Bill Macaitis, the former CMO of Zendesk, articulates how a SaaS marketing team should operate better than anybody else I’ve met. At a recent Point9 conference, Bill outlined the 9 marketing disciplines of great SaaS companies and how they fit together to create a marketing powerhouse. I’ve copied my notes from Bill’s talk below.
Ops & Analytics Team
The operations and analytics teams is the first marketing team every SaaS company should build because this team you erects the experimental infrastructure for determining which marketing tactics are viable. Over time, it also becomes the largest team.
Zendesk employed a combination of products to build this infrastructure including Convertro, Google Analytics, Infer, Optimizely and DemandBase. This team employed sophisticated attribution models to understand precisely how many impressions and the types of impressions were required to catalyze a conversion to paid event.
In addition to managing the experiments of performance marketing, the Ops and Analytics team measures qualitative metrics like net promoter score, aided and unaided recall, and sentiment analysis of the brand. These qualitative analyses provided Zendesk insight into the top five reasons users recommended product and the top five reasons users didn’t convert to customers, informative data for adjusting marketing tactics and guiding the product roadmap.
Customer Evangelism
Zendesk’s strong brand enabled its efficient growth. Bill’s team built the brand by investing in long term initiatives like customer evangelism and content.
Bill tasked the customer evangelism team with three goals. First, to identify evangelists; second, to nurture relationships with them; and third to leverage their enthusiasm for the product to drive awareness and ultimate conversions.
