How SaaS Companies Escape the “Messy Middle” of Growth | Corinne Cavanaugh | 398

Are you an overwhelmed SaaS founder ready to make the leap from leading a team to leading an organization? Join us each week as we refill your think tank with actionable tips and strategies from great business minds you know and those you don't know yet. This is SaaS Fuel with your host, 5-time entrepreneur, SaaS founder, and globetrotting adventurer, Jeff Maines. Welcome back to the SaaS Fuel podcast, where SaaS growth gets messy fast. When sales blames marketing, blames product, and product is busy shipping features that nobody asked for. Anybody ever experience that? I am your host, Jeff Maines, and I help B2B SaaS founders like you grow from traction to scale. Here, growth is more than just numbers. It's about crafting a future-proof company, premium valuation, and leaders who build a business of significance while living epic adventurous lives. There's something most founders won't admit out loud. There's actually probably a lot of things, but this one is that there is a stage in building a company that nobody puts on the highlight reel. No flashy fundraise announcement, no viral launch moment. It's a part where the scrappy hustle that got you here suddenly stops working. Your team is growing faster than your systems, and somehow, despite the revenue, everything feels harder than it did at the beginning. Sound familiar? Welcome to the messy middle. And the sad news is that most companies just don't make it out. But today we're pulling back the curtain on what it actually takes to scale past that wall. You'll find out why building the next great feature might be the single most dangerous thing you can do with your runway right now, and what smart founders do instead before writing a single line of code. We'll get into why your top-of-funnel obsession might be quietly killing your growth, and how to spot the early warning signs that customers are about to walk out the back door while you're busy courting new ones through the front door. We're also talking about a smarter way to bring in marketing firepower without the bloated executive salary. And why it might be the move that finally gets your revenue engine running on something other than sheer willpower. If you've ever felt like your business is growing and suffocating at the same time, today's episode was made just for you. The systems that get you to the next level are closer than you think. But first, you have to stop doing the things that are holding you back. Let's get into it. Our founder on Tuesday was Mike Armstead, CEO of Pulse Security AI. He was with us to talk about how companies navigate major technology shifts from early internet to cybersecurity to artificial intelligence. We talked about why businesses consistently underestimate infrastructure inertia, how founders survive difficult market cycles through conviction and adaptability, and why cybersecurity leaders have to learn to communicate risk in business language, not just technical jargon. And our expert guest last week was Jenna Nelson. AI strategist and advisor. She joined us to break down why businesses often fail with AI because they automate broken processes instead of fixing operational clarity first. Because tools are cool, right? We explored the intentional AI adoption workflow documentation automation strategy and why mastering one AI tool deeply is often more valuable than constantly chasing the newest platforms. If you missed either of those episodes, go back and check them out. My guest today is Corinne Cavanaugh, founder of CAC Media and Publishing, where she and her team of fractional CMOs help SaaS and tech companies find product-market fit and build systems that actually grow revenue. Before starting her own firm, Corinne spent time at Microsoft supporting the VP of Azure Data. Her team put up over $500 million in revenue and 76% year-over-year growth in a single year. That's the kind of numbers that will get your attention, right? Let's find out how you can put up exceptional numbers like that in your biz. Welcome someone who has spent her career helping companies scale smarter, not louder— Corinne Cavanaugh. Hey Corinne, welcome to SaaSFuel. Welcome, thank you. You've worked across startups and Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft and when you zoom out, what's the biggest difference in how each approaches growth? Every industry is a little bit different, and it's kind of wild. I think every industry has something to learn from another industry. And when I stepped into Microsoft, I started to see some patterns in tech. Sure. And generally, and it's just a matter of looking across and then bringing patterns that you want that can actually help optimize what you're doing. That's good. Pattern recognition is really important. What patterns do you see that work really well in small companies versus big ones? Let's talk about the big ones first because everybody's trying to model for them, right? So the big companies have all of the resources, and when you have smaller companies and mid-market companies trying to adopt and adapt their systems and flows and SOPs, To that, there's a couple things they need to keep in mind. One is feature prioritization, right? In tech, this is a huge deal. It drives everything you do, drives your roadmap. And what I'm finding is that smaller companies get very excited about every feature, right? If the founder has that idea, they just think it's brilliant and they just go for it. And what larger, more seasoned companies do is they actually vet it. Before putting any resource into it. And even in big companies, this happens that you might have someone super smart, genius level, and they just decide to go for it and put it in their product roadmap and spend all the resourcing to do it. But the smartest companies I have seen, and this is really clear, they do this in retail quite often, they go through a huge vetting process before they decide to add any features or services or even retail goods. And so they do testing in their marketplace