Ep. 165 - Why Most SaaS Ads Fail (and What to Do Instead)

Guest: Ken Lempit, President & Chief Business Builder at Austin Lawrence Group

Are your SaaS ads actually doing their job, or just burning budget?

In this week’s episode of SaaS Backwards, Ken Lempit and Jason Myers of Austin Lawrence Group go deep on what GTM leaders get wrong about advertising in 2025:

• Why most SaaS ads look and sound the same (and fall flat)
• Where messaging fails long before the click
• How to align sales and marketing in a high-consideration buying cycle
• The overlooked power of direct mail and live events
• When to pull back on spend—and how to know it’s time

If you’re spending more but converting less—or just tired of “safe” campaigns with no spark—this conversation will challenge your assumptions and give you a new playbook.

---

Not Getting Enough Demos?

Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch.

🔗 Get a Free Messaging & Conversion Review

We’ll analyze your website and content through the eyes of your buyers to uncover what’s stopping them from booking a demo. Then, we’ll give you a personalized report with practical recommendations to help you turn more visitors into sales conversations.

And the best part?

💡 It’s completely free.

No commitments, no pressure—just actionable advice to help you book more demos.

Your next demo is just a click away—claim your free review now.

Transcript

Jason Myers: Welcome to SaaS backwards podcast that helps go to market leaders to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is our very own Ken Lempit, who normally hosts the show. He's our president and chief business builder here at Austin Lawrence Group. And if you've been listening to us for a while, you know, every once in a while we like to flip the script.

Talk about what we're hearing out there. And today we want to talk about the issues that SaaS companies are having with advertising. Hopefully provide some ways that they can make it more effective. So Ken, welcome to the podcast. 

Ken Lempit: Hey, it's nice to be in the guest chair again and turn the hosting duties over to you and to talk about one of our favorite topics.

Jason Myers: Let's go for it. And as we've reviewed hundreds of SaaS campaigns, why do you think most B2B ads look and sound the same, and why is that such a problem for 2025? 

Ken Lempit: Well, there's a lot. That's a big question. It seems a simple one, but there's a lot to it.

First of all. I think a lot of companies don't do a great job on their messaging. They don't understand their prospect's mindsets and the real problems that they need to solve. And so the, the messaging is where a lot of companies stumble. You know, we found that. Even if once we knew what customers needed, sometimes that knowledge gets stale pretty quickly.

Today's world, things are changing very rapidly. So even if you did a great messaging project, you know, two years ago, you know, the problems that your customers are trying to solve are probably different from when you brought your product out or thought you had product market fit 2, 3, 4 years ago.

So, messaging kind of number one. I think there's also the confines of the messaging space. The ads live in a really terribly small space. You go back 20, 30 years, we had large space advertising and print magazines and we were able to be fairly creative. Today creative teams have to put all of their effort into a space that on the screen might not be much bigger than a business card.

And that presents a real challenge and. If you aren't a great creative and copywriting team, if you don't have a great creative and copywriting team, you're gonna end up with small space ads that are jam packed or unappealing visually, and they just don't pull. So stopping power, stopping the scroll in today's world a lot harder than it used to be.

And, and just demands a greater skill level. In fact, not a lesser skill level. And you know, that would have me kind of seeing Not everybody's an art director, not everybody's a copywriter. And the tools that are available to us more broadly, like Canva and other AI enabled tools for writing or designing don't make us great advertising people.

And I think we need even better creative than we used to, to get the job done. 

Jason Myers: Yeah, I think as I'm looking through LinkedIn, I see all these ads. They're very busy, they have very little stopping power, they're not talking about things that people care about, and I think that they're getting lost trying to put too much into those ads.

And they need to think about one singular problem that they are wanting to talk about and deal with the tearing down the ways that people try to solve that problem, leave that for the landing page or your homepage or the website or whatever that is. But your job in the ad, especially on LinkedIn, is to stop that scroll

and attract the people that agree with the problem statement. So if you're not putting out a problem statement, you're going to miss people right there. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean it's I, I think the way to approach advertising in these small spaces especially is to think about billboard writing.

What are the best billboards you've ever seen? And take inspiration from those. My favorite is Safe Light Auto Glass, and they actually use their vans, their Legion of Vans as part of their out-of-home advertising media. And they have, copywriting on the back of their vans that I love, and it goes like this.

It says, nice windshield period. Let us know if things change. So, you know, what was it? Seven or eight words? White, white. Headline on the red background of the back of the van. But it's indicative of the kind of style that we need to adopt when we're writing advertising for what are effectively small spaces.

