B2B SaaS Software & Affiliate Marketing Tips with Joran Hofman

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: B2B SaaS Software & Affiliate Marketing Tips with Joran Hofman
Host: John Wright
Guest: Joran Hofman
Published: Wed, 13 Sep 2023 01:47:00 +0000
Duration: 28:18

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: I think that's one thing I wouldn't do differently if I would do it again. Like focus on long-term growth channels or focus on like evergreen content or focus on things which are going to grow over time. That's something I wouldn't do differently. Like definitely focus on the long-term and not just a quick wins.

[00:00:19] Joran Hofman: I'm John Wright and you're listening to Affiliate BI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Staffster.

[00:00:30] John Wright: Welcome to the Affiliate BI podcast. I got a special guest here, someone I've been chatting with for quite some time. He is the host of Grow Your B2B SaaS Company, which I'm an active listener. I wait for his episodes to come out every week. And he's also the founder of Reditas, which is the software we're looking at integrating into our SaaS. So it's the full irony. Yuran, I'm going to pass it back to you to tell us a bit more about what you do.

[00:00:54] Joran Hofman: Yeah, yeah, we do. We do a lot, as you mentioned.

[00:00:58] Joran Hofman: Currently, I'm the founder of Reditas, basically in the affiliate management platform, purely focused on B2B SaaS companies.

[00:01:06] John Wright: So our goal is to help B2B SaaS companies go to review via affiliate marketing.

[00:01:11] John Wright: And how did you get into the space? Like what is your story of founding this company and getting into like not just SaaS, but something very specific that is a really interesting, unserved ease?

[00:01:25] Joran Hofman: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm trying to make a long story really short.

[00:01:31] John Wright: But I used to work at a SaaS, which was called Leadfeeder, called Dealfront right now. I got into that as a salesperson. So I did around like five to 10 demos a day. Then I became a customer success manager, same story, but then with existing clients, and they all asked me, this is a great tool, which tool should I use more? If you do that amount of demos, at one point you get sick of that question. So I decided to build a website, which is still called salesforcemarketing.co.

[00:02:01] Joran Hofman: And the idea was there that I'm going to list the best sales and marketing tools on that site, and then grow basically the organic traffic of it. I got it to 25,000 organic visitors per month at one point. So my idea was I'm going to lay on the beach somewhere and make money out of that website by going into affiliate marketing. So I joined all these different programs from all the tools I had on the site. And that was the moment I ran into a lot of issues. So with a lot of programs which I joined, I had to log in separately to their portal. So I had to figure out, okay, well, I need to sign up first, need to get approved.

[00:02:40] Joran Hofman: I need to get the link and then have to keep looking into am I actually making money or not? And then there's some bigger competitors now of Redditors where I had 15,000 clicks in a year and I did not make one sale. So on one hand, logging into different portals, on the other hand, where I had a tool, which did exactly what I wanted, but then the tracking didn't work. So got so frustrated that I decided to build my own tool basically.

[00:03:08] Joran Hofman: And skip the beach life while we're at it.

[00:03:11] John Wright: Yeah. Like I'm still working way too much. So I'm not laying on a beach on my end and making money like that. Awesome. Well, from the SaaS affiliates joining your network, what have you learned from them about this unique vertical of SaaS affiliation, obviously doing this yourself as a SaaS affiliate and also like B2B marketing and B2B affiliation?

[00:03:32] John Wright: Yeah, I think affiliate marketing within B2B is still pretty unfamiliar. Like people don't really know about it as much as they know from B2C. I think the way they look at it, because they hear a lot of things from the B2C side and then often like the negative overrules, I guess the positive sometimes where they hear, there's a lot of fraud of things going on.

[00:03:57] John Wright: I think they're unfamiliar with it. Plus they think like it wouldn't bring them what they are looking for. But in the end, when you actually explain them, like how it works and purely because we do it on CPA and CPS. So cost per sale, cost per action.

