Former Marketing Lead at Klaviyo, Louise Read was responsible for determining their go-to-market (GTM) strategy across EMEA and APAC. Now committed to helping SaaS start-ups build sustainable foundations and accelerate growth, Codi’s CMO shares her top tips on creating a game-changing GTM strategy.
A go-to-market strategy (GTM) is much like a well-planned trip. Just as a traveller maps out their journey, considering the route, supplies and potential pit stops, a company crafts a GTM to navigate how to take their product or service to market as smoothly as possible, being careful to avoid wrong turns or dead ends along the way.
But not all travellers are well prepared, as Louise Read, Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Codi explains: “The absence of a clearly defined GTM is the single biggest reason businesses do not see progress from their marketing efforts. Something that’s all too common in the world of series A and B SaaS start-ups.”
Here to lead you through the sometimes treacherous, B2B SaaS marketing landscape, Louise will act as your trusty travel guide. No stranger to scaling companies from the ground up, she walks through the core components of a robust go-to-market strategy, designed specifically for Series A and B SaaS start-ups.
Challenges for Series A and B marketers
How Codi can help with your GTM
A go-to-market plan is critical to business success. But, why are so few series A and B start-ups implementing one? To answer that, let’s take a closer look at some of the key challenges facing the SaaS series A and B marketer.
It’s an age-old problem for the Series A and B SaaS marketers – the intense pressure to make a rapid impact. Those responsible for marketing in start-ups are often judged by their ability to generate leads quickly, with typically a brief window of 3 to 6 months to demonstrate tangible results. This urgency can push the marketer to implement immediate, short-term strategies like launching paid advertising campaigns as a quick fix. Even if this approach may not align with long-term growth strategies.
“This method is a bit like throwing paint at the wall and hoping something eventually sticks,” says Louise. In other words, a quick way to drain resources and intensify existing frustrations with marketing outputs.
Another hurdle many start-ups must overcome in these early stages is limited access to substantial historical data. This data is so important as it allows companies to make more informed decisions, pivot when necessary, and gradually build a knowledge base that can guide future strategies and operations.
To make sure they’re on the right track, it’s important for start-ups to conduct a thorough audit of past marketing activities and strategies and allow for testing to start gathering more insights. But more on that later.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that series A and B start-ups don’t have 20 person marketing teams to benefit from.
“Even if founders recognise the value of implementing a robust marketing strategy, many businesses lack the experience to develop the strategy in the first place, or the means to implement it effectively at this stage.”
So what’s the answer? As well as considering outsourcing some marketing efforts to a fractional team, such as Codi, CMOs must be realistic about what they can achieve and where they allocate resources. They must prioritise high-impact activities that align closely with the company’s growth objectives – more on this to follow.
Let’s get stuck in.
Now’s a good time to reiterate that Louise’s strategy is geared towards Series A and B SaaS businesses who have likely done some marketing in the past. To help you get the most out of this guide, you will have previously done some of the following:
Not you? Don’t worry. Check out Codi’s blog section for more SaaS marketing insights and strategy-related advice:
All strategies start with the same question – what are you trying to achieve? A go-to-market is no different. The first rule of thumb when it comes to creating your GTM strategy is to define your business goals.
As Louise points out, “You need to know what your business wants to do in order to know what the marketing strategy should do. Everything should align to your business metrics.”
Typically a business will have broad goals such as to generate revenue, secure further investments and foster positive customer experiences. These objectives will look something like:
“Once your business objectives are identified, marketers should then create 4-5 marketing-specific targets that form the basis of your strategy. These must be related to your core business goals”.
Using the above as a guide, your marketing goals could be to:
While the relationship between business and marketing goals may seem obvious, there is frequently a disconnect between the two with marketing operating in a vacuum. Instead, every department should be on a shared mission, all parts working symbiotically to grow your business. After all, how can marketers impact the right things without this company alignment?
Ready to start 2025 with a bang? Speak to our SaaS experts to see how Codi can develop an aligned, impactful marketing plan that delivers against your specific goals.
With your business and marketing goals defined, the next, and perhaps most important stage in creating your go-to-market strategy, is to really get under the hood of your current marketing efforts to see what’s working and what’s not. Oh, and brutal honesty is a must.