Has home page too, right? Sure. I mean, well, we we're talking about advertising here, but an advertising needs to lead us, like an advertisement online needs to lead us somewhere. So the hero image of wherever we go has to reinforce that message, build on the problem agreement that we're trying to generate, you know, and get people engaged in the content that you have to offer.

So whether it's your homepage, a landing page. Even a long form piece of content, blogs, you know, problem agreement, messaging is where it starts. And consistency from one step to the next in your journey as a first time engagement with a brand. You know, that's really important. Get the message, repeat the message, you know, get people to want to dig deeper with you.

So that's the goal.

Jason Myers: So from your perspective, where are these marketing teams going wrong or where are they often getting their messaging wrong? Is it because of the product persona positioning? All of the above? What do you think?

Ken Lempit: So when you see 50 words on a small rectangle ad online or on a LinkedIn ad, you know that there isn't anybody with advertising experience on the team, right? You see type that's, you know, five or six points on a LinkedIn promotional ad. And a lot of it. So what's not happening? We're not hiring people with the skills to do the writing and design, that's a big problem.

We're, we're being lulled into the belief, and I believe it's a false sense of security that if I can find a template for it on Canva, it's gonna work. So, the first call here is let's have professionals do the job. And if we're spending 15, 20, 30, or a hundred thousand a month on advertising, let's invest in the creative, the vehicle that's gonna carry your message forward.

Again, let's have messaging that resonates. If we're not communicating about problems that our prospects think they have, they're probably gonna go right past us. So better customer insight, you know, the knowledge of the customer problem. And then it's a matter of, you know, is the media planning and placement effective?

We used to think about rule of thumb was you needed three or four impressions of an ad for somebody to remember. Remember you as an advertiser and maybe even move to an action. It's probably 30 or 40 or 50 or a hundred impressions today. You look at the, the smart practitioners in media buying.

They're flooding your inbox for a reason. You know, there's a reason you see the same ad almost every day, multiple times a day. And it's because it takes many more impressions to break through, and you need to be willing to invest in share of market. So teams under invest CEOs, CFOs are not being educated by the marketing teams about what it's really gonna take to break through.

So I think budget, budget and creative. Maybe it's a message, creative budget. Those three things really need to be strong to break through. Otherwise you're probably not gonna be happy with the result. 

Jason Myers: So that's a lot about what's not working. What are you seeing in creative and copy right now that is working

Ken Lempit: Well, I think it's, it's like how do you get there more than like specifics. 'cause everybody's working destination, like the good ad is different, right? A good ad for one brand is not necessarily a good ad for another. So how do you get there? I'm a big fan of Gary Vaynerchuk's method of message testing.

So we like to marry some customer and subject matter expert interviews to the frequent organic posts that Gary espouses in his latest book day trading attention. You know, your, your spokesperson should be on social media daily putting posts out in an organic form so that we can learn what messages resonate, what combinations of words and messaging resonates before we put money behind the ads.

So I'd say the things that's working, the thing that's working is the ability to be rapidly testing and iterating your messaging before you put too much money behind it. So yeah, you need to have an adequate budget, but I think you also have to have confidence that the money you wanna lay out is gonna yield a result.

And a great way to get there is by message testing, like for 60 or 90 days before you make big bets. And, I really suggest people read Gary's book. It's it's called Day Trading Attention, a really great mindset for people that want to invest wisely in, in media in today's world. 

Jason Myers: And with the rising cost per clicks and crowded channels, can performance marketing still deliver for SaaS companies, or are we hitting the limits of ROI and PPC or paid social?

Ken Lempit: So, yeah, I, I think there's, there's clearly a case for paid search. Paid search is very much the bottom of the funnel, so, you know, there's always gonna be a limit to who's ready to raise their hand for a demo or want to get into a buying motion. You know, the popular estimate is, call it 3% of your TAM.

So, there is a ceiling on the effectiveness of pay-per-click at any one point in time to generate opportunity. People still do search, they still do respond to ads. The FTC wouldn't be trying to break up Google's monopoly if it didn't work. People that have been reading my writing might know, I think around eight or nine years ago I wrote that Google was a monopoly.

So, it only took the government that long to catch up to my thought process about that. I think you have to be out there and you have to be constantly iterating. You can't trust only Google's machine learning. Its only desire is to get you to spend more money. You have to be really careful with this money.

I'd say the thing that's different is the number of distractions on that platform didn't used to be quite as complicated, and that's just getting worse and worse. And if you are gonna take advantage of the Quote, advanced tools on the paid search side, you really have to babysit those and just make sure they're actually gonna work for you.