to demonstrate and validate product market fit before they do any building, any creation at all. And I think that's something that small and mid-sized companies really need to consider because they're so resource constrained, right? And even the bigger ones that have all the resources in the world, it's a pretty common mistake even with the big tech guys. Yes. It is. That's what we want to do though. We want to get to those features really fast and we know that we've got an idea that's going to change the world, so we got to beat everybody else to it. Exactly. But the pitfall is you can beat everyone else to it, but if your customer is not ready and chomping at the bit to buy it, it doesn't matter. It could be the feature best product in the world, but you have to know, not only do you know this is a solution that will actually do good in the world, but it's a solution that people want to buy. And figuring out if that desire is really fiery and powerful enough for them to click the buy button, that's what it is, right? And sometimes it can just be that in the marketplace there's a perceived notion that this other company that's an embedded player really has the market already, has that feature. So if you're building something that doesn't actually exist, but people assume it exists elsewhere, they're not going to want to buy it. And it's gonna be an uphill climb for product market fit. Well said. You nailed it there. And I have that conversation so often with founders who either build products and they're like, I'm trying to figure out who to sell it to. Or we talk about roadmap and they're building it because somebody else has it. But what they don't necessarily realize, and I'm in the same boat, is that So many of the products out there, people are using 60, 70, 80% of it, 20% of it. And so a lot of those features don't matter. They absolutely don't. And what's heartbreaking is they just think, oh, if I do this or if I roll out this one other feature, then it's going to make all the difference and people are just going to flood to me. And you have to pump the brakes and go, okay, you should test it. Put out some ads, do some micro testing. Doesn't— could cost $5. $10, just see if anyone will click. And if you can't get anyone to at least click through, it's really not a good investment. And you can save yourself a whole lot of time by doing this validation testing. And in retail, it is absolutely critical, right? They're not going to spin up some new yoga pants without figuring out if people want to buy those pants. They're just not going to go through all of that trouble. Yet software developers are so brilliant in their notion, and they know that it's a need, and they have this drive that it's needed in the marketplace, um, that they'll just go build it. And It's a hammer and a nail problem, right? Like, if you have this skill set to go build it, you want to build it. You need to build it immediately and you feel the competitive space and you want to get it out there quickly. But quickly is not always the best thing. You need to pause and validate that demand. Absolutely. And now what you're doing today, you have a fractional CMO firm, which I love the fractional model. What's the gap that you're seeing in the market that traditional marketing leadership wasn't solving? Yeah, it's actually— it's really hard out there for middle market, right? So that messy middle, not only is it called the messy middle because it's difficult mentally and you're dealing with cash flow and you're trying to scale all these things at once, but there's also not that many solutions out there for that space. So that's what I bring to the table, right? That messy middle, you're going from hustle founder mode and some systems that worked really early on to get you a great customer base up to that next tier. And in order to get you there, that's what we do. So we install Fractional CMO and they help put in the systems and train your people and mentor your marketing team to get you to that enterprise level that can start operating on systems and building revenue pipelines and retention workflows. As a system rather than having to have the founder or CEO so involved in marketing. That happens a lot, especially early stage. So getting marketing involved early, even before product is built, is in that R&D, hugely valuable. Exactly. And that is one thing I noticed at a couple of different of the big tech firms out there, right? Even in those R&D conversations, they're almost like VP and above level. They don't even consider marketing. They're not even considering commercial many times. And so I'm all for getting someone at a CMO level in those early R&D conversations so that they can actually be involved and do competitive analysis and really see if it's going to land in the marketplace and the way that the executives are thinking about it. Really smart. Why is it so hard for us to do that? And I think I see it in a lot of companies. Marketing is kind of an afterthought. It is product first and then distribution and marketing second. Yeah, in this space, like SaaS is really— it's really important to get your marketing right, not only for the first sale but also for the leaky bucket, right? So once you get that customer, if you're running a SaaS model month over month, you want to retain that customer. And there's a whole bunch of levers you need to pull on to make sure that happens. And that could be done from customer engagement, customer support, Or that could be done and led from the marketing department, which people don't normally think of, right? They think of pipeline and new business and top of funnel and getting them through the funnel. That's all good. That's only half the story. And so I think that this is an emphasis that really needs to be out there. And there are resources. I have some resources on the site. I can drop a link for your folks to use those. But I think that's another part, the retention part that needs to be considered even before the product. Comes out, and once the product lands, you got to keep