SaaS leadership, customer marketing & creating delight w/ Laurie Aquilante Faiola & Shanann Monaghan

Is the funnel dead in SaaS? How do you create relationships at scale? What revenue are you likely losing from your customer base? In this episode of thinkPod, we are joined by Laurie Aquilante Faiola (Director of Customer Marketing at HubSpot) and Shanann Monaghan (Director of Customer Experience Marketing at Looker). We talk to Laurie and Shanann about what SaaS companies need to do when someone becomes a customer, the continuum between mass scale and one-to-one relationships, and how to measure if the customer is truly delighted . We dig into the metrics that we should be focusing on, the importance of acquisition costs, balancing the quantitative and qualitative analysis, and the cross-functional efforts between a customer success team and customer marketing team.

“[W]e're moving to a world where there's a continuum between mass scale and one to one relationships. There's a middle ground and I think it's things like user groups and it's office hours and it's programs that marketing can stand up and support, but [also] that customer success can plug into or even sales can plug into.” -Laurie Aquilante Faiola, Director of Customer Marketing at HubSpot

“The people who really inspire others to take action are the ones who can tell a compelling story that connects with other humans, that taps into feelings and emotions. And so data on its own doesn't always do that. But when you wrap data into a story, it also adds authority and credibility. Bringing those two worlds together is so powerful and it's a hard skill.” -Shanann Monaghan (Director of Customer Experience Marketing at Looker

Connect with thinkLeaders and our panelists:
@IBMthinkLeaders
@lawfaiola
@ShanannK

BIOS

Laurie Aquilante Faiola is the Director of Customer Marketing at HubSpot. Her team focuses on leveraging marketing strategies and tactics to help customers experience successful growth with HubSpot, help them discover and buy new products, and on building an engaged community of advocates. Laurie previously led middle and bottom of the funnel programs for the North America region.

Prior to joining HubSpot, Laurie was the Director of Demand Generation for NuoDB, a database startup in Cambridge, MA and prior to that held a number of marketing roles at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington. She is also the proud parent of a toddler and in her spare time, you can find her on outings with her family in Rhode Island or taking a boxing class.

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Shanann Monaghan has a decade of experience in marketing, communications and customer success. Prior to Looker, Shanann launched and grew customer marketing at several companies, including the optimization software, Optimizely.

As the Director of Customer Experience Marketing at Looker, Shanann is passionate about leveraging marketing tools, technology and data to drive customer engagement and growth, and deeply cares about creating amazing experiences that inspire and delight humans.