Jason M. Lemkin says most SaaS startups fail at customer marketing. His fix: small dinners with ten customers for referrals and upsells, hire a dedicated marketer at 100 customers, and founders should spend 20-30% of their time on it.
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But it turns out if your customer event is 10 customers and you just have 2 hours of content and a steak dinner, that may be magical. Those 10 customers may be— get you 10 more customers. They may buy more from you. They may buy more of your product, et cetera, et cetera. So I said after 100 customers dedicate someone 100% full-time, that's a simple rule. But bear in mind, probably everyone, almost everyone in the room gets an F on customer marketing. And if you think about going long, this is an easy course correction to make. How much of my time do I spend on customer marketing? Not enough. 20, 30, a full-time person at 100 customers. That's what you want. And your, your marketer's core goal is probably going to be something on the funnel. It could be leads, it could be an opportunity commit, it could be MQLs, whatever it is. We all have different metrics on the funnel. We'll run out of time to talk about them today. Your marketer in customer marketing, her numbers should be probably like CS numbers, net revenue retention.