Episodes
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Hando Sinisalu, the founder of Marketing Parrot, with extensiveexperience as an event organizer, and over the years, he has noticed that somecompanies tend to use their speaking opportunities during sponsored events todeliver sales pitches, which often end up frustrating the audience. This missedopportunity could have been used to build trust and establish relationshipswith potential customers.
In this conversation, wediscuss why this happens and explore strategies for maximizing the valueof event sponsorships. We'll be hearing both positive and negative examples ofconference sponsorships, from preparation to activation and gain insights into successful event sponsorshipstrategies.
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The USA stands as the world’s largest and most lucrative market. However, it is also a market characterized by intense competition and some of the highest marketing costs. In this conversation with Kristine Lamberga, CMO of SAF Tehnika, we delve into her insights about the US market.
SAF Tehnika specializes in the development and manufacturing of a range of high-end equipment, with its wireless data transmission technologies being its flagship offerings. Over the years, the company has successfully established a foothold in the US market. Interestingly, the largest part of the roughly 3,000 National Broadcasters in the United States are using SAF Tehnika microwave radios.
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Missing episodes?
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In this episode of #FriTalks, our guest is the founder of Mailigen and former VP of Product at Pipedrive - Janis Rozenblats.
He is joining us to share his valuable experience of building an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and the practical aspects of using it to optimise marketing execution and ROI.In our conversation, we discuss the following topics:
- How should we understand the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and what value it can provide to SaaS companies
- How to build an ICP and what data sources needed for that
- How to practically apply it across Product Development, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success -
Marketing often feels like an endless uphill struggle. Moreover, marketing managers often complain of poor internal alignment, conflicting and ever-changing priorities and pressure for short-term results.
In this episode, Andrejs and Rolands explore the marketing planning framework that they tested and improved in well over 200 campaigns. Their framework stands on four solid pillars: alignment on revenue goals, comprehensive audience research, strategic Go-To-Market (GTM) planning, and regular review of planned marketing activities.
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The decision-making process of B2B buyers has undergone significant changes.
Over the past few years, there has been a notable shift in the behavior of B2B technology buyers, marked by reduced trust in new vendors and their sales representatives. Present-day buyers exhibit a preference for conducting independent research, forming their own conclusions and using self-service options.
- In this episode, we explore the following topics:
- The shifts in buyers' behavior since the onset of Covid-19
- The objectives and tasks that buying groups aim to achieve
- The increasing significance of communities in the buying process
- The evolving role of salespeople in the modern buying landscape
- Strategies for how marketing can adapt to the changing behaviors of buyers -
Increasing pricing is the single best and most straightforward way to increase business profitability.
Why pricing is so important for SaaS? How an average SaaS company approaches pricing and what are the problems? How does pricing impact profitability? Principles of pricing Where do companies start if they want to review their pricing?
Pricing is so important, that companies would be well advised to spend a lot of time and effort to set optimal pricing.
Yet, according to research, SaaS companies only spend 6 hours on pricing. No monthly, not annually, ever.
In this episode of FriTalks, we are joined by pricing strategist and founder of Soft Fight Emanuel Martonca.
We discuss: -
In this first FriTalks of 2024, Andrejs and Rolands look at key trends in B2B marketing and discuss what challenges and opportunities they bring for lead generation in 2024.
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Did you know that marketing and sales alignment is the most significant roadblock to business growth?
According to Gartner, companies with strong marketing and sales alignment are 3 times more likely to meet their new customer acquisition targets.
In this #FriTalks episode, we discuss:
How does marketing and sales misalignment hinder business growth? What are the key issues companies face? And what are the first necessary steps to reduce conflict and build trusted relationships with both teams? -
In the rapidly evolving digital economy and with the changing customer behaviour, marketing's role in B2B organisations is being redefined. Marketing teams are now expected to facilitate and enable growth more than ever before.
We invited Jens Tinapp, VP of Marketing and Communication at Diehl Metering, to talk about the path of building a future-proof marketing team.
We discussed:
- How has the role of marketing evolved
- How have the CEO’s expectations changed
- What are the must-have skills and capabilities of the modern marketing team
- What to keep in-house and what to outsource
- How to bring an impact and build trust for the marketing team -
In today's era of customer-driven buyer processes, the role of salespeople is evolving. What exactly are customers expecting from salespeople today and how can salespeople stay relevant to their customers while achieving long-term success?
Listen to an insightful conversation with Bostjan Strazer, a business trainer and ice pilot at Hansen Beck, where we address these questions and more.
We discussed the following topics:
- How have buyer’s behaviour and priorities changed
- What do they expect from salespeople?
