How SAS went from performance to brand

0:29Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Okay, so we met in Cannes, didn't we, 18 months ago? We did. And I was really... You delivered one of my favourite Cannes presentations of all time. I have to say this, right? Honestly, I was really struck by... Go on. No, honestly, it was great. I mean, look, there's things you expect in Cannes, right? Like, obviously, talking about the craft and creativity and all that kind of thing. There's things you don't expect, which is seeing a presentation where you've got your CFO talking about how to do B2B marketing. I just thought it was such a clever idea.

0:57It really stuck to me. So I was really keen to have this conversation with you. But before we get into that, because I want to get to that and some other things as well, just give a bit of background to SaaS. What do you do and how does the company get to where it is today? Sure. Well, SaaS is a global leader in data and AI software. And 50 years. This year, we're celebrating our 50th anniversary as a company, which is such a significant milestone, particularly in technology. And while we're not a household name, those in the industry know us really well. So just to give you an idea of our footprint, 92 % of the Fortune 500 use SaaS.

1:32We have a presence in nearly 100 countries. And we're a part of your day-to-day life, and you probably don't even realize it today. So we're working with banks to protect your identity from frauds. We're making you financially safe. Every drug that comes to market in the United States is tested using trusted SaaS analytics to ensure that it's safe and effective. One of my favorites is, you know, many retailers are using SaaS. So when I go to one of my favorite stores, Ulta Beauty, I know I'm getting a personalized experience because of SaaS. So we're really behind the scenes in so much of everybody's day-to-day life.

2:09But we're not that household brand name. Now, something I learned today about SaaS is you're still led by your founder. You talk about being 50 years old and your founder is still involved in the company. I can't think of many businesses in the world that have got their founder after 50 years. Yeah. That is astonishing. There's a lot of things that are unique and I would even say contrarian to what you see in the business world about SaaS. And that wonderfully starts with our CEO and founder, Dr. Jim Goodnight. And he has had just a remarkable career. He's really an icon in the technology space.

2:47He's been called the godfather of AI and analytics in many ways. So he's active in the business today. It's an honor that I get to work with him. One of the things I find about him is when he started SaaS and started in his career, we were using punch cards in technology. And now we're pioneering areas of quantum computing. Like what an arc in technology. And along the way, he has always led us with this understanding that, like history, technology rhymes. And it's important to understand that what might be a hype today, is that really the hype that we need to jump on? Is that going to help customers?

3:27Is that where innovation should be happening for our company? And are we doing it in a responsible way? And so his guidance is just truly remarkable. And I consider it an honor that I get to work so closely with him. You're absolutely right because the technology has changed, but the principles underlie how businesses see probably happen. And he must have an amazing sort of pattern recognition of seeing, almost anticipating how things will evolve. He does. It's remarkable how he can draw a connection to when we move from PC to more mainframe type computing to cloud computing to where we are right now with AI.

4:06There's a lot of similarities there and some of the same risks. And I think that's where we like to think of ourselves as a 50-year-old startup. So we've got this notion of pace and innovation that you see in a startup, but we're also going to bring a little bit of wisdom to the table of we've seen a lot of these things before. We understand those patterns. And I think that's where what's unique to SaaS is we build really trusted relationships with our customers in that way, because that's something we can offer that maybe a startup that's been around for a couple of years can. Now, you've also been a company a reasonable length of time.

4:42I couldn't quite believe this, actually. You must have started very young, I'm assuming. Well played. Well played. I like to say I started when I was 15. Still at school. Alas. I've been there. This will be my 27th year at SaaS. Yes. And I know that's an unusual journey and it has its pros and cons. I've probably had four careers at the company and I've had the chance to work in our R &D organization and better understand our product requirements process. How do we listen to our customers? How does that get turned into a requirement for the product and ultimately delivered? I've had the chance to do more customer support.

