There’s one key area of the PE due diligence process that most firms overlook: marketing. 

Assessing a company’s marketing before an acquisition can give you critical insights into whether or not the business has a healthy long-term prognosis.

How big is their TAM?

What is the lifetime value of a customer compared to how much they’re spending to acquire one? 

Are the assumptions included in their financial forecast based on historical data? 

Answering these questions can help you get a better understanding of the financial health and future prospects of the company you’re considering acquiring, but they’re ones that many firms fail to consider – or don’t realize that marketing can even impact. 

Given the cost associated with making a bad purchase, both financially and in terms of the time devoted to an investment, it’s well worth reviewing these questions prior to proceeding with an acquisition. 

If you can...

How do you scale paid media to drive more pipeline? How do you think about it in a framework that lets you build scale and grow the business faster? 

This post won’t get into tactical details and specific plays, or examples of plays other companies are running - that gets too much into the nitty gritty. Instead, we want to give you a framework of how to think about the problem, how to implement this in your company, and the principles that are almost evergreen, regardless of where you are.

We'll cover:

• The process to scale
• Auditing current spend
  
  • Overall spend
  • Channel analysis
  • Campaign analysis
• How to optimize, reallocate and scale
  
  • Analyzing total potential spend
  • Reviewing total spend by funnel stage
  • Reviewing channel spend by funnel stage
• How to identify new channels and campaigns
  
  • Building a roadmap
  • Budget allocation
• Testing and collecting results
• How to adjust budget allocation
• FAQs

Process to Scale

There’s a five-step process when we're...

Content teams often end up with a load of different priorities from the business. Depending on the complexity of a company, this can be a pretty big challenge to navigate.

There are a ton of tactical resources out there - for example, on building out a good SEO roadmap, diving into specifics like keyword research and prioritizing based on keyword difficulty. But in this post, we're going to focus on the strategic side and the preliminary layers that help you figure out where content should focus its attention, resources and overall strategy.

A lot of the frameworks and models we cover here will apply to the majority of businesses, so you can apply them to your particular business and find the best way to think about content roadmaps and strategy for your users.

In this post, we'll cover:

• 9 roles content needs to play
• The right order to create content
• Challenges content teams face
• The solution
• A method for prioritization
• Creating a consolidated content roadmap
• FAQs from the...

It's a question a lot of our clients ask us: what does your marketing team need to look like for you to maximize the value you're capturing?

There’s no quick answer here: depending on where you are as a business, the answer is going to look different.

In this post, we’ll walk you through a framework for building the right marketing org structure for your particular situation.

4 considerations when structuring your marketing team

The realities many organizations experience are that:

• Marketing teams are usually small and mighty. They're usually in charge of a lot of items, projects, tasks, initiatives, and large revenue targets. 
• Aggressive growth targets are being set by the board or by the executive team. There isn't nearly enough bandwidth to execute on what's needed to hit those targets or do all the activities you need to take the company where it needs to go.
• At the same time, there's an inability to get approval for more budget for additional...

If you’re considering bringing in a marketing consultant, you’ll likely be wondering: Will you actually get the results they’re promising? Is what they offer the right fit for your team? And will you get a good return on your investment?

There are four concerns we often hear from people in our pipeline - including many companies that go on to become customers (in some cases, several times over):

1. Will a consultant really add value?
2. How well will they work with my team?
3. Will this reflect negatively on my marketing department?
4. Can I justify spending on a consulting engagement?

Below, we’ll take a closer look at each of those questions and explain our approach to these challenges, plus you’ll hear from some of our customers about their experiences in each area.

If you’d like to learn more about how How To SaaS engagements work, you can read all about our process and perspective here. 

1. “Our marketing is...

Are you under pressure to deliver more (and better) sales pipeline, but aren't sure how to get more of the right kind of leads through the door?

In this post, we'll cover the core framework we take our clients through at How To SaaS to scale marketing and demand gen. You can use this approach to think about marketing for any company - a lot of the concepts you'll learn about here are first principles. By the end, you'll be able to apply this framework to your particular business.

We'll cover five sections:

1. Market forces and dynamics at play that lead to the impact marketing needs to make inside organizations. 
2. Company dynamics and how to apply these principles for your specific scenario.
3. Demand generation and a framework for prioritizing your demand gen roadmap that you can apply to basically any business. 
4. A step-by-step process for using data to scale up demand gen for your business or product line.
5. Frequently asked questions...

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

• Do you have enough budget to hire for all the roles you need?
• Does your digital marketing 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 digital 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...

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
• How a fractional CMO works
• Why so many businesses are...