Ep. 190 - The SaaS Founder Bottleneck: Why Founder-Led Sales Stops Scaling

How to turn founder instincts into a repeatable pipeline engine. 

Guest: Javier Lozano, Fractional CMO & GTM Leader  

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Founder-led sales is often the fastest way to get an early-stage SaaS company off the ground. But at some point, the very thing that helped you close your first customers becomes the bottleneck preventing your company from scaling.

In this episode of SaaS Backwards, Ken Lempit sits down with fractional CMO and GTM leader Javier Lozano of Bolder Media to break down why founder-led sales eventually stop working—and how SaaS leaders can turn founder instincts into a repeatable revenue engine.

They discuss how to extract the winning patterns inside a founder’s head, transform those insights into positioning and messaging, and build a predictable pipeline that sales teams can execute at scale.

You’ll also learn why hiring sales leaders too early often backfires, how to create a “blue ocean” positioning that separates your SaaS product from crowded markets, and what investors really look for when evaluating early-stage SaaS growth.

If you're a SaaS founder, CRO, or GTM leader trying to move beyond founder-led growth, this episode provides a practical framework for building a scalable go-to-market engine.

Key Topics Covered

• Why founder-led sales works early but breaks at scale
• Turning founder knowledge into a repeatable SaaS GTM playbook
• How positioning and messaging create predictable pipeline
• Why hiring a CRO too early can stall growth
• Building a scalable revenue engine before raising capital

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS and AI CEOs and go to market leaders, accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Javier Lozano fractional CMO and GTM Leader who specializes in building predictable pipelines for founder lead B2B Tech.

Hey, Javier, welcome to the podcast.

Javier Lozano: Thanks, Ken. I'm really excited to be on here. I think we're gonna have some great conversation. Looking forward to it.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, me too. I think, our listeners are in for a real treat on this episode. But before we jump in, could you please tell us a little bit more about yourself and your company, Bolder Media.

Javier Lozano: Yeah. So, I actually got into the entrepreneurial world with my first company in 2008. ran that for about 10 years, ended up having a successful exit basically took that success exit and kind of the playbook that I kind of learned and how to run all that into corporate, if you will.

just kind of started diving into B2B and in industries that I wasn't very familiar with, but using the same kind of strategies and models that has been successful for me in the path. And eventually became a CMO at a marketing agency. And then most recently I was in-house. For just shy, shy of four years at a tech enabled company helped 'em go from about a million to 20 million in that timeframe.

And now I'm a fractional CMO helping basically tech startups and, and helping know, scale up start basically building out the right type of engine to create that predictable pipeline. So, excited about new journey that I'm taking.

Ken Lempit: It's a great path. I think you bring up sort of a subtle but important point when you do that part of your bio, which is a lot of the things about marketing are true no matter what the venue or industry. And I think it's really easy for folks that don't have a lot of exposure to marketing as, as a profession or as work that they do or did to think that it's about the things you do as opposed to the thinking you do.

And so I, I would encourage, you know, listeners to be open-minded to the marketing leaders that they encounter and try and change the way they think about the role of bringing your company and products to market. 

So. 

Javier Lozano: I, I mean, I've, I've said this to other folks that my path to marketing actually came through sales, and the reason I, I believe I, I got better at it is in sales, you're asking lots of questions. You're unveiling more, layers of the onion. And that's marketing in a, in a sense, like you're getting to a psychology piece.

The only difference is that you're writing it versus saying it. Or asking it. And so I agree with you that you, you need to be open in how you encounter this, 'cause that's where you're gonna get all your learnings and expertise.

Ken Lempit: Yeah. So people encountering you as a potential, you know, fractional marketing leader should be asking a lot of questions right? To, to learn what? What the process might be. I think that's a really important part of bringing in marketing leadership for a young company. And let's, let's kind of dig right in because a lot of these young companies, startup companies may be pre or

post first funding, like small funding rounds. they're focused on founder-led sales, right? The founder is doing 5, 6, 7 jobs. One of the most important being sales and, and you've said in our prep call that, you know, founder-led sales. That's not all bad, but it does break at scale, right? There's a point at which you can't scale on the top of that, so.