- How has the ultimate goal of sales changed?
- What does it mean for the salesperson?
- What skills and behaviours does it require?
- How to develop it in a practical matter? -
This time, our guest is Frank Sondors, a B2B sales veteran with over a decade of experience at Google, Black Crow, SimilarWeb, and Whatagraph.
He recently launched his own company, Salesforge, to address a challenge he deeply cared about: templated communication.
Just within three months company grew from ground zero to fifty paying customers by leveraging low-cost lead generation strategies and channels.
Listen to our conversation with Frank to uncover his remarkable quick-win approach and learn from his journey. -
Zabbix is a widely known software system used for IT monitoring by thousands of companies around the world. Despite being open-source and free to use, the company has established a thriving business and a global community of dedicated IT professionals, all with minimal marketing investment.
To uncover the secret of their success, we invited Zane Lasmane, Head of Marketing at Zabbix, to share her secret source. -
Data centre business is often viewed as a commodity market with a few global players dominating, leaving very little room for profitability, especially if you are a small player.
Similar is seen in other sectors of IT business.
So, how can small players still differentiate their value proposition and grow profitable business? We discuss it with our guest, Marija Bergere, Head of Marketing at DEAC, the company which seems managed to find its recipe for success.
During our discussion, we cover the following topics:
• The current market landscape and the key challenges facing the data centre business.
• How geopolitical and economic situations have changed the requirements of buyers.
• The impact of these changes on positioning, offering, and go-to-market strategy.
• Changes in marketing objectives.
• What marketing needs to do differently to succeed in the future -
We are back with B2B Sales and Marketing #FriTalks and kick off the new season with a conversation about how to make webinars successful.
Webinars are one of the most often used marketing tools and for a good reason.
Buyer's surveys mention webinars as the most valuable marketing content and research shows that webinar registrations increased by over 80% in 2022. Moreover, webinar participants are closer to purchase decisions than those who register for text content, such as whitepaper.
In this session, Andrejs Juščenko and Rolands Ozolins discuss their own experience with running webinars both for their clients and for IBD Consulting | Technology marketing.
We discuss:
- How to prepare for a webinar?
- How to improve public speaking skills?
- Choosing between on-demand and live webinars?
- How to get people attending the webinar?
- How to run LinkedIn events?
- How to run a webinar?
- How to repurpose webinar content?
- What to do after the webinar? -
In this episode, we discuss marketing and sales to highly technical buyers, such as engineers.
Research shows that highly technical buyers have very specific buying behaviour. They are willing to put extra effort into product research, and, compared to business buyers, they are rather averse to anything they perceive as being marketing or marketing prepared information.
Nevertheless, there is a clear path to market to this audience that we share in this episode. -
In this episode of Sales and Marketing #FriTalks we talk through insights from ‘Brand to Buyer’ the LinkedIn B2B Technology Buyer and Marketer Survey 2022/23 with more than 4,000 professionals in technology surveyed from North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific.
In particular, we discuss the top investment priorities and challenges of tech buyers, the latest trends shared by global tech marketers, and how we can apply these insights in our local go-to-market strategies. -
In this episode, continue talking about expansion to international markets.
Our guest is Aldis Erglis, VP of Technology Strategy at Emergn, a global software development company that operates in various markets, including financial services, healthcare, retail, government, and technology. Their clients include large multinational corporations as well as smaller organizations. Emergn has offices and teams located in North America, Europe, and Asia, and they have a global network of partners and affiliates.
In our conversation with Aldis, we talk about the success factors of international expansion, including the following topics:
- Is the local presence a "must have" factor?
- strategies for differentiating your value proposition from well-established competitors
- tactics for building trust among enterprise accounts
- essential steps to take for planning international expansion -
Most growth in the technology business is coming from as-a-Service business model. In this episode, we discuss how to move from the traditional one-off sales model to recurring revenue or as-a-Service business.
While highly attractive in the long term, this is by no means a simple journey requiring good planning, a strong ability to invest and a true obsession with pleasing your ideal customers.
In this episode, we talk about the following:
- Key metrics of SaaS business, such as LTV, CAC, ARR and more
- Cashflow planning consideration
- And organizational changes required -
In this episode, we discuss the costs of expansion to international markets and other key metrics that tech company founders need to consider before planning growth in global B2B markets.
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In this B2B Sales and Marketing #FriTalks our guest Olha Olifirenko, Product Marketing Lead at Newage.io, share the key learnings from her first-year journey of scaling a SaaS product to the global market. She also provides valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities that come with scaling a SaaS product and how to overcome them. This episode is an opportunity for anyone who is interested in taking their SaaS product global.
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