How to structure your B2B SaaS marketing team
As your company grows, your marketing function will require different skills. Here's a framework for structuring your B2B SaaS marketing team.
If you don’t take the time to set up a strong Go-to-Market strategy and marketing foundation, you’ll never hit your growth goals.
As the leader of a B2B SaaS company, the pressure to grow quickly can be overwhelming. Many founders, CEOs, and revenue leaders are eager to get traction with marketing, looking to launch demand generation campaigns fast and apply an agile methodology that’s popular in software production, to generate quick wins, increase revenue, and grow their business.
But without a solid marketing foundation, this rush to market can lead to unfocused, ineffective marketing initiatives, paired with a lack of reporting & attribution that can feel like you’re just throwing money into a pit with no idea what results it will generate.
The key to scalable, sustainable growth lies in laying the groundwork first—crafting a robust go-to-market (GTM) strategy that is specific to your company, competition, industry, Ideal Customer Profile, and target personas and guides every subsequent go-to-market action for your company.
In this article, I’ll explore why setting a strong marketing foundation is crucial and how the upfront sacrifice will unlock strong and smooth growth for your company.
The clock is always ticking for results.
When the need for growth becomes more urgent and previous attempts haven’t been fruitful, it's easy to see why many CEOs push their teams to start demand-generation campaigns immediately.
Influenced by the principles of agile development, there's often a belief that the faster you move and test, the quicker you'll see results. However, this mindset can backfire if it’s applied incorrectly to marketing.
Marketing is a long-term muscle that requires careful planning and strategic thinking before execution. It also requires that you consistently run initiatives without expecting an impact on your bottom line for months or even quarters.
Without this strategy and perspective, you risk running campaigns that are poorly targeted, misaligned with your brand, ultimately ineffective and are a waste of time and resources.
I’ve seen this occur many times in B2B SaaS companies.
Founders and executives can easily find themselves stuck in a downward spiral that looks something like this:
At the heart of every successful marketing effort is a strong GTM strategy.
A GTM strategy is like a trail map for selling your product in the market. Without one, it’s very easy to spend far too much time wandering around, ultimately getting lost, and the potential to get eaten by a bear or cougar is pretty high.
But, if you have the right GTM strategy, the path to your destination becomes smoother, faster, and avoids many of the pitfalls and predators out there in the market.
This isn't just about tactics, though; it's about making fundamental decisions that will shape your company's approach to marketing & selling in the market. Successful GTM strategies balance what we at Kalungi call “Big M marketing strategy” with “Little m marketing tactics & execution”.
Big M marketing strategy focuses on answering big picture questions like:
Little m marketing strategy is much more focused on the “how” of day-to-day execution:
As important as little m marketing is (and it’s extremely important), it’s nothing without big M marketing strategy.
Big M marketing strategy focuses the efforts of little m marketing execution to ensure that the impact is driven in the right direction, focused on the right prospects, and with the right differentiation to make sure that all of the channel tactics are as successful as possible.
Many marketing hires and agencies are very well versed in “small m” marketing. They’re great at the tactics of Google Ads, running demand generation campaigns, writing blogs, etc.
However, without the overarching guidance of big M marketing, more often than not these campaigns lack a cohesive direction, only address one portion of the funnel, and lead to ineffective demand generation and capture, which hurt your business’s bottom line and growth.
Here are the key elements of your Go-to-Market strategy you must put in place before launching your demand generation campaigns:
Try this: Host a Go-to-Market workshop with your executive team and customer-facing employees to jumpstart your GTM strategy. Discuss your growth goals, ICP, Personas, competition, positioning, points of differentiation, and brand voice. Then document them. Then give your marketing team 1-2 months to set up the marketing foundation the right way, before applying pressure to generate results. While it may be painful to wait initially, it’s more than worth it in the medium-to-long run, as your growth will be easier, faster, and more scalable.
Agile methodologies have become popular in many facets of business, including marketing, for good reason. The idea of quickly testing and iterating is very appealing and can allow companies to ship and iterate quickly, resulting in products that can better adapt to changing customer needs.
However, when this is applied to marketing, we warn against relying too heavily on this approach without a solid foundation to give it direction.
Without a clear strategy, A/B testing and rapid iterations can lead to confusion, inefficiency, and wasted resources.
For instance, without the right GTM strategy, and marketing foundation, how will you know that the increase in clicks that you saw from a headline variation was from the right audience? Or that they’ll be likely to convert? Or that they aren’t just clicking and then bouncing off of your landing page?
As you can see, without the right research and strategy, it’s easy to optimize for the wrong factors, which can negatively impact marketing performance and can lead to a marketing team that is overworked but unable to positively impact real results.
