Table of Contents
What’s Unique About Being a SaaS CMO?
Capabilities Your Fractional SaaS CMO Needs:
SaaS Metrics Understanding
Appropriate Top-of-Funnel Expertise
CRM Optimization & Report Automation Expertise
Strong Branding, Messaging & Communication Skills
What Kind of Personality Does Your SaaS CMO Need?
Should a Fractional SaaS CMO Also Be Your Creative Director?
Want to Meet a Fractional SaaS CMO?
For savvy companies bringing great technology to life, working with a SaaS Fractional CMO makes a lot of sense. You desperately need go-to-market strategy, but probably don’t have enough going on overall to warrant a full-time CMO salary, which can range from $150k-$300k+ before benefits.
This article is about marketing leadership requirements for SaaS companies specifically, which have their own unique challenges and opportunities.
You’ll find our set of great CMO interview questions applicable, but if you’re not a SaaS company, you may want to check our blog for articles more specific to your industry such as medical services or bank marketing.
What’s Unique About Being a SaaS CMO?
Software as a service became a strong business model once cloud-computing really took off over a decade ago. Investor interest in companies that can monetize this way has always been high because SaaS companies have recurring revenue and once product-market fit is found, have relatively low human capital costs. Relying on a ‘one and done‘ approach in sales and marketing can be a costly mistake, as it often overlooks the importance of nurturing long-term customer relationships.
Software developers are expensive but SaaS can be largely self-service when done correctly. And SaaS companies don’t have to worry about supply chain issues or disruptive macro-economic problems that other companies have to navigate.
But for the reasons above, the definition of successful execution for a SaaS company is perhaps clearer for a firm who might need a SaaS fractional CMO to lead marketing efforts.
And understanding the software development process is obviously critical. Someone coming from marketing physical products would struggle to get up to speed on requirements, wire frames, sprints, QA, and other nuanced pieces of how great software comes to life.
Capabilities Your Fractional SaaS CMO Needs:
Strong Marketing<>Product Communication Skills
A SaaS sales funnel starts with finding strangers who should care about the software and then working to get them into the product. Whether using SEO as top of funnel or an ABM funnel, the stranger becomes a prospect and then an actual user of the SaaS and that means a handoff has occurred…or does it?
Within the old way of doing things, you had two sides of the house in a SaaS company: R&D and The Business.
A Chief Marketing Officer, the Head of Sales (various titles), and their teams were all part of The Business.
The CTO, software developers, and the Product Manager/Product Owner were part of R&D. So for many SaaS companies run this way, the experience was very schizophrenic:
- Pre-sign-up, the company’s branding, messaging, and stated value prop was one way. Within the app, everything was different.
- The pre-sign up relationship-owner (sales) disappears. The support-implementation relationship owner may be saying different things.
- Features that were heavily emphasized pre-sign up, may actually be MVP (or NVP).
- Industries that are categorized as great fit are actually a poor fit.
The new way of thinking about SaaS is to treat the product itself as the company’s great marketing tool, so that means your Fractional SaaS CMO needs to:
- Be able to speak product language: features, bugs, tickets, product roadmap, prioritization, DAUs, etc.
- Be able to help the Product Owner/Manager with in-app conversion. Freemium only works if some users actually take the paid upgrade. Multi-module products need to land and actually expand.
- Use JIRA or whatever dev requirements and sprint management tool is in play.
- Share industry trends, what competitors are up to, what pre-sign up clients are saying, requests for features, etc. for future consideration.
- Be a strong voice in product strategy and product roadmap decisions.
- Be able to speak product language: features, bugs, tickets, product roadmap, prioritization, DAUs, etc.
Most importantly, your fractional SaaS CMO needs to be able to truly partner with whoever runs product. In a smaller company, it may actually be the CTO or CEO. Product and marketing leadership need to constantly challenge each other and set the table for each other.
Strong Marketing<>Sales Communication Skills
For complex offerings that require a sales team to communicate with clients, your fractional SaaS CMO needs to be great at supporting sales and extracting the intel that the rest of the company needs from sales. A good sales funnel consultant has the basic skills to be your SaaS CMO but would need years of experience in a company that develops software for this role.
If the CEO is not a seasoned sales professional, explaining what ICP in sales means, low-hanging fruit, and how one and done doesn’t work will be necessary.
Professor’s Note:
One and done meaning = putting a single touch on a prospect (with the expectation that a sale will occur). No conclusions should be drawn about new campaigns that only include a single touch as most prospects won’t even perceive it.
Low-hanging fruit meaning = The clients and revenue that can be acquired with the least amount of effort.
In modern, omnichannel go to market approaches, even a company using outbound communication as its primary top of funnel needs the rest of the company’s public-facing surfaces to support what the sales team is saying and reinforce credibility.
So keeping a positioning statement up to date via frequent check-ins with sales is a must. They are the team that talks to clients all the time and most likely to hear it first when market dynamics have started to change.
For companies that aren’t large enough to support a dedicated rev-ops professional, your CMO will likely own your CRM and need to provide the deal-level accountability reporting. Coffee is for closers, right?
And getting those changes voiced by sales is critical! But also hearing what objections are common, what prospects find appealing about competitors, and all the other intel that great sales people have in their heads documented so that marketing can address those issues with clients further up the sales funnel is critical for SaaS success.
SaaS Metrics Understanding
Any SaaS CMO needs to understand that the metrics really matter.
From a profitability perspective, cost of acquisition must be less than lifetime value. Ideally, much less so that margin can cover operating costs.
You can’t boil the ocean to get customers. Targeting the right audience will keep costs down and your analytics from becoming unwieldy.
Churn is how frequently acquired customers leave.
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and annual recurring revenue growth (ARR) are the other two metrics investors really care about. For SaaS products that have internal advertising or purchasable goods or services understanding DAUS meaning is tracking it is important.
And then there are all kinds of more granular metrics to track and hopefully improve like sales cycles duration and average number of touches, free-trial-to-paid upgrade for a freemium product, touch-1 conversion frequency while focusing on conversion rate optimization and many others.
Your SaaS CMO should be very comfortable tracking metrics and where needed, enforcing CRM hygiene so that the metrics actually mean something.
Appropriate Top-of-Funnel Expertise
Most people think of SaaS as predominantly a B2B play so your CMO needs to understand and be able to support ABM, PPC, SEO, Paid Social, Content, Partnership and other typical B2B funnels.
But what about Quicken, Tinybeans, Spotify? Well, if you’re B2C SaaS, your CMO had better be great at Organic social across all the Meta Products, and not just “doing social.”
Whether you’re going to use agencies or internal hires to manage your tops of funnel, your SaaS fractional CMO needs to be able to report on whether you’re getting what you’re paying for, and ideally help correct course via buy-in if required.
CRM Optimization & Report Automation Expertise
As already mentioned, metrics are critical in a SaaS company and your CRM is where those metrics live. As Scott Moss says, “Without an optimized CRM, SMB’s put themselves at a significant disadvantage in terms of operational efficiency, leads funnel management, deals pipeline visibility, and overall sales effectiveness – i.e. closing new deals.”
When HubSpot is properly optimized, the reporting gets updated on its own. But you have to have your digital tools configured correctly and your sales and marketing team using the tools properly.
Connecting Google Ads and HubSpot significantly improves your PPC intelligence as you can track your deals all the way back to the campaign in which they originated.
Strong Branding, Messaging & Communication Skills
Unlike Credit Union marketing where there are literally 1000s of competitors with basically the same product set, a SaaS company has the opportunity to create its own paradigm and choose what other products it chooses to position off of.
SaaS companies can be stressful. The rewards for being successful are immense. When things are going backwards, investors can get pretty upset.
