Directive

2 weeks ago, I took over as interim CRO at Directive. I’m now directly managing a 10 person growth team with a $18M bookings target. Here’s the Growth Dashboard I came up with to decide who gets more budget and why: When I (temporarily) transitioned from CEO to CRO, I realized it was nearly impossible to understand the exact impact of each member of our growth team. Everyone wants budget and every idea sounds promising. But, who should I give the more budget to and why? I decided the best way to answer that question is by looking backwards and evaluating who has done the most with what they have already been given. Enter my new Growth Dashboard. A simple dashboard that evaluates three core KPIs: two leading + one lagging. - Proposals Held (SaaS = Demos Held) - Leading - Pipeline - Leading - Closed Won Bookings - Lagging Across the following time frame(s): - Current Month - Previous Month - Last Three Months (L3M) The goal here is that you can clearly understand trends vs. one off’s and have a strong idea of who is honoring their budgets and creating the most value from your investments. I believe dashboards are for directional value not depth. If you want depth, click on the data source. Dashboards are for cultural change and directional insight. They incentivize performance and drive accountability. Both crucial components on high performing teams. If you want a copy of Growth Dashboard, comment “Dashboard” and Ill send it to you in a DM. 

I founded Directive 11 years ago. In that time, we’ve run marketing campaigns for 420+ SaaS companies generating over $1B in attributable revenue. Here are 5 forgotten marketing tactics that always work: 1. Post Fish Photos I use this analogy a lot. The fishing charter captains who are always booked out + can charge the most are not the ones who catch the most fish. They are the ones that remember to post the fish their CUSTOMERS caught on their social media profiles when they get back to the dock. Your company catches great fish for your customers every day. Don’t forget to post the fish you catch. 2. Tell Stories Executives lie. They SAY they just they want to see the data, but it’s not true. We are all driven by emotion, not by rational fact. Take the time to tell your story. Why did you build your products? What do you love about it? Why would the world be worse tomorrow if your company ended today? It seems utopic, but your brand has a story to tell. Tell it through the lens of your customer, your employee, your founder, yourself. 3. Create a Villain Every hero needs a villain. If you want to tell the hero story, you need to frame it in the context of a Marvel movie. Directive’s “Customer Generation” methodology delivers on the promise that Demand Gen forgot about customers. We made our villain the very thing people want when they search for us. Who is your villain? Why did you choose to do something different? 4. Publish Opinions Nobody wants to read an article written by AI. They want a highly opinionated subject matter expert. Someone who is willing to think boldly and challenge the status quo. Safe, easy, simple words that offend nobody and stand for nothing are irrelevant to your audience. It’s why every SaaS company is having a content crisis and their blog is a SEO-optimized, AI-infused, crap content cocktail. 5. Get Reviews Your prospect cares more about what others say about you then what you say about yourself. Social proof matters. Remember, people are good and they want to help you. You just need to to build relationships, keep your brand’s promise, and ask for reviews. Get more reviews, get more customers. TLDR Tech and tactics come and go. Yesterday was SEO, today is ABM. Both are moving towards being forgotten and the cycle continues. There will always be new channels, new targeting, new tech. The beauty of good marketing comes from always embracing first principles

Need more marketing budget? Of course you do. But how do you convince your boss? We pulled together data on how top SaaS companies across all industries spend their marketing dollars. You can download it here: https://bit.ly/41pLV5h That’s step one. Step two: now that you’ve confirmed that you are being outspent by competitors, it’s time to ask your boss for more budget. There’s a simple email template you can steal in the comments (no download necessary). Go get the budget you need to succeed.