those customers. That's really smart. A lot of the resources do go— when we are talking about marketing, they are to get the sale, but then that budget dries up to retain, to continue marketing, either in between the time the lead comes in and the sale happens, or after the sale through the point that they're using the product. Yeah, what's interesting about marketing is typically companies really think about it for that beginning stage. But if you get the right CMO-level marketing executive in there, they should feel and be responsible for the P&L, and they should be looking at your business in partnership with the CEO or founder and saying, oh, okay, how can we do this? How can we make sure revenue is going up, up, up? Month over month. And especially if you are doing some spend and you have ad, or maybe you are direct-to-consumer model, that's especially important. They need to have visibility to EBITDA because all their spend can influence the bottom line. So I think this is one thing that people often get wrong around marketing in general, and they shy away from, which is, yes, your marketing technicians should be doing demand gen. They should be doing all the pipeline stuff and funnel stuff. Yes, they should be doing that, but you should also have a CMO-level person in there to go, okay, we're doing all these things, but should they be done? And are there the right things to do? And can we do the systems around it? And how does that affect our P&L? And is this really making a difference for growing the company over time, scaling from the messy all the way up to enterprise? So if you don't have that sort of tier, It's really hard. And that's the challenge of the messy middle. And in the past, to your previous question, in the past you could hire a consultant, right? They would come in, they'd give you a really great strategy. I like to say that they do a drive-by, right? They drop strategy on you and they leave, right? Here you go, bye. And that's one of our key brand promises at CAC Media. We don't drop strategy and leave. We have 90-day or quarterly strategies, and we make sure that they happen by mentoring your people that you have, your technicians that you have, or getting the right people in there and making sure they're doing the right things to actually meet those goals quarterly. So that's a fractional role, and it's cool because you don't have to hire a full-time $300K CMO that has healthcare benefits and all of the risks associated with hiring and firing. People that are out there, right? So like you can bring on a fractional in this capacity that can give you the level of service that you need, right? The strategy, the touch base with the team, just so you get that marketing flywheel going and it doesn't feel like such a huge burden for the CEO. And I, this is my favorite thing. I love it when we're working with a CEO and they're just like, wow, this is handled. I'm just getting a check-in meeting weekly and all this stuff is happening without me. And it frees them up to work on big deals, licensing agreements, expansion initiatives, distribution partnerships. So that's the space that I'm serving because it's so unserved. It is, really is. What does the true pre-development checklist look like for founders, whether it's building an entire product or where they want to validate demand or just adding a feature? What does that look like before they're writing code so that they know that they're putting resources in the right place? Yeah. So the pre-development checklist should be ICP study, right? Confirm that your ideal buyer actually wants it. Test your messaging in multiple ways, but test product viability. Talk to some distribution partners, talk to some of your, like, a pre-engagement cohort that you've created over the time. Like maybe you've got a private preview out and you wanna go to them and talk to them about what would actually make them buy. Do some research around what they're going to pay for it. If I had this magic XYZ, what would you really pay for it? Okay, if I was to charge you tomorrow, how would you want to pay for it? So go through those steps and those processes to figure out, okay, this is really going to land. And then once you get to the point where you decide, hey, we want to build this, then you need to do a full competitive analysis. What's in pipeline right now? And you're gonna have to do some serious internet sleuthing to, to get that, right? Like luckily we've got AI now that can help us out with that. You need to see what else is coming, especially in the major players, right? If the big guys are gonna add your widget that you're standing up as a feature in 3 months' time, you need to look at their roadmap and see what they're prioritizing and see if it will bump heads with what you're doing. So that, those are the flow that you need to get into before you even start in development, before you even hire that first dev or starting to lay out your workspace. How much time should founders spend focused on competitors versus talking to customers versus building what they've validated or are pretty sure that their customers want? Yeah, that's a hard one. And it depends on where you're at, right? If you're the founder CEO, you should be equally in those places doing sort of a tap touch base with all of those cohorts, right? So feeling like you're in the know with who your customer is, you're dodging into customer groups, you're tapping partners, you're tapping your team. To, to figure out that knowledge so that you can have that top level on the landscape. And all of those things are important. And who's running your marketing department or who's running your operations for the company is equally important because they're taking care of all the, of the other little stuff while you are keeping your ears open and you're listening for those feedback loops throughout all the channels, you could say. Oh, that's good. I've seen so many founders looking at competitors and trying to match feature parity, and it's easy to forget that you you have your own market out