In this episode of Software Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig interviews Zach Hanebrink, a fractional CMO from Hooklead, discussing his journey in SaaS marketing, the importance of effective messaging, and the role of AI in the industry. Zach shares success stories, common challenges faced by B2B SaaS companies, and strategies for optimizing marketing funnels and sales processes. The conversation emphasizes the need for collaboration with in-house teams and the significance of understanding customer needs to drive growth. In this conversation, Zack Hanebrink discusses the importance of client engagement, effective pricing strategies, and the necessity of standard operating procedures for SaaS companies. He highlights common challenges faced by SaaS founders, the evolving landscape of paid advertising, and the need for businesses to adapt to market dynamics. The discussion also emphasizes the significance of building partnerships and community, as well as actionable insights for success in the SaaS industry. Finally, the conversation touches on the future of AI and its potential impact on business efficiency.
In this episode of Software Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig interviews Zach Hanebrink, a fractional CMO from Hooklead, discussing his journey in SaaS marketing, the importance of effective messaging, and the role of AI in the industry. Zach shares success stories, common challenges faced by B2B SaaS companies, and strategies for optimizing marketing funnels and sales processes. The conversation emphasizes the need for collaboration with in-house teams and the significance of understanding customer needs to drive growth. In this conversation, Zack Hanebrink discusses the importance of client engagement, effective pricing strategies, and the necessity of standard operating procedures for SaaS companies. He highlights common challenges faced by SaaS founders, the evolving landscape of paid advertising, and the need for businesses to adapt to market dynamics. The discussion also emphasizes the significance of building partnerships and community, as well as actionable insights for success in the SaaS industry. Finally, the conversation touches on the future of AI and its potential impact on business efficiency.
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Sound Bites
Chapters
Michael Bernzweig (00:01.891)
Are you ready to unlock the secrets of B2B SaaS success? Tired of sifting through endless noise to find actionable insights that actually move the needle?
Welcome to Software Spotlight, your weekly deep dive into the transformative world of Software-as-a-Service. Your host is Michael Bernzweig, who in 1998 launched Software Oasis as one of the first platforms enabling businesses to download, license, and deploy software instantly across their networks with a single click. Today, Software Oasis has evolved into one of the leading communities where businesses find top tech consultants across the USA and Canada.
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I'd like to welcome everyone to this week's edition of the Software Spotlight. I'm your host, Michael Bernzweig. And this week we're joined by Zack Hanebrink. He's the certified fractional CMO from HookLead. And with that, Zach, welcome to the podcast.
Zack Hanebrink (00:21.312)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Michael.
Michael Bernzweig (00:23.045)
Yeah, no, it's great to have you here. And I can see from a few of the questions that came in from the audience, this is an episode everyone's very excited about. So I was hoping maybe we could start by, for anyone in the audience that may not be familiar with either yourself or HookLead, if you could give everyone just a little bit of your journey, kind of getting to where you are now, and maybe let us know what goes on over there at HookLead.
Zack Hanebrink (00:32.365)
Awesome.
Zack Hanebrink (00:51.532)
Yeah, so we're a SaaS marketing agency and also offer fractional CMO services as well. But we're celebrating our 10th year in business. And so we started off kind of doing all things for all people. But.
I have a lot of experience in software companies. So before I started my agency, I worked for a lot of software companies, everything from, you know, fortune 500 publicly traded companies all the way down to several startups, which honestly I thought was the most fun. couple startups that I was had the opportunity of being a part of was,
One, I think I was employee number 20 or 21. And, um, when I left, uh, they were like a hundred employees and they're over 300 now. So being in that growth from like employee 20 to a hundred, yeah, it was just insane. And so I learned so much from the founders, um, because I had worked at another agency before that and it was the opposite. The founders just made a lot of mistakes. So I had like two opposite ends of the spectrum of like what not to do and what to do. And,
Michael Bernzweig (01:34.052)
I love it.
Michael Bernzweig (01:40.997)
Wow, it's paper-throwing.
Michael Bernzweig (01:57.861)
Sure.
Zack Hanebrink (01:58.988)
and then ended up in another startup head of marketing and always had this itch to start my own agency. And I did, me and my co-founder. So like I said, we're celebrating 10 years. We work with mostly B2B SaaS, but also some B2C. We specialize in doing PPC campaigns and conversion rate optimization. And also the fractional CMO side where we can kind of get in there and help build the systems, the revenue generating systems and that leadership for the team to grow.
