A Guide to Building all the Metrics that Actually Matter for a B2B SaaS Growth Company

Recently I’ve been in touch with a number of CMOs from different growth companies and I asked them what’s the biggest pressing issue for them right now. They all had a common theme: what to measure and how to report it 🤷‍♂️

The truth is, we’re drowning in metrics 🌊 and this is affecting the performance of marketing teams, in a very negative way. Although digital tools have made the life of marketeers much easier, they have also introduced an overload of data that is dividing marketing leaders based on their opinion of what should be measured and what shouldn’t.

For instance, my friend Lari from a company called Sievo, posted this recently on his LinkedIn…

“A great idea is a great start. But what you do next and how you do it, is what counts.”

I just finished reading the book Originals, by Adam Grant. This was a very special gift from a good friend as I was leaving the company we had been working in together for the past five years.

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and a magnificent researcher at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His work revolves around the basic idea that, in the end, even the largest organizations are run by individuals, whose brain works in a certain way, given their past memories and their instincts. …

Increasing customer LTV with a Customer Success strategy

In the first part of this article I addressed how to accelerate the sales closing process with B2B customers. Using return on investment (ROI) as a justification, it is possible to shorten the sales cycle and ensure decisions come faster from within the buying organization.

ROI is the #1 thing that matters for B2B customers when making a purchasing decision. This means that, after they have signed the contract with you, they’ll keep exploring future alternative solutions that are cheaper. Remember: their goal is to increase ROI, which in turn means they won’t settle with your solution if they can find something that is more cost-efficient. …

Reducing the sales cycle with laser-focused value propositions

For the past ten years, I’ve been working for companies that offer software solutions to other companies, that is, business-to-business (B2B) products and services. From 2007 to 2013, I was working as a product marketing manager for a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, and from 2014 onward I’ve been working in strategic marketing roles offering software to device manufacturers (OEMs) and enterprises working with the Internet of Things (IoT).

If one thing I learned about B2B markets during my career is that business-to-business models, although very monetarily rewarding, can pose two huge challenges for sales & marketing organizations:

1. Sales cycles can be very long, taking months or even years to close a…

Analyzing the anatomy of an engaging LinkedIn post

If you use social media as one of the main channels for your digital marketing, specially LinkedIn, you probably know already how hard it is to make a post that brings enough (justifiable) return to your marketing organization. Most posts require a number of hours of creative work, plus a prominent budget for promoting the post online, often resulting in pretty low ROI.

Last summer, I published a post on LinkedIn that was not prepared by any marketing effort, nor it was promoted by using a budget. I simply posted a personal opinion about something that happened to met recently. Unintentionally, the post became, in less than a day, the most viral post I’ve ever created. …

During the past two years I’ve read a handful of very interesting business books that helped me in my daily job as a sales & marketing professional. In fact, I’ve been filtering through dozens of books that come with flashy titles and tell you how successful you’ll be in business, to come down to a very narrow list of the very best that truly helped me in my career.

I’ve compiled the top 5 learnings from five of these books in this article:

1 — Confront the brutal facts

Good to Great, by Jim Collins, is a mixture between entrepreneurial motivation and growth company failures analyzed in an academic way. The book is based on a 5-year research over thousands of companies that have really made a difference when comparing to other “ok” companies in terms of growth. The main learning is that companies typically fail because they don’t want to admit they may be going out of business. …

4 Outbound tactics that bring 400x more ROI than any inbound marketing when it comes to growing our B2B sales

If you haven’t ever heard the term “inbound marketing”, you should stop reading this and go do something more interesting. But if you have, you’ll know “inbound marketing” is extremely hot at the moment. No matter whether you work in a startup or for a large corporation, these days everybody working in marketing seems to be sold to the promise of making a huge sales leap by solely relying on a content strategy and inbound tools. However, my experience tells me that “inbound marketing” is a broken promise, especially when it comes to B2B marketing.

As a background, I work as the head of marketing for a software company, and we sell our software to device manufacturers (phone makers, laptops, drones, action cameras, cars, speakers, etc) and telecom operators. This means that we are purely a business-to-business (B2B) company, where our products are directly sold to other companies and integrated into their products that will be finally sold to end consumers. …

TL;DR → Marketing goal = $$$

As of writing this, I work for Tuxera, a growth company that builds software for self-driving cars and is based in Finland 🇫🇮, Northern Europe. My main job as the Head of Marketing is to lead their marketing strategy to support the fast growth in the coming years (i.e., keep above 30% YoY).

Last year, I had one of the rarest work situations as a manager. We had just hired our new communications manager who, after only six weeks of trial, decided to leave the company. Completely shocked, I had a debriefing session with him to learn what we could improve for the future. His feedback → “you’re a great company with a great product, but your way of measuring marketing success is too much oriented towards revenue growth, and that’s not how marketing should be done”. …