In this episode, Ryan is joined by Joe McLaughlin, Director of Strategy at Rocket SaaS, who now oversees all Rocket SaaS clients and spends half his time on Rocket SaaS’s own marketing, to walk through exactly how an expert reviews a marketing strategy from top to bottom. Joe starts with reporting and attribution, because until you can see what is really driving pipeline, you are just guessing. From there it becomes a simple exercise of deciding what to scale, what to fix, and what to kill. Along the way they cover the outbound rethink that dramatically lifted conversions at Rocket SaaS.

Takeaways:

• Until your reporting and attribution are right, you are guessing. HubSpot is what let Rocket SaaS see which touchpoints actually produced deals
• Good attribution shows you where the funnel leaks, so you know whether the problem is lead quality, the sales deck, or the sales team, rather than guessing
• Run a simple exercise on every campaign: what do we scale, what do we fix, and what do we kill
• Kill what cannot be meaningfully differentiated. Fix what is close but underpowered
• Every campaign should earn its budget, and that means a time allocation as well as a spend allocation
• New markets and bigger clients are tempting, but there is usually more room in the ICP you already win in
• Do more of what already works. Attribution showed events, webinars, podcasts, and LinkedIn thought leadership drove almost every deal for Rocket SaaS
• Put process behind thought leadership. Have a dedicated testing campaign for promoted posts, and a recurring task so the weekly post always gets boosted rather than occasionally
• If the business is plateauing, it’s time to carve out dedicated time and people to grow your business through marketing efforts.