The Challenge of Not Having Performance Baselines

One difficult aspect of marketing at early and growth-stage SaaS companies is that your baseline for performance is always changing.

Pricing and packaging are typically changing every 9-12 months, products/features are being released, and new channels and tactics are regularly introduced into the mix. 😯

All great things, but the compounding changes can complicate optimizing site design, content, ads, landing pages, and emails.

Here are a few tips on how to approach:

1. Annotate as much as you possibly can. You think you'll remember what happened, but you won't. I've annotated as many as 50 things in one quarter before.

2. Segment and isolate as much as you can. For example, if your company drops the lowest price point, pull signs up by plan so you can understand if it was a true loss/gain or a shift in plan allocation.

3. Embrace it and don't insist on 100%. Sometimes you won't be able to say for sure why something is performing better YoY or QoQ, and you gotta roll with it. 🤷