Michael Bernzweig (02:28.731)
I love it. you know, and I think that's so important. You know, having had the foundational experience, having been in the trenches, you know, you really have a different perspective or an understanding on what fast growing SaaS companies need, you know, to optimize their full marketing funnel and all of that.
you know, the right way, the wrong way, and then the other way of getting a lot of these things done, which is really interesting. So, and I would have to imagine that you've got some pretty amazing stories to share with our listeners, but is there one that kind of comes to mind in terms of the most exciting?
Zack Hanebrink (02:55.092)
Hahaha
Michael Bernzweig (03:15.579)
transition or journey that you've had with one of your clients over that decade that would be fun to share.
Zack Hanebrink (03:21.698)
Yeah
Yeah, so I would say one was we started working with them.
They, they kind of dabbled. was no like cohesive strategy, right? It's like, we, we brought in an ad agency, ran some Google ads, didn't think it worked. You know, so we like, we wrote a couple of blog posts, you know, that kind of thing. they did have it dialed in as far as like, on the backend. So they had really good stats as far as like how people were using the software and like what stages they were and how active and all kinds of stuff. they weren't doing much for marketing. so I went in there and started, just kind of learning like, you know, who, who are their customers?
to make them what makes them tick. then within one year, if you look at the data, it's like kind of flatline, flatline, and then right about like 90 days to six months, it starts going up. And then by the end of the year, we're about completely hockey-sticked. And what happened during that time to bring us up to that almost near vertical.
increase was just kind of tying everything together. So we ended up finding some ads that worked really well, not just the ad channel, but the actual like image and messaging. We found one image that just resonated with the audience and they just ate it up. And that's what kind of gave us that explosive growth was finding out.
Michael Bernzweig (04:32.568)
Sure.
Zack Hanebrink (04:41.186)
just what makes them tick and what catches their eye and then just optimizing both ends of the funnel. So that's why I like SAS, right? As you have all the marketing stuff you can do on the front end, but there's also all that stuff on the back end, not just like checking out, but are people using the tool? You what part are they using? Are they active? Are they logging in? That's another part of the marketing too, really. It's just to try to help because if they're not engaged in the software, they're not going to subscribe. They're not going to pay money. They're not going to get value. So being able to go end end like that,
you know, taking data from their software, how the users are using it, and just building out all the things, know, Emo workflows and ads and everything, and just watching it explode in one year. was super exciting to see. And also during that time, the company hired probably, you know, six more people at the end of the year. So it was pretty neat to be a part of.
Michael Bernzweig (05:24.355)
Yeah, and that's amazing.
Michael Bernzweig (05:33.477)
Yeah, and I just want to throw out there for anybody that's listening, maybe on an audio player or an audio podcast platform, and would like to see what the heck Zach and Michael look like, you can actually go to softwareoasis.com in the community section, you'll see the community forum, and you'll see the video podcast right in the forum there.
Zack Hanebrink (05:45.739)
Hahaha
Michael Bernzweig (05:57.979)
for anybody that's listening. I just always like to point that out. But I think one of the interesting things, Zach, about that journey for that organization, obviously there's so many elements to successfully launching a SaaS and tying together all of the details from optimizing funnels, conversion rates, pricing,
finding different channels, but as you pointed out there, when you find the right messaging and the right channel that works, double down on it. mean, that's, yeah, I mean, that is, there's no, you know, no magic to that. You just need to find what works and do more of it. So that is the learning lesson there for anybody that's listening, but, you know,
Zack Hanebrink (06:36.204)
That's exactly what we did.
Zack Hanebrink (06:51.296)
And the, there's a funny part of that story too is, when I first started with the company, they had another competitor with really deep pockets. And, so he told me that upfront, the CEO, like we're competing against these guys. have a massive agency that they hire deep pockets. And by the end of that year, they went out of business. We almost acquired him, but we decided not to, but it was, I was like, wow, not only, know, but that's what's cool is, in marketing.
Michael Bernzweig (07:12.576)
I love it. Yeah.
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (07:21.482)
Obviously a bigger budget is going to get you further, but you can be scrappy, you know, as long as you know how to leverage the data. you don't always have to have, know, millions of dollars for marketing to compete with the bigger players. just have to be smart about it.
Michael Bernzweig (07:36.109)
Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot that you can do to grow organically and even with minimal, you know, spending on paid channels, I mean, I'll share with you and maybe we've had an unfair advantage. You know, I started Software Oasis back in 1998 and it is a SaaS solution, but we haven't spent a penny on marketing and the organization has grown. So, you know, I think at the end of the day,
Zack Hanebrink (07:58.243)
Mm.