Your fractional CMO needs to be really good at separating the signal from the noise and speaking the dialects of other people.
Sales, finance, and product people may be beating their chests playing CRO expert but your CMO should be able to politely acknowledge the ideas and then steer the thinking towards better solutions via the metrics.
An ability to lead from buy-in versus authority is critical.
An ability to get to the point quickly is also critical. After all, your CMO is not even working full-time for the company.
Especially for companies relying on inbound marketing, messaging skills are critical for shortening sales cycles but having a CMO who can also ghost write communication for your SDRs to use in their sequences is certainly a bonus.
Yes, you can build elaborate marketing automation to pick up the stragglers, but your CMO should be able to fix messaging across a sales funnel audit to get CAC down as much as possible.
Horror Story
A SaaS private cloud storage startup hired a first-time CMO with junior experience in a number of privacy-focused, European startups.
The approach to branding was to “look like the other privacy tech companies” and included a huge discount of over 50% on the retail price because “that’s what the other companies do.” Note: the other storage companies were struggling mightily as well.
This the opposite of how you want your fractional CMO to think. The focus should be on driving memorability, credibility, margin, and shorter sales cycles through becoming an iconic brand.
For more info on how to become an iconic brand, read our interviews with WMH’s Bill Harper and MailChimp’s Neil Bainton.
A Love for Research
Steve Jobs didn’t invent anything but he knew what was happening around him and was great at having it integrated/adapted to Apple’s products: readily available computer chips, Xerox’s visual interface, hard-drives small enough to power an iPod, Corning’s Gorilla Glass, internet bandwidth getting strong enough to support iTunes, etc.
Your CMO should be naturally curious and always looking at what competitors are doing, what vendors are offering to make go-to-market faster, what great ad campaigns are running, what news topics are important to the target personas and much more.
What Kind of Personality Does Your SaaS CMO Need?
SaaS can be stressful, especially if the company is not profitable yet or in a highly-competitive space. So an ability to absorb negative news and roll with the punches is required.
Your marketing leader also needs to be a synthesizer. A synthesizer is able to take in input from different tribes: clients, support, sales, product, finance, etc. and understand it, prioritize what matters, and come up with a logical plan of action. And then mostly importantly, make sure that all voices feel heard and understood. That’s called empathy.
Then your CMO also needs to be willing to hold people accountable with polite persistence. If the plan isn’t being followed, your CMO needs to be brave enough to attempt to solve the problem or escalate it to the most senior leaders who may have some hard decisions to make.
A sense of humor is a huge plus for this role. Being able to defuse tension and help people step off their soap boxes.
Should a Fractional SaaS CMO Also Be Your Creative Director?
No! It’s a common misconception that SaaS CMOs should also be the folks coming up with ad concepts, visual designs, video scripts, etc.
Your SaaS CMO’s superpowers should fall into the following categories:
- Messaging and branding (requirements, not the visual pieces themselves)
- Analytics
- Project management
- Research
Don’t expect your CMO to also be your graphic designer or write your video script. They should be able to clearly articulate to a creative what the requirements for the piece are: audience, value prop to be communicated, tone, etc.
And then after new marketing is deployed, use Hotjar (often misspelled Hot Jar), HubSpot, and similar tools to measure the gains.
Want to Meet a Fractional SaaS CMO?
At Sales Funnel Professor, we provide fractional CMO services to companies across the globe. With a funnel builder, you can create customized marketing funnels that streamline the process of turning prospects into loyal customers, optimizing each step along the way.
For those that need a broader scope of services, we also provide Head of Growth services, meaning leading marketing, sales, and operations as well.
With our teaching culture, we’re happy to help upskill your internal teams so that you eventually have a team member ready to step into your full-time Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, or Chief Operating Officer roles when your revenue supports it.
Boost your sales and streamline your marketing strategy with expert funnel consulting from our team of seasoned professionals.
Further reading: What is hotjar?