But yeah, 3% of your audience is in market, so 4%, 5%, whatever that number is. So there's gonna be bottom of the funnel action on, on LinkedIn's I think we're, we're maybe overestimating the response. That we should be getting from LinkedIn. That's really more of a demand gen platform. When people go on a search engine and they search best accounting software for my manufacturing business, like there's a good chance they're in a buying motion right there.

There's, a likelihood that same advertiser even if they are limiting the reach of their ads to people in their ICP can't expect that those folks are in market or thinking about the product at the time. So the challenge there is how do you stop them from moving past the ad, and that's probably gonna be a lot less about a buying motion and much more about.

Creating an aha moment, creating some commercial teaching as our friends, the authors of the Challenger sale and Challenger customer would have you believe. And you just have to have different objectives there. Just because somebody downloads your white paper on LinkedIn doesn't mean an SDR should be racing to call them for a demo.

And, and I think that's just all too tempting and mostly futile. So Yeah, please don't, yeah, don't do that. That, I mean, that hasn't been working for a while, but, you know, I, we keep encountering that reflex 

Jason Myers: With the caveat, unless you've got something super high value that you can deliver along with that.

And that does not mean a meeting to take a demo. 

Ken Lempit: I mean, I think if the call, if the, if the outbound call is an invite to a special event with the author of a seminal research project, you know, sure. You know, or a private meeting with a Gartner or Forrester analyst in your city, you know, I think those things are still valued.

I don't know if they're quite prized. Probably. It's more interesting to people to meet their peers than an analyst, but you have to be pretty thoughtful if you're gonna pick up the phone. I think that's the, the truth of it. Except for those bottom of funnel requests that come off, you know, paid search or the request a demo page on my website.

You know, if you fill out that landing page yeah, by all means have at it. 

Jason Myers: And I know we've worked with clients who are overinvested in paid media without a lot of conversion or pipeline to show for it. What do you think are the signs that a SaaS team should pause or redirect their spend?

Ken Lempit: I guess this depends on instrumentation, right? So are we paying attention to. The cost of desirable actions, so it's easy to do cost per click. But we can optimize cost per click and still have it not be valuable to the client. So instrumentation meaning are we looking at cost per desirable action?

Cost per demo cost per customer acquisition, CAC, we need real time instrumentation and we need to make sure we're not just flying into the sun. I'd say the, the, the thing that's hardest is when you're managing a decent size ad budget in house, especially if that's grown over the last couple of years.

You can get in over your head and we've seen. A number of cases recently where there's a digital marketer on staff and he or she grew with the business they went from spending 5,000 a month on paid advertising to 50 or a hundred, and things start going off the rails, and that digital marketer doesn't want to tell anybody, and they don't even see the errors they're making.

They're not. Skilled enough to know the errors they're making. So as a senior person with responsibility for that budget, you can have to look at the instrumentation that's available to you and watch that, you know, you probably don't have more skill than the person you put on the job.

So, early warning signs, watch your instrumentation, cost per lead, cost per demo, customer acquisition cost, those kinds of things. Or ask someone like us to do an assessment for you. We're actually building a new benchmark group for SaaS companies, and we'll be launching that soon. Maybe this is sort of like a pre-announcement, but we'll, we'll be launching a benchmark group for SaaS companies that'll allow them to plug in their own numbers, plug in their own advertising systems, and see how they compare,

on a number of important KPIs, I think there'll be eight or ten important KPIs that we're benchmarking there. So if you have doubts, look at your own instrumentation. If that's not enough insight, bring someone like us in. Let us have our skilled ad buyers take a look at what you're doing and give you the thumbs up or thumbs down.

Jason Myers: And speaking of benchmarking and data obsessed marketing organizations, what do you think the right role for creative is? Or what's the balance they need to strike between creative and the pressure to hit like short-term metrics?

Ken Lempit: Well, I just wanna bring it back to the safe light, you know, the back of the truck. You know, it's really hard to measure sometimes, the value of great writing. So it's pretty clear that Safelite got into my awareness and I remember them and they didn't really have to spend any media money to do that, though they were a major national advertiser.

The first time I really became aware of them again, was looking at the back of a van. So what was it? It was great writing. It's really hard to AB test great versus crap writing. You know, I mean, it's just like, it's almost nonsensical. It's like, should we not do placebo testing with drugs? Right? So, I'd say, you have to look at case studies from us or others where creative has led to outcomes. And one of our podcast guests that I think it's really worth listening to her episode again, was Melissa Rosenthal when she was at Clickup. I mean, this is a company that took the buzzfeed approach to content development for a B2B brand.

