20 - How much should you invest in Marketing?

How much money should a B2B SaaS company be spending on marketing? 

The answer is “it depends”, but there are a few ways to get a solid calculation. 

Today, with our special guest Brian Graf, we discuss the four factors you should consider when trying to create your marketing budget: product maturity, market maturity, growth targets, and growth velocity. We also share the methodology behind our new and improved budget calculator for early-stage B2B SaaS companies. 

It’s easy to want to throw money at marketing to get results, but that’s not always the best plan. Sometimes it’s best to not spend any money at all and focus on your product or nailing your go-to-market strategy. 

To comprehensively understand what a company’s budget should be, we pull data from four major categories: Company Attributes such as current ARR (i.e. annual recurring revenue, average contract value and referenceable accounts), Growth Targets (i.e. how much and how fast do you want to grow?), Market Attributes (i.e. how aware is your market and how much competition do you have?), and Existing Foundation (what are you starting with?).