In the last 30 days, we have spent $1,900 on LinkedIn thought leadership ads. They work incredibly well, but NOT AT ALL how I thought they would. For context, thought leadership ads are an ad unit on LinkedIn that allow a media buyer to promote any organic post on LinkedIn (once you’ve been given permission by the author). I THOUGHT running thought leadership ads would increase my followers and be a way to fuel my efforts of being consistent at sharing information that I believe is truly valuable and helps others… it did not. I added ZERO followers from this ad unit, weird. What it actually did was allow Directive to share the opinions of our leaders broadly and at scale. Ironically, it allowed us to diversify the voices of Directive beyond my own content. It also gave us a way to promote what our clients were saying about us online. Imagine if you promoted a client testimonial that they shared on their own LinkedIn directly from your own LinkedIn account 😱. LinkedIn’s Thought Leadership Ads gave us a way to broaden our brand messaging and make our talented team members the Robin to our client's Batman. Here’s our initial data from launching Thought Leadership Ads for Directive over the last 30 days: - 29,162 individual accounts reached - $57 cost/1,000 reached accounts - $39 CPM Compared to traditional sponsored content campaigns: - 20,738 individual accounts reached - $1,632 cost/1,000 reached accounts - $562 CPM If you believe in your leaders and want to tell their story, there’s no better way to start promoting your leaders and clients than running thought leadership ads. Have you tried running Thought Leadership ads yet? What did you see?

SaaS Marketing 2018-2023: - Google Ads for your primary keywords - Only gated ebooks and white papers - Legal-optimized case studies - “Product Marketing” - SEO-Optimized blog posts - Retargeting and display ads SaaS Marketing 2024-2025: - LinkedIn ads to a manually verified TAM - Functional content that allows your audience to interact with a tangential or micro-version of your product - Raw or high-production testimonial videos from your customers - Interactive product demos or demo videos - Long-form, opinionated, actually valuable content written with deep research and supporting visuals - CTV to target accounts, at scale It’s not 2018 anymore, buyer behavior has changed. Buyers used to search for information. Now they swipe and scroll. The 2018-2023 playbook is based on buyers that no longer exist. Evolve or die.

Here are the top 20 largest marketing departments in SaaS (by budget): 1. Salesforce ($3.2B) 2. Oracle ($2B) 3. Adobe ($1.4B) 4. Intuit ($1.4B) 5. ServiceNow ($923M) 6. Palo Alto Networks ($718M) 7. Netflix ($644M) 8. Workday ($573M) 9. Fortinet ($501M) 10. Autodesk ($469M) 11. Snowflake ($400M) 12. Shopify ($361M) 13. CrowdStrike ($350M) 14. Zoom ($348M) 15. Spotify ($324M) 16. HubSpot ($300M) 17. OpenText ($296M) 18. DocuSign ($281M) 19. RingCentral ($272M) 20. Zscaler ($262M) Any of these numbers surprise you? Here’s the reality: most SaaS leadership teams build their marketing budget half-blind. Each year, they set a topline goal, review 1st-party data to determine how much to increase or (usually) decrease spending, and assign a marketing budget based on that. Your team gets asked to produce more with even less, while your competitors increase spending and pull ahead. Let’s change that in 2025. Your boss deserves to know what it really takes to become a top company in your space, and you deserve more budget. We put together a report of 100+ top SaaS brands’ spending so you (your boss) can compare it against next year’s plans. Get access here: https://lnkd.in/gsD7EiAN

