Jennifer Durishin - Prodigal

In this episode of The Demand Generation Club Podcast, host Franco Caporale interviews Jennifer Durishin, the head of marketing at Prodigal. Durishin discusses her journey from consumer companies to B2B marketing and her responsibilities at Prodigal. She also shares insights on how Prodigal successfully generates engagement, leads, and pipeline opportunities with a limited budget. Durishin emphasizes the importance of targeting specific industries and segments, and explains how Prodigal manages multiple parallel campaigns with a small team. She also discusses the role of BDRs and SDRs in the marketing process and the need for prioritization. 

Transcript

INTRO:
The Demand Generation Club Podcast is back, and we're turning up the heat with season three. Get ready for insightful conversation with experts from Splash, TrustCloud, WorkRamp, UserGems and more, as we dive deep into B2B marketing approaches that are making an impact in 2024.

This podcast is brought to you by SaaSMQL, the SaaS growth agency that helps B2B software companies land seven-figure deals with highly targeted multichannel campaigns. Since 2018, SaaSMQL has helped over 100 SaaS companies generation millions of dollars in sales pipeline and recurring revenue. To learn more, go to saasmql.com.

Franco Caporale:

I'm here today with Jennifer Durishin, who is the head of marketing at Prodigal. Hi, Jennifer. Welcome to The Demand Generation Club.

Jennifer Durishin:

Hi. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Franco Caporale:

Fantastic. Right away, I want to ask you how did you end up becoming the head of marketing at Prodigal?

Jennifer Durishin:

Well, it's after years of working in marketing. I started my marketing career at a CPG company called Abbott Nutrition, and made my over to B2B at a big corporation. Then, made my way over to startup and I absolutely love it.

Franco Caporale:

How did you get from consumer companies to B2B? What kind attracted you there?

Jennifer Durishin:

Yeah. It's an experience. I started with B2C. Then, I got experience B2B2C. Through agencies, insurance agents specifically, and then to consumers. Then, was more specifically focused on just insurance agents, so that's where I got my B2B experience. That's what got me hooked on B2B. I absolutely think it's a blast. We're always learning something new and pushing hard, every single day.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. I'm noticing that once you get to B2B, you never go back to B2C.

Jennifer Durishin:

Yes, yes. I think it's similar with B2B and also startups. Once you get the startup bug, you just never want to go back. I would say those are both the same.

Franco Caporale:

What are your responsibilities at Prodigal?

Jennifer Durishin:

Yeah. Like you said, I'm the head of marketing here at Prodigal. I've been here over a year now. Lead all things marketing. Whether it be brand, demand gen, lead gen, PR, everything in between, design, content, product marketing, we got the whole side. Right now, I even have BDRs reporting through marketing. I don't think it matters why they report to, as long as we have good connection. But even have that, and even have a UX designer on my team. Pretty awesome, no dull moment and always more to do than we have time for. Prioritization is really key.

Franco Caporale:

How big is the company? How big is Prodigal?

Jennifer Durishin:

We're less than five million ARR, but growing really well. Really excited to keep on growing and scaling this company.

Franco Caporale:

How many people, more or less, that are employees?

Jennifer Durishin:

We have about 60 to 70 people full-time at Prodigal right now.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. I always like to ask this question. What is your favorite tech stack, as a head of marketing?

Jennifer Durishin:

Yeah. It's funny, because we use so many as marketers these days. I've had multiple tools. My favorite one, purely because of the user experience, is HubSpot. I've used Pardot, I've used Marketo. I think HubSpot is just very easy to use, review and you can even get some of the reporting from it. I really enjoy it and I think it's a pleasant experience.

Franco Caporale:

I 100% agree. I used to be a Salesforce Marketo person, but now I'm fully converted to HubSpot as well.

Jennifer Durishin:

Yeah. Their marketing's pretty good, too. I love their content marketing. I think they're a great case study for all of us in B2B as well.

Franco Caporale:

Obviously, working in a company at that stage, you're 60, 70 people. I'm sure you have to be very, very careful with the marketing budget and be super, super selective on how you spend it. I would like to know from you, how are you able to successfully generate engagement, leads, pipeline opportunities with limited budget that every startup has in marketing? How do you approach it?

Jennifer Durishin:

Yeah. Great question. I think for us, and probably like a lot of SaaS companies, today you've got to be watching your budget and you've got to do more with less. Maybe your budget remains flat, so that's good. But how do you squeeze and get more out of it?

