Drive SaaS B2B Growth by Building a Community
Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and CMO of Terminus, a SaaS platform that enables sales and marketing teams to run account-based marketing (ABM) at scale.
Before co-founding Terminus, Sangram led the marketing team at Pardot through its acquisition by ExactTarget and then Salesforce.
He's also the author of Account Based Marketing for Dummies' and the mastermind behind FlipMyFunnel.com, a community for B2B marketing, sales and customer success professionals.
This is a story about 3 first time founders who set out to build an account based marketing platform. In those days, most people didn't even know what ABM was.
They didn't have much money and realized how difficult it was going to be for them to get the attention of their target customers (B2B marketers).
So they asked themselves a simple question — How can we stand out?
They did that by building a community first and focusing on educating their prospective customers, not pitching their product.
In this episode you'll learn:
- How a blog post helped them get the attention of their target customers.
- How they organized their first conference and got 300 people to turn up.
- How they turned a small conference into a community of thousands of people.
- How they drove sales by educating, not pitching.
- What they dealt with high customer churn in the early days.
Today, Terminus has raised over $20 million in funding and has almost 200 employees.
There are some great ideas in this interview that you might also be able to use to stand out in your market by focusing on building community and educating prospects.
And you don't need thousands of people – Terminus started with just 300 people.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Book Recommendation
- “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Exposed and Explained by the World's Two” by Al Ries & Jack Trout
The Show Notes
- Terminus
- What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?
- Account Based Marketing for Dummies book
- Flip My Funnel
- Pardot
- Salesforce
- Sangram on Twitter
- Omer on Twitter