Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Unlocking Marketing Success: Striking a Balance between Metrics and Trust

21 Nov 2023 · 1 min

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0:47

Excerpt from a YouTube conversation where Jason M. Lemkin warns that over-emphasizing short-term marketing metrics (e.g., cutting spend to chase instant ROI) can dry up the sales pipeline and jeopardize future quarters. He argues for balancing measurement with trust in marketing leadership to allocate budgets (examples: $1M, $5M, $15M, $20M). An audience question asks how to reflect efforts to expand existing customers (increasing number of seats per account).

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I've already seen it happen as pipeline is drying up. Pipeline is drying up for sales teams going hooray, you, you cut your marketing spend in half and you only allowed instant roi. But if the sales team has no pipe going into the second half of the year, you're not going to hit your plan, right? So here's where metrics can also take you down the wrong hole and we've got to find a way in the in the middle where marketers have some leeway to spend a budget as best they can, right? That's the tension with metrics. You have to measure it but you also have to trust your team to say hey, your marketing budget this year is 1 million, 5 million, 15 million, 20 million and it's stressful but you have to trust your marketing leadership to do the best job they can with the budget they have.
How can you reflect efforts you're doing on expanding your current user base like expanding the number of seats of each customer.