Vena’s Hunter Madeley on Driving Engagement in a B2B Subscription Business

Subscription Stories: True Tales from the Trenches

Vena CEO Hunter Madeley joins Robbie to share best practices learned working at multiple B2B SaaS success stories. They discuss when it does and doesn’t make sense to pull out another company’s playbook, how to onboard for engagement and loyalty in a complex B2B environment, and his concept of “methodology before technology”.

Highlights from this episode:

• 2:12 - Vena’s Forever Promise and business model
• 5:00 - The role community plays at Vena
• 8:29 - PlanToGrow.com - Vena’s hub for community engagement
• 10:09 - Using a “methodology before technology” mindset to improve the customer’s journey
• 16:27 - Making sure the software follows through on its Forever Promise to the customer, the buyer, and the user
• 19:23 - How Vena’s onboarding process begins before the customer makes the purchase
• 21:50 - Vena’s “time to value” metric
• 24:00 - Balancing the needs of the salesperson and the customer
• 25:13 - When focusing on revenue can be counterproductive to creating a Forever Transaction
• 28:19 - How to analyze data in a productive and unbiased way
• 31:14 - Robbie’s Speed Round

Hunter's Bio:

Since 2019, Hunter Madeley, a serial SaaS entrepreneur, has served as the CEO of Vena. There, he continues his track record of leading transformational growth at some of the cloud’s most important companies. Prior to Vena, he was at HubSpot, where as chief sales officer he led annual revenue growth from $80 million to $600 million in just five years. His 20-year career also includes sales and growth leadership roles at ADP and Salesforce.com.

Links:

• Hunter’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/huntermadeley/
• Vena: https://www.venasolutions.com/
• Robbie’s Book THE FOREVER TRANSACTION: https://robbiekellmanbaxter.com/the-forever-transaction/
• Robbie's website: https://robbiekellmanbaxter.com/podcast