Top 3 Takeaways from SaaStr 2024 for SaaS CMOs and Marketing Teams

Articles Tech
Head shot of Chantelle Little
Chantelle Little
October 8, 2024 8 min read
Six members of the Tiller team standing with the SaaStr mascot at SaaStr Annual 2024

Tiller ❤️s SaaStr

For the third year in a row, six members of Team Tiller made the trek to San Mateo, California, to attend the world’s #1 SaaS gathering: SaaStr Annual.

SaaStr 2024 attracted over 13,000 founders, industry leaders, and venture capitalists. It featured over 300 speakers, 150 deep dives, workshops, and classes, and provided us with over 2,000 networking opportunities. Needless to say, it was a jam-packed three days.

Unsurprisingly, AI was a central theme this year. SaaS companies are promising to do more with less, raising the bar for everyone. SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin says we’ve entered the era of “hyperfunctional SaaS.” Naturally, this got us thinking about how to help our clients scale up their businesses (while growing alongside them, of course!).

Without further ado, let’s dive into our top three takeaways for CMOs from SaaStr 2024.

1. CMOs are under more pressure to prove marketing impact

On Day 3 of SaaStr, 200 CMOs and Heads of Marketing (ours included) piled into a room for an exclusive CMO brunch. But this event was less about hashbrowns and more about upping your marketing game. It was basically a mini-summit for marketing leaders.

One big theme of the CMO brunch was the mounting pressure to perform. The entire morning was dedicated to topics like improving efficiency and tying marketing efforts directly to revenue. Here are SaaStr’s top tips for CMOs who need to meet these sky-high expectations.

Remember the Rule of 40

The most successful SaaS companies aren’t just growing, they’re growing efficiently. The Rule of 40 is a principle that a software company’s combined growth rate (as a percentage) and profit margin should equal or exceed 40%. Basically, SaaS companies operating above 40% generate profit at a sustainable rate. SaaS companies below 40% might not have sufficient cash flow.

The SaaS Rule of 40 formula

The Rule of 40 was popularized by VC’s Brad Feld and Fred Wilson back in 2015 — but for many investors, it’s no longer enough. Some VCs now want to see results of 60% or higher (according to Ray Rike, founder and CEO of Benchmarkit).

While CMOs aren’t solely responsible for striking that perfect balance between growth and profitability, this renewed emphasis on results reveals why so many CMOs are now tracking metrics beyond traditional KPIs like impressions and MQLs.

Track KPIs that tie back to revenue

If MQLs are no longer enough, what are CMOs at top-performing SaaS companies measuring? We got a sneak peek at a lot of different marketing dashboards measuring a lot of different things, but the most powerful marketing metrics are the ones that tie directly back to revenue.

  • MQL-to-opportunity conversion rates – measures the effectiveness of lead nurturing by tracking the percentage of MQLs that progress to sales opportunities.
  • New ARR – measures revenue growth by calculating new recurring revenue generated from new customers and upsells within a given year.
  • Marketing spend as a % of new ARR – measures marketing efficiency by calculating how much marketing spend is required to generate each dollar of new recurring revenue.
  • CAC ratio – measures the sales and marketing cost required to secure every dollar of annual recurring revenue (as opposed to CAC which just measures the cost to acquire one new customer).
  • % of qualified pipeline from inbound – measures organic lead gen by calculating the proportion of sales pipeline that comes from inbound vs. outbound marketing.

A lot of these metrics only become really powerful once you move past the early adoption phase. When you have bigger budgets to allocate toward customer acquisition and retention, then you can start analyzing the financial impact of your marketing efforts.

Increase efficiency with AI

How to use AI to find time and budget efficiencies was a prominent theme threaded through nearly every keynote presentation at SaaStr. With longer sales cycles and increased customer expectations, marketing strategies need to be more precise and .

Marketing teams that effectively leverage AI are seeing 2.5x to 7x increases in achieving their goals. What that means for CMOs is that the benchmark has permanently changed. With so many SaaS companies already doing more with less, it’s no wonder expectations are higher.

The challenge for CMOs isn’t figuring out if AI is a good fit for your marketing team — if you’re not using it, you’re lagging behind — but how to best use it to streamline existing workflows.

2. CMOs need to keep up with a rapidly-evolving market

SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin noted a massive push to efficiency for all SaaS teams, from customer success to marketing to sales. Everyone’s running leaner and the ‘new normal’ is for public SaaS companies to scale to a team of 700 at $200 million ARR. That’s $300,000 per employee.

The hiring craze is over. CMOs today need to balance agility with forward-thinking strategies to outpace competitors. Here’s how the top companies are doing it.

Leverage automation

AI is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s essential. Even if the AI-craze levels out, expectations are permanently altered (there’s no walking back those efficiency increases mentioned above!). That’s why savvy CMOs are using AI to automate processes such as:

  • Lead scoring, segmentation, and nurturing
  • Addressing process bottlenecks and pain points
  • Conducting market research
  • Pulling Voice of Customer (VoC) insights

But even though AI was mentioned in nearly every presentation at SaaStr 2024, it always came with a strong cautionary note: there’s no replacing human ingenuity or thoughtfulness.

AI is incredibly powerful for automating mundane, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks. But there are still a lot of pitfalls with using AI for original content creation, especially when it starts hallucinating or recycling its own made-up data.

