Should I Outsource Sales and Marketing for My SaaS Business?

One of the first questions many SaaS Founders ask themselves, once they’ve established product-market-fit and launched their MPV, is whether they should consider hiring marketing and sales personnel in-house or to outsource SaaS sales and marketing to external agencies or freelancers.

The answer of course depends on many factors, but the primary reason most SaaS businesses choose to outsource from the start are the obvious cost savings, especially if they haven’t yet obtained Seed funding and are bootstrapping the business from their own pockets.

Now, unless you’ve raised a couple of million in funding, there is no doubt you’ll either want to start-off promoting the business yourself or at least outsource some of your sales and marketing activities.

So, the next question keeping many SaaS Founders’ awake at night is:

‘But how do I decide which activities to outsource, when should I start hiring employees for those roles and in which order??’ 

Should I Promote and Market my SaaS business myself?

To explain how a lot of SaaS businesses start out, I use the following boomerang metaphor…

A founder will often start with doing everything themselves, from writing copy, sales prospecting, running a few ad-hoc ads of Facebook or Google etc.  Then when it gets too much for them to handle (or they realise they aren’t really getting the results they were hoping for as they’re not experts in those fields), they start outsourcing to external agencies or freelancers.  Finally, as the business starts to grow and revenues increase, they’ll start hiring people into the company to take care of those activities full time.

This is more or less the right way to go, in principle, but in my experience, firstly Founders often leave it too late to get experts in to help them, which can drastically impede their rate of growth.  If you find yourself in this situation, do not be afraid to loosen the reigns a little and delegate the work to the experts. It’ll save you a lot of time and stress in the long run! 

On the flip-side, taking on new employees too quickly can lead to failure, as it could force your operating costs to get out of hand and you could find yourself in zombie-land struggling to make any profit, nor have enough funds to reinvest into your customer acquisition strategy. 

It’s also important to mention that unless you have been directly carrying out sales and marketing yourself for at least 10 years, you will find that you will waste a lot of time on a long learning curve.  Leave it to those who have tried and tested strategies, preferably within your industry, so you don’t have to waste valuable resources trying to find out for yourself. Also, there are other areas you’ll need to focus on such as product development, so you are unlikely to have the time required to cover all areas of sales and marketing on your own to grow the business fast.

Now we’ve established that you’re going to need some help, let’s take a look at each discipline and role individually, and weigh out the pros and cons of contracting them out or hiring dedicated staff to leverage in-house expertise.

Sales & Support

There are many different types of sales personnel for a SaaS company, such as Marketing Development Representatives (MDRs), Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), Account Executives (AEs), Customer Success Managers (CSMs). As a start-up, having to pay all these salaries can be quite a daunting prospect.  And, whether you end up hiring all or some of these into your organisation will also depend on the complexity of your product. 

For example, for SaaS businesses that will be delivering high-ticket technical products to enterprise customers, it’s likely you’ll need all of the above eventually, however, for a self-serve freemium or lower price SaaS, which is almost entirely automated, you may only ever need CSMs as a point of contact for support and to help guide the customer through the buyers’ journey. 

If your business model falls within the latter, this is one area you can certainly do yourself from the start, as you know your product and care deeply about your customers, until your customer base starts to grow, then start with one SDR and CSM, bringing in AEs and MDRs as you scale.

That said, there are arguments for and against outsourcing sales teams for a SaaS product, with the main criticism against outsourcing being that a sales person needs to know the product inside-out, fully understand the ICP and the product’s different use-cases, have a deep understanding of the prospect’s challenges and be able to handle objections.

Yes, this is true, but with well-constructed and in-depth training, this information can be learned, so it is often recommended to outsource sales teams for your outbound strategy before bringing them in-house. This strategy has been undertaken by many successful SaaS brands when they were starting out, such as ZoomInfo, which helped them get to the $400+ million in revenues where they are today.

You just need to make sure that you have set your sales strategy and agreed on the targets that you want to achieve for your investment within your agency agreement.

Copywriting and Content Marketing

Now, this is one area where I am adamant needs to be undertaken in-house right from the outset.  The amount of content you need to produce and publish as a SaaS product to attract and retain customers and to truly stand out from your competitors can be quite overwhelming. 