So how should founders separate their voice and perspective from the actual selling motion as they try and get to a repeatable go to market process?

Javier Lozano: that's a, it's a tough one because it's for the founder. This is their baby. This is like what, they've created this, and they, they know what works really well, and so we wanna lean into that. We don't wanna just like strip away what they've built and be like, all right, Mr. Founder or Mrs. Founder, you've done a great job.

Give the keys to somebody else. It's really just kind of taking what their learnings have been, so getting their point of view, getting what their trust engine is on what has made 'em successful, and just learning and say, okay, this makes sense. You're closing these opportunities really well. We need to double down on this.

We need to piggyback off of this. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to systemize what's inside their brain. When you do get to a point where you're able to extract that information that has made them win or lose so that you don't make those same mistakes. That's where things become more successful, where you can literally sit down in front of a boardroom and say, Hey, this is what pipeline looks like.

This is what our, you know, conversions are at different stages, and we are doing this predictably for the past quarter. All of a sudden, the board is gonna be like, okay, you've gamified running a business and that's what you're trying to do is gamify the situation versus kind of running by the seam of your pants.

Now, I'm not saying that in a founder led company that, you're not gonna be running, you know, like, just kind of like. Ad hoc changing and pivoting. I'm not implying that, but there is moments where you need to start building that system and foundation so you can create repeatability.

Ken Lempit: It, you know, it's really interesting this like formulaic or process oriented approach to business seems to be coming at us in every direction. You know, as we look at implementing AI in client. Go to market teams. We talk about not being able to scale up if we don't have process. So I think it's never too early to start thinking about what are the constants, what are the things that I see repeatedly?

So even if your business is still pretty formative, you have to start looking for the things that seem repeatable. So I, I think that that sensitivity to where there's the potential for process be really important for, for founders. And let's, let's keep digging in a little bit on, on the founder mindset.

' cause. I think that you're right when you say that you have to extract what's working from them, you know, get, get in their heads a bit. So how, how do you do that? You know, how do you get into their mindset and start to build up, you know, sort of the marketing narratives, the, the angles, the stories, and, and even getting to positioning, which may be a, a first time exercise for some accidental founders.

You know, these subject matter experts.

Javier Lozano: Yeah, this is one of my favorite pieces is as a marketing leader, I think it's important that you become the founder's best friend, if you will. You are essentially not there as their sounding board, but you're there to find what is making all these things tick. And so you are gonna want to review some of their wins and losses.

Like, that's gonna take where you're going through call logs and just kind of seeing like, okay. Or even if you, you don't have the calls like recorded, even the transcripts and just having analyzed and saying like, this is interesting. Every time you say these words or you, you know, you encounter this situation, you close at 90%.

Like this is insane. So how do we, how do we find more of that kind of situation? It's finding that it's, it's mining the gems and the gold inside their brain, if you will. Sometimes it could be also interviewing customers. It could be where you have some of your most successful customers where they're super happy and as the marketing leader, you come in and you ask them questions.

You just kind of. You know, almost, you can get a case study outta this as well too. So if you ask the right questions, you get a case study outta that, and then all of a sudden you're double dipping if you will. So that's a little hack that, you know, other, other folks should be doing.

But the idea is that you're trying to kind of package all this stuff up into some sort of like field kit, you know, and you're gonna essentially kind of start creating your, playbook out of that, information that you're capturing and that's gonna allow you to say, okay, this is gonna be our positioning.

When we position ourselves to the market like this, this is how everyone sees us. And that's how you start developing your blue ocean. 'cause a lot of the times, you know, these, these founders are coming into. You know, where there's incumbents and there's, you know, they're getting kind of mixed up with like, well, that you guys are like these other people.

Like, well, no, not really, but how you position yourselves. And sometimes that can't really come out from a founder. It's not that they're not smart, it's just they're not thinking about that. And if you can pull those things and get the right messaging, all of a sudden you start having the story that really resonates with your audience. 

