How to Continue Growing Through Budget Cuts and Layoffs

The unfortunate reality for a lot of SaaS companies right now is that they are laying off a percentage of their team, cutting budgets, or both. It's tough.

But unless your company is shutting down, you intend to keep fighting and make it through all of this and get back to scaling your company.

So, how do you keep growing when you now have fewer people in Marketing and Sales and those folks have fewer resources to work with?

Here are the 5 things I would do if I were working on a Marketing team at a SaaS company today.

Target Ideal Accounts

I would analyze the paid accounts to determine the campaigns that meet an acceptable CPL or CAC threshold (in partnership with Finance) and keep those.

Ideally, this still leaves some budget left within the new, lower budget that can be repurposed and I would use it to run LinkedIn or Twitter ads directly to a list of my ideal accounts.

Anything outside of the lean campaigns in paid search is just stressing the system. Your sales team has to follow up on those trials or provide demos, so you want to make sure they are working on the best.

Everything else should go towards proactively getting your message and content in front of the absolute best audience for your product.

Just because a campaign has a good conversion rate or CPL doesn't make it good for your business. Consider the bandwidth of reps and focus on revenue efficiency.

Shift Content Focus

If your company is doing a decent amount of content marketing, it can be hard to know what to stop and what to continue.

I would make a few changes to ensure two key things.

1. Even if the volume needs to be scaled back, I would make sure that we can continue to create written content that is intended to rank and drive organic traffic and leads. The growth rate may slow down but stopping completely will only lead to declining performance that will work against you.
2. For all other content marketing like webinars, videos, guides, podcasts, etc., I would shift to try to get the most content from the least amount of effort. Many of these take a lot of time to plan and create so I would do fewer of them, but in a way that the distribution and repurposing of them can lead to the same amount of output as before the cuts.

Tap Existing Database

In good times, companies tend to get lazy with their existing database and all of the potential that lies within.

I would create campaigns (honestly, even a single email could be better than nothing) that focus on these groups to do more with what we already have.

1. Past/existing leads - I would do quite a bit with this group to get more of them into a free trial or demo experience.
2. Past trials/demos - Put together a special offer or just plain ask them to sign up. Anything to tip the scales now for those on the fence, that weren't ready in the past, or are unhappy with the alternative they chose.
3. Churned customers - Create a win-back campaign highlighting what all has changed or been added since they left and make an offer for them to sign back up for your product.

Dig In With Sales

I would set up a regular cadence with the team, maybe weekly to start, to have faster feedback loops and constant communication.

As I mentioned before, revenue efficiency is critical.

• How can we dial in the pipeline to make it the best opportunities being discussed?
• What can be automated to save reps time?
• How can we align target ads with rep outreach to hit the same key accounts together?

Move together. Make decisions together. Win together.

Optimize the Website

I would focus a good amount of time and effort on optimizing the website.

Maybe some broader A/B tests to work towards improvements, but mostly it would be constant, small improvements.

• Reading through content carefully to find typos or clarify messaging
• Looking at how the site renders and behaves on various devices and browsers
• Getting heatmaps on critical pages to identify areas for improvement
• Analyzing conversions by URL and determining where alternate CTAs are needed, what is missing, etc.
• Reviewing content and identifying more ways to link to core pages from the content
• Running page speed reports identifying unused scripts or fonts being loaded on pages that can be removed

There are more things that you can do here, but even this list with a persistent focus will help you continue to get more from what you are already getting.

Wrapping Up

If you are going through any cuts or changes in a SaaS company right now, I'm sorry.

I know it isn't easy and I hope that even one or two things here can help alleviate some of your stress and keep your company growing.