How 7 Experienced SaaS Marketing Leaders Evaluate Success
It's not universal. Everyone has a slight twist on measurement and goal setting.
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When you work agency-side, it’s easy to see that every company prefers metrics based on their own marketing philosophies, tools they trust or are willing to pay for, current project priorities, and what executives value.
To provide insights into this, we’re pulling in 7 conversations we’ve had recently with marketing leaders who currently work or previously worked in-house at SaaS companies of varying sizes and scales to see how they articulate their measurement and goal structures.
1) Emily Kramer of MKT1 - Like product teams, not sales teams
I think of marketing as being goal-ed on short-term and long-term revenue. You’re trying to help sales, or in a PLG motion, get product upgrades in the current quarter and prime the pump for the future.
A lot of times, when marketing only has goals on pipeline for this quarter or a specific time period, you’re missing a whole piece of what marketing does, which is to set things up for the long term.
So you have to have some goals around that [long-term directional goals]. For example:
Web traffic
Content views
Content conversions
I also think that marketers should have goals for projects and tests and things like that, too, because it’s not the same as sales and cannot be measured the same as sales which is “Did you hit your quota this quarter?”
Instead, it’s “Are you setting us up for long-term success in the future, improving full-funnel, improving conversion rates for sales and customer success?”
I think the best teams aren’t just measuring KPIs and conversion rate goals. They’re also setting project-specific goals and test-specific goals.
In some ways, it’s like measuring the success of a product team. Eventually, there are product engagement metrics, but until you get there, there are milestones to hit and shipping things to get beta testers into it. Sometimes you’re building products to be released next week, and other times you’re building the foundations for products set to launch next year.”
See the exact conversation at the 36:20-minute mark of this podcast episode.
2) Pius Chan of Lumen5 - Revenue and qualitative warm fuzzies
Revenue is definitely a big portion of that [measurement], but we want to drive the right type of revenue and the right type of growth.
How we achieve growth is important to us fundamentally. We want the right type of long-term sustainable growth with great customers who are happy to work with us.
When we look at success for our company, it’s really about helping our customers do what they wanted to do when they first came to us - whether they’re part of our millions of free customers or paying customers. That’s established by our leadership and our founders.
It comes from a place of first-hand experience with the frustration of making video content at scale.
One of the things we use to measure success is a channel in Slack called Warm Fuzzies. We all share happy customer stories, and it’s a good way to measure how we’re driving success.
See the exact conversation at the 25:00-minute mark of this podcast episode.
3) Amanda Natividad of SparkToro - Broadest applicable metrics + trends
We look at probably the broadest applicable metrics. We definitely pay attention to MRR and ARR. We have goals around ARR, and that’s kind of it. That’s the main metric. It’s the one that counts.
We make sure that everything we’re doing is in service to that.
Along the way, you can’t just look at success once a year. We’re tracking success generally across trends in a given way. Like, do I look at email open rates, yeah, I do. Does Rand or Casey? Probably not. But If I noticed those rates declining over a given time period, I would flag that with them.
The nitty-gritty of the daily stuff doesn’t matter as much. We try to zoom out and take a more holistic look.
You don’t have to know that 5% of our customers are converting specifically because of office hours so we should keep doing it. But if you’re able to understand over time that these office hours are causing churn, then of course your want to regroup on that stuff.
You’ll never get the perfect attribution. You’re better off understanding what’s resonating, what’s working, what’s not, what’s growing, and what’s not. Then make decisions from there [based on those trends].
See the exact conversation at the 31:00-minute mark of this podcast episode.
4) Jess Cook of LASSO - Laddering up goals, a repurposing multiplier, brand search clicks
One is we have a company-wide revenue goal. We have a shared marketing and sales demos-booked goal.
Then each person on the marketing team has an individual goal each quarter that we work with our manager to set.
Those individual goals ladder up to the demos goal which ladder up to the revenue goal. It’s a very motivating goal structure that allows us to actually grow the company and do the things that we need to do to hit our numbers.
In terms of how we measure content performance, we look at what is probably considered all the normal things like conversion rates, etc.
Something I’m really focused on this year, tho, is strategic repurposing which I’m calling the repurposing multiplier.
For example, tracking how many people listened to the whole podcast episode. Then, how did we use all that content, repurpose it, and what’s the multiplier or delta between those two things in terms of how many people consumed it? So in Q4, we saw an 11.5x repurposing multiplier, and we now can use that as a baseline.
Another metric I love to look at is branded search clicks in Google Search Console and trying to see, is the number of people searching terms “LASSO + [term]” growing? That’s the one I’m keeping an eye on and making sure more people are hearing the name, LASSO.
See the exact conversation at the 25:00-minute mark of this podcast episode.
5) Eric Doty of Dock - Experience + output volume
Right now, we’ve anticipated what would be the biggest challenge for me. That is going to be output in terms of being a one-person team. I’m going to be a bottleneck for things to happen.
When you set goals for yourself, it’s about guiding your behavior. So what do we want to guide my behavior? We want there to be a lot of output.
So to incentivize me, who overthinks things and takes too long to hit publish, our definition of success is how often are we publishing.
Especially because we’re in the first 6-months of our content strategy, it’d be a waste of time to look at the little traffic line. Yeah, our traffic line goes up every month and that’s great, but it’s not telling me much about how I should change what I’m working on.
So we define success by metrics like, did I publish 8 articles this month? Did I post on social 20 times?
If we didn’t have a strong gut feeling that we were doing the right tactics, then that could be problematic for someone else at another company. But we feel like we know what channels are going to work because we both have 10 years of marketing experience and have determined that output is currently the strongest indicator of whether or not we have success.
See the exact conversation at the 27:15-minute mark of this podcast episode.
6) Alina Benny of Aura - Revenue, paying customers, in-between content conversion milestones
[Speaking specifically to their SEO traffic that crossed the 1M+ per month milestone]
Like with any other company, it comes down to conversions and revenue for us as well. The way we see it is subscribers, enrollments, and customer acquisition cost.
Our goal is to convert 1% of the traffic we’re getting and to continue testing the in-between conversion milestones between someone reading a blog and becoming a paying customer.
Our cross-functional team members that specialize in conversion rate optimization then come in to help us set goals and priorities for what we need to slate for the next quarter.
See the exact conversation at the 25:00-minute mark of this podcast episode.
7) Tara Robertson of Bitly - Acquisition KPIs, brand awareness, and multi-product adoption
Everything is really KPI-driven. We use objectives and key results in the way that we look at the overall business.
There are the company-wide OKRs, and then each department ladders into them.
At the company-wide level, what we look at, first and foremost, is our acquisition numbers, which is our performance marketing – from how many sign-ups do we want for paid acquisition, how many sign-ups do we expect for our non-paid acquisition down to conversion like sign-up to paid acquisition. Those are your traditional marketing acquisition KPIs that we look at for brand.
We’re focused right now on starting to grow our brand beyond short links, and QR codes is one of the biggest and fastest-growing products in the market. We aren’t known as much for that. So we’re measuring success with brand around market awareness and starting to do aided and unaided reports that we’re looking at bi-annually to look at the overall growth around our paid acquisition.
And then, for product marketing, we’re looking at multi-product adoption as the number one metric specifically for product + marketing KPIs. This gives us insight into the stickiness and shows better net dollar retention
See the exact conversation at the 33:15-minute mark of this podcast episode.
Are you measuring marketing success in a unique way?
As you can see, every team has varying levels of complexity within their measurement systems that their leadership feels is necessary to understand the trajectory of the overall company.
From measuring things like output to repurposing multipliers or customer acquisition costs and multi-product adoption, we’d love to hear how your team communicates that marketing is doing a good job growing the company.
Feel free to leave comments below!
Additionally, I’ll be a guest with Mariya Delano on The Juice’s live event hosted by Brett McGrath next Thursday. We’ll be discussing earning content opportunities through relationship building.