Ken Lempit: you said one thing that I think people might not be familiar with. Just wanna make sure people understand what you mean by a blue ocean, because I think that's, a little bit of trade craft. I.

Javier Lozano: So a blue ocean is essentially, this is like, let's say that, you know, in the SaaS world, a lot of the times it feels like you're competing, let's, let's talk about SaaS, or let's just say CRMs, just to make something very simple. You've got the HubSpots, you've got the Sales Forces, and then you've got the smaller companies and the, and then like the mediums from small companies.

You come out with another, you know, CRM. It seems as though you're competing with all of these companies and it's very challenging to kind of go out there, so you're in a red ocean, you're fighting, right? But the only way to create your blue ocean is to essentially position yourself as like, oh no, we're not like HubSpot.

We're different in this, you know, this is what everyone else experiences. So you find the challenges that a customer typically experiences, and then you essentially start saying, this is why we're so successful, or this is why. This product is amazing is because we don't do this, we don't do this. You don't experience this, and that's how you create your blue ocean.

So now you're competing against yourself versus competing against 20 other SaaS products that are selling CRMs. That is hard to create, but once you figure it out, the sales process almost is, I'm not gonna say it's an automatic close, but the person getting on the sales call is gonna already be pre-sold because they understand the problems that you're solving and they can actually feel the pain that they were experiencing, and you're agitating it and they just need confirmation from you.

Ken Lempit: So this gets back to what we talked about in our prep, that this is really a part of a positioning and messaging exercise, right? So if you're a first time founder and a marketing person comes at you with this idea that you need messaging and positioning, the point of the exercise is to help you to compete more effectively and narrow your focus.

Because as a young company, it's unlikely you're gonna be able to compete with every entrant in a market, right? Especially if you're in a broad category like A CRM. You have to find a real reason to be otherwise you're just gonna get hammered. 

Javier Lozano: and you've got marketing dollars that you may not be able to fight with 'em. You know they're gonna spend, they're gonna outspend you all day long. You know, so that's another avenue. So you've gotta figure out where, like where can you get your wedge that really sets you apart? And then you create that audience, you create a following, and that's where the things start happening.

Ken Lempit: And you said one other thing I wanna highlight. 'cause it's so focused, so central to our focus as an agency, which is we always seek problem agreement in our marketing work for ourselves and for our clients. And so this problem agreement, which you, you sort of hinted at, is. Exactly as you said it.

They already feel the pain. They know they have the problem. So if it's a, let's keep with the CRM. You know, if you're a dentist or a chiropractor and you're having trouble with repeat business, you probably have some kind of CRM failure or your practice is terrible, but let's assume you're good at what you do.

You know, the CRM. Could be critical to growing the practice. So if you're a former chiropractor and you decide to build a CRM for medical professionals, you can translate your own experience where you had business issues that were significant into specialization for the product. Create what's known as positioning, right?

The CRM for chiropractors and however you'd make that. More compelling and probably start with what were the two or three problems that held you back as a former practitioner now seller of a CRM. So, so important to get to that problem agreement with your prospects so that they, as you said, start selling themselves.

so we have that, that positioning. How do we turn that into a system that the team can start using? So what, what is the process by which, you know, you would build that into a system at, at a company you're working with? I.

Javier Lozano: So, you know, a lot of the times a marketing leader, CMO might come in and want start changing all of the, messaging, you know, on the website, on everything, everything you know, forward facing. And I would actually say that's the last thing you want to do. You don't want to just. Just basically rip everything down.

The idea here that you're trying to be methodical, like what is working and then you're, you're finding these areas or these pockets that are like, Hey, when we say these things, this is what it's attracting this audience. So what I would say to, to kind of build this into your company and making it a part of it is take a step back, don't change everything.

Maybe it's like you're changing your positioning messaging when it comes to your internal communications to like your audience. So emails. Okay. Maybe it's like what you're posting on social media. Maybe it's thought leadership from the CEO or founder. They are kind of changing what they're saying on there and seeing how the audience is resonating that, you know, that followed them.