5:18So what happens after we've marketed and sold the product? How do we ensure our customers are getting the support they need? How are we hearing them? And then I've had a variety of roles within marketing and everything from starting off in industry analyst relations, where I really got to cut my teeth to understand our products and the portfolio deeply, to leading the building of our MarTech stack. when we realized in the mid-2000s, we need a MarTech stack. We need to really build this up to global field marketing and really starting to understand different cultures and how SaaS needs to be translated in a consistent brand fashion, but locally relevant.

5:58Because how we show up in Singapore or Stockholm or here in the United States, it looks different. Now, I think from our conversation, you were running kind of what we describe as performance marketing, you know, direct response up until COVID happened. That's right. And then your role changed around COVID. So how did you get the role you currently have today and what happened? I think when you're at a company in the longevity of the career that I have, I often say you're actually interviewing for your next job every day. You just don't realize it. And I always I've been fortunate to have probably people who believe to me more than I believe to myself throughout the arc of this journey.

6:35and when the company was ready to make some changes in leadership, they tapped me on the shoulder and said, what do you think? My initial reaction, and I'm not proud of this, was, oh, I'm not ready for that. And then I thought about, I'm like, of course I'm ready for that. Bring it. I can take this. So I took over all of marketing in January of 2020, and I thought I had a plan. I had a team, we had a plan, we were going to just do amazing things in 2020. We still did, but it was different. And so six weeks in, the world changed, right? Of course, my roots at that time were very much performance marketing oriented.

7:17And when we looked at the contributions, the impact that marketing was making to the business and something to know about SaaS, we're about 95 % direct sales from SaaS. So working with our sales teams, critical, critical part of the stakeholder management that I do. 60 % of our leads were coming from live events. Well, there's no live events anymore in COVID. And so it really forced us to think about how do brand and demand need to work together differently? How are we going to reach our audiences in a way that's going to have an impact to the organization? So yeah, it was an interesting time.

7:54Like I said, for six weeks, I thought I had a plan. To what extent did COVID oddly help, though? Because in some respects, you were forced to think differently and forced to kind of rethink how you market the brand. 100%. I mean, it was a forcing function for us to take a step back and say, what's going to be the most effective way to reach our audiences? And so in that way, it was, you know, it was a gift, a horrible time in our society. Please don't mistake that in any way. But, you know, sometimes those forcing functions give you a gift and you need to take it to say, I need to look at this world a little bit differently.

8:33Now, this brings us to Can, of course. And your first, am I right in saying you did your first brands building campaign for 20 years? It was 25 years, actually. So we launched a campaign in 2000 that was all around the power to know. And we can talk more about that as well. But then we didn't touch brand for a while. We left it out there, but we didn't put any energy behind it. And we really focused on those product-centric, demand-gen, very geo-based programs. So, I mean, if we looked at how SaaS showed up prior to 2000 in every country, you might not think it's the same SaaS. So we really were decentralized and inconsistent.

9:23I think this will resonate with a lot of people because a lot of people working, particularly in tech, where it's product led and it's all kind of, you know, the marketing team get involved very late in the process. And it's all about executing with customers. So how did you take the business on the journey then to switch investment over to brand? Because that was the thing that really captured my attention in CAN, because you did it in a very clever way. So at SAS, being a data and AI company, data is our love language. So for me to have that conversation of how we need to invest our resources differently, I needed to come with data.

9:53And so this is where our partnership with the B2B Institute and bringing data to the table from Ehrenberg Boss Institute, just talking about things like the 90-95-5 rule, right? The people, our buyers, only 5 % of them are a market. We still have to reach that 95 or the long and short of it. How demand generation efforts and brand building need to be balanced a little bit more. So I brought all that data to the table and I really worked across all of my stakeholders. My CEO was on board. That was his task of me when I took over as CMO, which was build the brand, change the perception of SaaS. We're perceived as a legacy vendor.

