Skip to resource content
Founder conversationLeader $5m+

How I Grew Factors.ai by 6x by Prioritizing Strategic Marketing Initiatives

Sri Swaminathan · Factors.ai

Published September 6, 2024
Watch the full conversation
About this resource

Explore the lesson. Sign in to access the slide download.

What you’ll learn

Sri Swaminathan explains how Factors.ai pursued founder-led marketing and strategic channel initiatives to grow. The session covers LinkedIn participation, live sessions, partnerships, events, and automating SDR work so sellers can focus on creative outreach.

Read the source passages

Key moments

Find the ideas you need and go straight to the source.

Build visibility through consistent LinkedIn participation

“scale for us to actually get in through we also Focus on getting top marketing analytics Voice top uh uh product marketing or any other B2B marketing ABM marketing leadership voice Etc this is actually a little more easier hack within LinkedIn so LinkedIn actually asks for like comments on specific posts and specific places where you can if you consistently comment on that it's basically like if you cons comment on more than 20 articles you would be actually pushed up as a top marketing”
Watch at 04:56

Use live sessions to generate demos

“once you start doing it the live attendance metric starts going up and most importantly your actual buyer personas who see your LinkedIn live either directly or later then they come back and ask for Demos in multiple ways like can you give me a demo can you this thing this happens in multiple sets this alone has generated more than 100 customers for us close to 800k in Revenue which is almost a zero paid channel for us which is the part which I talked”
Watch at 09:48

Invest in partnerships and events

“Champion across globally and this is something which we started working on very early and that started showing results this is in parallel with our paid marketing and other efforts which we are doing but after one and a half years we started showing efforts this is one of them secondly like 2023 we went to the Mumbai Office that's when we started doing some events and sessions with them making sure that we show some value for them sorry and the other one was”
Watch at 14:35

Automate tasks so SDRs can sell

“at any point in time you can't afford to have more than like say three four SDR and it's like at a certain stage which is there and SDR have to to spend more time selling which is like creatively finding out like what is the kind of a better email which they can write what is a better sequence they can write what's a better LinkedIn messaging or content who they have to connect rather if you automate most of their tasks what you get is like they can work at 2 or 3x their capability levels in one sense so you are basically automating the task of”
Watch at 19:19

Transform the marketing team

“Founders prioritizing marketing Hiring the Head of Marketing Before & After Team Structure Transforming the Marketing Team FOUNDER-LED HIRING THE TEAM STRUCTURE”
Read slide 5

Balance planned and experimental channels

“Channels that worked for us 80% planned, 20% experimental Preparing to sell to enterprises Let’s jump into Section 2 I’m going to show you MARKETING STRATEGY PLANNING MOVING UPMARKET”
Read slide 9

Move upmarket with product marketing

“Going Upmarket Core Product Enhancements 4X price increase; moved from smaller to large enterprise companies Leveraging product marketing and transforming sales and partnerships”
Read slide 13

Build a co-sell partnership

“Partnering with G2 Met G2 stakeholders in SaaStr 2023 Attended multiple meetings and events with G2 Signed Partnership Co-sell motion with G2 sales team”
Read slide 17

Preview slides

Open slide preview in Google Slides

Resource files

  • Video

    Watch video

  • How I Grew Factors.ai by 6x by Prioritizing Strategic Marketing Initiatives - Slide Deck

About the speaker
Sri Swaminathan

Sri Swaminathan

Co-Founder · Factors.ai

LinkedIn

CEO of Factors.ai, a B2B marketing analytics platform that provides businesses with data-driven insights to improve their campaigns.

Company revenue
$7.5M

More founder interviews

Slide text

Find a passage in the slides and open the original deck.