Oh, that's interesting. And so you're doing these micro, you know, things that are kind of changing how you're, you're getting perceived in the marketplace and then you're capturing data and the simple data could be like, Hey, we're getting more impressions. We're getting more likes and more comments on whenever you talk about stuff like this, or we're getting more reply backs from emails because we're kind of hitting the nail on the head on this one.

That becomes your signal or your trigger to help you say, okay, this is working, and we're gonna start putting that maybe, you know, forward facing on our landing page, our homepage for now. See how that does. And the idea is that you're, you're kind of just building out this strategy, so. It's not going in and just changing everything.

It's really being methodical and, and having a process of like, all right, we believe in this. We stand for this. We're gonna die in the hill for this. This is how we're gonna convey this to our audience. This is the feedback that we've gotten so far from our audience, from interviews that they love.

These are testimonials that support what they love about this. Okay, this all works. Let's lay this out and let's create the story, you know, and put it forward. So like, it's not just one thing, it's, it's really getting to every single step and being methodical in how you do it. 'cause then you could measure it.

You can't just say, oh, it didn't work when we did this. Well, no. Like, is the process behind it. 

Ken Lempit: Absolutely. I mean, you know, if you build from the ground up like that good chance that you're messaging and your outbound communications are gonna land well with the people you'd like to sell to. So those are really nice crystal explanation of the process. I really appreciate it.

Javier Lozano: Yeah.

Ken Lempit: let's move on a bit I wanna talk about the next step.. So you're a founder, you're starting to get a little bit of revenue traction. You realize that working 70 hours a week probably won't do it for the long term, and you're gonna start building an organization. You know, you have to do that at some point. And a lot of founders, that first hire is actually the sales leader or even A CRO, which you know, some people would say is a little early if you're that young, right?

If you're that small company, but they, you know, it's all the rage, right? It's all the fashion to have a CRO and a software company. So, what goes wrong or what typically could go wrong if the messaging and positioning that we just talked about, building up this agreement with our prospects about what their problems are and how we can help why is this maybe not the best first hire?

Javier Lozano: So, it is gonna sound like I'm biased, but I always come into this as a, I want to help and. Make sales successful. So where I'm coming from here is, is that if you go in and you hire the first CRO or the first VP of sales of your company. They're going to basically start kind of doing a little bit of random acts of, of sales.

So in marketing, I have a word that like, you know, for my company, we are like, our enemy is random acts of marketing and we don't want that and we don't want random acts of sales. What we want is we want the ability of saying like, Hey, when we talk about ourselves like this, this is what really resonates with, you know, with the audience or with our customers on the phone.

And so what we're trying to do is create repeatability. So the challenge here is that a salesperson is, they're really good at finding what their. There are key points that really, you know, helps 'em close and, and helps 'em be successful. Or they might even bring in their own types of like audience as far as like, Hey, if I had my last customer over here, I can bring a few, you know, buyers over there.

But then you get these micro wins that aren't scalable, they're not gonna be winning all the time. The other part is that if you start adding, like an example, like AEs or SDRs just because you're, you're getting a little bit of traction. They don't have a playbook, they don't have any sales enablement.

They don't have anything that they can lean into where they can, like, where they're getting pushed back on, on these sales calls and they can say, Hey, I've got this to help you with this. I've got this to help you with that. And the idea is, is that. These positions, they're gonna possibly fail immediately and it's gonna make the CEO or the founder very upset, make them probably like, rethink what they're doing.

It's gonna, you know, give a bad taste to the sales leader as well too. So I believe that you lay this foundation out so that when you bring somebody in, they're like, oh, I get it. You are fighting against this, and I can get behind that. They have this emotion behind it where they can actually feel the like how to actually sell this correctly.

And a salesperson is going to be super successful when they're confident on what they're selling. They know for a fact. That they have a blue ocean, that there's no one else that offers that solution, and they have all these tools at their disposal to use, you know, at any kind of point. If something's gonna go sideways or whatever it is. That makes a big difference because that salesperson now is already a leg up, you know?

