Sales-Driven SaaS Marketing Maturity Report Card

Sales-driven SaaS marketing maturity is critical to revenue growth. I’ve been in SaaS marketing since 2007 when we launched our first platform. As CMO, I’ve built capital efficient sales-driven marketing programs that delivered qualified leads to meet or exceed revenue growth goals. The path to that predictable performance was built on a foundation of principles and metrics that set and measure a relatively scientific and objective course. We’ve built SaaS advisory assessments and now, self-service tools to measure SaaS marketing maturity and make recommendations.

The self-services Sales-Driven SaaS Marketing Maturity Report Card tool is embedded at the end of this article.

About the Sales-Driven SaaS Marketing Maturity Report Card

Beacon9 SaaS Marketing Evaluation Lineage

The SaaS companies we work with at our SaaS advisory Beacon9 function at wildly different levels of maturity. And it’s clear that SaaS marketing maturity has little to do with scale. While working with a set of SaaS companies between $1M and $20M in ARR, we’ve formulated a pretty effective marketing assessment as part of our overall business evaluation. The metrics side of that assessment appears below. In addition to the quantitative assessment, we ask a series of conversational questions that discover underlying processes and systems. We then form a maturity assessment from the quantitative and qualitative. We make recommendations from there. Today, we’re giving Married2Growth.com readers a shorthand, self-service tool version of that process.

Sales-Driven SaaS Marketing Maturity Report Card

There are two kinds of SaaS customer acquisition. Sales-driven customer acquisition means there’s a sales team that closes deals. Self-serve customer acquisition means new customers sign up online unassisted. This Sales-Driven SaaS Marketing Maturity Report Card assesses the marketing maturity of customer acquisition that comes from a sales team. The Self-Serve SaaS Marketing Maturity Report Card will be released in the coming weeks.

The Sales-Driven SaaS Marketing Maturity Report Card pulls 16 questions together that let SaaS founders, CEOs, executives, boards, bankers and investors paint a picture of a marketing organization’s maturity and likelihood to scale predictably. Each question has three or four multiple choice answers. Each answer contributes to an overall score. But the more valuable aspect of the report card is qualitative. I’ve written roughly 50 helpful recommendations based on specific answers to each question. These are drawn from my experience running marketing and running SaaS companies. And, we give you a way to email yourself the report card, which makes those recommendations much more useful.

So please, use the report card to evaluate your SaaS marketing maturity all you want. It’s free and doesn’t require sign-up unless you want the results to be emailed. And as usual, we don’t share your email address or anything else with anyone. I hope you find the tool useful. And please let me know if you find any bugs or typos. It’s brand new.