there, and then others that never look at competitors and are just building in a vacuum. So that's really good advice to think about that. And these days it's so easy to— you could set up a GPT, or you could set up some sort of workflow with AI to actually keep a pulse on your competitors. So I think now these days there's no reason not to do it. You need to know what they're doing, what's coming, but also you shouldn't be chasing them. And if you feel like you're chasing it based on features, you need to step back and think about, okay, what space am I trying to create? Am I creating a category? Is it something you can ask yourself? Like, how do I reframe what we're doing so that we are so clearly far apart from our competitors rather than have to chase the features that they're releasing or make sure that we release it before them? So if you're feeling like, if you're in that sort of rat race, oh my gosh, feature catch-up, or get ahead of their features, You need to pause and think about how you're positioning yourself in the marketplace and how you can totally set yourself apart. And there's a lot of ways to do that, right? You could completely change the, your branding and top-line positioning and all that stuff to be totally different. But it just depends. What's interesting about this is a gal on my team just talked to me about this recently, Julia, and she, she was at WooCommerce. Right? So WooCommerce has a whole bunch of companies, but WooCommerce is the most known out of them. And they were talking about how they were going to launch that brand and how they were gonna create a category just for that. And so what they did, which is Automattic is the parent company. So what they did at Automattic was they actually looked at the marketplace and go, okay, we're not gonna do like a retail platform. We're just gonna say it's a website. With a retail platform built together from scratch so you don't have to piece all these pieces together. And so that was a game changer, right? And GoDaddy did the same thing when they launched. So you can learn from other industries even though it's in the tech industry. But if you're doing that rat race, ugh, get out of it. Take a pause, take a half day, uh, strategy day for yourself to just start to work on the business rather than in the business and start to think about all those things that you can do. Yeah, super important. Play in your own game. And a few weeks ago we had an episode about category creation and the category creation formula. I think that's really savvy to frame it that way, of distancing yourself from the competitors, not chasing them. Yes. And don't get me wrong, there are a whole bunch of basics you need to do, right? And you were alluding to that earlier, right? So standard business plays that you need to be doing, especially if you're in SaaS, right? Right. You're working on your USP, you're working on your launch, you're doing ABM for enterprise clients, right? You're thinking about your tiers and pricing and in comparison to competitors. Those things are all very valid. But then you also have to be looking at the retention and churn early warning systems, for example. So I've put together 12 of these most common in a SaaS marketing playbook. So your folks can get at that by heading to cac-media.com/playbook. Pod, P-O-D. It's free. It's just a resource because I think there are so many things that you can do in the marketing realm, both for pipeline and for retention. It's overwhelming, right? So if you are trying to scale up, you need to decide which plays you really want to work on and do them really exceptionally well. What if a leadership book and a Netflix drama had a baby? That is The Captain's Keys: Storms, Emotional Wreckage, and a Surprisingly Practical Leadership System that One CEO Called the Owner's Manual and Never Got for 20 Years of Leadership. Here is the brutal truth. You're probably drowning in LinkedIn connections while starving for real relationships. I hear it all the time. Most leaders are exhausted from playing the lone hero, and it's killing both your results and your sanity. The Captain's Keys reveals a new leadership framework, the Stability Matrix, for specific relationships that prevent burnout while multiplying your impact. And this isn't just theory. It's a system that I've used to scale companies and taught over 1,000 executive leaders. So grab your copy today at thecaptainskeys.com, Amazon, or choose your own adventure—print, ebook, or audio. Stop drowning alone and build your Stability Matrix. So good. And we'll make sure and link that in the show notes. What would be maybe the top 2 from that plays that they should be paying attention to or running? I know that this is not on AI, but I have to say it. Your AI, your marketing department needs an AI modernization as much as any other department does. So there are operational efficiencies. So that's one, you got to look at that. Just think about what is within your marketing department, within your current technicians, or for you yourself what is taking a lot of your time that could possibly be more made more efficient and look into that. Now, I'm not saying you have to go build a tool, right? You don't have to get— you don't have to become an AI engineer, even as much as you probably would love that distraction project. You don't have to do that. Just think about everything that's taking a whole bunch of time right now, how it can be optimized, but also retain authenticity of the brand and yourself, which super important. Another key play I think is in the retention area. This early churn warning system is super important. In marketing, we typically would do lost souls campaign. So right now I'm suggesting in the tech space, there's so much data available to you in your platform— monthly active users, so you can see what the last time that they logged in, all these different data points. Stack those data points into a workflow where you can get people before they leave and intentionally re-engage them. Something I just launched, honestly, this week was the CARE method. I'm talking about it broadly now of re-engagement, and the whole idea is to grow your lifetime value. Hang on to these customers, don't let them go out of the leaky bucket, and that's just one of the initials in CARE, re-engage these customers. So look for those flags, right? If they haven't logged in 3 months or monthly active users is going down, you need to proactively get at these people before they leave to re-engage them. That's the R in CARE, and that's really important. And a third one, if I had to just pick 3 out of the whole playbook, I would say you need to get your ABM working properly. Account-based marketing. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that makes that work really well. Knowing exactly who your buyer is is one of them. So I could go on a whole tangent about this, Jeff, but I'll just say your buyer is so important. And when you're pitching for a capital raise, you're thinking about the TAM, you're thinking about your total addressable market, and you're trying to get that number so big, as big as it can possibly be, so that it is an interesting investment. This is the opposite. Your ICP, your buyer, is the opposite of that. If you have 100 exceptional names of people or companies that you would love to work with and you know that they would love to work with you, that is a good list for account-based marketing. And so that is one approach you can really dial in, and it's super important in this middle market space because there's so much you can do and you do not have the time or funds to do everything. So zip all of your activities into exactly what is going to be working for you, exactly the buyer that you need to get at, and do it in a focused way in 60 or 90 days. We call this an activation. Annual planning is old news, right? Like focus on 90 days. That's what you gotta focus on to actually get stuff done and to get everybody moving in the same way. So good. So many great things there, and everybody should go download that playbook, as that's just 3 little nuggets from, from the whole thing. So that's— there's got to be a lot of other great stuff in there too. Thanks, Dan. Excited about that for the audience. I'm excited about what you're doing. It's pretty incredible what you've put together with this community. Good on you. I think a lot of founders need support like that. Thank you. Uh, at the growth stage, companies often hit plateaus. What systems or processes are usually missing when that happens? What have you seen? When you're hitting a plateau, what happens is if you have a customer base, there's two scenarios. Okay. So if you have a customer base and it's just slowly dripping off, that's a lifetime value problem. And that's that CARE model, that re-engagement. But if you start to get the bubble, where you're seeing ups and downs, that is another flag. It tells you two things. If you're getting the ups, it means your marketing campaigns are working, but they're not sticky. So there's a couple things that you can do there. If they're not sticky to the customer and they're leaving, the first thing you can look at is who is the customer. Are you actually getting at the right buyers, or is the wrong buyer? And they sign up, but then they're like, this isn't what I expected, and they get out. Right. So that's one thing you gotta look at. But if you're also getting the bubble, it's not competitor flow, it's your problem in your system. And so you might also be having that retention leap for any number of different reasons, but it's actually pretty promising because if you get lifetime value under control and you've stopped the leaks in the leaky bucket, then those bubbles are going to start to go in an upward motion and you're gonna get that upward trend and your revenue's gonna go up over time. So. If you're seeing any bubble whatsoever, it means that your acquisition engine is working. But if you are doing marketing campaigns and you're not seeing the bubble in your line chart or graph, it means your marketing campaigns are not working and you're just kind of wasting money and you should just try something else. And that's fine. You can iterate really small ways in small scale, small budget. And then once you find what hits, that's when you put the funds behind it. Go where your people are. So know your buyer so well that you know where they hang out. Are they on Discord or are they on Slack? Are they on Reddit or are they just in their email? Or are they on LinkedIn or not? So you can test it in the place that you believe that they are, and you can do it in sneaky shadow ways, right? So if you've got people on Reddit just kind of talking and getting feedback about your product and all that, you're presenting it in multiple ways and seeing if people are interested in that way, you could do it like that. Or you can just talk to your customers, your existing customers. Honestly, if you give them incentive, they will probably really want to talk to you, and it's part of the CARE model. You want to engage them. Once they feel like they're a part making the product really awesome, they're going to be customers for a long time. So there are different ways to get at it, but there are a few there for you. Oh, that's really good. Once we have that messaging aligned, another big alignment that you talk about a lot is aligning marketing, product, and sales. And what does that alignment actually look like in a company that's doing it really well? Well, isn't that the million-dollar question? Yeah. Marketing, marketing, it is marketing, product, and sales. Let's talk about marketing and sales first. Okay, so I'm a big fan of breaking down the wall between sales and marketing. Absolutely. Because what happens, and this is a legacy problem, right? The old school salespeople did not like the marketing people. I, let me just get, let me just back up. I'll give you a real story from my life. My first big job was a, I was in advertising sales for a newspaper, so I sold display advertising. Okay, so there was the publishing side of the house, editorial, and then there was the ad sales side of the house, and nobody liked ad sales. Yeah. So this dynamic has existed for a long time and it still does. And marketing people typically, if they're gonna have grudge, they don't like sales because they say those people can never close our leads. They're making us look bad, right? We got all these leads and sales says some version of that, which is, oh, all the leads they give us is garbage, are garbage. So to align those people, I like to say you gotta break down the wall because they should be attending the same meetings. They should be aligned on the top line messaging, all of the talking points. Marketing can go test those talking points and, and then go to sales and say, hey, this is what worked. Will you try it on some calls? It needs to be collaborative. That is how you do it. You don't just give sales a playbook and say, hey, sell it like this, or hey, here's our research, here's what we found in the market. Place, go do that. It has to be collaborative co-invention for everyone to buy in, and that just solves the problem. And then when you do hit obstacles where it's like, oh, we thought this was going to be like a really big launch and it just didn't work very well, what happens is those people come back together and they talk about why it didn't work really well, and then they can iterate together. So that's breaking down the wall between sales and marketing. Where when we're talking about marketing and product, I think having that early participation in research and development, not as like a, hey, marketing, go do this research, but as a thought leadership partner in the beginning, that will tie it together. Because then they're going to start to see the messaging we're seeing, we're seeing customers respond to this, or prospects are responding to this really well, and they come back, feel free to come back with leadership and actually talk through product roadmap and like maybe they can feel like they have input on, maybe we should deprioritize these 3 features in the roadmap cuz it turns out from what we've seen, nobody actually cares about that. Maybe we should go all in on this cuz people are clicking by because of this. And that communication that like that open loop is only created when you have it early on. So that they feel like they actually have any control over the product. And so often marketing does not feel like they have any control, right? Here's a product, go figure out how to message it to sell it. And so that, that really, that proactive working together in collaboration is what will make it happen. So marketing can be the middle. You could say it's the tie between product and sales, and it helps if you've got a CMO-level person that can tap all three peers, it's really helpful. That's really good. I loved having the, just the connection between marketing and sales, super valuable in the leads, because I've heard that discussion so many times. And then product as well, product and marketing. And that's so why it's so important to have marketing at the beginning or involved in that product process instead of just throwing features over the fence. Figure out how to message this. But when they really understand what it is, that should be— marketing should definitely have a voice in product because they're close to the customer. They're having these conversations. They understand, and sales as well, what it is that they're looking for and then how to take that feature and sell it to the world. Yeah. Make them really want it. That's what they're looking for. Yeah. You just reminded me another often missed thing, especially in the tech space, is partner testing. So let's say you've got this partner cohort, right? This happens a lot in physical manufacturing. For example, I had a hot tub company that was a client of mine back in the day. And when, whenever the manufacturer wanted to like, I don't know, do a new jet or something, they didn't just manufacture loads, 100,000 new jets. No, they would test new jets in 5 distribution partners in the showroom. And so the partner would be there, the guy behind the desk in the physical showroom and being like, looks like Bob and Susie really love that new jet. Right. And then they would write back to the company. So obviously that's physical, but you can do the same thing with your partner network. Partners don't always have to be a traditional push to partners like, oh, new feature, let's tell our partners all about it. It doesn't have to be a push. It should be an engagement. And a chance for you to actually use their audience to test your stuff before you do a full launch. I think that's a really kind of hidden gem from another industry that's missed in tech for sure. Super smart. Got a client that did something similar in the SaaS space of we were talking about features and should we build this, and it wasn't going to take a lot of time, but it was going to take resources from other things. It's like everything And so the sales team, it was create a new tier, add these features to it and what you're talking about and go sell it. And do people buy that? Do they upgrade from package A to package B because it has these things in it? And if yes, then build those and you'll have them before that they're actually delivering. And if not, skip it. And so they're actually in that process today of testing that and deciding whether it is something that, are they going to add this in? Yeah. Or is it something the market just doesn't care about? Yeah, you gotta test it like that. That's such a great example, Jeff. It just reminded me of something else. Customer advisory groups are another way to do this, right? To build this. Yes. And for example, I worked with UBS Bank. So UBS Wealth Management. Wealth management is one of the most commoditized things out there. Absolutely. There are so many big wealth management companies. You can go to, well, one in a million, right? They're all selling the same thing. So how do you make a difference? I'm bringing this up because it feels like, especially in tech, there's so