“Conducting a marketing audit is similar to a car mechanic performing an MOT – it allows you to identify what needs fixing and what adjustments are necessary to ensure your marketing engine runs smoothly.”
A marketing audit should flag areas for improvement and look at where a business should spend its time and resources. We could write an entirely separate piece on conducting a marketing audit (and we will), but let’s look at some of the core questions for your investigation.
“Ultimately, the key question you need to answer is: Which marketing efforts are truly working? This insight will guide you in deciding where to double down and invest more resources, and where to pull back,” explains Louise.
To determine this, marketers should review individual marketing channels to discover:
An effective audit looks beyond surface-level metrics. Let’s say you’re targeting highly relevant BoF (bottom of funnel) keywords with PPC (pay-per-click), and the CPC (cost-per-click) is high and the volume of traffic is low. It might be easy to say ‘turn it off’. But if that campaign has driven pipeline deals surmounting to thousands of pounds – it’s a successful campaign and shouldn’t be turned off.
And the same works in reverse for so-called ‘vanity metrics’. To see what is truly driving revenue, marketers must see beyond the stats that may look good, but don’t add any meaningful business value. Remember that brutal honesty we were talking about?
Next consider your more troublesome areas. Is your main issue getting new leads? Or do you have a ton of leads sitting in your CRM that aren’t progressing?
Let’s look at a common problem area Louise commons encounters when working with series A and B start-ups – too little time spent on closing existing pipeline opportunities.
“All too often SaaS start-ups fall into the trap of focusing all their time and resources on pipeline generation. Some businesses are already having good conversations with potential clients, but are struggling to convert.”
Obviously every business is different, but because most marketing teams are measured on lead generation rather than revenue or retention, they don’t bother focusing here.
The answer? Instead of pumping money into driving new leads, she urges them to switch their attention to winning open pipeline opportunities and retaining and upselling to their existing customer base.
The third question helps to discover top performing channels and decide if the channel is performing to its full potential. Not only does this comparison offer an honest assessment of your efforts, it can also inform goal setting, resource allocation and justify marketing spend.
For an idea of what good looks like, here are some B2B marketing benchmarks to aim for based on a Series A B2B SaaS company in operation for a couple of years:
For one-off campaigns:
For lead nurture flows:
SEO/ Website
Domain Authority: 20+
Site Health Score: 80+
Organic Traffic (as a % of total traffic): 50%+
Conversion Rate (website): 5%
Conversion Rate (Landing page): Around 20%
Bounce rate: 25-55%
Session duration: Around 4:26 minutes
Average form conversion: 2-3%
Social media
LinkedIn:
Average engagement rate: Small accounts (< 5,000 followers) 6% & Large accounts (100,000 + followers) 3%.
Post impressions: 4000-12000 per month
Paid media
LinkedIn:
Note: These will vary by audience and the type of campaign you’re running
Cost per click: Aim to keep these less than $5, less than $2 is very good (but this varies based on what you’re advertising)
Click-through rate (CTR): 0.5%+
Cost per click: Under $5 = good, under $2 = very good
Click-through rate (CTR): 5%+ = good, 7%+ = excellent
Evaluating your competitors is another key ingredient. Gathering competitor intelligence and reviewing their current strategies allows you to identify any lessons that could be drawn from their approaches.
As Louise highlights, “this goes for industry leaders too — those companies you aspire to emulate, even if they are not direct competitors. Look at factors like whether their CEO engages frequently on LinkedIn, or whether they host user conferences or conduct regular webinars.”
Together, these insights form the foundation of a good marketing audit and will provide valuable direction when building your own marketing strategy.
While we’re not going to get into the nitty gritty of budgeting right now (that’s a whole other beast), it’s important to work with your CFO and CEO to determine what sort of budget you’re going to have to play with. This will influence how much you can do, what channels you select and how quickly you can test.
We’ve covered a lot in the last section, so before we move onto the next piece of the puzzle, let’s review what you should now know:
Armed with the answers from your audit, your business objectives and budget, it’s time to move onto identifying the core channels you’re going to implement in your go-to-market strategy.
It should hopefully be clear to see where your customers are coming from, and which sources are driving demos, sales and revenue.
