846: SaaS: $50m Raised, $12m+ ARR To Incentivize Reviews and Influencers

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2017

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Mark Organ. He’s the founder and CEO of Influitive, helping companies mobilize their advocates to produce massive increases in referral leads, reference calls, social media participation and more. He revolutionized B2B marketing and the founding CEO of Eloqua, the world leader in marketing automation software, which was acquired by Oracle for $871M. In between, he was the go-to marketing consultant for SaaS companies in North America and Asia.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Getting to Yes
What CEO do you follow? – Dara Khosrowshahi
Favorite online tool? — LinkedIn
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “How important it was to build new relationships with people”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:40 – Nathan introduces Mark to the show
02:17 – Mark left Eloqua even before the acquisition
- 03:25 – It was the VCs that pushed Mark to leave
- 03:54 – Mark still had a great exit from the company
04:10 – Influitive helps companies grow by getting more value out of their happy customers
04:46 – Mark saw the importance of mobilized customers when he was still in Eloqua
05:13 – Influitive created communities where companies invite their customer advocates
05:51 – ACV is $50K annually
06:10 – Influitive currently has 270 customers
06:33 – ARR is close to $10M
06:51 – it would take 4-5 years for Influitive to reach their $100M ARR mark
07:02 – Influitive was founded in 2010
07:21 – Influitive has raised $50M
- 08:09 – Mark shares why he had to raise
09:13 – Influitive’s growth is faster than Eloqua’s
09:40 – 2016 revenue
10:05 – Influitive is averaging more than 50%, year-over-year growth
10:50 – Influitive is cash flow positive on some months
11:08 – Team size is 125 with 8 people in sales
11:22 – “I want all the sales guys to make money”
- 12:03 – Increased quotas make it impossible for salespeople to hit their numbers
12:55 – CAC is around $40K
14:10 – Payback period is a year to 15 months
17:01 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

VCs are there for a reason, trust them.
Reaching one’s quotas takes a much longer time than it did a decade ago.
Networking and relationships are crucial to your personal and business life.

Resources Mentioned:

Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	founder of Eloqua grew that, then eventually left, still saw a big financial windfall when obviously
0:04.8	it exited. Now he's building Influidiv launched in 2010. They raised $50 million of capital,
0:09.7	125 folks, really helping you build stronger and basically help you get influencers,
0:16.8	customers, and everyone else to give you better reviews and incentivize them to talk about you
0:19.7	and share their stories. Again, over a 50 million raised growing about 50% year over year, doing over $10 million
0:25.5	in the ARR now. This is the top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number
0:31.5	two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're
0:37.4	making, what their
0:38.5	marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk.
0:45.0	Five and six million. He is hell bent on global domination. We just broke our $100,000 unit
0:49.8	sole market. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B-to-B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed.
0:59.0	If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates, customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to g-et-l-K-A.com.
1:10.1	Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to myself.
1:13.5	It's so freaking valuable.
1:15.2	And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage,
1:20.4	I'm only letting 10 companies on each month.
1:23.2	So we're full this month, but you can go to gitlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month.
1:27.4	And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest vCs you've
1:30.5	ever heard of. You've probably heard of them. They're big, private equity, billions and billions
1:34.3	under management. So it's an impressive waiting list. Go get on now at Git Latka.com.
1:39.1	Hello, everybody. My guest today is Mark Oregon. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Influidiv, helping companies mobilize their advocates to produce massive increases in referral leads,
1:48.3	reference calls, social media participation, and more. He revolutionized B2B marketing as the
	...

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