Since returning from Silicon Y’all, we’ve had several Beacon9 client meetings with something in common. They’ve all had adoption, usage, and retention challenges, and they all lack SaaS customer marketing basics. This is despite being quite mature (in SaaS terms) and despite achieving scale with double-digit millions in ARR. These are quality companies whose growth rates are being undermined by a lack of customer education and communication.

Two SaaS Customer Marketing Blockers

The fundamentals of SaaS customer marketing are relatively straightforward but often neglected. I lived this neglect and can speak to it firsthand. The reason for it is ever so simple — the marketing function in a growing SaaS is more than fully committed to customer acquisition. It’s everything to them. And typically where all of the incentives lie.

Before customer marketing can carve out 25% of marketing’s effort, values must be realigned from the CEO to the CMO and below. Adoption, usage, retention, and expansion must be understood as huge value drivers in revenue growth and organizational prosperity. So blocker number one is lack of resources and blocker number two is lack of incentives, rooted in underappreciation of the value of the function on revenue growth.

I was both the CEO and the CMO of our SaaS prior to its acquisition. So I was both the problem and the solution for customer marketing. Like many a growing tech company, ion interactive shared the myopic focus on capital-efficient customer acquisition. My marketing team was overcommitted on a daily basis and driven to deliver low-CAC. So when Anna came to me to say she wanted our Director of Customer Success to attend our marketing sprint plannings and standups, I wasn’t enthusiastic. We didn’t have the bandwidth to do more than the bare minimum on the customer side, and that’s what we were already doing. The bare minimum meant a customer version of our monthly email newsletter, an occasional customer-specific webinar, and product release communications — in-platform and email.

SaaS Customer Marketing Value Prop

Then we began to talk through the value proposition of customer marketing and the potential impacts it could have on our business — churn reduction, expansion revenue, reduced time-to-value, and increased usage. With a quick bit of revenue quantification, I went from cynical CMO to enthusiastic CEO in the blink of an eye. Marketing was ultimately in the growth business, and we could have more revenue growth by redirecting 25% of our effort to customers than by spending that same 25% on new customer acquisition. Yes, it was a bet and not a sure thing, but it sure looked promising.

So began the cultural reprogramming of our priorities that led to sizable benefits, not the least of which was a massive reduction in revenue churn. But before that could happen, customer success had to convince the CEO, who had to reprogram the CMO, who had to refactor his team to believe and deliver on the customer marketing promise. This is why so many SaaS companies have poor-to-no customer marketing.

But over the last week, I’ve found myself recommending a remarkably similar set of SaaS customer marketing initiatives.