Michael Bernzweig (08:05.551)
You know, either time or money, you have to have one of the two and being able to do the right kind of analytics and the right kind of analysis to figure out what's going on. The other thing that I think is really exciting when you look at it, and I've done some research on this, I think over the upcoming years with AI and all of these other tools, I think we're going to see our first unicorn.
Zack Hanebrink (08:08.438)
Right, exactly.
Michael Bernzweig (08:35.813)
that is literally an individual running a SaaS company with all of the tools enabled through AI. And I think that, I think we're gonna see that, yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (08:47.424)
It's getting close. I saw somebody on LinkedIn brag about that the other day, how they had, can't remember the revenue is in the millions and they leverage a crap out of AI and I think their team was like, like five, like five or less people doing millions of dollars in revenue. was like, wow.
Michael Bernzweig (08:55.3)
yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (09:01.531)
Yeah, very, very small organizations doing tremendous amounts of revenue. And I think that's interesting. And I think the flip side of that, and I don't know if this is what you're seeing or thinking as well, but I mean, if you look at AI, obviously, chat GPT is up there, it's a very fragmented market. If you look at traditional search,
Google, you you look at Bing, you look at Yahoo, all of these other engines, you have a clear market leader and it begins with a big G. But at the end of the day, when you look at AI search, which is really growing at a dramatic rate, very fragmented market, not a clear leader at this point. You know, you have an organization or two pulling to the head of the pack, but they're all fighting for market share at this point. And I think.
Zack Hanebrink (09:39.743)
Hahaha
Michael Bernzweig (10:01.123)
You know, we'll see how things go, but I think if you look at it, think AI search at this point is heavily subsidized because, you know, if these organizations were charging the genuine amount that it costs to provide these searches, I don't think anybody would be subscribing. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see if the technology gets to the point where it is able to be offered at the pricing that you're seeing now. But I think.
Zack Hanebrink (10:18.728)
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (10:30.019)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Bernzweig (10:30.299)
It's heavily subsidized and I think, you know, as things transition in the years to come, I think you're going to see a dramatic either increase in the cost or a dramatic increase in the capabilities of a lot of these models. So it'll be interesting to see where that heads.
Zack Hanebrink (10:46.883)
yeah, definitely. Yeah, I'm all into AI.
Michael Bernzweig (10:49.563)
Yeah. so, so on your end of it, as far as organizations that you're helping, you know, to get the right playbook for, and you mentioned it was mostly B2B SaaS to get, get those solutions to market, to get their funnel of, you know, opportunities rolling in and closing. What, what are, what are some of the challenges that you see that are common that you see companies coming to you with? And
some of the solutions, and while they might be different, across different organizations that your team helps them implement.
Zack Hanebrink (11:27.182)
Yeah, so it's probably one of two things most of the time. They either don't really have, it's like we've never done marketing. We've been off of referrals, which is great, but you can't scale that. So that's kind of the main thing. And then two are the people that just like, need leads for our team. But really, once we dive in, it's usually a little deeper than that.
just leads because especially in B2B SaaS, I often see a lot longer sales cycles. So a lot of the times it's, it's not always like that. The sales team needs more leads, but they also need sales enablement. you know, it's not effective to just keep sending email after email. Hey, I just wanted to follow up. Hey, I just wanted to follow up. Hey, what'd you think of the demo? You know, you can really shorten the sales cycle if you understand.
your customer's needs, wants, goals, challenges, pain points, and you create like a collateral library of things that can help them. You know, so you're delivering value so you can shorten the sales cycle and close more deals. So it's not always like, Hey, we need more leads. It's like you need more deals, but how can we get there? You know, surely more leads can help, but there's other things to tweak as well that are just as important.
Michael Bernzweig (12:39.513)
Makes a lot of sense. And I think that's a big part of nurturing organizations along to helping them get their desired end goal in terms of what they're hoping to achieve.
Zack Hanebrink (12:52.94)
Yeah. And then B2B too, you're often selling to more than one person. So you might have one point of contact, but there might be different decision makers. And, that's another thing that we like to do is figure out what's important to them because you might need to show them different information. So for example, if you need to see, if you need a buy-in from the COO, then, know, maybe they need to see like a ROI calculator, a case study, you know, something like that. if it's, if it's like,
you know, a CEO or the IT department, you know, maybe they need more technical stuff for the ID department. And, you know, maybe more of like an executive, you know, so you kind of have to know, like, so when you're putting these collateral pieces, you're putting this information together, like who are you speaking to and what's important to them. So if you can get buy-in by speaking to everyone in their own language and what's important to them, then, you know, you can really shorten that sales process up and increase that conversion rate.