One of the things that we're doing is also leaning in to the channels that are working. We know events is our number one lead, where we get our best leads, most qualified leads. We're obviously looking and evaluating those events where we do best. But also, reevaluating. Do we actually need to exhibit at et ones we've exhibited at in the past? Where can we just attend, we know enough people? We stopped sending our big booth because, frankly, that with just a lot of money and shipping is crazy. We don't need to spend that anymore. We have a tabletop exhibit and that's totally fine.

Then, one thing we're really trying to do more of too, is because we know thought leadership is really important in B2B and you can't always just be pushing your product, but really empathizing with your customers or your prospects and their pain points. We're really working closely with even event organizers to submit more speaking opportunities. Obviously, not just us as a vendor, but with our customers, and be on those panels so we can get our name out there in different ways. We're making a really concerted effort to get more speaking opportunities on those panels accepted.

Franco Caporale:

Are you already planning for next year events?

Jennifer Durishin:

Yeah. No, that 2024 calendar is started and frankly, some of these speaking opportunities, they try to plan six months in advance. Also, we're studying what are some of those topics that we know are really hot ones? We're an AI company. We've been an AI company before ChatGPT. How do we lean into that? Because we know a lot of people have questions about how do I use AI in my business? We can leverage that and get those opportunities to get in front of those audiences, and lend our expertise.

Franco Caporale:

From this, you mentioned something when we were talking, Jennifer, about being also selective on who you target. Because as a Series A, Series B, Series C startups, you cannot target too many industries, too many types of companies. You have to be very, very focused on your target. How do you strategize around your ICP?

Jennifer Durishin:

Great question. I didn't even really tell you what Prodigal does or who we are. We're a vertical SaaS company, Series A specifically. We're venture-backed. The vertical SaaS, meaning we're targeting segment, one specific industry, and that's consumer finance for us. What we're doing is we're targeting those companies to modernize the lender servicing and loan operations lifecycle, and bringing software and intelligence to those players. It can be anyone from collection agencies, auto finance companies, revenue cycle management companies. Anyone who has a customer interaction with any sort of company where they're talking about money. Car payments, medical debt, credit card debt, anything. There's a lot of different companies in that space, all with that through line of a vertical SaaS of the consumer finance industry.

What we're doing, even though our customers, I named a bunch of different types of customers that would be applicable for us, the hardest thing is those customers, even though they're in our vertical, they don't go to the same conferences. They don't read the same publications. What we're doing, trying do more with less too, is really doing a lot of quick testing and learning. And saying, "Okay, let's go after collection agencies," where we started, where we've been successful early on. Then, we're seeing some good progress with auto finance companies. We know prices of cars are going up, interest rates are going up. How do we then target those?

The last one is our healthcare, medical debt keeps going up. It's usually unclaimed [inaudible 00:08:09]. But a lot of hospitals outsource their billing and collections to third party revenue cycle management companies. We're seeing some good success with those. There's not a ton of those. So how do we double down and go after them as much as possible, and help them with their needs? We're super excited about that. But, speed is the name of the game here too, and identify those most likely prospects that we can convert.

Franco Caporale:

These are obviously three different segments that you guys are targeting and you have to build, I'm assuming, different messaging, value proposition's different. How do you manage to run three or more parallel campaigns when you don't have a large team in-house?

Jennifer Durishin:

Believe it or not, their pain points are all very similar. They're struggling to hire people to fill these roles. They can't retain them, it's hard to train them, or they leave a lot. They have a lot of pain in the hiring space.

All of these industries too, their compliance driven because they're regulated by a Federal agency. Minimizing compliance, maximizing revenue or minimizing expenses are all areas that they all have that similar through line. It's just some of the language we use is different. Instead of calling them a borrower, we'll call them patients. We try to rinse and repeat as much as we can with our content, but make sure it applies to that specific persona and that specific segment that we're going after.

Franco Caporale:

One more question on this. Obviously, all of these segments will require budget. How do you shift budget between one segment to the other? Do you look at revenue generated pipeline, leads? How do you decide how to distribute your marketing budget?

Jennifer Durishin:

Yeah. At the end of the day, it's coming down to back to that testing and learning. So running a couple of campaigns simultaneously, and then saying, "Hey, what was that cost per lead? Which of those is converting over to SQL? Which of those is converting over to us? Which of those is converting to closed won?" Then saying, "Okay, how do we go back after that?" If it's been successful and we're doing the best there, how do we go after another set of prospects in that same industry segment?