many companies flooding the market right now. And so how do you break through that noise when suddenly your thing you've been working on for 5 years and have been selling and it's going great, you've got this customer base that's a couple years old, it's in a tender spot, right? Like, how do you make yourself stand out when you have competitors flooding in because People are vibe coding things in their basement and launching direct competition. So what do you do in a commoditized market? Let's take this wealth management model as an example. Sure. Customer advisory groups, education as the trust builder. This is one approach I think doesn't happen enough in this sort of tech space. So focused on building the thing and selling the thing. Education as an authenticity play is it. And no amount of AI-ing anything and all the content churn, it's just going to add to the noise. But if you're the company that's actually thinking about it this way and having your customers or different groups be truly advisory, where you're going in and you're helping them with their biggest challenges that they have, that will set you apart in a flooded commoditized market. That's really good. And what types of things— I'm just thinking about the wealth management example. It doesn't necessarily have to be— and you can tell me right or not— it doesn't necessarily have to be about the product, but it's really things around the product, things that your ICP would be interested in, but it's not product education. Oh no, it's not, right? You could do videos about your thing until you're blue in the face. Yes, it's helpful if somebody has a problem and they want to YouTube it, figure out how to whatever, use your tech. Yeah, you need that. That's a foundational thing. But this idea of having— being an advisor, being a trusted advisor, it's like you understand your ICP, your buyer so well, you probably know what's going on in their life, right? You can be an advisor in their life. If we're going to break down the fourth wall, Jeff, you and I are doing it right here. This is what we're doing. And you, you gotta be there for your customers. Give them whatever advice, whatever help you can in a way that builds trust because it is authentic and it is genuinely helpful in the spot that they are in. I like that you're able to enter the conversation that's going on in their head, the things that just— what's going on in their life, what things do they care about, what questions do they have, and you can provide the answers and resources around those. Yeah, exactly. Because you know them so well. And they will feel that, right? They will feel you know us so well and it will come across in all of your messaging too, right? If you're thinking about the marketing department again, they're having to churn out content. If they know that buyer so well and you're doing, I don't know, educational webinars or something like that, or roadshows or whatever helps your customer the best, they could then use those tools and it will as content, right? And they can chop it all up and put it all out to your audience. So people, especially in tech, are like, what are we going to talk about? We're just used to talking about features. Stop it. Start talking about the problems that your customers have and you'll get a listen. Oh gosh, these people really understand me. Their tech probably solves my problem because they get me. They're the kind of nail on the head, right? If I look at their LinkedIn page, they're talking about things that really I am dealing with. That's how you will get the customers that are loyal and retain. I think within messaging, we're all using AI to some extent within our marketing. Yeah, either a whole lot or a little bit, but I think everybody is doing something with it. How do we avoid being stuck in the middle, that boring, bland, beige, no opinion with our messaging? I know. How do you do that without losing our voice? I know, I know. It's a hard one. I have tools. I have something I call the SCALE framework for it. It's how to build an AI-first marketing department without homogenizing your brand without producing slop by accident, right? And it has to do with auditing first, right? So if you wanted to bring AI into your marketing department, you should not— don't recommend just letting the marketing department at the tools without a policy. So a use policy is really important. A quick story. There was a company that's like a magazine company. I won't say their name, but you know who they are, and they do reviews. And this magazine, like, they review sports products and it's very popular online. And they hired an agency to help them. And this agency spun up fake reviewer profiles with fake reviews. And the company did not know. This is a major magazine, you know the name of, and it was such a splash. And AI use policies not only help direct to your marketing team and your people to feel really comfortable with the tools and the top-line messaging and the gates in the process. But also, if you have a situation like that, you can enforce it legally. You have grounds for termination, all this sort of thing. So have an AI use policy. I've got a draft of one that I give out. I'm not a lawyer. So you look at this, you think about what language you wanna adopt, and you bring it to your lawyer to make it enforceable. And make your final version. Okay, but I've got a version 1.0 if your folks want it. This AI use policy, it's just so important. Yes, you should be using it for efficiency. Yes, you should be using it for content, but you need to build in the policy and the brand basics, like having it know your brand voice, having it know what you're not gonna talk about, like your full branding template. It should know it inside and out, and you need the gates. So these are steps where you have a human intentionally stop the workflow. So it is not 100% optimized on purpose. You have a human go in, look at the drafts, revise it. You have a human at the beginning that's directing the work. That's one way to get around that for content. But