Help them create a billion dollar business. Would they have gotten there without Melissa Rosenthal? I mean, how can we, we can't know that alternative reality, but what we do know is that it did contribute. We do know that on the back of their. Whole mindset about how they built messaging, how they built content, the risks they were willing to take, they were able to build a business.

Could they have done it being super buttoned up and uninteresting? I mean, maybe, maybe the product's so great. 

Jason Myers: The answer to that is no. I mean, put it this way. Like, there is no way that they could scale at the rate that they scaled. And it was like, 50 to a 1000 employees in a year and a half, and there is no way that they could have done that with an outbound sales force.

So like, if you're out there pounding on outbound, that is not going to be the way that you scale a SaaS today. I'm sorry, it's just not gonna work. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah. I, I mean, I agree with you. I, I, I just think that there are, there are gonna be those who hear our, our podcast and they're, they're gonna be skeptical.

Right. Well then, then bring 

Jason Myers: me an example. I, I'm open to this. Bring me an example where a company has achieved that level of scale by employing BDRs to pound the phones and spam people on email. I wanna see it like, and we're talking about today, we're not talking about 2015. Or 2010, right? Sure. We're talking about today.

Who's done that today? 

Ken Lempit: I think the question though was the value of creative, right? It's not just the motion. And I appreciate your passion for getting people to get contemporary in their go-to market motion, which is kind of a related topic, but like, can you be dry and more dead ahead and breakthrough is, I think it's in part what you were asking 

Jason Myers: Well, yes and no.

I mean, we, we found, you know, personally in some of our ads that the dead ahead approach works, but it's still an advertisement as opposed to like an outbound approach. That's, that's what I'm trying to make the distinction that you just simply cannot scale. Very quickly, at least this is my premise, unless you have leadership team and hopefully the CEO that is, understands that marketing is the way that you do that, not by turning into a boiler room sales organization, 

Ken Lempit: Unfortunately we don't have Alec Baldwin here to join us. But yeah, I mean, you know, we can't always be closing all the time, right? I mean, that's, that's just not, that's not really gonna work. Fair enough. So if you wanna scale quickly, you need to be willing to invest in kind of muscling your way into a market and muscling competition out,

right? To the extent you can afford it and get investors behind you. Media is probably a lot more efficient than SDR outreach. Really well-crafted media and creative strategy is gonna create space for you in the market, in a way. Cold outreach just can't. They, they do tend to work together. If I heard, well, that leads to 

Jason Myers: the next question, which is like, how do you align that?

To work together because a lot of companies that's, they're making that mistake as well. The marketing, at least in terms of the narratives and the sales are working in silos. They're not working together, and which is why you have disjointed messaging on a homepage or in an advertisement. And then you have salespeople that have to, instead of giving demos, they have to explain what the messaging means.

Ken Lempit: Yeah. I mean, there, there's, there's a lot there. You always ask these complex questions, Jason. So, let's, let's try and unpack that a little bit. So there's incongruity in messaging has always been a problem we can't say one thing in advertising and another thing in the sales process.

And a third thing. On the web experience. So we need to coordinate our messaging carefully and again, based on the actual problems customers believe they're experiencing or that we can educate them that they actually are experiencing. So message congruity and meaningfulness to prospects really important.

It's where everything starts. If you don't have that. You might as well not go further. But then there's a, a thing that I think is really important, which I was, I wanted to bring up here, which is orchestration. So most of our clients are selling relatively complicated things, so it's a high consideration purchase.

It's not like Canva where one person can take out their credit card and spend $5 a month and go at it. So, in that world, we need to have sales and marketing working together, and most likely we don't have a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand prospects or a million. We have two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand prospects, and we might have a hundred to two hundred or three hundred accounts per sales person, kind of that ratio.

So, like, if I have three thousand real prospects in my TAM, I might have, you know, ten or fifteen salespeople depending on the value of the sale. So how do we orchestrate that activity? So that sales and marketing are working together. And that's what I think is really important is sort of an ABM approach with account-based sales.

So account-based marketing and sales block step through the prospect base. So we have this sort of background effort of stimulating the entire addressable market. And then if we know that this month. You know, one 12th of our customer base is gonna get special attention from the sales teams. We're gonna put special attention for our email marketing, special attention from our advertising, and maybe even direct marketing getting into people's mailboxes now that they're going back to the office.