[00:04:14] John Wright: They don't give anything away until they actually receive the money themselves. And then they think like, hey, this could actually work. Then you see the mineship twist, but then they think it's a magic bullet, which it isn't either because it still takes time and effort to build it up. So I guess from going from unfamiliar to thinking like, okay, this is a magic bullet, and then of course making the next step to actually put the effort in. Like, I think that's a bit of flow our clients go through. Yeah. It's just the irony that both of what we have to do is market our own SaaS companies, and I'm sure there's a lot of similarities you see about what affiliates actually have to do and all the different things that can kind of

[00:04:54] John Wright: like you just copy ideas and copy lessons learned. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the end, it takes time, right? Like I always compare it with SEO. Um, like it takes time to build up things, take time to get it. If it is take time to get those affiliates to really start recommending you. But once you have it, the compounding effect takes into place. And then from there, you can actually, uh, grow it to the, to the place you want it to be.

[00:05:18] Joran Hofman: And as a data company that helps affiliate programs, deployed tracking tools. What are some of the features that your partner programs and your actual users in the network, the affiliates, they're wanting to see beyond just getting their basic stats and click and sales count and commissions. Yeah. I think like, um, I mean, what we currently offer is for example, like multiple multi-level tiers. So people want to get rewarded if they, if they do well. Um, I think like, for example, SaaS companies of course, want to see, is there any fraud going on with, uh, the affiliates taking into referrals?

[00:05:51] John Wright: But I think like what we're going to work towards. So, um, is basically showing affiliates, but showing SaaS companies what is doing well in the affiliate case, like which programs are converting well. Um, cause we have a lot of data, right? We know exactly how many clicks go to the, to the site, then how many actually convert it to a signup and how many signups actually convert it into a paid like it's simple conversion rate metrics. But at the moment we don't show them towards a free list, for example. So they don't know, um, they can only see the commission percentage and then we now show them the average revenue per account. But what if we show them also the conversion rates and then from there

[00:06:31] John Wright: they can decide, is this a program good for me to join or not?

[00:06:36] Joran Hofman: Um, so that's something like the more sophisticated affiliates want to see cause, um, they want to know what is converting could I spend money and time and effort into it? And is it actually going to deliver me money at the end?

[00:06:51] John Wright: Um, on the other hand, SaaS companies of course want to see, what is this person who it is, uh, they say they are and do they have the reach they say they they have. So like one point we're going to work towards as well is have them connect like, um, think like Google analytics, for example, to show the reach. But where is the reach? Is it, um, uh, do you say like, um, connecting with the ICP we have. So we're trying to, uh, grow in regions Europe, North America. Do they have traffic there and, and, and basically go from there. And of course, historical data regarding affiliates, like are they doing well for other programs?

[00:07:29] John Wright: Uh, what are their conversion rates or are they selling in the matter we actually want them to sell? So I think providing both of them, these kinds of metrics is just going to help, uh, to decide, uh, do we want to, to, to join or not and accept this affiliate or not. That's a good insight where it's a mixture of fraud on one hand where, you know, obviously the affiliate programs want to know who they're dealing with and to make sure that you're not agreeing to a deal based on what they said they had for traffic and then going full circle to having just better matching where it's a, yeah, you can do the matchmaking and have the affiliate join the program. But if it's not really good fit, it's all about everything from well, matching

[00:08:08] John Wright: products to matching different geos. And, you know, maybe you might have like a Spanish affiliate focusing on SAS tools and, you know, a Spanish focus, a SAS platform. So it makes sense to, to also do that matchmaking. Exactly. Yeah. Cause we have some, some clients who purely, for example, focus on Germany or have like a contest still in Dutch. So it doesn't make any sense to get an affiliate in from, from North America, which I was pretty easy to tackle, but when you buy textual information and then you can, you can check that. But if you actually use the data, it's, it's a lot easier. You can automate it and then it's just going to be smoother for everybody.