The takeaway here: leverage AI in your workflows but don’t lose the human touch.

Revisit your positioning

We may have swooned a little bit when April Dunford took the stage. If you haven’t heard of her, she’s the author of best-selling books Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch, and she’s a master at helping B2B SaaS and Tech companies nail their positioning.

It’s easy to view positioning as static and think that once you find it, you’re set. April challenged that thinking. She argued that positioning isn’t static, because your company isn’t static. Your brand and offering changes in response to new competitive pressures and shifting customer needs.

When you think about it like this, it seems obvious that positioning needs to evolve over time.

Importantly, new positioning isn’t something that marketing teams invent out of nowhere and it doesn’t manifest when c-suite lock themselves in a room for a brainstorming session. Instead, you need a customer-centric methodology to nail positioning that will dominate a market.

The takeaway for CMOs: talk to your customers. Voice of Customer (VoC) can provide clarity on who your competition is, the value you provide, and the status quo you’re replacing. Your team should be re-evaluating their positioning every six months, but first you need that clarity.

Share powerful stories

Great positioning goes beyond features and benefits — it’s a compelling story.

Siqi Chen, founder and CEO of Runway, gave a great talk about how stories are the central operating pillar for a company. He talked about Runway’s challenge — how finances are often seen as this big, scary, complex thing, and how Runway rewrites the narrative to communicate financial concepts in an easily-understood way.

The right story creates cohesion, defines mission, shapes strategy, and literally changes how you operate by influencing your messaging, how you sell, and even how you build your product.

When you find that story, it’s intuitive. It feels like you’ve always known it. Everyone in your company adopts it, and your customers hear it and feel deeply understood.

We’ve always been big believers in the power of storytelling — both brand stories and customer stories. But learning how it can (and should) be incorporated into everything from engineering, to product, to design, to marketing, to culture was inspiring. The right story isn’t just something you whip out to close a lead or market your brand; it’s something you live.

We’re already thinking about how to do more with Tiller’s story (more on that soon!) and we’re excited to help SaaS brands capture and share their bold, unique, differentiated stories too.

3. CMOs need to strategically plan ahead

The SaaS landscape is shifting from economic downturn to hyperfunctional efficiency. While a lot of companies struggled in 2023–24, the top-performing companies still managed to experience staggering growth. And the gap between them and the rest of the market is getting wider.

By understanding where we’re at, where we’re going, and how we’re getting there, CMOs can proactively build toward future success.

Understand the current state of SaaS

In 2023–24, we saw top SaaS performers set a new, higher bar for truly great products. Canva, for example, added 60 million users — eight years’ worth of growth in one year! But while the top performers posted solid growth, many others struggled.

The gap between the top performers and the rest has never been wider.

What do these top performers have that other SaaS companies lack? Usually, it boils down to strategy and efficiency. Automation is everywhere and AI is automation on steroids. These companies are implementing it thoughtfully — both within their SaaS tools as customer-facing features and within their workflows to multiply the capabilities of their teams.

But make no mistake, the strategy is key here. You can’t just deploy AI and expect to win. Just look at Salesforce — despite investing heavily in AI, they didn’t report any significant revenue growth and actually lost $50B in market cap in 2023.

Invest in trending growth channels

One of the most actionable takeaways to come out of SaaStr 2024 was the giant list of trending channels that CMOs are leveraging to power brand growth:

  • Brand marketing – tell your story and get people to fall in love with who you are
  • Customer advocacy – share social proof (testimonials and case studies) AND get customers to “go to bat” for you. One attendee actually brought a happy customer to their booth and had them explain why they loved the product so much. Genius!
  • Influencer marketing – ditch the brand social accounts and instead hire or build your own influencers (Founders, Leaders, SMEs, etc.).
  • Events and conferences – show up strong, stand out, don’t be afraid to network, and proactively get access to email lists.
  • Partnerships – seek out co-marketing with related products or organizations. Tap into a complementary audience for greater scale at lower cost.
  • Differentiated content – leverage human expertise to communicate something valuable to your audience. Write for humans but don’t neglect SEO best practices.
  • Outbound lead gen – it’s tougher now, but can still work if you do it well:
    • Niche down your targeting.
    • Provide content that’s humanized and personalized.
    • Address relevant pain points.
    • Prove how you’ve helped similar organizations.
    • Respond quickly. Responses within the first hour = 7x more likely to qualify.

While these channels worked for CMOs at SaaStr 2024, your mileage may vary. You should prioritize the growth channels that show the highest return on investment.

Prepare for 2025 and beyond

One of the biggest takeaways from SaaStr 2024 was that B2B SaaS will achieve AI parity in 2025. Adding AI to your product is no longer a differentiator; it’s table stakes.

If being “AI-Powered” is now basically just another checkbox on a feature list, how do emerging SaaS companies win? The answer is something you’ve had all along — your customers. Solve buyer problems and you’ll find yourself solving business problems too.

When you tap into Voice of Customer, you’ll find yourself better equipped to:

  • Evolve your brand positioning and messaging
  • Customize your products, packages, features, services, and upsells
  • Multiply the impact and reach of your marketing
  • Grow customer retention
  • Get ahead of potential brand crises

So yes — definitely think about AI. Use automation to improve your processes. Find new ways to streamline and optimize. But anchor everything you do in solving your customers’ needs.

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