So to coordinate our outbound efforts in marketing with our outreach efforts in sales. To try and stimulate a greater response. So, I think that's one of the missing elements in a lot of unsophisticated motions. And, you know, there was some, I'd say there's automation solutions for that, but I'm not sure that you need to be buying a hundred thousand dollars worth of software to do that.

I think you can do that. With a little bit of elbow grease and put that money into working media and, and probably be just as effective or very close to as effective. 

Jason Myers: So at what point do you think SaaS marketers should look at going beyond digital?

Ken Lempit: I think there's a, a little bit of a math function working there. The smaller your number of entities and individuals that you need to influence, the greater the case for direct marketing. You know, if I've got 500 people I need to influence , you know, they should be getting physical direct mail from me pretty often 'cause I can stand out there.

I think we've underestimated the return to office motion, right? The, the reality of return to office is many of our prospects are now working in their offices. So the fewer people that you have to reach, the greater the business case for getting in postal mail. And the, if you have reasonable budget, make it undeniable.

Make it three dimensional.

You know, three dimensional direct mail has remarkable response rates. So if you can afford to put something in a box that's at all engaging to a prospect, the returns can be spectacular. You have to be able to get over the hump of that fixed cost. But you know, if you can afford fifty to a hundred thousand a month

in working media, you can probably afford to put things in the mail to your top prospects. And you know, you might just stratify your prospect base and say, Hey, you know, 5 or 10% of my ideal customers are gonna hear from me in their postal mail stream, as well as hopefully I can reach 'em by email, digital, and, you know, sales outreach.

So, it's really just a matter of the size the audience and, and your ability to budget. I'd say the problem there's, there's a couple problems with getting that done. One problem is the lack of available talent that knows how to build direct marketing things that's getting harder to come by.

It's not impossible, but there are just fewer vendors like your vendor partners landscape is smaller. Also the designers who know how to make those packages more appealing to open and more cost effective to build. And then going to the CFO and trying to explain that every package you put in the mail is gonna cost $25 and you wanna send a thousand of 'em every month.

You know, that's, that's a hard conversation in today's world when they're used to things being free. And I think that maybe in, in 2025 and 2026, people will no longer expect everything to be free. So maybe that conversation will get easier.

Jason Myers: And to, 

Close it out. If you could say one thing to every SaaS revenue leader before they green light another ad budget, what would that be?

Ken Lempit: Call us first.

Jason Myers: Well, yeah, get some, you know, we do a free messaging review, you know, shame on you for not taking advantage of it. We study this stuff every day, all day, so there's my pitch. Yeah, absolutely. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah. I mean, hey, take us up on, this, there's two free offers here. You know, one is we'll help you understand if your messaging is on target.

If you're doing the work correctly, we're not gonna be able to rebuild your messaging in an unpaid assessment, but we'll let you know if you're onto something or not, right? If the, if the messaging makes sense as an outside observer, and that's highly valuable. Everybody who's done that work with us has thought it was really useful.

And as I mentioned earlier, this new offer we have of a media buying assessment, you know, your media efficiency. We, we'll be able to tell pretty quickly if there's, you know, further analysis and, and if there are problems in the way you're buying media, we'll be able to tell that pretty quickly. Put our expert team on that and also invite you into our benchmark for SaaS firms.

I guess the, the third thing I would say is assuming you're not gonna take us up on those offers. Make sure you're confident about the messaging that you've tested it. make sure that the creative is built by people that have advertising, design experience, and copywriting experience. And if you're doing it in-house be willing to invest in your people, train them.

They're great copywriting classes that you can take that can improve the outcome of your creative process internally. We, we train our own people. So, I mean, it's just the same work we do for ourselves. There's on the job training and formal training that we provide our own people to make sure that they sharpen the saw.

So make sure your people really know what they're doing and they're not just somebody you like, that you've put on the, the business or they've grown beyond their skillset. So keep sharpening the saw. Can't ever stop. 

Jason Myers: Great. Well that sounds like a good place to land the episode and people want to get a hold of you.

How should they do that? 

Ken Lempit: I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. It's LinkedIn/in/kenlempit My email is kl@austinlawrence.com or if you'd like to start with Jason and have him help you dig into your messaging and, how advertising and your web experiences are coordinated. I think you should reach out to Jason.

He's at jm@austinlawrence.com. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed, if you would like to see, rather than listen, you can always find us on the SaaS backwards channel on YouTube. And thanks so much for listening. 

Jason Myers: You bet you stole my closing, but that's all right.

So thanks for being the guest on the podcast. 

Ken Lempit: Hey, it's always fun to toot our own horn. Thanks so much, Jason.