Sonya Pelia is a B2B marketing executive with expertise in driving revenue, product led growth, marketing strategy and brand development for startup companies.
She is a startup mentor, founder at How Women Invest, Non-Profit Leader, TEDx Speaker and Aspiring Author.

In this episode:

1. Sonya defines product-led growth which means the go to market strategy uses the product to aquire, convert and to retain customers.  Freemiums and free trails are
common mechanisms for product-led growth.  Continue to dest your freemium and trials every 6 months to convert customers into your enterprise product.

2. Sonya describes the difference between lead generation and demand generation.  Although often used interchangeably, they are different.  Demand generation is the top of the funnel and is used to describe the challenges customers are facing.  Lead Generation are techniques that move your customer onto your website.  It describes the process of someone who is willing to give their contact information for you to email them.

3. Sonya talks about many operational challenges that SaaS founders face at various stages of the startup.  One of the challenges is time.  Digitalization of solutions is happening so quickly that startups can no longer wait to operationalilze critical programs.   Another challenge is the lack of a metrics-driven sales & marketing team.  Determining the metrics early on is critical.  Ensure that all teams are looking at the same numbers.  The earlier you can understand churn, CAC, CLV, etc. the better you can work against numbers.  Another challenge is around the hiring process.  Competition for talent is fierce.  Developing a process for onboarding talent is important.  Finally, developing a methodology for customer engagement and success are critical.  This includes talking to customers regularly and ensuring there is an active customer base.

4. Sonya shares her lessons learned for startup founders:  CEO's should talk to 5-10 customers per week.  Don't wait until they have a problem.  Also, your website should look bigger than your product and the size of your company.  This helps to infuse trust with your customers that you plan on being around a long time.

...and much more!

You can connect with Sonya on LinkedIn or at sonyapelia.com