[00:08:45] Joran Hofman: What are some of the data stories of things you've learned over the past two years in launching and growing Reddit?

[00:08:52] John Wright: There's a lot of data. I think that's the first thing we learned. Like as soon as, I mean, we got more, more and more clients in, like there's a lot of data, which we capture. So we had to upgrade our database quite a bit. Like we're actually thinking of like completely separating it from the things we do within, within the app, just because like it keeps on growing, right? The more SAS companies we get, the more affiliates we get and the more clicks they generate and then from there, they're, they're called like referral events and then it goes into that. So especially watch this podcast, like there's a lot of data we can

[00:09:29] John Wright: leverage to actually show the metrics basically and show what is converting or not.

[00:09:37] Joran Hofman: Yeah. What else did we learn? I think, yeah, it grows exponentially, like definitely put limitations into place. Like one mistake we made is we sometimes allowed people to enter, textual fields like freely or like with country from or like super simple things, which I mean, it's, we think about this common, common mistake or like a super stupid mistake and we're now putting everything into place. Like we're limiting everything. So the reason why we're doing it so we can leverage the data later on, it's going to be unified, et cetera. So I think that's one.

[00:10:13] Joran Hofman: And then the third one, which like is our huge potential is there's a lot of room to start using AI or machine learning, I guess, to figure out, can we match affiliates with SAS companies automatically? So it can, because we have a lot of data and I do think we need to, to maybe get six months more of data to really figure out like what is working, what isn't, and then start leveraging it to, to help clients to get value basically. That's a great insight where I didn't create any AI questions for this attribute, but it's always nice to see it when it pops up because I mean AI is

[00:10:51] Joran Hofman: the hottest thing now and it's not going away, but I think you're right. I think the ways in which you can apply AI for what you do, for what we do, and for what affiliates do is almost never-ending. It's limitless.

[00:11:05] John Wright: Yeah. Yeah. And like I'm real practical as in, I'm not going to say we're using AI just because then we can say we use AI. I want to actually use it in a logical way where it drives value towards like our users. So that's why we're not, we don't have any features so far, which are going to leverage it because it needs to provide value. Like we're not just going to have it added for the sake of adding it. You mean not change your domain from getreditist.com, like getreditist.ai

[00:11:37] Joran Hofman: Exactly. Or say that we're AI powered or things like that. Like we'll wait until the perfect time where we can actually use it and make good use of it. And also not throw in the other buzzwords like blockchain while we're at it.

[00:11:51] John Wright: Exactly. Exactly. Next question are what are some of the lessons you've learned in growing your B2B SaaS that you think affiliates can learn that focus on B2C and what would some of those key takeaways be?

[00:12:05] Joran Hofman: Yeah, I think, I mean, the biggest lesson, like I made some pitch decks of course, and looked into affiliate marketing as a whole when we got started. And I think when you compare B2C to B2B, like B2C is a lot more mature, right? I think like what you guys are doing as well, you take things, you look at things a lot more in a mature way. Where we still, for example, the dashboard is pretty simplistic, I guess. I mean, not to downgrade our app, but we look at the main metrics a SaaS company cares about, which is like already really good.

[00:12:43] Joran Hofman: But I guess like when you look at B2C, the things you can do with everything within affiliate marketing, there's a lot more maturity going on. So I think that's definitely one lesson or one thing we keep looking at B2C side, just to learn things from there. And with that said, like also the potential, right?

[00:13:01] John Wright: A lot of money is being earned on both sides, on the B2C side, where I think B2B can still leverage it a lot more and a lot better, basically. Maybe like an open kind of.

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[00:13:55] John Wright: Discussion. We both have our own podcasts and I'm sure you know this very well that in the B2B space, B2B buyers, they go through maybe a different journey or I've read that they have to go through so many more touch points before they trust us. So we're building our podcasts to build trust so we can get our customers on board. And do you think, would you recommend that this is something that B2C space could use and leverage? I mean, you must see people that do B2C that have a podcast that's actually part of their main marketing traffic strategy.

