Marketing audit for tech and SaaS

Marketing audit for tech and SaaS

by | May 4, 2023 | B2B Strategy, Chief Marketing Officer

Why a marketing audit for tech and SaaS companies?

    As we move along in 2023 I’m seeing more clients ask themselves ‘why are we doing what we’re doing?’. They ask that because they haven’t done a marketing audit for their tech or SaaS company.

    As a tech CMO, I always start with “well, what’s working and what’s not?”.

    Many of them just don’t know.

    Young business woman pondering a question, used to illustrate a marketing audit for tech and SaaS.

    If you don’t where to start, look at the info on my web page about marketing audits. This will give you a current foundation on how to go about a marketing audit for tech and SaaS companies.

    There are 3 brief audio/video overviews plus links to The 2023 CMO Survey and The 2023 State of B2B Marketing Budgets.

    Disclaimer: Yes, this page was created for a marketing audit service I offer. But it will show you how the pros do it.

    Go to marketing audit page
    Pie chart populated with human figures, used to illustrate market segmentation.

    Marketing audits must be tailored to market segmentation

    Why change? Why now?

    Marketing audits for tech and SaaS companies answer these questions. Especially critical in 2023, a marketing audit shows:

    ✔︎ where are we wasting money?

    ✔︎ how should I focus the marketing budget?

    If your company is a going concern, a marketing audit is an essential first step to creating a marketing plan. How can you plan for next quarter or next year when you don’t know what’s working, and what’s not?

    Marketing audits for tech and SaaS are different

    Marketing audits for tech and SaaS companies are different because the B2B buyer has very different motivations than the B2C buyer.

    Yet, the tech and SaaS buyer has very different motivations than the office furniture buyer.

    Buyer personas in different industry verticals have different purchase preferences. So your marketing audit must be tailored to your vertical.

    What works for office furniture buyers typically won’t work for tech or SaaS buyers.

    What is the state of your marketing?

    A systematic appraisal of your marketing is a sure way to help you explain the marketing budget.

    Every business is its own ecosystem. Marketing presents your ecosystem to the marketplace, with incentives to engage and dive deeper.

    The best way to determine the state of your presentation and incentives is to do a marketing audit for your tech or SaaS company.

    Of course, allocating resources to do a proper audit is difficult for many companies.

    That’s where market strategy consulting firms like mine come in handy.

    Most of our marketing audits cost between $10K and $15K, depending on your company size.

    We complete them in two weeks.

    Feel free to check out the details on our web page.

    Go to marketing audit page
    B2B go-to-market strategy

    B2B go-to-market strategy

    by | Oct 11, 2020 | B2B Strategy

    Enterprise software company wins big with B2B go-to-market strategy

    sales presentation best practices

    Logo DataFrameworks

    Overview

    How do you choose the right B2B go to market strategy?

    DataFrameworks, a Silicon Valley company had a unique solution for file management in enterprise data storage environments.

    Additionally, they used an often overlooked go t0 market strategy.

    A year after beginning work with Harris CMO Partners, they were acquired by DellEMC.

    Here’s the story.

    Founders recognized a trend

    The founders recognized a growing trend in the data storage space. Rich content (sound, video and images used at the same time and place) was overwhelming enterprise IT departments with petabytes of unstructured technical data and rich media content. There was no dedicated solution for allowing end users to access and retrieve massive rich content files from storage environments.

    Consequently, IT departments were overwhelmed with requests from end users to find and deliver rich content files. Besides, this increased the costs of storage management dramatically in companies that are heavy users of rich media files. Affected industries included media and entertainment, software development, life sciences and more.

    The trend was forecasted to keep growing for years.

    Image of tall data servers in the clouds.

    Where’s my data file?

    The challenge…

    Like most early stage B2B companies, DataFrameworks had a limited budget. Correspondingly, they decided to forgo marketing except for a website, focusing on B2B go to market strategy instead. Also, they minimized direct sales and focused on partnering with large OEMs in their market space. These included HGST, Quantum, DellEMC and others.

