Why Traditional ABM is Failing Your SaaS Business

 Welcome to the SaaS Backwards podcast, where we reverse engineer the success of fast growing SaaS firms and explore strategies CMOs and CEOs are using to drive their businesses forward.

Welcome to the SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CEOs and CMOs to accelerate growth and enhanced profitability. Our guest today is Dmitri Lisitski, co-founder and CEO at Influ2, a person-based advertising platform that allows you to reach specific people within target accounts and see who interacts with your ads. Dmitri, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, that's a pleasure. I'm really excited to record this episode. But before we begin, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and something about Influ2?

Sure, sure, yeah. A little bit of the background. My previous business was a company called Global Logic and it was a large IT services firm. And we built a pretty large business. It was acquired by Hitachi two years ago for 9.6B. So a pretty huge scale IT services company. And then what kept me unsettled was the fact that B2B marketing was not super useful for success of this company. And I was thinking, what, what else could we do? And that's what led me to create Influ2. And the idea was like, “Hey, we believe that marketing can help in enterprise sales.” And that's basically what we do with Influ2. So we built an advertising platform that helps to target individual prospects and influence their decision to buy your products. And then we also try to track how much it helps you to drive additional revenue by doing this.

I see. So another subject matter expert kind of coming into building some software. You saw a business problem where you were before and wanted to find a good way to solve it. Well, there's a co-founder with you. How did you come together? And tell us a little bit about getting the business started in the first year or so.

Yeah, sure. Yeah. It's kind of a funny story a little bit. So in fact we started together with my co-founder, but we almost did not interact. And in fact my wife and his wife knew each other quite well. But somehow we never connected. And then when I quit my previous job, I realized, I actually decided to retire. Because, like, I thought about this problem, but I couldn't see a solution to this problem. And obviously I had some retirement plan made from my previous company. So I did not probably need to work that much. And then I shared my frustration with a problem that I couldn't solve with him. Like, we accidentally met. And he told me, “Hey, I have an idea how to solve that”. And he had like 7 ideas. He’s like really brilliant guy. And one of those ideas.. I just think it was the easiest solution to that problem. And it turned to be able to build what we now call Influ2. And it took us like six months to build the technology because the technology itself is pretty… You know, it requires some additional effort. And we both have applied mathematics degree from the university where we studied back in Kyiv. And basically used our knowledge of machine learning and mathematics to solve the problems that seems to be impossible to solve.

That's very cool. So, so it's the power of a social network in your actual real world life that got you to your co-founder.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. It's like, it's pretty accidental, I think, in some cases, but it worked for us.

That's okay. And I think there's a lot of power in just finding someone to start a conversation with as a founder. You don't always know where these conversations are going to lead. So it's very cool. Why don't we dig in a bit on Influ2 right from the get-go here and how it's different from other ABM advertising platforms that our listeners are familiar with. Because I think there are some distinct differences here.