Not only do you need to be producing 3-4 blogs per week as part of your long-term inbound strategy, but also content for landing pages, e-books and other lead magnets, content to help customers through the buyers’ journey such as case studies, product guides, white papers, webinars, pitch-decks, newsletters, email nurturing and onboarding sequences, as well as content for video and social media posting as part of your organic and paid outreach strategy. 

The list is endless, and imagine what that would cost you if you were paying $60 per 300 words!  And even then, the content you receive is likely to be mediocre.  No matter how good the agency is or claim to be, they will never be fully ingrained in the product or your industry as an in-house copywriter, and if it works out cheaper and they can produce more content to help you grow quicker as a business, then it’s a no brainer, right?

Social Media and Community Development

Again, social media posting and managing communities, if done well, is almost a full-time job.  It is therefore recommended to have an in-house specialist maintaining them. However, this role could be performed by the same person you’ve hired for your content marketing as long as they have previous experience in community development. 

If you do need to outsource this aspect of your marketing strategy, then find a loyal freelancer who is able to monitor your social media channels during business hours at least, and is likely to stay with you for up to the first year, to gain a deeper understanding of your product and your ICP.

Website and Branding

As the focus of any SaaS company is the development and UX of its core product, there is often already a team of programmers and designers, which can take on the role of creating the marketing website, branding and other communications materials.  This is fine from a design perspective, however, the messaging and targeting strategy needs to be identified prior to any design work commencing.

Therefore, the job is probably best left to an agency, at least to get the initial logo design, messaging strategy, and the website initially, which will set you back anything between £2k-£10k (depending on the level of professionalism), then sub-contract a freelancer on an ad-hoc basis when you need to design landing pages and banners for social media etc. 

SEO

Today, search engine optimisation is not as much of a science as it used to be, as the best way to optimise your website is to publish regular, good quality content, which we’ve already covered above.  If you can hire a content writer that also has some knowledge of SEO then even better. 

However, that doesn’t mean you should forget about SEO entirely, as it’s important to ensure that certain technical elements are covered and that you are keeping up-to-date with the latest algorithms which are constantly changing, and the last thing you want is to be penalised with a reduced ranking or even get kicked out entirely of Google’s SERPs because you’ve unknowingly violated their guidelines. Also, you may be missing an opportunity to gain even more traffic to your website.  Therefore, an SEO agency or freelancer will certainly help you stay on the ball, and it shouldn’t set you back too much money.

Ads Management

This is another area which is advisable to outsource as a start-up, until you can acquire more customers and scale revenues where you have enough to build a dedicated in-house marketing team. 

It is advisable to use an agency or freelancer who has previous experience and success in managing paid advertising programmes within your industry.  They will know what strategies and tactics have previously worked and will give you the highest ROI for your ad spend.

Marketing Management

Now, until you have assembled an in-house marketing team, you’re probably not going to need a full-time marketing manager at this stage.  Also, to take on a highly qualified and experienced senior level marketing manager with the skills required to take your business to the next level you will need to pay a £50k/$100k per annum at the very minimum.

However, as previously explained if you don’t have at least 10 years of hands-on marketing experience, you will need someone on-board to help you set out your growth strategy and make sure you hire and/or train the right people who can deliver it.  For this you just need an experienced strategist or consultant, who will work closely with you to dive into your product, industry and ICP, and will create a road-map for the next phase of growth, following which you should be in a strong position to hire an in-house marketing management team.

In Conclusion

Therefore, in summary, don’t try to everything yourself otherwise all you’ll do is prevent your SaaS business from penetrating your market and growing as quickly as it could, and that could also mean missing the boat when it comes to being first-to-market. 

Consider outsourcing your sales team before bringing them in-house, but make sure they are well trained in your product first and a clear strategy and targets are set before-hand.  However, if you have a high value complex SaaS product aimed at an enterprise tier, then you’ll most likely need to start with at least one in-house SDR and AE.

An in-house copywriter or content marketer is paramount to delivering a successful inbound strategy for new customer acquisition, and preferably a community manager too, unless the content marketer is experienced enough to do both. 

Other marketing activities such as web design, SEO and paid advertising can be safely outsourced to an agency or freelancer, as long as they are experienced and can provide success cases working within your particular industry. 

Finally, unless you are an experienced marketing wizard, you’ll need help with overseeing and implementing your full growth strategy, so it’s best to hire an external strategist or consultant first before forking out up to 6 figures on a senior marketing manager.