When B2B SaaS companies find themselves burning through capital on ad spend and marketing programs that don’t bring an ROI, they tend to increase ad spend to try and balance the bad marketing. The default is we need more leads for sales, without further investing what’s creating the bottleneck. But increasing ad spend on a bad marketing program will only further dig you into a hole, and accelerate your burn rate.
And currently, burn/runway is most likely the number one metric giving your CFO and the board nightmares.
Capital is much harder to acquire both through venture capital and general sales. So beyond the fact that pumping up ad spend to compensate for bad marketing is terrible practice, now marketers and the GTM team can no longer champion volume spikes as a means to drive revenue more effectively.
One of the first places B2B SaaS marketing teams should be looking to improve revenue isn’t an increase in ad spend, but a drastic improvement in targeting. Because a huge company killer isn’t a lack of pipeline volume, it’s a lack of pipeline velocity because unqualified accounts sit in consideration or fall out of the funnel because they were not a best fit account in the first place.
So here’s 5 Steps that you as a B2B SaaS marketer should take in order to uncover, refine, and improve targeting so you can create a profitable pipeline:
1. Talk with sales about accounts that are “stuck”
Your first priority here is to communicate with sales and uncover/define stuck (i.e accounts that are 30-60 days beyond average sales cycle). This gives you a visual into the pipeline bottleneck so you can look for key attributes.
2. Validate whether it’s bad targeting, bad sale practice, or both
We don’t want to assume blame on either side, we just want to know where the ball is being dropped. The fact is, both sides have major room for improvement. The question then becomes, “Which side can iterate and improve the fastest and with the least amount of resource deployment?” 9/10 it’s marketing who can iterate and pivot faster.
3. Talk with Customer Success about customer segments that churn the most + customer segments with the highest retention
You will gain a massive amount of insights from CS when you go through the poor performing and best performing customers. This will really give you ammo and info to dial in and refine your targeting. Try your best to find the trends as to why that segment churns (i.e budget, time to value too long, bad product fit, etc), and why the top performing segment stays.
4. Find an overlap between what’s reported from sales and CS
Take the insights you received from sales and overlay it with the insights you received from CS, and find key attributes of prospects that drag along the sales process and end up churning. Also find the key drivers of prospects with the shortest sales cycle and customers with the highest retention and satisfaction.
5. Cut the fat, refine the audience
Take those attributes of poor fit prospects and customers and exclude them from your targeting on Paid. Take the winning prospects and customers and tailor the language around what you found drove them to your company, and add those attributes to Paid. To put it plainly, increasing spend will only:
- Create more clog in the pipeline for sales with stuck accounts
- Attract more bad fit prospects because you may be resonating too heavily with them in your messaging and distribution
Disclaimer: What will really amplify your results is understanding intent signals, but I will save that spill for another Script.
Refining and dialing in on your true ICP will drive healthier, more fit accounts down the pipeline which in turn will cut down on sales cycle, and amplify revenue WITHOUT increasing ad spend.
Learn More About Evron
We position B2B marketers like you to source more revenue with less friction. With GTM roles shifting to the right, marketers are challenged with sparking up initiatives that drives sales ROI, and having data to back the results. Current GTM and Demand playbooks don’t help today’s B2B marketers optimize for revenue outcomes. That’s where we come in. We develop roadmaps and campaigns, execute demand and ABM tactics, and design creative assets to fuel revenue results.
Discover more about Evron at evron.io. Join the GTM and Demand convo on our socials: LinkedIn, YouTube, Tik Tok. Listen to The A2B Series Podcast on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.