Michael Bernzweig (13:47.001)
I love it. And are most of the organizations that you're working with using a traditional inside sales team or not so much anymore? Or what are you saying? Like more in the mid market to enterprise level space, I guess.
Zack Hanebrink (13:58.795)
Most of the time.
Yeah, most of the time I'm still seeing inside sales. So the smaller companies that's founder led or maybe like, you know, the first couple of teammates, um, then larger ones, it's like an inside sales team. I've seen where it's even broken out into like more lead generation sales and then more of like, uh, you know, the ones that take the time to do the demo and I guess close it. Uh, but yeah, it's mostly in house. Um, that's from what I've seen.
Michael Bernzweig (14:23.451)
Yeah. And are many of the, as founder led organizations, they darn well better be presenting and selling it on their own if they're going to learn, you know, learn their ICP and all of that. But as the organizations grow, I think that, as you mentioned, does change. But do you find that at the point where an organization ends up on your front doorstep, that they've found that product market fit or not so much?
Zack Hanebrink (14:32.174)
Right?
Zack Hanebrink (14:52.526)
They have, but they don't know how to communicate it clearly to the market. It's always the messaging. Yeah. So I mean, it's easy, like, because they're technical people. They built the software. So they're thinking in features and what it does and all this stuff. But really, you've got to position it as kind of that before and after that sell the end state in your SaaS is really just a tool, the bridge to get them there.
Michael Bernzweig (14:57.751)
Okay, so the messaging is K.
Michael Bernzweig (15:21.509)
go.
Zack Hanebrink (15:22.094)
Sure, you need a page for features and all that, you know, that's not what's driving their emotional and, and, you know, reasoning decisions. It's, the stuff that that's important to them to get them to that end goal.
Michael Bernzweig (15:34.843)
So for organizations that have a little more time versus those that are really trying to onboard clients at a faster pace, do you have different strategies that you use for generating signups and conversions and all of that that you might find for either scenario?
Zack Hanebrink (15:59.758)
Yeah, so So for both scenarios we have a few different things that we do but most of the time we're gonna start with strategy and Because that's we're gonna figure out, you What kind of positioning do we need? What kind of messaging? What's the offer gonna be? Who are we speaking to? How are we gonna press their buttons? You know, how are we gonna resonate and connect with them and then where are we gonna do that? You know, so we have this great message. Where do we need to put it? That's kind of one because then once we kind of do all that then we start to discover
What I like to call quick wins, right? So a lot of these companies already have momentum in certain areas So it's really just taken. What do they already have the momentum in and you know, just like just gassing that while we kind of shore up the the weak spots in the funnel and then on the flip side if someone's like more ready to go and they might have some of that stuff out of the way that's the beauty of staying, you know working in one industry as
We've tried so much stuff and one and failed doing a lot of things. So we do have very repeatable systems, for specific types of businesses like.
B2C funnel, a B2B funnel that sells through demo and stuff like that. So we kind of have playbooks for both, but it all kind of originates with that strategy first. We kind of need to know, instead of just a point of ad campaign, we have to kind of know more behind that so that we can be confident that that is the right thing to do and that we're not missing anything. What I like about SAS is a lot of the times, the data is always there.
don't have the time or the knowledge to look at it and kind of let the data steer them, you know, in the direction that they need to go.
Michael Bernzweig (17:39.899)
So when a new client comes aboard, what does a typical onboarding process look like with your team? Where do you start? There's so many areas to focus on.
Zack Hanebrink (17:53.58)
Yeah, so we start with a strategy. So the first month we're doing the persona research. We even interview some of the customers to try to figure out, you know, directly from the horse's mouth, you know, what they like, what they don't like, why they're using it. and they kind of show that and set up, know, to the client and work through a different positioning, and, core message. Cause once you have that core message, that's what needs to be scaled out across the entire campaign. Once you get to the campaign. so once we have the core message, we have the personas.
We figure out where they like to hang out, how we can get in front of them. We already know what resonates. Then let's put a plan together. I always start the plans. The first 90 days are going to be those quick wins. So like I said, if they have momentum anywhere, where can we get those quick wins and get things moving quickly the first 90 days while we're all the different, optimizing the funnel and stuff like that. So the first 90 days is strategy, plan, and quick wins.
Michael Bernzweig (18:52.059)
So what are the levers that you can pull in terms of, once you've got that all nailed down, in terms of driving relevant traffic through those different funnels and optimizing those funnels?
