Maximizing Marketing ROI in Enterprise SaaS: A Guide to Verticalized GTM Strategies

Evaluating marketing spend for a B2B SaaS company focused on enterprise sales, particularly one starting to verticalize its go-to-market (GTM) strategy, requires a clear understanding of growth drivers. SaaS companies grow through three primary levers: Acquisition, Renewals, and Expansion. For companies past $10M in ARR, renewals typically overtake acquisition as the main growth driver, and for those exceeding $100M in ARR, expansion becomes paramount. Marketing supports all three of these growth areas, with varying emphasis depending on the company’s stage and strategic focus. See appendix for a breakdown.

Three Lenses of Measurement

Discussions of marketing ROI often center on Acquisition. Below is a structured, 3-step framework to evaluate and measure the ROI of marketing investments for 6-figure ACV enterprise SaaS company:

1. Measure Leading Indicators (Activity and Engagement)

• Why: Early signals indicate whether campaigns are reaching and engaging the right audiences.

• What to Measure:

  • Vertical-specific engagement: Content downloads, webinar attendance, and website visits.

  • Top-of-funnel metrics: Leads generated, target account engagement, and email open rates.

  • Sales enablement utilization: Use of vertical-specific materials (e.g., case studies, decks).

• How It Helps: Ensures marketing efforts drive awareness and interaction within target verticals.

2. Measure Lagging Indicators (Pipeline and Revenue Impact)

• Why: Validates marketing’s role in revenue and pipeline growth.

• What to Measure:

  • Marketing-sourced pipeline: New deals directly created by marketing campaigns.

  • Marketing-influenced revenue: Closed-won deals where marketing played a role.

  • ROI per vertical: Pipeline-to-spend ratio across verticals (e.g., banking, healthcare).

• How It Helps: Links marketing activities to business outcomes.

3. Optimize Based on Efficiency Metrics

• Why: Identifies high-ROI investments for budget optimization.

• What to Measure:

  • Cost per opportunity (CPO): Campaign spend divided by opportunities created.

  • Pipeline velocity: Time from lead to closed-won, broken down by vertical.

  • Campaign ROI benchmarks: Comparison of performance within verticals.

• How It Helps: Guides budget allocation to efficient channels and campaigns.

Example in Action:

• Leading Indicators: A vertical-specific webinar generates 200 healthcare leads, with 15 converting to meetings.

• Lagging Indicators: Of those meetings, 5 deals enter the pipeline, contributing $1.25M.

• Efficiency Metrics: The webinar’s cost per opportunity is $2,000, and healthcare deals close 20% faster due to tailored messaging.

This framework ensures marketing’s contributions are measured holistically, balancing proactive assessment, impact validation, and optimization.

Attribution Models

Accurate measurement also requires thoughtful attribution modeling to account for marketing’s role throughout the buyer journey. Here are key attribution models and their applications:

1. First Touch: Assigns all credit to the initial touchpoint.

2. Modified First Touch: Resets first-touch credit after a set period of inactivity.

3. Last Touch: Assigns credit to the final touchpoint before opportunity creation.

4. Influenced: Credits every touchpoint equally before opportunity creation.

5. Weighted: Assigns partial credit to touchpoints based on an engagement model.

Expanding the Attribution Perspective

It is correct to have a view of attribution that looks only up to the point of opportunity creation. This phase provides critical insights into how marketing drives initial engagement and conversion into opportunities. However, for a more complete picture, another model should be used to determine which activities and investments help accelerate deal velocity, improve win rates, and increase deal size.

Traditional models also often overlook the contributions of multiple stakeholders within enterprise deals, particularly in the context of Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM requires tracking progression at the account level rather than individual leads, including multithreading—engaging multiple stakeholders across an account. Standard CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot are not inherently designed to handle these complexities, so RevOps and data teams often need to build custom solutions. These might include mapping interactions to key decision-makers, tracking stakeholder engagement across the buying committee, and aligning activities with account-level goals to provide a more accurate view of ABM’s impact on pipeline and revenue.

Advanced Techniques for Marketing Spend Allocation

To address additional limitations such as the reliance on correlation rather than causality and the challenges of measuring offline spend, consider:

1. Media Mix Modeling (MMM): Uses historical spend and outcomes to assess ROI and guide allocation decisions across channels.

2. Incrementality Testing: Employs experimental methods (e.g., heavy-ups, hold-backs) to isolate the causal impact of marketing spend on outcomes.

These techniques complement attribution models by providing a high-level view of channel effectiveness and enabling data-driven decisions for annual or quarterly planning.

