We’re championing the Real SaaS Revolutionaries. The leaders and experts building the SaaS companies today that’ll shape our industry and community tomorrow. Each week we’ll be profiling some of the SaaS champions, nominated by their peers. Know someone who deserves the spotlight? They could be our next Revolutionary!
Today we have two Real SaaS Revolutionaries: Carole Mahoney and Philipp Wolf.
Carole Mahoney is the founder of Unbound Growth. She was among the first Hubspot Partners and is an entrepreneur’s evangelist. Today she trains and coaches other entrepreneurs to grow their business with inbound.
Tell us the founding story of your company?
In 2007, SEO was the hottest 3 letters in business. But when the Great Recession hit, businesses were scrambling to cut costs and understand the new economic reality. By 2010, it was all about Inbound Marketing. We were at the forefront of Inbound when we discovered it’s dirty little secret. Even with Inbound, we need sellers to help buyers make the best decision.
Unbound Growth evolved from an inbound lead generation firm who found sellers and leaders who were still using outdated and ineffective sales tactics that turned internet educated buyers off.
Our cognitive approach to sales performance ensures that training and coaching sticks with leaders and sellers by creating behavioural change for more predictable and improved sales results.
What’s been the highlight of building your company?
When a Harvard business school professor called me the ‘sales therapist’. And when clients come back and tell us how the sales training and coaching didn’t just change their sales results, but impacted their personal life. They are better bosses, spouses, and even parents because we help them transform mindsets that carry over into their personal lives.
From your experience, what’s the #1 piece of advice you’d give to other SaaS leaders?
All data must have context. Just looking at KPIs doesn’t tell you what caused it.
Recommend one book, blog post, podcast episode or video that’s really helped you as a leader.
The Code of Trust- Robin Dreeke.
Philipp Wolf is the CEO of Custify. He helps SaaS businesses deliver great results for customers. After seeing companies spend big money with no systematic approach to customer success, Philipp knew something had to change. He founded Custify to provide a tool that lets agents spend time with clients—instead of organizing CRM data.
Tell us the founding story of your company?
I discovered that fixing the funnel and making sure that customers gain real value from a product makes a huge difference, especially with a recurring revenue business model, so for most SaaS companies.
It is a well spent investment that is more than self-financing.
Many solutions that I then tried out did not satisfy my needs, were too expensive, too complex to use or too complicated to get them even running. So I figured: this can be done better. That’s when we started Custify.
What’s been the highlight of building your company?
While launching new functionalities within the product is always exciting, every customer that we can help reducing their churn is a highlight for me. It’s amazing to see the before / after and how great data can be, if you use it right.
From your experience, what’s the #1 piece of advice you’d give to other SaaS leaders?
Judge based on data.
Recommend one book, blog post, podcast episode or video that’s really helped you as a leader.
Your team is everything, so the book I’d recommend is: Hire With Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiring to Build Great Teams (Lou Adler)