10:35The how we do it was always something that we continue to debate. And I had a great relationship with our chief sales officer, chief revenue officer. We definitely partner very well there. I would say I did not have the relationship I needed with the finance team. And so I really worked on how can I, what we have, where we're kindred spirits is we're looking long term. where my CSO and a lot of the performance marketing are very quarter and calendar year focused. Very important. But we have to be able to have both of those. And in fact, those short term objectives are going to be more easily reached if we're able to do more of this long term.

11:15And so I brought finance in and I said, all right, I need to better learn about your world. And would you do that in the reverse and learn about mine? So I improved my finance literacy. The finance team came to the table improving their marketing literacy. And then we partnered with the CFO to understand, all right, if we're going to take, because I didn't get a gift of a bigger budget to invest in brand. It was, all right, this is the portfolio. Now I'm going to manage that portfolio a little bit differently, which brought a whole host of change management that was needed as part of this. But the CFO and his leaders were working closely with us to say, all right, if that's the investment you're going to make, what does the return look like?

11:57And how do we look at measurement that is not going to be an immediate lead or pipeline created in the next 30 days. It has to be a different measurement. And so one of my favorite clips from, from CAN that I continue to use is the CFO saying, well, marketing spends a lot of money and it's an investment. And so it's, it's, it is perceived that way. And, you know, fast forward to today, I have a finance business partners that reports into the finance organization, but sits on my leadership team. He is in my leadership calls. He's working with me as we're building our strategy. He's helping me as we think about our budget allocation.

12:37He represents me when I'm not in the room. And so I know that when I'm having conversations about the large pot of the budget, he's advocating because he understands how we're going to use that in a fiscally responsible way. I love that so much. I mean, that was the thing that really struck me listening to you in can was um when the cfo was explaining the marketing thinking i was like that's such a move right because suddenly the cfo goes from sort of like you know marking your homework checking you're doing it properly to actually an advocate and that's that you know you're flipping the relationship to becoming you know a supporter rather than a challenger and i looked at some statistics on this actually because um i think it's a key topic actually for for cmos and the shocking stats 35 Only 35 % of marketers say they regularly work with the finance department.

13:28Wow. One in three. That's astonishing. And then CFOs were asked how collaborative is their relationship with CMOs. Almost half described it as somewhat collaborative. So not very, but somewhat. So that's the bit in the middle. I mean, somewhat is like basically no, isn't it? Because if you're somewhat, you're just being polite. It's a polite no, isn't it? 100%. So half of CMOs don't have a good relationship with the CFO. I think that's something marketers could absolutely work on to improve, to improve the profession. And I would imagine that that 30%, it's probably still a very transactional relationship.

14:04And so that's a big shift that we made along this is it used to be transactional where I'd get my annual budget and then at quarterly re-forecast, we'd look at the number again. That has to change. You have to start pulling the finance team in as you're thinking about the marketing mix, as you're thinking about just all of the more strategic elements of the investment and make that a much more strategic relationship. It can't be transactional. Now, what was the reaction when they saw the brand campaign that you came out with? Because if they'd not seen a campaign for 25 years, this is obviously a new experience, isn't it, for the business?

14:42and they're not used to kind of, you know, the different type of marketing. What was the reaction to the campaign? There was excitement and pride, and I loved that. And so there was elements of that campaign. The first round of the campaign we focused on, just given the nature of where we were in, I think, the pandemic, at that time there was very much a focus on purpose-led marketing as a way to introduce ourselves, reintroduce ourselves, I should say, into the market. we focused on curiosity and the role that curiosity plays in innovation because what we were finding from our research was we weren't getting the credit that we felt like we deserve for how innovative our products are.

15:23And so that's a value that we appreciate as one of our corporate values is curiosity. We also know that for data scientists that are our technical users, that's one of their superpowers is how they think curiously about the problems that they're trying to solve for their businesses. So that was our first wave. And so there was a lot of pride from our employees. And it turned out to be effective for us relative to what we were doing in the past. Then what we realized is, all right, we now need to say, how are we enabling curiosity? So we wanted to get a little bit down the, we found that there was just this turbulence.