    Instead, they used a small sales team to call on the OEMs. And they chose us to do the partner marketing. Selling their solution to thousands of OEM salespeople would be a lot of specialized work. DataFrameworks needed a variety of support materials created to get their new, expanded OEM sales teams up and running.

    The solution…B2B go-to-market strategy

    Harris CMO Partners was hired to help. Working closely with the founders, sales and technical teams, we created architecture diagrams, solution briefs, business cases, sales presentations, sales kits, press releases, event marketing and more.

    The great thing about this client was that they knew precisely the business value of their solution. “Bringing business and IT together to unlock the value of data trapped in silos.” With that, and a couple of white papers they had created early on, we went to work.

    Shortly after we started working with DataFrameworks, they partnered with DellEMC. It was a perfect fit with Dell’s Isilon product line, a family of scale-out network-attached storage systems, designed for demanding enterprise file workloads.

    Isilon’s sales team already had relationships with the companies DataFramework wanted to target. Now, all DataFrameworks needed to do was educate and coach the DellEMC team.

    Their B2B go to market strategy was working well.

    The first customers…

    We decided to focus on large OEMs (like DellEMC) serving data intensive industries including media and entertainment, life sciences, oil and gas, EDA, software development, automotive and others with complex workflows.

    In their first phase of sales, they focused on acquiring a handful of marquee clients. These included Disney, ESPN, Quantum, IBM, NetApp, illumina, Sony Pictures and many more.

    B2B go-to-market strategy success

    I worked closely with both DataFrameworks and DellEMC to execute successfully the B2B go to market strategy.

    I created the sales and marketing story, sales training and plenty of intriguing content.

    Once DellEMC had the new solution firmly established as a partner offering with its existing customer base, sales materialized quickly.

    The tech giant saw distinct value in acquiring DataFrameworks and completed a succesful acquisition.

    DataFrameworks’ solution is currently featured in DellEMC’s Enterprise and Midmarket IT Transformation solutions.

    https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/dell-emc-claritynow-data-management-software-helps-transform-data-value/

    More on strategy

    Market strategy is hugely critical to your success.

    You might like this article on how Steve Jobs outfoxed the major competition in his time.

    How Apple Competes…And Wins

    Discovering Product/Market Fit

    Discovering Product/Market Fit

    by | Jan 21, 2020 | B2B Marketing, B2B Strategy

    Discovering Product/Market Fit

    dog with cheeseburger in mouth, discovering product market fit

    Will the dogs like the dog food?

     (B2C)Product/market fit determines whether you grow steadily, slow, or not at all. Remember, a B2B tech or SaaS product exists for only two reasons:

    • saves time
    • saves money

    A consumer tech or SaaS product exists for these reasons:

    •  attractiveness
    • immediacy

    You must prove to yourself and your investors that your idea will fly in the marketplace. But the typical Catch-22 is that you don’t have a ton of money for formal market research.

    You don’t need it. Use these no/low cost techniques to disover product/market fit, before you develop it.

    Why do this?

    • To see your product’s value from your prospects’ standpoint.
    • To hear what your salespeople will hear.
    • To learn how to align your new concept with the marketplace

    Sales & marketing are social processes

    The first thing to understand (and many people don’t) is that business is a social process. To do this successfully you’ll be spending the bulk of your time talking with people…not staring at a laptop screen.

    If this provokes anxiety you’re in good company. Many people are hesitant to reach out to strangers. If you take the plunge, however, you’ll find it gets much easier as you go along.

     

    Discovering product/market fit: a 5-point model

    Work through the following 5-point strategy model as a first step to discovering product/market fit. Just apply what you already know, or strongly suspect, is true about your market. Support each assumption with whatever market information you have on hand.

    1. What are the trends in my industry?
    2. What’s driving the trends?
    3. What are we doing about the trends?
    4. What are our competitors doing about the trends?
    5. What should we be doing about the trends to grow revenue and profits?

    Now you have a baseline.

    The rest of this guide is in a PDF. Click button to view/download.

    No email required.

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