And especially when they're getting on a call with someone that kind of knows what they're doing as far as like, Hey, I, I like this, I like this, like this. I need you to confirm these items. That salesperson's gonna, again, have confidence and nail exactly what they need versus like, uh, let me ask you this.

Ken Lempit: Sure. So, 

this, sort of requires that somebody's able to generate revenue before they bring in these salespeople, right? so there's a possible scenario here where the founder just is not a capable salesperson, not even sales leader, just not even capable salesperson. So, you know, one, yes.

And I want to give here. Is if that's you, if you know you're not gonna be selling as a founder, as a leader of a young company, the sales hire that you make has to be someone who wants to build that world, right? They have to have that kinda larger mindset that they're gonna be building and executing and iterating to create those resources for the following salespeople in the organization.

So it's not like all hope is lost if you can't do the revenue gen your own on your own. But you, you have, you have to recognize the need. If you want to build a successful sales organization, there's some infrastructure here that those people are gonna draw from. We can't expect them to create sales outta thin air.

Javier Lozano: Yeah, no, and that's exactly it. Like I recall my last in-house role where our sales team, like we had weekly meetings and we would go and review what was working, not working, et cetera. The thing that was really interesting is, is that they're like, Hey, we, we wanna see a lot of more social posts.

And the reason is because we get on calls and they're like, Hey, I'm on your Facebook page and I'm looking at your third picture, and I want you to design this. And so what that did is that it gave our team like enablement of saying, oh, okay, we need that piece. Another one, and these are just little silly examples, but this is how you learn from your sales team and you create an enablement for them.

Another one was like giving examples, like we were selling vehicle wraps. We were giving examples of like what a small wrap looks like, what a medium wrap looks like, and then like a price range. And so we were doing it for industries because some people wanna see what it looked like for like a plumber or for an HVAC company.

So then we created pages and then the sales team would basically say, Hey, lemme send you a link really quick. You can take a look at it and you can get some ideas and inspiration. That changed the conversation completely because now the person that is looking to buy is like, oh, that's what I can design.

I like that, but I want my logo here. So the idea is that when you build this, and then you also have that feedback loop with sales and marketing, it just changes the game. 

Ken Lempit: Totally. It's really important that, it's a great example of like almost having an online catalog out of your social . In the software world where we typically operate, a lot of that might be kind of use case stuff that you put up, right? We're gonna do uh, ask me anything on, you know, how to do an email, email campaign from our CRM for chiropractors or whatever it might be.

Javier Lozano: Yep.

Ken Lempit: I wanna move to like, the founder mindset pre-funding we both work primarily with funded entities, so we want to help people get to that point.

But pre-funding where, where it's early days as friends and family maybe have some seed money, the founder's very focused on the product and that initial traction, some, some revenue generation to show Investability. And, and what should they be doing from a marketing and positioning standpoint to encourage, like their first institutional investor to take them seriously.

Javier Lozano: I'd do two things. Obviously you wanna be able to tell the right story, but the other part is I would actually build a revenue floor. If you have like, you know, like two or three offerings that are really good to your marketplace, find one that you crush it and double down in that area. Because when you go to investors, they're gonna be looking at not just like how you're perceived in the marketplace.

They're not gonna be looking at just on, you know, what your revenue is overall. They want to know where there's like predictability and scalability in there. And so that's exactly what we did in my last role is, is that. We basically built a revenue floor that was 60 to 70% of our overall revenue that we could depend on.

We put a dollar in, we'd get $8 back. That was our average ROAS, as we were running ads, we knew what our closer rates were. We knew exactly what the pipeline looked like, and then all of a sudden like that allowed the team to, to go to investors and say like, oh, interesting. You're doing really well in this area.

It's underserved, and I see what the TAM is, and I see they see all these pieces. That tells a different story and you can build off of that. And it gives confidence to the investors that they're not just gonna be throwing money into something that they're wishful thinking. Wishful hopes. 

Ken Lempit: It is really important, you know, to demonstrate repeatability, which is I think, sort of the theme we started with investors don't want to. Put their money into one hit wonders, right? What they want to put their money into. Something that has, certainly, if it's not a machine yet, it's gotta look like it could become one.

