: - I've lived in 7 different places in the past 2 years - I'm scared of caffeine - I built my first computer 3 weeks ago