Instead, testing should be used to validate and refine your strategy, not replace it. By grounding your tests in a strong strategic framework, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are both effective and aligned with your business objectives.
This way, you’ll be able to tie headlines to your messaging framework, which draws from customer interviews and is much more likely to resonate with your target audience (to continue the analogy from the above paragraph).
It’s also critical to have a specific hypothesis and goal in mind for each test that you do. For example: If I include an ROI stat in my website header, I’ll improve my CTA clickthrough rate because prospects will internalize the company’s credibility and the positive impact we can have on their businesses.
As for goals, make sure that you create SMART goals:
Here are some examples of A/B tests you can use to validate your GTM strategy:
Here are some A/B testing tools you can use, to help you conduct your tests and gain the most insights possible.
Always use testing as a tool to fine-tune your strategy, not as a substitute for strategic planning. Prioritize strategic patience—taking the time to build a solid foundation—over tactical impatience, and always have a hypothesis and result in mind when launching your tests that will help to move your strategy forward (not just your short-term results).
Finally, once you have a strong enough test result, spread the change to your other marketing materials and watch the results.
Keep in mind that testing is a game of small, frequent wins. Compounding one percent gains over time are much more impactful than a one-time 20% bump, so constantly test in alignment with your overarching GTM strategy.
Just watch the incremental improvements transform the results your team delivers.
One of the biggest risks in marketing is the tendency to become randomized.
Marketing is a function that is capable of supporting almost every department within a B2B SaaS company. As a result, it can be very easy for marketers to get spread too thin across too many priorities and work extremely hard to generate lackluster results.
Here are a few of the most common ways that marketing teams become ineffective:
The risk of this pitfall is particularly high when marketing teams lack a clear strategy. Without the focus provided by a strategy and clear goals, it's easy for marketing to become a "black box" where resources are consumed, but results don’t materialize.
A strong GTM strategy, paired with a specific set of Objectives and Key Results (or Rocks for the EOS fans out there) helps prevent this by providing clear direction. After all, a strategy is as much about saying “no” to the wrong things as it is about saying “yes” to the right ones.
With a strategic foundation, marketing teams can avoid getting sucked into low-priority initiatives and concentrate on the most important ones, ensuring that their efforts are aligned and their impact is maximized.
Try this: To maximize your marketing team’s impact Boil the Go-to-Market strategy that you came up with above into SMART, Quarterly goals for you and your marketing team. Check on your teams’ progress every 2-4 weeks and ensure that you help them stay focused on your strategic objectives and avoid the temptation to chase every new trend or idea. You can use frameworks like Objectives and Key Results or Rocks to help your team stay organized and focused on the right things.
Although it can take time to build, when you’ve completed a solid marketing foundation, the benefits are impressive.
A well-defined GTM strategy leads to more effective campaigns, clearer ROI, and better alignment between marketing and other departments, like sales.
Your team will have a clear direction, enabling them to work more efficiently and effectively.
You'll be better equipped to adapt to changes in the market.
Your campaigns will be more likely to succeed because they're rooted in a deep understanding of your audience and the market.
Moreover, with a strong foundation in place, your marketing efforts will be more efficient, generate higher quality leads that convert better down the funnel, and compound their impact with strong attribution data and coordinated testing.
You’ll be able to reap the benefits of your improved marketing efforts with the right assets built at the right place in the funnel, for the right target audience, and the right system to attribute, ingest, and hand off the right leads to sales.
This is the ideal starting point for marketing. It gives marketing the direction it needs and the aircover to get there with a strong GTM strategy and the right leading KPIs. It also puts the right system in place to measure marketing’s success and optimize its efforts, from the top to the bottom of the funnel.
It also equips marketers and executives with the data they need to make smarter decisions on where to invest vs divest in marketing channels and initiatives. And finally, it optimizes each channel to its fullest potential, resulting in real, repeatable, scalable, and ROI-positive growth for you and your business.
Invest time in building a strong marketing strategy and foundation. Then give marketing the space to execute on that strategy, while holding it accountable to the leading indicators of success. The long-term benefits of having a clear, focused approach far outweigh the short-term gains of rushing to market.
Rushing into marketing without a solid strategy is a recipe for frustration and wasted resources. By taking the time to build a strong GTM strategy, you can guide your marketing efforts, ensuring that they are aligned, efficient, and effective.
Ultimately, this sets up your B2B SaaS company for scalable growth and long-term success.
Brian works with companies to help them discover their marketing potential. Through high-level strategy and day-to-day management, Brian helps B2BSaaS companies scale their marketing departments the right way, enabling them to acquire the highest value customers, minimize churn, and drive ARR.
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