Striking The Right Growth Balance In 2023

2023 is set to be a very special year in B2B SaaS marketing. Let’s be clear: the pressure is on. The economy is in/out of recession, VC funding is down, sales cycles are extending, close/won rates are down, and churn is generally up. In short: growth is not a given. Growth models are rapidly changing.

On a personal note, I just kicked off a new career chapter as VP Marketing at CHILI publish. I will be working with CEO Kevin Goeminne, COO Bram Verniest and the extended team to accelerate growth of CHILI GraFx. CHILI GraFx is the most advanced and flexible cloud-based platform built for multi-national, enterprise companies producing multichannel graphics at scale. See the action video here. I can't wait to start outlining the marketing plan and growth strategy over the coming weeks.

Opportunity: Finding growth has become more challenging

So as you accelerate into 2023, I don’t expect most of your time to go into brand marketing, go-to-market strategy or even product strategy. Most SaaS businesses I know and follow know full well WHO they are, WHAT they’re selling and to WHOM. They don’t have the time or resources to get into big brand building initiatives, and they’re under a lot of VC pressure to grow, grow faster and keep growing. The million dollar question is (not: will ChatGTP save the day, but rather:) HOW, because the old lead generation framework we’ve been operating for the last 15 years isn’t producing the results we used to get for the budgets we used to invest.

This is a great opportunity for marketing to reinvent the kind of business value we create, and how we do it. I expect the new paradigm to rest on 3 motions of growth, and the task of growth leaders to strike the right balance in resource allocation across these 3. We'll need new business relationships, new skills sets in the marketing team, and an adjusted set of OKRs to account for our efforts.

3 motions of growth

In recent conversations, I've suggested three concurrent motions of growth: marketing/sales-led, community-led and product-led grwoth. I don’t believe we’ll have the luxury of picking one of these three motions for our businesses, and just run with it. For the coming years, the art of B2B marketing will be to strike the right balance between these three growth motions for your audience, your value proposition and your sales model.?

It presents marketing leaders with a real challenge, because each if these three requires different skill sets and will deliver value at different speeds and quality levels. Hence this balancing act is not only in planning and aligning, but surely also in execution, reporting and stakeholder management. You’ll have to prepare your organization for a different growth framework.

Done right, planning for three growth motions will change how we organize our marketing teams, as well as how we commit to marketing’s pipeline contribution.?

Same, but different

In various shapes and forms, these three growth motions have been around for a while. However, the success of the marketing/sales-led growth model in many iterations pushed the other 2 into the background. Yes, we had a community, but we mainly used it for education and support, rather than referral and growth. Product-led Growth was approached as upsell driven by Customer Success and Sales, not so much by the product itself.?

Now that the demand waterfall is under pressure (cost of paid search and media exploding, conversion down the funnel dropping, CAC and earn-back times up), we’re forced to diversify our revenue-generating activities, and not solely rely on traditional leadgen - most notably through great content, word-of-mouth, referral and by using the product as a sales channel in product-led growth (PLG). For PLG, there’s still a ton of work to be done, for a prescriptive model to emerge. But we have some terrific and very successful examples of PLG available (Slack, Figma, Calendly), we can all build on to get to a more sustainable, balanced growth model.?

Demand Waterfall is redefined yet again

The demand waterfall isn't going away, but is rather redefined to support advanced content marketing and industry/account based marketing and targeted sales efforts. Full focus on understanding dynamics between inbound and outbound motions in marketing and sales. Marketing automation, lead scoring and lead/pipeline attribution continue to be essential (and fiercely debated) elements of the marketing/sales-led growth motion. Because of the performance drop of the traditional demand/lead gen mechanism, marketing and sales will be forced to work together even closer and behave as a singular business unit.

In B2B start-up and scale-up marketing, branding means nothing more/less than driving consistency in promise, voice and visual across all touch points in execution (in marketing, sales, CS and partner enablement). As simple as that may sound, it’s a high bar, this has never been more difficult and critically significant for longer term impact.

It's a new ball game

The growth game has fundamentally changed over the last year. It’s a good thing we’re not starting from scratch. Some quick pointers below for each of the three motions:

1. Marketing/Sales-led growth

• Primary objective: Create and capture demand in the market
• Tested, well defined SaaS growth engine: ToFu, MoFu, BoFu
• Connected Buyer Journey from first touch to signed customer
• Invest in Vertical and Account-Based Marketing
• Tight marketing/sales alignment, agree on inbound/outbound?
• Tight control on spend, conversion and throughput
• 3 main KPIs:

1. MQL > SQL conversion (marketing quality)
2. Cost per SQL (cost control)
3. Marketing contribution to sales pipeline (sales value)

2. Community-led growth

• Main objective: Drive and activate community of users to support revenue growth
• Go where the customers are
• Create great content to celebrate your client champions’ personal brands
• Communicate, educate, enable
• Reward ambassadorship
• 3 main KPIs:

1. Community Qualified Leads (CQL)
2. Marketing’s contribution to new customer revenue
3. Customer referral rate

3. Product-led growth

• Main objective: Turn product into a sales channel
• Tight communication planning on new product updates
• Invest in product & solutions marketing to educate own organization, customers and prospects
• Consistent messaging and content across all digital and physical channels and touchpoints
• Drive broad and deep adoption within the platform
• 3 main KPIs:

1. Time to value
2. Product Qualified Leads (PQL)
3. Expansion revenue

It goes without saying that marketing will have to build strong ties with sales (like always), with customer success (for customer content and community building) and with product, in order to apply marketing thinking to how users interact with the product and continue to adopt new modules and features over time.

Here's to a well-balanced 2023 — be safe and healthy everyone!

* Image sources:

• Marketing/Sales-led growth: https://www.forestrockdigital.com/blog/the-marketing-funnel
• Community-led growth: https://vwo.com/blog/flywheel-marketing/
• Product-led growth: https://thenicheguru.com/niche-marketing/product-led-growth-guide/