And, and the thing that's holding it back is the money. So let's talk about the funding. You get your first, you know, $2 milion, $3 million, $5 million round. So the minute that funding hits the bank account, you know, the clock's ticking, the pressure's on, and you're likely gonna wanna hire and expand. Let's, build on the prior conversation to.

Kind of set up a framework for our listeners about deciding where to double down and what to ignore, and I, I think it's really hard. The what to ignore part is probably a little harder.

Javier Lozano: Yeah, no, this is hard because, you know, you've got the pressure from the board and investors that you need to grow and scale immediately. And then, you know, the, the initial things, especially if you're in SaaS. Initial things that you're probably gonna be looking at, either hiring, you know, sales or hiring engineers.

Those are the probably the two big ones that you'll be focused on. And I'm not saying those are bad hires, but what I'm saying is maybe you delay those hires. So that it allows you to lay the foundation that you're trying to create for your, your company. So how I would look at it is, okay, if we don't have a CMO or a VP of marketing in-house, we need to go fractional.

I'm, I'm not just saying that because of my role, I'm saying that because this person is going to kind of lay the, the frameworks of, engineers when they come in, Hey, this is what we're building and this is what we're, how we're gonna change the world. Engineers can get behind that. For salespeople, this is what we're selling and this is what the pain points that we're, we're offering, and this is what we're gonna try to do and this is how we're gonna attack it.

And then all of a sudden, salespeople can get behind that, that story can be told. I would look at building this piece as just as a framework of making sure your messaging is gonna be hitting tightly and your story's gonna be compelling. And then from there you start looking at your, you know, areas that are successful.

If you have like a specific go to market that is working very well. Then you hire maybe one or two salespeople. You build out that playbook and you just say, Hey, we're just gonna focus on this right now. You don't have to get a, a VP of sales at the moment. Just have that person just kind of execute that, get learnings from there.

And so build slowly on different areas. And then as you get some signals and trust and, and, and trust points that are working. Then you double down and you keep, you know, expanding on those pieces. And then as other things kind of come in, you start learning what the marketplace is telling you. You determine if it makes sense to add another go to market.

You determine if it makes sense to pull something off the shelf, et cetera. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I think it's also a time to narrow your focus, right? There might be things that you as a founder, you know, really thought would work out, and they're maybe not, and know it's sort of hard to separate yourself from your own ideas. But I, I think this is also a time to focus on the winners and kind of prune back the things that aren't growing the way you hoped they would.

Javier Lozano: Yeah, for sure.

Ken Lempit: Speaking of growth, like there's often, you know, and, and again, we focus a lot on the software world, but the, there's a rush to want to go up market to chase more recognizable clients for a solution. And this pressure's probably even greater after a significant funding round because the investors, they won't know X, Y, Z Co, but you know, they know ExxonMobil, right?

So, so how do find founders, you know, decide if they're actually ready to be selling to the enterprise versus just being seduced by, you know what I call the siren song of the Enterprise Sale? 

Javier Lozano: As far as going enterprise and going upmarket, you've gotta make sure you've got a few things in line. You gotta make sure you have cash flow because those sales cycles are longer. You've gotta be okay taking a bigger hit on your margins because you know the Exxons of the world, the bigger enterprise companies aren't gonna be, you know, paying your, your, you know, market price as if you will.

They're gonna be going in, they're gonna be hammering you a little differently. Now, I understand SaaS is different because the margins are much higher, but the point is, is that. That starts impacting your business. At the end of the day, in my opinion, when we're doing this, you've gotta have a great relationship with that CFO that understands contribution margin that says, Hey, when we go enterprise, we're actually losing out on our contribution margin and, and it's not really helping us hit our numbers and our revenue goals for this year or next year, et cetera.

So we gotta be, be sober with these numbers. And the other part is we have to also know that. Is that really our sweet spot? Is that if we're on upmarket, does that create a red ocean for us? Or if we're just getting, you know, these mid-market or or s and b market, is that where 

it's a lot more work, but like we're creating great opportunities. Our contribution margins are huge. Our close rates are great. We can, we can, you know, gamify this whole process. That's where the sweet spot becomes is like, do you really want to get those, you know, those big logos or do you wanna just get a ton of logos that really add up?