Since 2019, I’ve coached 20+ agency owners from $1m to $10m in revenue. Across all 20 agencies, I have found 3 core principles that drastically improve performance: Principle 1: Gross Margin Is Your Most Important KPI Gross margin is a KPI that represents how efficiently you are able to deliver value to your customers. Unfortunately, most agencies are not properly allocating their costs to the right COGS categories in their P&L and are not focused on optimizing the effiecency of their delivery. You want to target a gross margin of 50-65% and if you are able to deliver on this KPI you are in a great position to grow top line revenue YoY while still having EBITDA at 20%+. Principle 2: You Need to Spend More on Marketing Every agency I have ever evaluated or coached is underinvested into their own marketing. As a benchmark, you should be roughly targeting the following %s of revenue: - $0-3m in Revenue = 30% - $3-6m in revenue = 25% - $6-12m in revenue = 20% - $12-20m = 15% - $20m+ = 10% The key takeaway is that agencies are valued as a multiple of EBITDA and you can’t have more EBITDA then your top line revenue + gross margin allows. Don’t put the cart before the horse. Principle 3: Pay Yourself on Performance Every founder I have coached has had a compensation model that pays themselves a good salary + a bonus. The problem is that the bonus is not based on the same performance metrics that they hold others accountable too but instead a number that they feel is safe to take from the agency or that they have “earned”. Instead, I propose a simple compensation model. Base Salary + a % of top line revenue every month (3-4%) In agency life, mo' money equals mo' problems. And, most shops have a growth partner and an operating partner. For perfect alignment, I recommend this model as both parties are rewarded for growth and you are truly paid on your performance. If you want to make more, you need to make more. TAKEAWAYS: Once you have cash runway/security, EBITDA should not be your core KPI (unless you are trying to sell in next 24 months). You should be constantly re-investing into initiatives that can drive top line revenue growth. If you want to make more money you need to grow your agency and not cheat the game. P.S. I have two more spots available in my 1:1 agency coaching program. If you're an agency owner doing $1M+ in revenue and want to get to the next level, DM me to see if you're a fit.

LinkedIn advertising is for direct response, not the promotion of gated content. You need to stay focused on proving the monetary value of the platform. Before you can spend money on brand awareness, you need to make sure that you can prove direct value. If your CFO asked your marketing team to prove the worth of LinkedIn ads tomorrow, could you? The reality is that most SaaS marketers can’t advertise to > 15% of their TAM because they don’t know how ask for the budget. They know the value of the channel, but they can not crack the code. The code is simple: - Bring your own data to the party - Leverage conversation ads - Make 10x more videos - Use an incentive (worth $100+) like gift cards, in exchange for a demo - Send to AEs, not SDRs - Use a scheduling link post conversion LinkedIn is a critical channel for SaaS marketers, but if you use it to distribute content as your top priority (instead of directly driving demos) you will never be able to properly or consistently deliver impressions to your ideal customer at your ideal account.

In the last 60 days, we spent $290,000 on ads. The result? Only $100,000 in bookings. Ouch! Here are the 4 biggest mistakes I made (and how we’re fixing them): 1. Expecting ad spend in historically high-performing channels was scalable We were maximizing our budgets on our highest-performing campaigns in an effort to maximize leads before the holiday lull, and we ended up blowing past the limit of what our campaigns could produce efficiently. The Fix: We are going to scale spend a little each day (instead of all at once) so we can find our point of diminishing marginal returns on our campaigns without waste. This way, we will be more informed about how much spend a specific campaign can take and still be efficient for us. 2. Spending time and money where there wasn’t value While volume was improving and initial traction was made, we found that we had just spent lots of money in places that weren’t entirely driving up-market leads for our sales team. The Fix: we are regularly checking the quality leads that each campaign is getting over a certain time frame. If it is driving quality efficiently, we will give it more love. If not, we need to refactor and it has to earn the budget back in the future. 3. Not aligning on a clear testing framework. We went all-in on a few new campaigns as an experiment and didn’t give ourselves a testing framework. Tens of thousands of dollars were wasted because we didn’t treat this as a proper experiment. The Fix: Now any new channel or campaign will have a testing framework, complete with a hypothesis, execution plan, time frame, and definition of success. 4. Making ad copy with a short shelf life. We used to have ad copy with messaging around “hit your Q3 goals,” or seasonal trends which then would inherently need to be updated every 3 months (sometimes sooner), or else there’s no way it would convert. The Fix: We have shifted to making our copy have a longer shelf life. That way, we can focus on ad delivery metrics to determine ad fatigue, rather than writing ads with a predetermined expiration date. TAKEAWAY: We weren’t being proactive in our paid media planning and spending. We let the urgency of the moment make us reactive, which is a bad place to be as a marketer. Don’t let urgent work get in the way of more important things, particularly with forecasting, analyzing, and testing. P.S. Shout out to 🏔️ Sam Calhoun and Evan Fehler who fixed these issues for us.

Name a better collab?