After weeks (or even months) of searching, you’ve found the ideal candidate to fill a role on your marketing team. You’ve both signed the contract, and they’re starting next week. At this point, a lot of CEOs and marketing leaders breathe a sigh of relief. The position is filled; their job is done.

Only, your job isn’t done once the new hire starts.

Even with the most thorough hiring process and the most suitable candidate, a lot can go wrong in the onboarding period. If you don’t start off a new marketing employee’s tenure with your company the right way, you’ll likely see:

• Unengaged and unmotivated employees
• Fragmented team
• Missed targets
• Rapid employee turnover
• Low ROI on your hiring investment
• Limited or even negative Marketing-led growth

Investing time and resources into effective onboarding is in the interest of the business, the marketing team, and the individual employee.

Of course, every company, team, and individual will need...

This post was originally published on the Crownpeak blog.

Everyone wants to scale Marketing, but doing so without the right data framework in place is a bit like playing roulette with your budget. 

Many marketing departments allot their budget based on engagement stats, MQL numbers, or even just gut feel, and cross their fingers that those choices pay off. Maybe you guess right and invest in the right space, but maybe you don’t.

Alternatively, you can use data to connect Marketing to revenue and build a predictable engine that allows you to invest more dollars with confidence. The right metrics will give you hard evidence of which campaigns are working and which ones are not. With this information, you can determine where to allocate your budget and track the success of those investments.

To connect Marketing’s actions to revenue and get clarity on where your marketing dollars are going, you first need to track the performance of Marketing-generated leads from the...

Whether you're building a marketing team from scratch as your company scales, replacing a team member, or restructuring a newly integrated function area, growing a marketing team comes with plenty of challenges:

• Do you have enough budget to hire for all the roles you need?
• Does your team have the best possible structure?
• Are you looking for the right skillsets? 
• Can you find qualified candidates?
• Can you merge new hires into your team?

From helping dozens of SaaS companies build better marketing teams, we've put together a toolkit of templates that addresses these challenges.

In this toolkit, you'll find:

• Marketing team structure deck
• Marketing team job description templates
• Marketing onboarding checklist

Fill in the form below to download the toolkit now, or read on to learn more about each template. 

Marketing Team Structure Deck

It's easy to default to just replacing employees who leave or adding more marketing assistants to increase...

Fractional or interim CMOs are a common choice for startups and small businesses that can’t yet afford or don’t yet need a full-time CMO. In the earliest days, many businesses don't have 40 hours of CMO-level work each week, and fractional services can be a way to get the benefits of CMO experience for less than the salary of a full-time employee. However, this is just one situation in which fractional CMOs can help. 

Have you considered what a fractional CMO can offer to established enterprise-level businesses?

While some fractional CMO services focus on covering the basics for small businesses, others are designed specifically to take successful businesses to the next level.

So, is a fractional CMO the right choice for your business? What can they offer that you won’t get from a full-time CMO?

In this article, you’ll learn:

• What the term “fractional CMO” really means
• Why so many businesses are looking for fractional CMOs
• ...

You can have the best marketing team, the most creative campaigns, and an incredible product-market fit, but if you don’t have the right budget to power your marketing, your efforts will fall flat.

Many businesses aren't spending the appropriate amount on marketing to hit their targets. There are several reasons why this might be the case for your business—including not knowing if your spending is in line with other companies of your size and vertical. 

You might have heard various percentages of revenue or total budget suggested as the average amount to spend on marketing, but the reality is more complex. The amount businesses spend on marketing depends on their vertical and the company size.

This benchmark report shows how companies are spending their money on marketing. The raw data is drawn from Deloitte's CMO Survey 2021 and Gartner's Annual CMO Spend Survey 2020-2021. We’ve organized it so you can see at a...

If your business is considering bringing in an external marketing consultant, it's likely that the in-house marketing leaders will have (and should have!) a lot of questions. These questions might include:

Will the benefits Marketing sees actually warrant the time and expense of the engagement? 

Does the consultant have the relevant experience to understand your business and give valuable insights?

Will they work with your team to make changes, or will they just hand you a list of unrealistic recommendations? 

At How To SaaS, our team is made up of marketing professionals, and almost all of us have been in this position. We've asked these questions, and we've often been frustrated by how vague some consultants are in their answers. 

We want your experience with How To SaaS to be different. To help you get a clearer picture of what working with us means for your marketing department, this article covers what you need to know: 

• What a How To SaaS...

“We were on a hyper-growth trajectory and going through multiple acquisitions a year,” recalls Lacey Ford, former Senior VP of Marketing at insightsoftware, a financial reporting solution provider. After 14 acquisitions in the space of just a couple of years, "what we needed was to build the foundational elements to scale the business as quickly as possible,” Lacey explains. 

From a marketing perspective, there were three fundamental areas insightsoftware needed help developing: getting the team structure right, building the data infrastructure, and scaling the demand gen engine. 

Read on to hear how Lacey and insightsoftware managed to: 

• Pick a consulting option that balanced strategy and implementation
• Scale inbound lead generation to 2x
• Uncover areas of over- and under-investment in marketing
• Build a marketing team with the skills to support their growth
  
  

Choosing the Right Consultant

Lacey started looking at various consulting options...

Increased price transparency helps everyone win.

• Customers win because they can self-serve and identify if a solution is a good fit for them.
• Sales wins because they have conversations with more qualified prospects who understand what they're in for.
• Marketing wins because all MQL thresholds include price education earlier in the buyer journey.

Most importantly, efficiency increases because far less time is spent on having customers jump through hoops to get a pricing 1-pager that they cannot afford.

Even if you're a B2B enterprise company with a $100K offering. Boldly put your starting price point on a pricing page for the world to see.

Your whole Go-To-Market motion will improve and your buyers will trust you more.

Most PE-backed businesses aren't getting the full value from Marketing as a growth lever.

To start changing that for your portfolio companies, take a look at Shiv Narayanan's new book, Post-Acquisition Marketing: How to create enterprise value in the first 100 days. Here's what you'll learn: 

One of the key areas the book covers is how to effectively shift Marketing's accountability. Below is an excerpt from Post-Acquisition Marketing that reveals:

• Why Marketing's current accountability is stalling revenue growth
• The data Marketing should be tracking
• A real-life case study of a business that made this switch

Shifting Marketing’s Accountability

“I need to know the truth, and I need to know it fast.”

Those were Henry’s first words on his first call with me, shortly after Fleetsync, his fleet-management software company,  was acquired by the private equity firm North Star Capital. 

Henry was...

“One of our biggest challenges was the fact that our entire lead flow was single-channel,” David Setzer, Founder and CEO at Mailprotector explains. “We work in a community environment, so it's a very event-driven lead flow. That was working great, but after raising our series A, we needed to expand the inbound lead channels to more than just relying on one channel. It can be cyclical at times, so being able to have a consistent lead flow and also tap other potential partners that aren't at events or in these communities was just absolutely critical for us.”

With their new funding, Mailprotector was poised to grow. But they had been playing zone defense on marketing, and they knew they needed some support here to help them build their pipeline in a data-driven, scalable way. 

David first met Shiv Narayanan, Founder and CEO of How To SaaS, at a private equity entrepreneur event. He soon realized that they completely aligned on their philosophy of the...