16:05We were at this kind of 40 ,000 feet level with curiosity. And then we take you down into demand generation talking about products. Well, that's a bumpy change in altitude. So what we decided to do was lean into VIA, which is our new data and AI platform, as that vehicle for curiosity. And it was actually being at CAN that inspired this for me. And hearing from Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, talking about how B2B doesn't need to be boring, but you don't have to talk about the product. You can talk about the promise. And so VIA was really our promise. And so that became our next wave in this campaign was talking about VIA.

16:47What we found when we launched that, again, a lot of pride for our employees. They liked seeing our products show up. But then I had to do more stakeholder management expectation setting of we're going to talk about VIA because it is going to help companies with productivity. Not all of the features and functions, which are amazing, but features and functions don't belong in a brand campaign. They belong in the downstream, further down the funnel conversation. And so I actually felt like we had a lot of work to do to describe those altitudes and why they are all important and they need to coexist.

17:23Now, being a data company as well, how did you kind of measure the effectiveness of the campaign as well? Because performance marketing is really easy, right? Because you just immediately you see the attribution. Although, of course, you know, the attribution is a lot more than the last click. But how did you measure the effectiveness of the campaign? Yeah. And this is an area I think we continue to mature. And I actually, you know, I talked about some of the change management between performance marketing and brand marketing and the work that we still continue to do today. Because I feel like there's sometimes still a chasm between those two types of measures.

17:58What we started off with was some of the things you might imagine, aided and unaided awareness. The challenge with that is those take a long time to move the needle. And so that was our long-term measure and continues to be our long-term measure. In the interim, we began to look at things like, how are we evolving our NPS? How are we a customer net promoter score? How is our news favorability? What's the gravity we're creating into our organization? Are we seeing a lift in engagement on our social channels? Are we seeing lifts in traffic we're getting to our website? Are we bringing in new responders?

18:33That's marketing's job, bringing new people. So those were some of the metrics that we focused on there. I still had that chasm, though, between brand and demand is what we called it at SAS. I've got a bone to pick with the term performance marketing. So we called it brand and demand. That's good, yeah. And it used to be brand versus demand. And so we got to a place that's brand and demand in our organization. So to try to connect, we began to do more analytics, some deeper analytics. And this is a great partnership with LinkedIn. in. We did a clean room project to understand the connection of exposure to brand advertising to one revenue.

19:09And what's the lift that we see on that? That extremely valuable. What we found is five times lift on the one revenue ability to win if they've been exposed to our brand. So getting that, being able to connect the dots there was really significant and important to us. We've done more sophisticated market mix modeling, which began to show us how brand and demand work together and that it's one plus one equals three, right? And so that's, I think we've got a ways to go there. I think, look, if anybody in the marketing profession has unlocked this entirely, call me up because I would love to have this conversation.

19:48It continues to be a challenge, but I do feel like one of the maybe superpowers we have at SaaS is we've got some data chops and some analytics chops and we're bringing that to bear here. It's a challenge for everyone. I did a study last year, actually, with analytic partners, Walk, System One, and it demonstrated your point, basically, that brand plus performance delivers more. What was interesting about it is everyone was celebrating. Yes, of course, it's and, not versus. But what was interesting about it is that brand did more of the heavy lifting. So basically, adding brand onto performance had a much bigger impact than adding performance onto brand sort of thing.

20:25So the direction you went in was absolutely the right one. And of course, what people forget, I think, is that all your short term measures go up as you improve your long term measures. It has a halo. Absolutely. I think my colleague Orlando talks about rather than long and the short of it, the lasting benefits rather than long. Because it's not like you have to wait a long time. It's that they last rather than sort of, you know, disappear after short term. Sure. Well, I think what we were finding, too, is we were doing demand marketing and continue to do it really well. And I'm proud of the work that we do there.

