HOW AN IDEALSAAS MARKETING TEAMSHOULD BE STRUCTURED

The ultimate question thatcomes before the structure of a SaaS marketing team ishow many people should be in it.

According to extensive research published on Insightsquared, it depends on how big your SaaS company is.

Here are the few marketing experts that you want to have onboard before you start advertising in the B2B market.

1. Vice President of Product Marketing2. Product Marketing Manager3. Product Marketing Manager – Sales Enablement4. Web Developer5. UX Research Specialist6. Vice President of Content7. Content Marketing Manager8. SEO Manager9. Data Analyst

Vice President of Product Marketing

The VP of product marketing leads a team of marketers and directly responds to the CMO. Marketers in this team are responsible for messaging and delivering the service to market.The VP of Product Marketing is responsible for bringing services and features to market while collaborating with the service developer and customer research teams.

This role is crucial for SaaS marketing success, because it stands in the middle of all efforts and operations. A VP of product marketing has to have leadership experience, brilliant communication skills and a highly analytical approach. This person has to be able to communicate with service developers and designers, customer research analysts and other departments.

Product Marketing Manager

The Product Marketing Manager’s role in your SaaS business marketing will be to tell other companies in the market the story behind your service. He should be the one who strongly advocates for specific features and how they will change the business of people who decide to buy it. The PPM is also in charge of one more incredibly important task –designing. the strategy around the new service, update or feature launch.

Since the product marketing manager will have to post on forums, reply on Quora questions and occasionally blog, they have to possess excellent written and verbal communication skills. This is because his role is to present, or better said, sell ideas to potential customers. This person also has to love to collaborate as they will constantly be involved in interactions between the employees from the company’s other departments and prospects.

Product Marketing Manager–Sales EnablementThe role of PMM Sales Enablement is to drive customer growth every day. This person has to be able to dominate the competitive landscape by optimizing the sales process. Main responsibitilities include:

work closely with customers in order to identify pain points and learn from their experiences

write customer success stories analyze the competition and use a broad specter of data to support the ideas they

are communicating to the prospects and other marketing team members

Personality traits to look for when hiring people for this position are:

Great communication skills able to make tough decisions when prioritizing features and updates

Problem Solving through a Collaboration Mindset StrategicalThinking;

Web Developer

Since you are a SaaS company, your website is one of your primary marketing assets. It has to be functional and beautifully designed.

Along with practical web development skills, a web developer should also have an eye for design. This person is crucial for your marketing success and he has to be able to collaborate with graphic designers and service marketers.

They should be able to create responsive websites and deliver a great website experience in order to drive action. Above all, this person has to be innovative so that your company can benefit from the latest UI trends, best practices in web development and agile methodology.

UX Research SpecialistThe role of a UX research specialist is to bring improvement to website design and your application user interface, to further improve the usability of both. Along with practical web development skills, a web developer should also have an eye for design. This person will make your application easy to use and allow you to advertise your service as one with a very short onboarding process.

do user research, and persona and scenario development, predict how the service will be used in order to fully optimize it, make sure that the user interface stays user-friendly in

all sections of the app, effectively collaborate with software developers, content designers and

marketing teams, to ensure that each of their efforts provide beautiful experience to end users.

The UX research specialistmust be able to:

Content Marketing ManagerThe ideal SaaS marketing team should always have at least one CMM who is proficient in writing and producing various projects. This person is in charge of building and expanding the SaaS company’s digital footprint through regular blogging, raising awareness and generating more leads via social media. When you are looking for a person to fill this position, you want to make sure that they have previous experience in producing web content and building

Personality traits that qualify a person for this position are:

Passionate about their work creative Loyal and able to dedicate time to get to know the audience

organized and oriented on goals

SEO Manager

In today’s market, having an SEO manager on your marketing team is a must. This person will be in charge of identifying and following on the opportunities to improve your company’s rank on search engines.Their responsibilities would be to manage off-site and on-site SEO for the company and collaborate with other content creators in order to utilize the specific keywords for reaching your market segment.

Personality traits that qualify a person for this position are:

Collaborative Ambitious and hungry for knowledge Innovative and agile Reliable - able to use good judgement in various scenarios Effective and dedicated to their craft

Data AnalystAnd last, but not least, your team will need a Data Analyst. This person should be statistic-savvy.