[00:14:29] Joran Hofman: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, when you look at podcasts, like we are now getting good traffic on our podcast, for example. Like I think we just surpassed 10,000 plays almost like two weeks ago, where I think we're surpassing like 11,000 plays maybe in another two weeks. So we're growing it really nicely. So the brand authority indeed like is increasing just because we have high value guests and we talk about like top, but that also means is if we recommend something, people are more likely to probably check it out and try it out.

[00:15:02] Joran Hofman: So I would definitely say it can help people to convert clients into or convert into clients by using a affiliate marketing.

[00:15:14] Joran Hofman: I'm taking notes here. I think I should have you on as a guest every four weeks. So I can do this just for my own needs. It's pretty selfish, but it's a, no, it's the irony. It's, you know, we're trying to focus on what people have to do on the B2C side, but at the same time, I saw someone, I think it's Dustin Howes. He mentioned that this whole B2B affiliation space is really untapped. And I'm talking to probably one of the best guests that knows this in both building like a Reddit as well as actually having your own website that promotes sass schools. And I just think this is an untapped niche.

[00:15:50] Joran Hofman: And my experience personally is every time I've done B2B, it's been low competition. And do you think this will be low competition for the next couple of years or what's your take on the growth of this?

[00:16:01] John Wright: I'm going to call it niche, even though it's really big right now.

[00:16:04] John Wright: No, yeah, it is kind of a niche, right? Cause I think people don't know indeed if we're marketing B2B sass again. So there's definitely a lot of potential because depending of course, what a sass company allows you to do as an affiliate.

[00:16:20] Joran Hofman: There are some companies, for example, and we're adding that data attribute now in our system where we're going to show the affiliates if you can run paid ads. Because some affiliates run paid ads, right?

[00:16:33] John Wright: Almost no sass companies will allow you to do it on the brand name. We have one client, for example, who does, and they just reach 1 million ARR generated via affiliates just because they allow you to do it.

[00:16:47] Joran Hofman: And their philosophy there is that we don't have to hire a digital marketer. We know our customer acquisition costs, because we know we give away 8% for X amount of months. So it's an easy calculation for them and they don't have to invest money upfront.

[00:17:02] John Wright: But for example, if sass companies don't allow that, depending on brand name, which I think makes common sense because otherwise you're stealing traffic, organic traffic away. But if you allow it on keywords, you could actually, as an affiliate, you could also calculate, okay, well, how much money can I earn, I guess, to start generating traffic towards a sass company? What is their average revenue per account? How much commission do I get? And for how long do I get it?

[00:17:28] John Wright: Of course, I would probably do it for more established brands than the more, I guess, like early, early stage companies, because they probably still have to work out their conversion rates, but it's an easy calculation you can make as an affiliate and the beauty with B2B SASS is recurring, it's higher ticket priced, so in the end, the amount of commission you can earn is going to be a lot higher. Great. And the next question, which I kind of have a good idea because I mean, I've been talking to you about switching from our in-house affiliate software to using Reditas.

[00:18:06] John Wright: How easy is it to set up an affiliate program with Reditas, like using your software and what do the tracking tools look like?

[00:18:13] Joran Hofman: Yeah.

[00:18:15] John Wright: There's three steps. It can be done in two and a half minutes. That's the record at the moment.

[00:18:21] Joran Hofman: It was a developer, so that's, I have to give him that. But basically it's pretty simple. Like we need to have a tracking script on the site. So that allows us to place a cookie with somebody click an affiliate link. We need to have one line of code in the signup form, which allows us to capture the email whenever somebody signs up and then we want to connect with a payment processor and we have like native integrations with Stripe and Paddle, which are the most common ones used.

[00:18:48] John Wright: If that's not the case, then we have an API and then it will take a bit longer. But by having these three things, we would already be able to track the entire funnel, basically.