Zack Hanebrink (19:11.054)
Yeah, so it's going to depend on the business, but I can give you some recent examples. So obviously, you got the traffic aspect, right? But then you have different things. Like, for example, we found a quick win with a newer client. It's B2C. When you look at their funnel, they have all these people going in the top, And they have like a, I think it's like maybe a three-step kind of quote unquote checkout process when you're signing up for the trial. So you have like this massive percentage going in the top.
in this teeny tiny coming out of the bottom. So you have this massive gap of people that start the process and never finish. Um, there was no, uh, email nurturing system. So they put in their, their email address, I'd maybe get a step or two further and quit. And then that was it. They'd walk away and no communication. That's a quick win to me. You know, if you got 80 % of your funnel,
that was interested enough to sign up and then stop for whatever reason, we need to reach back out to them and present that value again. So that is a quick win. Another one is like,
Michael Bernzweig (20:08.837)
Sure.
Zack Hanebrink (20:16.798)
Another client that I have, you we built all the things for him and now they're getting all these leads and they're getting on the phone and they're noticing, okay, like I said before, what do we do after the demo? It's like, okay, well, let's create that library of value that we can use for the whole group decision. You know, what's the COO want? What's the CEO want? What does the IT people want to see? You know, stuff like that. Cause all that stuff is super important. All the leads in the world aren't going to do you much good if you don't have the value in the, in the processes and systems to close them.
in a way that they like to be close. Nobody wants to be sold, but they want to learn and they want their problem solved.
Michael Bernzweig (20:52.449)
Absolutely. And, you know, just that you have a lot of stakeholders, especially as organizations start to grow or grow rapidly. How do you interface with with different in-house teams to manage a transition like this?
Zack Hanebrink (21:12.342)
Yeah, that's what's interesting is I'm intentionally open. So for example, each company is going to have different scenarios. So for example, I have one company where they already have an in-house marketer. So I just work with him at another company that there was nobody. So we brought in a team, trained them up, and stuff like that. that's kind what we do is figure out, do you have a team? Do you need a team? Do you have an agency? We can work with whomever. But there has to be a team in place, obviously, to get the work done.
Michael Bernzweig (21:43.023)
Makes sense, makes sense. And do you find that are there certain scenarios in which you find the clients are more cooperative and get things done faster versus certain organizations where you find you're spending so much of your time on the minutia of just getting decisions made and being able to push things forward? What do you find?
Zack Hanebrink (22:07.192)
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (22:11.446)
Yeah, so there's different kinds of people and that's kind of the beauty to start more strategy because we can put something together that's super valuable, but we also get the opportunity to work together and.
And it works both ways, They want us to, they have expectations for us, we have expectations for them. We do our best work when we have clients that are engaged, right? The ones that are just so busy that can't really give any time or attention, then that's really money wasted in my opinion, because we just can't make the impact that we could if there is more engagement. So if we run into situations like that, we can kind of set them up and give them everything they need.
Michael Bernzweig (22:38.907)
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (22:54.576)
to transition into maybe a different offering or a different way to get their solution, I guess.
Michael Bernzweig (22:57.915)
Sure.
Yeah, and I think sometimes the consulting and strategy can be one part of it, having a done with you or done for you type of solution is sometimes very needed to get that quick momentum in the right direction. So a lot of interesting things there. Now, what about pricing strategies? think one area I see a lot of founders focus on
pricing but maybe in the wrong way. What do you see as far as pricing and pulling that lever to bring aboard clients?
Zack Hanebrink (23:40.31)
Yeah, so with that, I would say if there's never been any testing done on the pricing, that I would do that. Because with SAS, there's lots of different models and different flavors of those models from a pricing standpoint. Like, for example, if you're B2C or even B2B, you have a free trial. Have you tested it to put the credit card first? Have you tested it with no credit card? Because you get completely different outputs from that. The credit card first, the quality is going to go up.
but you're not gonna get very many people. You get a lot of people in with no credit card, but 80 % of them might bounce. So it's really just testing. Not only testing the price of things, but testing is it a monthly subscription? Do you offer a yearly plan with a discount? When are they putting their card down? Do they have to put it down before they try it? Is there a demo? All that kind of stuff. And then there's also like...
Some companies are upfront with their pricing on their website and some companies aren't, especially in the B2B. You know, we often see no pricing. You know, so that's something to is testing like, should you put a starting at on the, on the website at least, you know, to kind of filter out the people that may not have the budget or might not be the right fit. just, just test everything because just assuming that it's the correct way, you're not going to know unless you test against it.
Michael Bernzweig (24:59.471)
Yeah. And it's interesting what you said there, like understanding your ideal customer persona is so important because clearly then you can, you can focus on the value that's important to that client persona and kind of double back from there. And I think sometimes it doesn't have to be such a mystery in terms of pricing. mean, I think, you know, you can obviously have a range of different a la carte options, but sometimes, you know, less is more, you know, if you give
clients too many choices sometimes, you know, it's the analysis paralysis, you know, a lot of individuals may.