“Generally speaking this should be a good mix of organic digital channels (content and SEO), paid digital channels (PPC/LinkedIn) and more traditional channels (Events),” suggests Louise.
Your audit will have given you a clearer understanding of goals, how to distribute resources across key areas, and identified the channels you want to invest in. But there will still be some things you don’t know.
In addition to your main channels, Louise recommends setting aside a portion of your overall budget specifically for testing new tactics or approaches.
“Aim to allocate about 5-10% of your overall budget for this purpose, and ensure you have the agreement of your CFO and CEO for this”, she urges.
This dedicated budget allows you to explore new initiatives without jeopardising your core operations. Maybe you’ve seen a competitor do something that yielded impressive results, or perhaps you’re keen to attend an industry conference next year. Whatever it is, having a small budget signed-off for experimentation is a really smart move.
The next pillar of your go-to-market strategy is to establish how you will measure your success. Marketers should define clear key performance indicators (KPIs) for each marketing channel and implement robust attribution tracking to monitor performance.
Each marketing channel will have different KPIs that align with the channel’s purpose and objective. Let’s look at some example KPIs by channel:
Email marketing:
SEO:
Social media:
Paid media:
Content marketing
Attribution tracking is just as important when trying to determine which marketing activities are driving leads and revenue. This could involve using tools like Google Analytics to track user journeys across your website and landing pages, and integrating your CRM system with social platforms like LinkedIn and Slack.
Setting up attribution can be a daunting process for inexperienced marketers and requires specialised expertise. But by doing so, you can accurately follow a customer’s journey from their first interaction with your brand through to purchase or sign-up.
Louise advises setting up your HubSpot, or other CRM, to display a clear visualisation of each channel’s performance, like the image below.
Image: Hubspot
Need help getting started with attribution tracking? Speak to an expert.
Next comes the plan of action – the ‘how’ of your go-to-market strategy. At this stage you’re essentially tallying up what needs to happen to achieve your goals, and who is involved.
Louise suggests using a Gantt chart, to guide your implementation process, keep everything on track and chart progress against time. This structured approach will help ensure that your go-to-market strategy is both effective and adaptable.
Build a list of all the assets you plan to create in order to implement your strategy. For example, blogs targeting specific keywords, eBooks, imagery or graphic design elements, landing pages, email and web copy etc.
Looking at the list of assets, ask yourself what skills you need access to? We typically find start-ups need access to more expertise and manpower than they have the budget to bring in house. That’s where Codi adds real value, providing both CMO-level strategy support and execution services with the added flexibility to ramp-up or down your efforts, when needed.
Take the first step: Talk to our team.
“So many businesses are not making decisions fast enough. Maybe you’ve spent a ton of money on pay-per-click (PPC) but aren’t generating any leads from it. So, why are you still allocating money to it? If the channel isn’t working, move on.”
This is particularly important when it comes to channels you’re testing for the first time – if the horse is dead, stop flogging it. Not every channel will work for every organisation and that’s okay. After all, it’s about finding your growth levers as soon as possible so your business starts to see results.
This forms the basis of Louise’s final pearl of wisdom on GTMs – Implement fast, fail fast, learn fast and improve fast.
And series A and B SaaS start-ups are uniquely positioned to benefit from this kind of approach due to their typically lean structures. If a particular marketing channel isn’t performing well, keep an open mind and be open to pivoting quickly when needed. Ultimately it’s this agility that will give you a significant competitive advantage over the big hitters.
We hope by now the importance of a well-defined go-to-market strategy is obvious and you’re already considering the ways your business could implement this plan for a successful start to 2025.
“Sadly, so many businesses try to skip past this stage and just get started with it all. Few Series A and B start-ups are willing to spend the time to figure out this strategy. What ends up happening is they adopt the ‘have a go approach’, place those bets and put investment in areas that fail to generate revenue.”
This feeds a self-perpetuating cycle of frustration with marketing efforts and greatly impedes your growth goals. The truth is that if you want to really hit the ground running in Q1, businesses must dedicate time here.
That’s where Codi can help.
We work alongside businesses to develop an aligned, impactful go-to-market plan that delivers against your specific goals. We understand your business is unique, so your marketing strategy shouldn’t be any different. That’s why we always kick off with a marketing audit like we’ve mentioned in this article to really identify opportunities for growth.
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