I'm all about the singles and doubles versus the Grand Slams in my opinion.

Ken Lempit: we were talking with a, a founder of a software company recently, and you know, their per seat price is under $25. You know, they sell 10 to 50 or maybe a 100 seats at a time

Javier Lozano: Mm-hmm. 

Ken Lempit: and they've got a $40 million business that throws off a ton of cash. And there sure are some enterprise deals in there, but that's not the focus of the business.

It just makes perfect sense. The, the other thing about the enterprise is they're gonna come at you in a lot of ways that you're not built to take on. We didn't even mention things like procurement. So yeah, it takes a long time and you are gonna be dealing with a cast of characters that you may not have any experience with.

So, you know, the advice I have is, unless it's really a world you know, or you have a sales and marketing team that has, gone to market to the enterprise. You know, let those guys come to you if they will, and if they don't want to go through your normal sales motion, then tell 'em, you know, maybe there's a better solution elsewhere.

Javier Lozano: Exactly. Exactly.

Ken Lempit: Lastly, I, I wanna touch on again, post-funding. Now we're scaling up, right? We've, we have our two or three ICP vertical market sets. We have an idea of who we should be selling to, what their pain points are. And so we're starting to really gather up some momentum. So how should the marketing leadership think about influencing revenue, not just building the brand so that things that were quick wins, become repeatable, this machine that we wanna build.

'cause once you've been invested in, once, you know the goal is further investment, or ultimately a sale of the business. So how can marketing leaders kind of push that? Business imperative forward.

Javier Lozano: So I think it's gonna be running two motions in parallel. You're gonna be building brand playing for the long game while you're building demand. And the idea here is that your brand, how people might look at it is like your logos, your colors, that sort of stuff. I look at brand as your reputation, what people say about you, your company when you're not in the room.

And so you're doing brand plays that allow you to kind of, compound like in the marketplace, like an S&P 500, that is one piece. And then you're, you're, you're doing this other piece where you're, you're creating campaigns or you're creating, like a monthly cadence or a quarterly cadence of different strategies or, or different campaigns that you're gonna be executing every single quarter, because it allows you to grow and it's gonna give you more of that predictability.

Hey, this quarter we've got these three events that we're, you know, we're focusing on. We're gonna have this product launch, we're gonna be doing a press release on, you know, this, this month. You build those out so that you can say, okay, we're building our brand for the long term, but we're also hitting, you know, our revenue numbers every quarter by doing these movements or these plays.

And that's kind of how you kind of run these things simultaneously, because what happens if you only focus on one or the other, one of 'em is gonna bite you in the butt. This way you're playing for both sides, understanding that you're in this for the long haul.

Ken Lempit: Well, that's great and a great place to land our episode Javier Lozano of Bolder Media. Thank you for being on SaaS backwards. If people listening want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do so? 

Javier Lozano: Yeah, two ways. I'm on LinkedIn all the time so you can definitely find me on there. Look for Javier Lozano Jr. Make sure you put the junior there. I believe I'm the only Javier Lozano Jr on LinkedIn. And you can also go to my websites. You can go to boldermediasolutions.com. I got some great stuff on there that will help you as far as diagnose your leaky pipelines.

It's for free that you can kind of download. And then I, I've got a newsletter on there as well too. But, with that, those are the two places. Again, Ken, I really appreciate this opportunity. This was a lot of fun. 

Ken Lempit: That was great episode, alot in there for founders and founding teams as they look to scale up their businesses. Thank you for being with us. If people wanna reach me, I'm also on LinkedIn at Linkedin/in/kenlempit. My advertising demand generation and strategy firm for SaaS is Austin Lawrence Group.

We're at austinlawrence.com. And if you haven't subscribed to the SaaS Backwards podcast, I can't believe it. But if you haven't, Javier may have convinced you. Please do subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. Hey, thanks so much, Javier, for helping us today here on SaaS backwards.