We work with a lot of technology companies. These days, many of them are SaaS (Software as a Service) providers, one of the fastest growing business sectors worldwide. By working with these companies, we have learned about their challenges, and we design marketing programs for them to address those challenges and achieve their goals.
Most commonly, we find SaaS CEOs, especially in the early stages, are savvy about digital marketing tactics but often don’t know how to get started and what to invest. We wanted to help them with planning and budgeting, so I wrote an eBook to help CEOs make more informed marketing decisions.
There are specific, unique challenges to SaaS Marketing that derive from the main growth (and survival) stages:
In general, you want to achieve high conversion rates on all kinds of lead generation tactics in order to reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) as much as possible. High CAC is the great killer of SaaS startups, but without sufficient sales and marketing spend, you can’t generate enough revenue to get to break-even before the well runs dry. This is what David Skok calls the “cash gap.”
You also want to get to profitability as soon as possible so you can attract venture capital and stay viable in the long run. The trick here is to minimize churn and increase customer lifetime value through expansion of seats, upsells and cross-sells.
In the eBook, I tell the story of one of my favorite SaaS companies, Shopify. In a few years, Shopify has risen to market dominance in the highly competitive e-commerce space by doing sales and marketing right. It has largely pioneered the blending of digital marketing with live promotions and customer service to reach and engage its target customers, the rapidly growing small business market.
The most important thing Shopify has done is to focus everything on its customers and their needs. Everything from its website and channel partners to user forums and support communities has one theme: help customers grow their businesses.
There are plenty of great examples of SaaS companies using inbound marketing, content marketing and more to achieve their revenue goals and attract capital for growth. My hope is CEOs can learn from these examples and get to profitability sooner and with less pain. In SaaS Marketing for CEOs, I lay out a roadmap for success based on best practices innovated by Shopify and others. In the eBook, we talk in detail about:
I hope you will enjoy SaaS Marketing for CEOs and stick around for the conversations.
Best Regards,
John McTigue
