Leading Your Team to a Killer Tech Stack with Andrew Davies

Paddle’s work to offload tax agony from SaaS companies hasn’t gone unnoticed. They’ve earned over 3000 clients globally and have accumulated impressive revenue processed numbers.

His style is listening to his team and consistently learning from them and everyone around him to build a stack that works effectively and efficiently for everyone. He also likes to keep things fun and creative, for instance, by producing a documentary about how to build a SaaS company.

In this episode, he joins to share his team-leading and RevOps strategies on how and why he’s using so much qualitative data.

Main Takeaways

• Building a modular stack and avoiding over-reliance on a single tool is crucial for long-term sustainability.
• Hiring or training experts in the marketing team and trusting their expertise leads to better outcomes.
• Creating a culture of experimentation and learning from failures is essential for growth and innovation.
• Qualitative data can be turned into quantitative insights through tools like Winter, enabling data-driven decision-making.
• Responding to failures with empathy and support fosters a positive environment for growth and learning.

Tools Mentioned in this Episode

• Paddle: Paddle is a complete payments infrastructure solution for software businesses. Paddle uses its tools to sell its software.
• Salesforce: Salesforce is a customer relationship management solution that brings companies and customers together. Paddle uses it for managing customer interactions and data for sales.
• Hubspot: HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and service software that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. Andrew and his team might use Hubspot for its marketing features.
• Outreach: Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps sales teams secure more meetings, drive more pipeline, and close more deals. Paddle uses Outreach to streamline and optimize its sales process.
• Gong: Gong is a conversation analytics and salesforce training tool that uses artificial intelligence to analyze sales calls and meetings, providing insights and coaching to sales reps. Paddle uses Gong to enhance its sales strategies and performance.
• Wistia: Wistia provides video hosting services for businesses. Andrew and his team use Wistia to host and analyze the performance of their video content.
• Livestorm: Livestorm is a webinar software with all the capabilities to host free and promotional webinars. Paddle uses it for hosting online events and webinars.
• Reachdesk: Reachdesk enables sales and marketing teams to send personalized gifts, notes, and swag to prospects and customers at scale. Paddle may use Reachdesk to enhance its customer and prospect engagement strategies.
• Metadata.io: This is an autonomous demand generation platform. Andrew and his team at Paddle use this platform to automate routine Marketing Operations processes and to target their advertising efforts better.
• Wynter: Wynter is a platform for getting B2B website and messaging copy reviewed by your target audience. Paddle uses Wynter to test and improve its website and marketing copy at scale while minimizing cost.
• Drift: Drift is a conversational marketing platform that combines chat, email, video, and automation to remove the friction from business buying. Paddle has specific uses to engage users and turn them into leads.
• FiveTran: FiveTran is a data integration platform Andrew uses to automate data pipeline workflows and ensure seamless data syncing across various sources.
• Snowflake: Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that Andrew utilizes to store and analyze large volumes of data with high performance and scalability.
• RudderStack: RudderStack is an open-source customer data platform that Andrew deploys to collect, unify, and route customer event data to different analytics and marketing tools.
• dbt: dbt (data build tool) is a command-line tool that Andrew employs for advanced data transformations and modeling, allowing him to quickly build reliable data pipelines and collaborate efficiently with his team.
• Census: Census is a product analytics platform that Andrew relies on to track and analyze user behavior within his application, enabling him to make data-driven decisions and optimize user experiences.

The Challenges of Building a Marketing Stack

Building a marketing stack comes with challenges. Davies highlights the importance of not relying too heavily on a single tool and instead building a modular stack. He states, “One of the reasons we’ve got that stack that’s pretty fresh and well thought through is that we became too reliant on Hull…we’re trying to be a bit more modular as we go forwards and hedge that risk a bit.”

Another challenge is managing the feedback and requirements of a central Rev Ops function. Davies acknowledges the volume of requests and the need for better structuring and prioritization.

We need to get way better…at structuring our feedback and our requirements and having more technical people on our side to be able to give better requirements into RevOps to solve.

The Power of Valuable Content

Andrew and his team understand the importance of creating content that resonates with the audience. He believes marketers often forget that making content people care about is challenging.

As marketers, sometimes we forget that…we can be stuck in an ROI calculator and a white paper, but actually, it moves the needle for our customers and our prospects if we’re making stuff that they actually care about.

The Paddle team has focused on developing content that drives revenue and provides value to the broader software community. They have launched initiatives such as the Tax Agony Index, which helps software companies navigate the complexities of sales tax in different jurisdictions.

By providing valuable resources and insights, Paddle aims to support the growth of the software community.

The Role of Experimentation

Andrew believes that experimentation is crucial in marketing. He emphasizes creating a culture that encourages taking risks and learning from failures.

One of my goals is to always be the dumbest person in the room…I really want to make sure we do the same here where we’re testing and learning.

To foster a culture of experimentation, Davies and his team have implemented a process for structuring ideas into experiments. They have created an experiments backlog and prioritize ideas based on their potential impact. Improving its marketing strategies and driving continuous growth.

Future Outlook

Andrew emphasizes the importance of creating valuable content, fostering a culture of experimentation, and addressing the challenges of building a marketing stack. Marketers can drive growth and impact the SaaS industry by focusing on these critical areas.

Looking ahead, Andrew believes that the future of marketing lies in finding innovative ways to engage with the audience and deliver personalized experiences.

The future is about finding those moments of engagement and those moments of value…and making sure that we’re delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

As the SaaS industry evolves, marketers must stay agile and adapt to new trends and technologies.

Check out the documentary Andrew mentions in the episode “We Sign Tomorrow?“.

Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack. Real experts will tell you how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine, and take your sales to the next level.