Conclusion

Effective evaluation of marketing spend in a verticalizing B2B SaaS company requires balancing granular, campaign-level attribution with broader, strategic analysis. By using a mix of leading, lagging, and efficiency metrics alongside advanced techniques like MMM and incrementality testing, businesses can optimize their investments and ensure alignment with their GTM strategy. This holistic approach not only justifies marketing budgets but also positions the organization for sustained growth across acquisition, renewal, and expansion efforts.

Appendix: The Full Scope of Marketing Activities

While the discussion above focused on capturing and modeling attribution around acquisition, it's instructive to keep a big picture view of where marketing is contributing across not just acquisition, but also renewals and expansion as well. Different types of activities will require their own measurement framework. 

For Acquisition, marketing contributes with these activities:

• Messaging & Positioning:
  • Developing clear, compelling narratives that differentiate the company and resonate with target audiences.
  • Ensuring consistency across all marketing and sales touchpoints.
• Market Research & ICP Definition:
  • Identifying ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and key verticals based on data, market trends, and customer insights.
  • Providing sales with actionable intelligence on market dynamics and customer needs.
• Brand Awareness (“Air Cover”):
  • Building credibility and visibility, especially when selling to enterprise organizations, which tend to be risk-averse.
  • Includes initiatives like brand advertising, major conferences, public relations (PR), analyst relations (AR), and thought leadership content.
• Lead Generation:
  • Reaching new audiences through content, paid media, SEO, social media, community-building, and co-marketing.
  • Nurturing leads over time with personalized email campaigns and retargeting.
• Meeting Generation:
  • Supporting inbound lead generation efforts (e.g., “hand-raisers” from content, social, events, or ads).
  • Partnering with outbound teams to drive highly targeted account engagement through ABM campaigns and gifting.
• Multithreading:
  • Driving engagement with multiple stakeholders within target accounts, focusing on at least two decision-makers and three influencers.
  • Developing campaigns and content that address the unique needs of each buying committee role.
• Sales Enablement:
  • Equipping sales with high-impact tools like:
    • Email sequences and templates.
    • Case studies, ROI calculators, and product comparisons.
    • Demo scripts and vertical-specific pitch decks.
    • Objection-handling guides and training materials.

For Renewals, marketing contributes with these activities:

• Customer Success Enablement:
  • Providing materials like case studies, FAQs, onboarding guides, and adoption playbooks to ensure customers see value quickly and consistently.
  • Producing "how-to" content or webinars to help users maximize the product’s value.
• Engagement Campaigns:
  • Regular customer newsletters, webinars, or events to keep customers informed about product updates, new features, and best practices.
  • Community-building efforts like user groups, online forums, or AMAs (Ask Me Anything sessions).
• Customer Advocacy Programs:
  • Developing customer advocacy initiatives, such as case studies, testimonials, and reviews, which double as retention tools and social proof for prospects.
  • Encouraging participation in customer councils or advisory boards.
• Voice of the Customer (VoC) Initiatives:
  • Running satisfaction surveys (e.g., NPS) and using insights to proactively address potential dissatisfaction or churn risks.
  • Producing materials that share feedback-based improvements, reinforcing the company’s commitment to customer needs.
• Onboarding Campaigns:
  • Automated onboarding sequences to guide new users through first-use milestones.
  • Role-based guides and campaigns to support adoption by various personas within the customer organization.
• Product Adoption Support:
  • Creating feature adoption campaigns to ensure customers are leveraging all relevant capabilities.
  • Launching usage benchmarks and gamification to encourage deeper engagement.

For Expansion, marketing contributes with these activities:

• Account-Based Marketing (ABM):
  • Tailored campaigns targeting additional departments, regions, or subsidiaries of existing accounts.
  • Personalized messaging to align with the expanded use cases of the product or service.
• Upsell and Cross-Sell Enablement:
  • Developing materials to highlight complementary products, upgrades, or advanced features.
  • Creating ROI calculators and success stories to demonstrate the value of upselling or cross-selling.
• Executive Engagement:
  • Hosting C-suite-specific events, executive roundtables, or thought leadership pieces to drive buy-in at higher levels of the organization.
  • Delivering executive dashboards that showcase the business impact of the product.
• Customer Lifecycle Campaigns:
  • Targeted email and ad campaigns to promote additional products or services based on customer behavior and usage patterns.
  • Drip campaigns designed for different roles or departments in the account.
• Advocacy as Expansion:
  • Encouraging existing advocates to champion the product within other teams or business units.
  • Highlighting peer success stories to inspire other departments to adopt.
• Partnerships with Customer Success:
  • Collaborating with CSMs to identify opportunities for expansion based on customer goals and usage.
  • Co-developing playbooks to guide conversations around expansion opportunities.
• Use Case Discovery Campaigns:
  • Educating customers on new and expanded use cases that could drive additional adoption within the account.
  • Using surveys or data analytics to identify gaps or potential areas for expansion.