A Data Analyst’s primary role is to: hack the data and provide useful insights to other members of SaaS

B2B marketing team implement a statistical test on your marketing efforts and comeback

with the results that show their significance and impact on lead generation.

By analyzing data, the analyst will identify new opportunities for growth and point out a more efficient way for your marketing team to operate.7This person should also be able to collaborate with and bring statics close to other colleges so that they can use it to learn and improve their skills.

So How do youHire and Structureyour marketing Team?

Regardless of constraints, growing SaaS companies have to structure their marketing teams and hire people to make sure they meet the following goals:

Quickly build a customer base Retain customers Upsell customers and maintain the loan-to-value ratio

The most effective way to achieve these goals isto leverage pay-per-click and cost-per acquisition campaigns.This way, SaaS companies can optimize and have insightful metrics on customer acquisition costs (CAC) in the long term.In addition, a marketing team should be developing an inbound marketing strategy to set actions in motion for achieving the same goals in the long run.

Next in line is building educational resources. This way, you will provide your users with updates on the latest features, upgrades, help them learn the best practices and get the most out of your software. So, these teams should always include an experienced marketer, a research analyst in charge of creating a buyer persona, a data analyst, content creators (graphic designers and copywriters), a web developer and a social media manager.

For SaaS companies that have been present on the market for years, marketing to B2B has to heavily rely on inbound marketing. That is content, SEO, and Social Media. Your marketing team should be able to write blog posts several times a week and share them on your social media profiles frequently. The blog posts should not only provide resourceful information for your intended audience, but also tell stories about your customers’ successes.

Your perfect marketing team should at least have the following:

Inbound Marketing Manager - if you are just starting with Inbound Marketing, you should hire an experienced professional who will be able to build a unique inbound marketing strategy.

Social Media/Community Manager - this person will be in charge of developing specific strategies for different social networks. By using the best practices, integrating the best tools, and tracking the right metrics, this person will help you grow your audience and convert them into leads and customers.

Content Marketing Manager - this role stands at the core of any marketing team. CMM should be able to collaborate with various SaaS department teams and be able to produce relevant content. This content has to be able to meet the needs of the target audience and key stakeholders as well.

As companies shift their focus from shipping units of a product to building and monetizing relationships with subscribers, a whole new culture is needed. A Subscription Culture wraps the entire company — from product to sales to finance to operations — around creating sustainable customer value.

- Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, an enterprise software company that develops SaaS apps for other companies.

If it could be summed up in one sentence: a SaaS company culture has to be both employee and customer centric. Since SaaS companies have to be very agile (move quickly to create more customer value) and extremely customer-focused, the emphasis is put on building exceptional collaboration and communication.

Here are two companies that seem to be fighting for the first position when it comes to the best company culture award - HubSpot and Moz.Hubspot has a unique model of company culture. They have been named as the best place to work in Boston for several years in a row. They are known by their “No Door Policy”. This means that the CEO and other execs don't have their separate offices but sit with everybody else.

The company culture in Moz is coded as

TAGFEE - Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, Exceptional.The Moz model of dealing with responsibility really sets the bar. They say: “We acknowledge that we are entirely responsible for our own reputation, the level of success we achieve, the brand image we create, and the contributions we make to the marketing industry”.

Both Moz and HubSpot have something in common. These companies seem to have:

Strong personal relationships Great connections with customers Cohesive sets of values and vision Individual and collective passion

Dave Key, co-founder of FileNet, FieldCentrix and YouMail states that a healthy SaaS company culture has to promote and nurture these traits:

Collaborative organization Empowered employees and culture that accepts occasionally made

mistakes Mutual trust (leaders - employees) Treats employees as the most valuable assets

ConclusionAs you can see, there are many types of SaaS marketing teams with different organizational structures. Each role in this team has a unique set of requirements that complement those of others. There is no ideal SaaS marketing team that can be considered universal. This is because every SaaS company has its own unique product, features, design and specific target market.

You will have to build your own by utilizing some of the best practices we have mentioned in the article. When you are building your own SaaSmarketing team, you should compare your goals and needs with the roles and marketing team organizations outlined above, so that you can put together a team that will custom tailor the experience for you target market.

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