[00:18:58] Joran Hofman: Interesting. Now I'm going to use one of your own interview questions flipped around towards you, which is based on your experience in working with SaaS affiliates in your network, what would you say the tools and skills are needed to make 10K months of recurring revenue as an affiliate?

[00:19:16] John Wright: As an affiliate? Yeah, that's a good question. Like I think as an affiliate as well, like if you have already an existing network, it's going to be a lot easier because in the end, what you're going to do, right, is you're going to sell a software towards your network. Like that's kind of what is being expected.

[00:19:37] Joran Hofman: So like build an audience and rather sooner than later. So like the same we're doing with this podcast, it's a great way to start building an audience. Like I've seen other podcasts, people add a newsletter to it. So it allows you to also start promoting, for example, tools which are related towards the podcast you've been doing with a different guest. So I think like building your own audience, building your own, yeah, own to audience, that's definitely one.

[00:20:05] John Wright: If you don't have that, like a quick way, I guess would be to run paydas, but make sure you check the terms and conditions of the SaaS companies if they actually allow it, because otherwise you're spending money and then in the end, the commissions are being rejected. So definitely make sure you check things before you start doing that.

[00:20:27] John Wright: And yeah, what else? I think like having your own distribution channels, that's key. Like for example, with the Salesforce marketing website, it took me like a really long time to get to that 25,000 organic visitors per month. But once you get there, it's a nice position, right? You have money coming in from the ads you're running, for example, on the site, plus you have affiliate marketing income. So it allows you to keep scaling the efforts you're doing to grow the traffic again. So the beginning is going to be hard, especially, I mean, it's similar to SaaS company going from zero to 1K MOR, that's I think the

[00:21:04] John Wright: most difficult period and don't give up, keep trying things and see what's working and then start iterating and building on that. And going back to the site you built for listing different SaaS companies and being a SaaS affiliate, if you had to do that playbook all over again, would there be something you'd do differently? Would you include a podcast in that? And what are the little shortcuts you would do in having to rebuild that roadmap?

[00:21:32] Joran Hofman: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:34] Joran Hofman: I mean, how I did it, I think, which is a good way to do it is to do it when you're still working full-time or at least have a different source of income.

[00:21:42] Joran Hofman: So I first built a website, I think in Webflow and then in the end, I turned it to WordPress just because there's so much more optimizations you can do. Plus you can outsource a lot of things. So I was really good in outsourcing a lot of things. So I had my stable income, so I was able to put some money into place to actually have people do things for me. So to build a website, to write blogs, to add content, to kind of just, I guess, like make it as easy as possible for yourself so you can think of new ways to do things.

[00:22:17] John Wright: What I would change at a newsletter, like more quicker, I guess, because it was a really nice way to build an audience and to keep them engaged with the site. Because otherwise they would only find you when they're searching for something.

[00:22:31] Joran Hofman: A podcast could definitely be a good one. Like, again, like the traction we're now getting on our podcast, it's really nice. Like, I wish, I guess, I did it sooner. And like, as soon as you get into this nice vibe, you can actually leverage other people's network to get visibility to the things you're doing, basically. So I think that's the other thing, like leveraging other people or partners or websites more and more, like you see it a lot, right? Where people have like a certain batch on their site you earn from G2 or

[00:23:10] Joran Hofman: TechPond or any other review site, but that's good for both of them. Because they both get visibility and they both get more traffic. And often there's a backlink behind the button. So it's even better for the review site. So I guess there's a lot of things, but like own media, like make sure you own your own channels, distribution channels, make sure you leverage other people's network, it's just going to kickstart things and try to like outsource if you can, when you're working full time, try to outsource as much as you can. Because then it allows you to do other things again to grow it quicker. Yeah, I'd agree.