20:56But we were also beginning to hit this plateau. And I don't think we were going to break out of the plateau until we did the brand advertising. And we talked about SaaS a little bit earlier, but we have some challenges. There's brand confusion because we're SaaS the software company. Well, there's SaaS the shoe, SaaS the airline, SaaS the British Secret Service, the San Antonio Spurs. We get called SAS, not SaaS, which is always painful for me. And then there's software as a service SaaS. And so we aren't going to be able to improve short term performance until we really stake our claim in that area of kind of brand confusion.

21:35That's a really good point. I forgot to mention that. That was the first thing I thought of before this conversation. It's a challenge. We Google SaaS and you do get the British Secret Service. I know. You get an airline and there's quite a few things that come up. Oh, John, I'm just painfully aware of this. Painfully aware. It is. It is. which was another bonus for why we thought about elevating SaaS via to a brand level. Because when we can start to associate SaaS and SaaS via, that just gives us a little bit more distinctiveness. It does. Now, of course, a new campaign just come out as well, haven't you?

22:08That's right. Which leans into humor, which I love actually, because I think humor is one of the best things you can use, particularly in B2B, which can be, let's admit, rather boring sometimes. It can be. I mean, there's a sea of sameness in B2B for sure. So when we thought about this next part of our campaign and how we think about SAS Viya as a tool to help improve productivity in organizations, people are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of data that's coming at them. We wanted to be able to tell a story in a way that would break through or at least get us out of our comfort zone. So I would say I don't know that we've completely broke through yet, yet, but I will.

22:48But we're getting ourselves known differently. So a couple of things. We wanted to lean into humor. And we thought that's not used as much in B2B. But we wanted to be thoughtful about humor. There's a lot of nuances to humor. So we didn't want dark humor. We don't want mean-spirited humor. But there's some things about office life and I think the pain you feel around needing to be more productive and wanting to have something to help you. And that's SaaS and SaaS Viya. We also really leaned into having some brand devices. And we hadn't done that before. So we introduced a pink cube, which represented VIA and insights you get from VIA.

23:28And then we used white spheres, balls, to represent the overwhelming amount of data coming at you. So some of the first ads had people in a glass conference room that was full of white balls and you feel like you're just drowning in all of the data. But you could alleviate that by SaaS. So that was really fun. And gosh, what we found is it was one of those things that was so extensible and fun globally. So not only did we have the brand campaign, how we saw it brought to life in areas like our events, whether it was an owned event or at a third party event. We had ball pits. I got adults getting into ball pits, acting like kids.

24:07So it was just fun and just unexpected. And that is something that we want people to think about when they think about SaaS. I think it's so good. I mean, everyone can relate to being overwhelmed by data. I mean, it's a problem. It's a universal problem. Everyone can relate to it immediately. It doesn't need explaining that idea, does it? It's immediately obvious. And then tackling it with humor makes it more memorable. Yeah. Yeah, very, very exciting. You've also signed up a new sponsorship, haven't you? which is for particularly anyone in the UK listening to this, you've just done a sponsorship with Liverpool Football Club.

24:39That's right. Yes, we have. Very exciting. So we just announced that in December of 2025. So we're just a month into what is going to be an amazing at least five year partnership. We have worked with sports teams before. What I like about us in the sports category is it's something that we all can appreciate. I think people, you can relate to our audience in just a very human and authentic way. So we've had a partnership with the Orlando Magic that dates back 10 years. We recently also announced a partnership with the L.A. Football Club. Liverpool is by far the largest and honestly the biggest bet that I'm taking in my role, the largest one I brought to the table.

25:22What's unique about how we think about these sports partnerships is we're not just going to put a logo on the club and walk away. The partnership is two way. So we're an official global AI marketing automation provider and partner. And then the club, Liverpool Club, is using SaaS for fan engagement. And so we'll be able to tell stories that are really authentic and just some great IP around how we're improving the club. And so, yeah, our approach to that was, again, data being our love language. If Liverpool fans were a country, they would be the third most populous country in the world. That's how big the fandom is for Liverpool.