Zack Hanebrink (25:32.33)
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (25:37.472)
Yeah, we had a client, a client like that. It's like, which plan do you want out of seven options? It's like pricing page you needed a widescreen monitor to get all the options. I'm like, man, this is too much. You know, got to condense this. It's too many choices. It's like buying orange juice at the store. You know, there's an aisle full of orange juice and there's like 50 different kinds now. It's like, man, I don't know. I just want orange juice.
Michael Bernzweig (25:43.224)
enough.
Michael Bernzweig (25:52.855)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (26:00.251)
With pulp, without pulp, orange, some other color. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I've noticed that one of the areas that you and your team focus on are, you know, advocating for traditional operating procedures or, you know, standard operating procedures for marketing. What do you see as the value of that and how does that help out?
Zack Hanebrink (26:04.428)
Yeah, with vitamin D without vitamin D.
Zack Hanebrink (26:22.018)
Mm-hmm.
Zack Hanebrink (26:26.242)
That is a huge value, and it's often ignored in a lot of companies. And it really shouldn't be, because a lot of these SaaS companies are fast growing. And what that means is, whomever is doing a task today doesn't mean they're going be doing that task tomorrow. A new person could be doing that task. So for example, like the founder led, right? Like, you're selling yourself now, but then maybe in six months, you're going to start.
hiring salespeople, well, how are they going to know? So that's where SOPs and playbooks come in. like for the sales, let's put together a sales playbook so that way, like for example, you know, what collateral do I send when it's like, well, if they have this situation, you send this, if it's a situation, you send that. And then, you know, on the flip side, yeah, I lost my train of thought here, sorry.
Michael Bernzweig (26:56.357)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (27:09.049)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (27:16.111)
Yeah, no, but I can see the value and it's just a matter of having some of these things documented.
Zack Hanebrink (27:20.36)
yeah, the SPS. Yeah, the SPS. Same thing. like SPS, it's like, all right, so if we have, you know, a contractor, for example, like doing things or one person in-house.
Once you find something that works, it's important that those things are done consistently, you know, the same way. so that way you can keep the output consistent as well. If things are done differently than the results may vary. having those SOPs are important because, it allows you to, to scale. So everybody's talking about scaling, but how do you do that? It's by hiring, pulling in the right people and getting them up to speed quickly. SOPs help that. And that's something that we include. as we're
going through and we're setting up, we're building all the campaigns and everything. We also have a library of SOPs that we can share with our clients so that they can have their own SOP library. So as they grow in scale, you know, they can get their teammates up to speed quickly and consistently.
Michael Bernzweig (28:13.573)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So if you were to kind of bullet point the typical challenges or roadblocks that you see SaaS founders coming to you with, that day in and day out, they all seem to have the same kind of challenges. Is there a short list of things that you see over and over again?
Zack Hanebrink (28:40.482)
Yeah, and one of the things that jumped to the top of my mind was interesting because I said earlier that I love that they have all this data.
On the flip side, it's not always set up correctly. so for example, I'm always surprised that the amount of companies that don't know certain conversion rates or CPA costs, like what do you pay? Like what's a healthy cost to acquire a new customer? I don't know. You know, I get a lot of that. So it's like, all right, well, we need to figure out, marketing can only have a return on investment if it's healthy and we can only do that if we know what healthy means, you know, so what, what CPAs do we need?
Michael Bernzweig (29:00.965)
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (29:19.79)
and like how are things converting because that's going to help you dictate where budgeting dollars needs to go. You know, where are you getting the best CPA? Where are you getting the highest conversion rate? Where are you getting the highest quality? A lot of that stuff just simply isn't tracked or if it is tracked, it's not set up or if it's set up, it's not being looked at or if it's being looked at, they're not making decisions off of it. So putting all that together because that really is what drives most of stuff to have anything be effective.
Michael Bernzweig (29:39.694)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (29:47.215)
And as far as paid ads, do you find that paid ads can be an effective channel at certain areas in the funnel versus others? Or what do you find there?
Zack Hanebrink (30:01.356)
Yeah, and paid ads is really changing a lot and quickly. So the strategies that were really effective like two years ago, they're completely different now. So you really want to go full funnel. So you kind of have that awareness top of funnel where they're just kind of researching tire kick and they may not know that they a need and then kind of that mid funnel and bottom of the funnel. But from an ad standpoint,
Michael Bernzweig (30:20.41)
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (30:30.072)
costs are rising. you look at like Google CPC costs year over year over year, it's like a hockey stick. So that's something they have to compete against, right? It's like, so whatever your healthy CPA was three years ago, you may not be able to get that now. so you might have to make some changes and also like Google is, from a company, I feel like they're making a little shift as far as their products. They're building a lot more of this AI and machine learning into it. and that takes more and more controls away, you know, from,
Michael Bernzweig (30:36.058)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (30:56.357)
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (31:00.016)
like what you can manage and some of the data that you need. So it's really just figuring out like how to best use the products that they have available because it gets really.
Michael Bernzweig (31:08.559)
Yeah, bottom line is they've really dumbed down the interface. Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (31:12.098)
They have, and there's a lot of waste going on. There's a ton of wasted ad spend. So you have to really know what you're doing or else you're going to blow a ton of money and not get much for it. We see that a lot.
Michael Bernzweig (31:21.083)
Yeah, it can happen really quick. Absolutely. And one of the factors that I think is, is, you know, leading to that is a couple of things. mean, I think at the end of the day, the stock market demands ever increasing returns. And, you know, you get to a certain point where it's just not possible anymore, but if you continue re raising prices, you know, there's obviously going to be a.
Zack Hanebrink (31:40.716)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (31:44.731)
smaller and smaller segment of ad buyers that can afford and have giant margins. And the other thing that I think is a struggle that Google is dealing with, think, know, traditional search traffic, Google, Bing, Yahoo, is projected to continue to decline 25 % over the next couple of years. So, you know, if they have less traffic coming in, they have to sell the existing traffic they have.
more. So it's just, yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (32:12.878)
Exactly. Yeah, they're putting all the AI answers in there so you don't even have to click on a website to get your answers. So there goes your HubSpot loss like what 40 % of their traffic or something like that.
Michael Bernzweig (32:18.459)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, same thing there. And then you have, you know, I don't know about you, but I use AI a lot during my day. And I think everyone else's as well. you know, AI searches as the starting point for search is increasing by 35%. You know, if you look at Forrester and Gardner and all of these different studies that are out there now. So, you know, you've got two diametrically opposed
Zack Hanebrink (32:29.954)
Mm-hmm.
Zack Hanebrink (32:40.738)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (32:48.655)
things happening and the stock market in the background saying give us more revenue, more profit. It's going to hit from all ends. So that's kind interesting.
Zack Hanebrink (32:53.888)
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (32:59.628)
And that's one thing that I've been telling a lot of people lately is you really start, you really got to start thinking ahead of how can you insulate yourself from some of these market dynamics. for example, cost per click is going up year over year, every year, every year. That's a given.
I can't remember the exact percentages we talked about, but people are losing organic traffic. So all this blogging and stuff is not as effective as it used to be. with those two things going on and those two channels typically are huge drivers of the highest quality leads that I've seen because they're intent based. So how do you get around that?
Michael Bernzweig (33:24.739)
Not as effective.
Zack Hanebrink (33:39.084)
You know, social media is always dynamic. know, tick tock might go away. Like Facebook might make a tweak or something like that. So I've been telling people to focus more on, building things that they own. So for example, your email list, you know, building a focusing.
Michael Bernzweig (33:52.591)
Yeah.
Zack Hanebrink (33:55.042)
real big on email list because that is going to insulate yourself from the rising cost per click costs from less organic traffic. Focus on that, especially to a software, know, there's longer sales cycles. So they need a lot of touch points and email is a good way to do that.
Michael Bernzweig (34:11.023)
Yeah. And, know, like they say, you don't want to build on rented land, you know, at the end of the day, at the end of the day. Yeah. The channels that own are the channels that you control and, you know, diversify, you know, amongst your social media channels and some of these other channels that you have out there, but don't, don't come to depend on, on any one, you know, for, you know, for your
Zack Hanebrink (34:15.278)
Exactly. A lot of people are doing that. A lot of people are doing that.
Zack Hanebrink (34:23.468)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Bernzweig (34:39.417)
majority of your revenue or your leads or your opportunities. The other thing that we're finding is becoming more more important are partnerships. think, you know, everyone holding hands and working together with strategic partners is even more important in the year 2025. And that's one reason we've seen some very exciting growth in our Software Oasis partnerships platform. A lot of organizations are realizing that
just that, you know, it's really important to find other organizations that have the clients that you want to get in front of and then partner with them. So that's a very exciting space to explore and something new that is interesting. have a community where a lot of organizations are connecting with one another. have...
know, weekly webinars where a lot of organizations are able to come to, to learn, ask Q and A and questions and things like that from others in the community. I think a big part of, you know, of, SAS and a big part of the whole, you know, online business world is finding your contemporaries, finding your peers, finding others that, you know, like yourself, Zach, where, you know, individuals and organizations can learn from.
And, you know, working together to kind of push things forward and in a good direction, because at the end of the day, you know, ever increasing, you know, just, just like that company that you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that had deep pockets, but it seems, seems like very quickly, they, went through a bunch of that money. And, I think that's. Yeah, that's the challenge. mean, it's so you can, you can easily spend, but.
Zack Hanebrink (36:06.029)
Mm-hmm.
Zack Hanebrink (36:19.874)
Hahaha
Zack Hanebrink (36:27.011)
They burned it all.
Michael Bernzweig (36:33.304)
you have to see that return on investment with anything that you're doing, you know, in all of these different spaces.
Zack Hanebrink (36:41.592)
That's why it's important to track. A lot of people might do a lot of things, but if you don't have the conversion rate and CPA per channel, then how are you going to know that you're spending your money wisely? One last thing on this topic too is I like to try to get to four or five.
steady channels because like you said earlier, you know, one can be up and down. Another can be up and down. So if two are up and down, maybe one's up. The other's down, you know. So if you want to have a goal to try to get to four or five channels that send you quality leads, like you mentioned, partnerships could be one, you know, ads could be another email could be another. so that way you're insulating yourself. like you said, you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. I talked with one company that's killing it on Facebook. They're doing nothing else but Facebook ads. And I'm like, what happens if they make a change?
Michael Bernzweig (37:17.435)
Sure.
Zack Hanebrink (37:27.056)
entire business could go under overnight.
Michael Bernzweig (37:30.427)
Sure, Absolutely. It's some crazy stuff. we always like to leave folks with some actionable ideas. Is there anything that you've seen across all over your years with all of the clients that you have, some quick levers or actionable details that an organization can get into play that'll help them move the needle forward?
Zack Hanebrink (38:00.396)
Yeah, I'll tell you one exercise that I love. It's total geek, but it's totally worth it. Especially for B2B SaaS companies, most of them have some kind of a CRM. If you have a CRM to where your sales are connected to how that sale came about, do a hard export, pull that into a CSV, pull it per channel, and start plugging in and learn where are your sales actually coming from.
And like I said, how is that converting and what is the cost? Because you will learn a lot from that, um, even down to like how they got there. So for example, I had one client that, you know, had two different types of leads that they would get. One were had a high CPA and one had a super low CPA, but the higher CPA netted way bigger deals. They wouldn't, we would have never known that without, you know, export slicing the data.
going through figuring out where all the sales came from the past 12 months and using that to tell the story of how we need to do going forward, what needs to be cut, what needs to invested more in.
Michael Bernzweig (39:02.869)
And, you know, as far as where you sit in the industry and what you see coming in the next few years, is there anything that's really exciting to you that you're looking forward to or you see on the horizon that you think is going to impact a lot of companies in a positive way?
Zack Hanebrink (39:20.138)
It's definitely AI. And I think it's really more about AI adoption and learning because I'm already seeing it now. The companies that are learning to use AI correctly, then that could be anything from right marketing copy to using it in your actual software tool itself. They're the ones that are getting more done faster, more efficiently. The ones that are like, what's AI? I opened up Chat GPT once, like they're missing out. You you can get
more work done with less team. So it's really just learn as much as you can about it and how you can apply it to the business because I think in five years, I mean, who knows where AI is gonna go, but if you're not familiar with how to leverage it, then you're gonna get left in the dust.
Michael Bernzweig (40:05.091)
I love it. love it. Well, I want to thank everybody for listening today. In addition, if this is your first time, in addition to the software spotlight, we also have the consulting spotlight and career spotlight all available on Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast player. For anybody that's made it all the way through to the end here is something I want to share. Very excited to say that we've just surpassed 30,000
listeners as of this past month. we're really moving forward in a good direction. And one other tidbit for anybody that is in the B2B SaaS space, we have one ad spot that's opening up June 1st. So for anybody that would like to share some relevant stories on the podcast, we'd be happy to have you aboard. And with that, I really appreciate your time on the podcast today, Zach.
Zack Hanebrink (40:36.046)
Nice.
Michael Bernzweig (41:04.555)
For anybody that wants to keep up to date with everything that's going on, if you just go to softwareoasis.com, check out that community section. You can sign up for the newsletter, the forum, get involved in the community or any and or all of the above. So once again, we've had Zach Hannabrink with HookLead on the podcast today, and I really appreciate your time.
Zack Hanebrink (41:30.658)
Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great.