[00:23:48] Joran Hofman: I would even add going full circle back to the podcast stuff that the whole take on it is that when you do these podcasts, you develop a connection a lot stronger. I mean, we've been chatting for quite some time and I joined your podcast. So it gives us the opportunity to say, hey, when do I have an opportunity to send a lead your way? And we know that kind of goes both ways. And I think by having our own podcast, that gave us the chance to build our own network, and I think that's probably the more powerful takeaway where in affiliate marketing, you usually have to go to conferences to start building your network, but that's not always easy to do. Whereas with a podcast, if you're doing a weekly, you're forcing

[00:24:27] Joran Hofman: yourself to get that weekly connection. And I don't know what your experience has been. I'm probably sure it's the same, but for me, it's been beyond valuable.

[00:24:36] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:24:37] John Wright: Likewise. And I think once you get into a good flow and you have like a good level of guests, then it's also easier to keep leveling it up basically, right? So, and then it's just going to kickstart everything once more. So if you provide them everything they need to promote at a podcast show, the things they've said is just also going to allow you to leverage, leverage their network more and more. Plus build that relationship a hundred percent. If you're an hour long on a call, talking about the things you love, then it's a connection there already. And we're obviously, it goes without saying you're producing as content that

[00:25:16] John Wright: sits there and pulls more people in and wins you trust in all the other benefits that come with it.

[00:25:22] Joran Hofman: Yeah, exactly. I think that's one thing like I wouldn't do differently if I would do it again, like focus on long-term growth channels or focus on like evergreen content or focus on things which are going to grow over time. That's something I wouldn't do differently. Like definitely focus on the long-term and not just that a quick wins. Going full circle back to the very beginning of where you started off working in customer success, do you think some of what you've learned in the past as well as what you have to do today with your SaaS in terms of customer success are things that you could apply to B2C or do you think it's more in the B2B realm?

[00:26:02] John Wright: Can I apply to B2C? That's a tricky question because like my knowledge, like especially my things I've been doing are purely B2B. Like I think if I maybe say like what I'm focusing always is on the end value. So I guess like we're doing things, right? Like we're helping, for example, setting up an affiliate program for B2B SaaS, but they don't want an affiliate program. They want revenue. So for example, what we do is we charge them based on the revenue they're getting by the affiliate program. More revenue, the more they're going to pay us, but that's the value, what they signed up for using ReadyTest. So that's what we're going to charge them based on.

[00:26:41] John Wright: So I think if you convert that into B2C, that's always a good practice, right? But it's a bit more trickier because it's not always recurring. It's maybe one off. Like what is the actual value they're getting out of it? So that's that is going to be more trickier for sure. And last question, what do you see is the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence?

[00:27:03] Joran Hofman: Yeah, I think what I said before, as in matching affiliates and SaaS based on data, like when I look at, I guess, like my niche, right? B2B SaaS, like I think they're both looking to grow their revenue, but sometimes they just have to find each other. So I think like for us, when we look at the data we have, like we're able to start matching them at one point based on all the data points and based on all the things they provided us. So I think that's definitely one.

[00:27:33] John Wright: And like for ourselves as well, like often when you apply to a program, you still have to fill out all these textual things.

[00:27:40] John Wright: I think that should be gone at one point where you're going to trust data more than actual textual answers.

[00:27:47] Joran Hofman: So again, coming back to matching them, because if you can trust the data, you can automate a lot of things more. So you can auto accept people if they meet certain criteria, like do they have a domain authority of 30 plus? Do they actually have the traffic they say they have? Do they have the same network you're looking for? So I think that's going to be key. And from there you can build like partner profiles, SaaS profiles. It's yes, so much fun in data coming up. Awesome. Uran, thank you so much for doing this. How can people get ahold of you?

[00:28:22] John Wright: I mean, I think I'm still the only one on LinkedIn called Uran Huffman. So if you search on that, just connect with me and happy to connect. Awesome. I will put that in the show notes as well as links to your site and a couple of social media profiles. Thank you so much for doing this.

[00:28:38] Joran Hofman: Well, thank you for having me, John.

[00:28:41] John Wright: Thank you for tuning in to the affiliate BI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. That helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners.