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Ever watched a basketball game with a top-performing team? It likely had excellent defenders grabbing rebounds, a point guard passing to open shooters, and shooting guards hitting shots from almost anywhere.
Now, imagine a team with a bunch of gunners (players who love to shoot the ball). No one’s passing to open players and no one’s grabbing rebounds or blocking shots from the other team.
Not only would this be boring to watch, but it’s ineffective for winning games.
And it’s the same when designing your SaaS marketing team structure. Having the right players with the right skills on your team is critical to your business’s success.
Let’s explore what it means to have a well-structured SaaS marketing team.
There should be channel experts spearheading initiatives, while senior-level managers guide strategy (while still being hands-on). (Image: Adobe Stock)
A properly structured SaaS marketing team ensures you have team members who can manage the various parts of a marketing strategy.
Without these key members, planning and executing your SaaS marketing team becomes significantly more difficult.
“SaaS companies structure their sales team to have a fluid pipeline — from the initial touch point of a sales development rep to an account executive,” says Sam Yadegar, CEO of HawkSEM. “Their marketing teams should also have a funnel-based structure.”
Yadegar notes there should be channel experts spearheading initiatives, while senior-level managers guide strategy (while still being hands-on). Then everyone reports to a Director or CMO.
Not having the right team architecture can lead to miscommunication with marketing efforts. This could result in confusing the target audience, since there’s no unified approach to lead generation and sales pipelines.
Who you bring (or don’t bring) aboard your SaaS marketing team can be the difference between launching effective campaigns and stalling your growth.
Yadegar also believes that having a single marketing manager or director overseeing and managing multiple channels — such as PPC, content, and email marketing — is a big no-no.
“Instead, partnering with the right agency gives a concentrated effort to each channel,” he explains. “The internal in-house marketing manager can focus on strategy and business goals, while the right agency partner takes on digital strategy and execution. It’s also challenging (and costly) to build out your marketing team to have a dedicated member for each channel.”
Your B2B SaaS marketing team doesn’t have to be entirely in-house. Hire who you need to keep your business goals on track and outsource to an agency that can execute those goals.
A good SaaS marketing team structure should have dedicated teams and managers for each channel. For example, if you want to focus on growth, then you need a growth marketing team and manager. Or if you want to focus on content, then a content marketing team and content manager are necessary.
This works best because it ensures the manager has focused goals and their team has the skill sets to reach them. You can’t take a growth marketer and put them into an inbound or product marketing team and expect them to perform as well as they did on the growth marketing team.
With this setup, you have a lean in-house team doing the bare minimum to keep your SaaS marketing operations going. Then you save money by outsourcing PPC, SEO, and development to agencies, since this is something you want to scale up and down as markets and demand shift.
Since product marketing is the primary focus for most SaaS companies, we’ll delve into this further.
Software-as-a-service companies are selling digital products, so it only makes sense to have a team dedicated to promoting the heck out of it.
With a product marketing team, you’ll have people who understand your product and its users, so their messaging is on point and more likely to convert.
But who should be on this team — or better yet, how big should your product marketing team be? It depends on your budget and goals.
In a survey conducted by Swipe Files, 48% of SaaS companies have a marketing team of one to five people. And another 34% have no team at all (team of one). So it appears many like to keep their marketing team size lean.
But this doesn’t mean they do it all themselves.
The same survey finds 51% of SaaS companies outsource to one to three freelancers and contractors.
Surprisingly, not many are leveraging agencies to maximize their outcomes (which we highly recommend). Only 18% work with one to five agencies.
Should you be a part of the majority? Absolutely not. Partnering with an agency presents an opportunity to do what your competitors aren’t by scaling up your operations — whether it’s content output or advertising efforts.
Whatever in-house team size you choose, you’ll need to instill a hierarchical structure to keep everyone in order.
Before you hire your marketing team, determine what structure will work best for your business. The typical organizational structure in a large company will look a little something like this:
Who each role reports is clearly defined: Teams in each channel report to the manager of that division, and the division manager reports to the senior level manager.
According to the 2022 Product Marketing Report, over 65% of product marketers report to marketing. Another 16% report to product management. Makes sense to do both to align the efforts of product development and marketing with what’s happening in the product marketing department.
In this case, you want a more linear structure than a hierarchical one. For example, you’ll have a generalist marketing manager who can oversee the tasks of cross-channel teams. This may include a content marketer, web designer, user experience (UX) designer, copywriter, and SEO specialist.
Then as your SaaS company grows, you can use agencies and freelancers your marketing team members can leverage to maximize their efforts. They’ll need more hands on deck to push out more content, manage product and site optimization at a larger scale, and grow pay-per-click ad campaigns.
The marketing roles you hire for will differ based on the type of team you’re building. For instance, a product marketing team may have the following team members:
There’s no one way to hire for a product marketing team in a service-based business. Look at your particular needs to see what tasks must be performed and who are the best professionals to manage and execute them.
A successful SaaS marketing team should have a mix of skill sets tailored to the goals and objectives of the business. (Image: Unsplash)
Now, there are several ways you can structure your product marketing team in a SaaS business. For instance, you can structure your marketing team based on:
A successful SaaS marketing team should have a mix of skill sets tailored to the goals and objectives of the business. Based on the 2022 Product Marketing Report, this is the top skill to have: strong communication.
Roughly 82% believe communication is critical to building a successful SaaS marketing team. The survey also shows product marketing teams collaborate a lot with product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Then over 61% interact with colleagues 3-7 times per day. And nearly 20% engage with customers weekly.
So yeah, communication skills are crucial.
Your SaaS business is only as good as your marketing team. Without the right talents and characteristics, you’ll struggle with long-term success.
Your team members should also be adept at taking constructive criticism. In marketing, there’s a lot of experimentation, which means things won’t always go according to plan. Those who hold grudges or take feedback personally won’t thrive in a marketing environment, especially in a B2B SaaS company receiving dynamic insights from customers and analytics tools. Things move fast, so the ability to keep up will be critical.
Combining skills and characteristics will ensure you’re getting people who know what they’re doing and can play well together.
If you need help fleshing out your SaaS marketing team and filling in gaps necessary to grow your company, then let’s talk.
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