I see this sort of headline and have a visceral reaction, but this time it wasn’t justified (woot). Some thoughts: > I once joined a company as a consultant -

I see this sort of headline and have a visceral reaction, but this time it wasn’t justified (woot). Some thoughts: > I once joined a company as a consultant - in the previous 12 months, they'd spent their entire $1,500,000 marketing budget on Google/Facebook ads. Using Hubspot we could track leads through the funnel and look at exactly how many customers this money had generated. The answer was 0. In total, the ads brought in two leads to the website who never even booked a demo for the product. For $1,500,000. I would posit that this isn’t entirely true. This is what Hubspot saw, but ( unless they’re doing really scaled Account Based Marketing) they’re going to miss non-click signals in the funnel and misattribute results. I’ve done a ton of B2B SaaS marketing over the last ~18yrs and most (>70%) of the marketing ROI comes from reaching your target accounts at scale - and they never fill out a lead form. Instead they respond to your sales team that has already reached out, resulting in sales taking the credit. I’ve quantified this effect several times now with a number of companies so I’m quite confident in it. That said, it doesn’t mean the company he cites was doing great - far from it! They definitely needed to get their house in order and spending $1.5mm was clearly not the right path. Was it zero effectiveness? Unlikely. Was it really effective? Absolutely not. > But how do you know if your business is ready to invest in marketing? To answer this question, you'll need to understand if your company have some form of product market fit - PMF. Agreed. I typically warn clients that are early on in their growth journey to focus on product led growth, start a referral program (I end up doing that a lot) and get their organic growth in order. Paid ads should be an amplifier on a strong foundation, not the foundation itself. > If you don't have any PMF, don't invest money in marketing - you might end up like the examples mentioned in the introduction. It’s less about not investing and more about being smart. Referrals are great and low cost, investment in SEO early on - those are where to put the energy. They are great ways to accelerate your path to product market fit without burning excessive cash. > How did we arrive at this number? As a rule of thumb, the pipeline in startup SaaS businesses usually comes from: > > - Marketing: 40% > - Cold-outreach/sales: 40% > - Partnerships: 20% Just like my own experience with the ratio of B2B SaaS conversions from leads vs. sales outreach through paid, be very careful here ascribing a rule of thumb to your business. I’ve seen companies with very different mixes of sources, all very healthy. Your business may see greater opportunity from marketing and nearly zero lift from sales, so don’t assume this is a metric to shoot for. Overall, I enjoyed the article and I’m glad to see that despite the clickbait-y title it was a more levelheaded read.