22 passages

Strategic marketing initiatives

  1. Slide 1Open deck

    SaaSOpen, September 2024 How I Grew Factors.ai by 6x by Prioritizing Strategic Marketing Initiatives Sri Swaminathan Co-Founder & CEO, Factors.AI

  2. Slide 2Open deck

    Over the next 20 minutes I’m going to show you TEAM Founder-led marketing Hiring a Head of Marketing Team structure - before and after STRATEGY SALES & PARTNERSHIPS Channels that worked for us 80% planned, 20% experimental Moving upmarket G2 and LinkedIn partnerships Communities and agencies Eating our own dog food

  3. Slide 3Open deck

    Our Revenue Growth

  4. Slide 4Open deck

    Factors.ai Revenue Growth In Q1 2023, we pivoted from an analytics tool to an account intelligence and activation platform Q1 2023

Building the marketing team

  1. Slide 5Open deck

    Founders prioritizing marketing Hiring the Head of Marketing Before & After Team Structure Transforming the Marketing Team FOUNDER-LED HIRING THE TEAM STRUCTURE

  2. Slide 6Open deck

    Leveraging Founder and Employee Brands on LinkedIn

  3. Slide 7Open deck

    Hosting and speaking at various events 2023-24

  4. Slide 8Open deck

    Building a 10x Marketing Team Hiring a Head of Marketing Hiring for two critical roles - Product Marketing and Demand Generation Hiring 10x marketers is more important than 10X engineers today Head of Marketing Product Marketing Demand Generation Growth Marketer Social Media Content Marketing Developer Marketing Designer Co-founder Product Marketing Consultant Demand Generation (in-house) Social Media (in-house) Content Freelancers + in-house Co-founder Before After

Planning channels and strategy

  1. Slide 9Open deck

    Channels that worked for us 80% planned, 20% experimental Preparing to sell to enterprises Let’s jump into Section 2 I’m going to show you MARKETING STRATEGY PLANNING MOVING UPMARKET

  2. Slide 10Open deck

    Channels that Have Worked for Us Paid (but relying on just this will get you in trouble) Socials (high value content and lives) Content (200+ blogs, ~26k unique visitors)

  3. Slide 11Open deck

    Betting big on LinkedIn Lives

  4. Slide 12Open deck

    80% Planned Efforts, 20% Experiments LinkedIn AdVisor - built by a dev in 1 day Successful experiments can turn into full-fledged strategic initiatives Incentivize team by including experiments in OKRs

Moving upmarket

  1. Slide 13Open deck

    Going Upmarket Core Product Enhancements 4X price increase; moved from smaller to large enterprise companies Leveraging product marketing and transforming sales and partnerships

  2. Slide 14Open deck

    G2 and LinkedIn partnerships Agencies, and communities Eating Our Own Dog Food Let’s jump into Section 3 I’m going to show you PARTNERSHIPS AFFILIATE SALES

  3. Slide 15Open deck

    Partnerships is a Long Game Built over multiple meetings with multiple stakeholders You need one champion on the partner side But if done well, it can unlock tremendous growth

  4. Slide 16Open deck

    Use this Slide to Feature And use these points to summarize Bold key points Research Design One of your reporting dashboards Meeting with the LinkedIn Team 2023, LinkedIn office, Mumbai

Partnering with G2

  1. Slide 17Open deck

    Partnering with G2 Met G2 stakeholders in SaaStr 2023 Attended multiple meetings and events with G2 Signed Partnership Co-sell motion with G2 sales team

  2. Slide 18Open deck

    Partnering with Agencies Not just partnerships, but building good relationships Co-creating content on LinkedIn Adding 2-3 agencies/month

  3. Slide 19Open deck

    Intent-based Sales Workflows Hiring a Sales team - Head of sales, 2 sdrs, 3 AEs, 1 partnerships sdr Using intent data, account scoring and best-in-class sales tech Adding 150k-180k every month

  4. Slide 20Open deck

    Eating our Own Dog Food Use Callouts Like this for key points. Caveat font.

  5. Slide 21Open deck

    Over the last 20 minutes, I showed you: … with real examples! SECTION 1 Founder-led marketing Hiring a CMO Team structure - before and after SECTION 2 SECTION 3 Marketing strategy 80% planned, 20% experimental Going Upmarket G2 and LinkedIn Partnerships Communities and Agencies Hiring a Sales team

  6. Slide 22Open deck

    SaaSOpen, September 2024 Thank you! [redacted email] Sri Swaminathan Co-Founder & CEO, Factors.AI