The START Plan is designed for companies intent on building their first marketing function. After receiving growth capital, or your initial Seed- or Series A funding, you need results fast. You cannot afford to make mistakes, and marketing cannot be your primary focus. You realize it’s time to hire your first small marketing team.
Your CMO will use best practices, and templates for marketing calendars, budgets, website planning, positioning etc. to get going fast.
The Start phase will drive to at least one predictable, sustainable demand generation channel that has well understood ROI economics.
Turn your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with a few raving fans into Product Market Fit (PMF) with a larger group of paying early adopters.
Leads: Now that we know what good prospects look like, we get more of them. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) become a key metric.
In Start, your CMO will bring checklists, like the Trello board, and templates for things like a marketing budget, marketing calendar, and KPI dashboard – all proven and optimized for teams that are in the same growth stage as your company.
Start ensures that you don’t reinvent the wheel. It prevents mistakes that can be avoided. Start is 6 to 12 months in duration and includes the basic building blocks that every SaaS company needs to get its marketing function in place:
In each phase, the time the CMO spends with your team goes down by design. The first 3 months are very intense. Then the time-spend goes down gradually. During the last phase, it’s 25% of what it was in the first 3 months.
While the CMO-as-a-Service concept includes shared resources, it’s not a part-time engagement where your CMO would not be available at certain times. It’s important to state that your CMO is responsible for your marketing function (the team and the results) full time, 7 days per week.