TrainHeroic is a fitness software company with a SaaS business model. The platform allows fitness professionals to train clients in a hybrid setting or completely remote.

When I was hired, I was tasked with building a marketing team and strategy to create a growth engine. This was my first foray into SaaS marketing. Growing a SaaS product has its obvious differences from marketing a more traditional, one-time purchase product. This can present challenges, but also creates the massive upside that makes subscription based-business models so attractive for everything from software to meal delivery.

My task was to evolve my marketing strategy to create a high performing SaaS growth machine.

My first task was to establish a vision for the ideal team structure.

I firmly believe there are thousands of great ways to set up a digital marketing team for success at scale. The “right” structure depends on the business, the size and strengths of the team, and goals. I had the benefit of starting from scratch.

I have found that a few key principles are always common among the most successful teams I’ve been a part of:

My next step was to refine my marketing strategy to fit a SaaS product. Luckily, at the time I was just coming off a multi-year stint marketing to destination skiers, which has some similarities to a subscription model. Repeat or return visitors tend to make up the majority of your marketing opportunity. Increasing average revenue per customer is key. New customer acquisition has to be efficient and effective.

One of my first areas of focus, even through the interview process, was to immerse myself in better understanding of the economics that drive a subscription business. It was important to me to ensure that I fully understood the mechanics and best practices of a SaaS business as established by those who have grown large companies before me. I’ve took these insights and compared and contrasted them to the destination skier marketing strategy that I had been a part of developing and executing for the prior four years.

Acquisition:
Acquisition for both business models requires an omni-channel, always-on approach to prospecting.

Creative approach:
One major difference was that I was coming from a well-established brand who is a leader in their industry to a challenger brand in an increasingly crowded space. This was vital to our creative approach to prospecting. Playing the challenger brand can be difficult, but it can also be very fun.

Foundations:
My acquisition strategy was to build a solid set of foundational artifacts that would act as the scaffolding for everything built around them. This included nailing down customers personas, fully solidifying our brand and product positioning, developing a visual language, and re-building a marketing website designed to sell.
Once our landing page was tuned and accurately represented the value story of our product, it immediately began to drive lead volume at a much higher capture rate.

Channel Strategy:
It was obvious TrainHeroic had been successful writing content geared at helping coaches in a high school setting run their weight room, get the most from their athletes, and coach like a pro. Several pieces of content that focused on the art of coaching were already driving a significant amount of traffic to the website. The strategy was to continue to create content that address customer pain points and attract traffic from high volume search terms.
In addition we layered on event marketing, revamped our social media focus, and added a layer of paid media with hyper niche-focus and story-driven creative.

Measurement:
Another huge difference I identified is in the way revenue is realized between the two business models.

When a destination skier purchases their lift tickets, the company realizes all of the revenue from that purchase immediately. The obvious difference in a SaaS business model is that the revenue realized from each user is fractional in the first month. The real leverage is retention. In fact, it is not uncommon that a customer acquisition cost is greater than the initial purchase of one month of a subscription.

This makes measuring your return on different marketing initiatives just slightly more complex. From ROI to LTV:CAC. Return and conversion must be measured on a cohort basis, rather than a simple in-month calculation of spend over return.

Lifecycle:
With a healthy flow of leads and a high capture rate, creating an automated activation and upsell process was paramount.
Purchasing an entire ski vacation and navigating the pre-trip planning experience can feel overwhelming. Much the same as navigating the purchase and subsequent adoption of a complex SaaS business flow tool.
We needed to create a self-serve suite of educational resources that helps our coaches understand how to find success and feel the value of our tool within their 14 day trial.

Automating the journey:
With clear activation actions identified, our lifecycle marketing team began the process of developing a journey map outlining our best customer experience over the course of 14 days. We turned that into an automated communication sequence consisting of an app, push, and emails. This communication drives to a self-service getting started guide. Once we had the automation events in place, we had created a machine that turned prospects into revenue while we slept.

Measurement:
We worked with our data team to create dashboards showing key customer behaviors by monthly cohorts. These reports became our dashboards and system health reference used by our lifecycle marketing experts daily.

Product:
Customer retention, reactivation, and churn also presented interesting similarities and differences.
Destination skiers technically churn every season. At the time I was working in the ski industry there was no such thing as a multiyear or multi-season pass. This means that every year we must focus on reactivating all of the customers from the prior year in addition to finding new customers.
In some ways, this is very similar in the SaaS business model. This is specifically true if your pricing structure does not offer long term subscriptions that lock a user in for any period of time such as an annual commitment.
Lifecycle and product marketing in the ski industry tended to focus on a single season at a time with upsell as their key goal. In the SaaS business, this approach needed to be much more continuous and ever present. The goal is anti-churn (retention).

Strategy: 
Product marketers on the destinations skier visit teams were primarily focused on expanding average revenue-per-user by upselling our guests into various add-on products or experiences to complement their visit. These add-on products were almost never free.

Contrast this to the sass business where product and development teams are consistently building new features and tools for our users. Sometimes the new features are monetized as a premium service, but just as often they are just improvements to an existing product and platform.

Communicating the value of those new features, educating our users on the benefits of the solutions, and driving continued adoption of those new features is paramount to constantly winning the value equation in a SaaS customer’s mind.

Measurement:
Understanding key actions and activities that correlate strongly with higher retention was key. Having a dashboard with these and warning signals of churn was immensely important to understand and be able to act upon using anti-churn communication efforts.

I was the head of marketing at TrainHeroic for roughly 4.5 years in which time we reached about half the scale of the ideal team structure I had laid out early in time with the company. 

Implimenting the general strategy and team structures outlined here resulted in: