Congrats. You’re officially the new head of marketing at a SaaS company.
You might be in your first marketing leadership role or in your second or third role as marketing leader, only at a different startup. Whatever you’ve inherited (tech stack, CRM instance, content strategy, ad campaigns, reporting structure), you know that you’re going to have to make some big improvements quickly.
The clock is ticking, and expectations are extremely high (as eMarketer puts it, more marketing is tied to revenue goals even as the ability to track marketing impact has declined).
In my work with dozens and dozens of high-growth SaaS companies, I’ve seen tons of leaders come and go – even among big, relatively stable companies who aren’t operating at the breakneck speed of a startup, CMO tenure has dropped to 3.1 years.
I also know the process of the ones who have gotten real, positive traction in their first few months and translated that into long-term growth.
Here’s what that process looks like.
Understand your foundation
Chances are, you’re going to step into a lot of pressure to drive immediate results. Resist the temptation to make big decisions and investments until you know your organization’s landscape.
Get a handle on everything that’s happening: ops, campaigns, tech stack, measurement. Figure out who owns it and any big projects and results that have happened over the past 6 months. Zoom out to assess the team’s achievements, investments, and challenges over the last two years, but don’t bother going back beyond that; anything older than that was done in a different marketing world.
In other words, spend a week or two, maybe three, and figure your sh*t out. Just make sure you’re clearly communicating your research, findings, and next steps with your executive team along the way.
Shore up your measurement
Once you have a handle on your environment – pros, cons, and opportunities – do not start new paid campaigns. Do not launch a brand campaign. Don’t overhaul your content strategy.
Instead, go straight to your reporting.
What are you using: HubSpot? GA4? Segment? Amplitude? Whatever it is, can you actually trust it?
Can you see where users are coming from, what they’re doing, where they drop, and if they ever turn into money? How are you defining MQLs? Are you actually tracking all the pipeline stages, lead sources, etc.? What’s broken? (Hot tip: something is always broken).
Also, do you know what your AI model attribution looks like? Are you tracking AI citations?
As of 2025, this is a very important addition to your measurement checklist (by the way, your agency should be able to offer AI measurement tools at pass-through costs – if they don’t, hit me up to get our agency discounts).

Research your power users and product metrics
Dig in.
Where do your best customers come from? What channels? What content? What steps did they take before becoming obsessed with your product? How does your product improve their day?
Look into product marketing metrics too. Where is the drop-off in your product funnel? Where are the drop-offs in your marketing funnel? Are there traffic sources that drop off in product more than others?
Get uncomfortably granular here. Beyond identifying high-priority opportunities to improve, look for growth patterns: basically anything you can repeat, automate, or amplify. That’s your playbook now.
Audit and adjust your lifecycle marketing
SaaS leads rarely convert right away, and they don’t convert themselves.
If you’ve got people signing up for demos or trials and you don’t have a multi-stage follow-up process in place, you’re leaking revenue.
Do you have onboarding emails? Sales handoff alerts? Lifecycle stages that make sense? If someone ghosts after trying your product, do you just let them go?
When you’re reviewing your lifecycle approach, don’t forget retention. SaaS is recurring revenue; you win by keeping people.
If you’re not providing value to your users by teaching them how to optimize your product, proactively reaching out to give them a resource to answer questions, and giving them heads-ups about new products about to come out, it’s not the right time to spend on acquisition.
If your team is already good at those things but hasn’t invested in a referral program, you have an opportunity to turn happy customers into more happy customers.
Audit your website (you knew this was coming)
Your site, like your measurement set-up, almost certainly has room for improvement.
Where are users dropping off? Is the messaging clear? Is your value prop actually about the customer or just a features list? Are CTAs working? Is it clear on each page what you want the user to do?
Find the issues, then clean them up. Remember to communicate clearly and directly; SaaS buyers don’t have time for puzzles.
Go deep on content and SEO
Audit your blog. What’s ranking? What’s dying? What’s sitting deep in the archives that needs to be refreshed? Do it. Fix your internal linking.
And yes, assess how your content is showing up in AI-generated results and spot the patterns for the content that’s got traction there, then apply those patterns to your other important topics.
Get critical about your paid campaigns
I almost guarantee you’re spending money where it’s not doing your bottom line any good – and when I say that, I don’t mean you should just cut brand campaigns.
Put your channels through a ruthless analysis – in channel silos and in measurement how incremental each channel is in your bigger picture. Then cut and reallocate.
Start marketing for growth
Once you’ve patched the holes and you’re tracking real outcomes, you’ve got the right foundation for growth and a good base to enable quick, strategic decisions.
Now it’s time to start marketing and make big moves, fast.
The reality of start-up marketing is that you’re on the clock to prove yourself from day one – but it’s possible to act too quickly and sabotage your efforts without taking the right steps first.
All agencies tout their great marketing results, but we know a lot of the real work comes before you make a single decision regarding your marketing campaigns. We’ve partnered with many, many new marketing leaders in SaaS companies and can help you get through these stages quickly and effectively.
Hit us up if you need a guiding hand to get your new role off to a great start.