you know what? It's very tempting, right? Like in the marketing departments, people, technicians, especially if you're not paying them very well, like it better be, you gotta make it worth their while. And be really clear about what the rules are and be really clear about where those checks and balances are so that you don't have that sort of AI slop or homogenization problem. That's good. And just like you're saying, actually creating that, it's one of the really great things about AI is you can actually have your style guide, you can have your brand assets, and then use those as guardrails or use that as part of the project. So that it is capturing your brand voice a whole lot better than, than just AI out of the box. And I think so many companies do that. They're just like, here's a simple prompt, go write me this thing and we'll publish it. And that's— it's bad. It's bad. It feels bad to read. We all know the rhythm. You can read it and you see it, you feel the rhythm of it and you're like, this is just kind of lazy. You know what I mean? Have enough respect for your brand to build in the guardrails, making sure humans are actually monitoring it, editing it. And don't get me started on the AI agents. I'm all for agentic workflows, but there needs to be guardrails. You do not want to be pushing out spam, and that's really what's happening right now. I think the most blue sky in AI and marketing right now are connected tools, right? So making sure your workflows connect, for example, very common graphic design tools called Canva. Right? So if you hook your Claude, has a native connector right up to Canva that it can just take your messaging that you wrote in conjunction with Claude, it can pop it right into a template, save you an hour. So the connected space, that is the opportunity right now. At first it was just like, okay, turn me out a newsletter. But now there's a lot more that you can do and there's more every day, right? There's more coming out every single day. You should absolutely use it, but you're right, Jeff, to flag that homogenization problem. We do not want to sound like everyone else because it makes it really hard on our customers. Honestly, they don't like it and they're trying to figure out who's who and who I should go with. And you got to make their decision much easier than that by being really sharp with your language, really sharp with your USP so that they know exactly the value you bring and the economic value story that you're trying to tell them. So good. For SaaS founders that are listening, they're trying to scale right now. What would you say is the single most important marketing shift they should make in 2026? Systems. You absolutely stand up some systems. So you got to stop, think about what your time— figure out what you're spending time on you shouldn't be. Systemize that. Then look at your team, figure out where they're burning time in repetitive tasks. Think through the systems you can put in place. Pretend you have a $200 million company. What would you not be doing that you are doing right now? So if you scale that fast— one of my favorite books I recently read is called Scaling Up. Yeah, sure, I think it's, I think it's right back there. Uh, all these books are great, but one of the things it talks about is, okay, if you only had this much time, if you only had 90 days, or if you only— so if you're future projecting yourself, you say, okay, if in 6 months I had 100x customers, what systems would I put in place? And that's exactly what you should be focusing on, because that will get you from where you're at, the scrappy stages, or whatever scrappiness is left in your business, into systems mode. And that's really where it's at. So good. Where can people learn more about you and about CAC Media online? Just that. I'm on LinkedIn and I'm on Instagram if you like those channels. Or you can just head to cac-media.com. So it's cac-media.com. And if you want to hit a backslash and then POD, you'll get all the resources I just told you about today. Fantastic. We'll make sure and link that in the show notes. Everybody should go there and check that out and pick up the resources. Really good stuff. Karen, it's been a great conversation. Thanks for being on SAS Fuel. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks again, Karen, for coming on the show and sharing your insights and resources. You can learn more about Corinne and CAC Media at cac-media.com. As always, all links, highlights, resources, and full show notes are available at sasfuel.com. And be sure to check out our YouTube channel as well. It's @championleadership. Lots of things over there for you. Thought leaders share. Share this episode with a founder who treats every new idea like destiny and every old idea like it never happened. Everyone who shares this week gets a searchable archive of your previous "this changes everything" moments. Yeah, sometimes that would be helpful, sometimes not, maybe. What happens when emotional bottlenecks, not technical ones, become the biggest obstacles inside organizations? Next up, Robin Sims Allen, Agile Consultant and founder of Phoenix Marcus and TotalHer, joins us to discuss cultural transformation emotional bottlenecks, leadership dynamics, and how organizations can unlock innovation by addressing the human side of change. Then one week from today, how do B2B teams stand out in crowded markets when everyone is using the same outbound tactics and intent signals? Mohan Mutu, founder of SpringDrive, will be with us, and he talks about resonance messaging strategy. Probably haven't heard of that. Modern outbound systems, GTM engineering, successful sales teams are all using it. Creating relevance, not just volume. So you're going to learn more. That is one week from today. So I will see you next time, and as always, enjoy the journey. Thanks for listening to SAS Fuel. Full show notes for each episode, which includes a summary, key takeaways, quotes, and any resources mentioned, are available at sasfuel.com. 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