That's how we're doing it, measuring and learning every step of the way. Then, when we see something that's working, focusing our attention on that, before you'll find that next best opportunity.

Franco Caporale:

You mentioned something at the beginning of the episode, which is your have your SDRs, your BDRs reporting to marketing. How did you make that decision? What is exactly the role?

Jennifer Durishin:

Like I said too, that's just what we're doing right now. I think there's been a lot of debate in the B2B world, especially in the SaaS world too, about who should they report to. It's a fun headline, but at the end of the day, I don't think it really matters. What's most important, and we're seeing some good success, is that making sure the BDRs and SDRs ... Sometimes people say BDR is inbound, sometimes SDR's outbound. We're not as fixed about that here. But, how do we make sure that there's good alignment and that they're aware of what marketing campaigns we're running so they can quickly follow up with any engaged accounts with a personalized message and outreach. Whether it be call, or email, or reaching out to them on LinkedIn. We're seeing that good connection is really, really key to get some movement, and then get those warm leads over to our account executive and sales team.

Franco Caporale:

They are only focused on warm leads, they don't go after cold prospects or accounts?

Jennifer Durishin:

Right now, we've got enough work for them to be following up with those engaged accounts. We are trying to get more BDRs because we're seeing some success and there's enough volume that we need more people to handle some of this. That's what's working right now.

Franco Caporale:

I have one more question on that. How do you make them prioritize different lead sources? For example, when you have an event but you're sponsoring, but you also have leads coming your content or from your ads? Who do they go after first? Do you have a scoring system, or how do you have them prioritize?

Jennifer Durishin:

Right now, we're just having weekly calls, I just got off of one earlier today, just to say, "Okay, this is the focus. We just finished this, this is what's coming up next, these are the campaigns we're running. This should be the top priority accounts right now." We haven't formalized it with a scorecard, but we'll certainly be heading that way. Our team is not huge, so we can talk through it together. Like I said too, at some of these B2B SaaS companies, there's always more work to do and not enough time to do it. Prioritization is the name of the game.

Franco Caporale:

I have a few more questions for you, Jennifer. The first one is what are some of the initiatives that you're going to focus on for the next few months?

Jennifer Durishin:

Two great things. All of us in marketing are talking about AI. Obviously, our company uses AI in our products and services. But we as marketers know there's a lot of opportunity there. How do we leverage it to help us do more and go faster? One thing we know today is AI's probably just going to get better over time in a lot of these services. But help us to do that initial outreach, but we know it's not the final product, so we need a human in there to tweak it, and customize it, and make sure we all look like we're smart and done a lot of research. That's number one, just getting better about testing and learning in that space.

Then number two, I'm actually hiring an event and content marketing manager. If you know of any good candidates or anyone who would love to join our team, I'm hiring. Like I said, events is right now our number one lead channel, so really, really important role for us.

Franco Caporale:

What is one thing that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career in B2B marketing?

Jennifer Durishin:

In B2B marketing. The number one thing in a career, in a business career, I'll just broaden it a little bit, is always being networking. No matter what, even if you're doing great in a role, you want to make sure you're always reaching out. You don't want to just forget about people. You never know when your paths are going to cross again. It's maintaining your personal brand, making sure you continue to network, because that's how a lot of business gets done these days. I would say invest the time and the effort to make sure you're always networking, even a couple of times a week.

Franco Caporale:

Again, for the people that are at the beginning for their demand generation and B2B marketing career, what is one mistake they should avoid, in your opinion?

Jennifer Durishin:

I think the biggest mistake in B2B is that people say, "Oh, it's so different from B2C, we're not talking to consumers." Well, actually in B2B, we know at the end of the day, we're still selling to humans. Humans buy from other humans. We have to think about leveraging more of the B2C marketing tactics and pulling them over to B2B. I think that's going to make us even better marketers over time and help us grow even more. Don't minimize B2C in that space.

Franco Caporale:

I 100% agree. Jennifer, it was great speaking with you today. Thank you again for sharing your knowledge with The Demand Generation Club, I really appreciate it.

Jennifer Durishin:

Yeah. Thanks for much for having me, that was a lot of fun.

CLOSING:
That's a wrap for today's episode of The Demand Generation Club Podcast. If you're curious about how we're landing enterprise deals and unlocking millions in recurring revenue using account based marketing and integrated direct mail campaigns, check out our website, saasmql.com. That's S-A-A-S-M-Q-L.com. We share tons of content every week on tried-and-true strategic ABM initiatives that actually generate pipeline from enterprise accounts. Thanks for tuning in.