Matthew Deal
Every SaaS founder lives inside the same tension: you're balancing feature development against the need to drive customers and revenue. Engineering wants more resources. Sales wants more leads. Marketing is somewhere in between — either understaffed, under-strategized, or both.
And because the people making decisions are usually close to the product, marketing tends to get treated like an afterthought. You hire a junior marketer or spin up some Google Ads and hope something sticks. Sometimes it does. Usually it doesn't — at least not in a way that compounds.
This is where most SaaS companies get stuck. Not because they lack budget or ambition, but because they lack the strategic marketing leadership to turn scattered efforts into a system that actually builds on itself over time.
What is a SaaS fractional CMO?
A SaaS fractional CMO is a part-time strategic marketing leader who specializes in helping software companies build, test, and scale their marketing channels — without the $250K+ commitment of a full-time Chief Marketing Officer. They bring the outside perspective and experimentation discipline that most early and growth-stage SaaS teams can't build internally.
That outside perspective matters more than most founders realize. Let me explain why.
The Product Trap: Why SaaS Companies Struggle With Marketing
SaaS founders tend to be product-first thinkers. That's a strength when you're building — but it becomes a blind spot when it's time to grow.
The most common mistake I see is underinvesting in brand development and marketing infrastructure because all the oxygen in the room is going to product. The logic makes sense on the surface: build a better product and customers will come. But that's not how it works in a crowded market. Your competitor with an inferior product and a better go-to-market strategy will eat your lunch.
The other challenge is proximity. When you're inside the company every day, it's hard to see your own positioning clearly. You know what your software does — but articulating why it matters to someone who's never heard of you is a different skill entirely. An outside perspective cuts through the internal echo chamber and forces clarity on messaging, positioning, and channel strategy.
This is what a fractional CMO brings to a SaaS company. Not more tactics — a system for figuring out which tactics actually work, and a framework for scaling the ones that do.
How a Fractional CMO Builds Marketing Systems for SaaS Companies
When I come into a SaaS company, the first priority isn't launching campaigns. It's building infrastructure that lets you learn fast and compound over time. Here's what that typically looks like.
Establishing Channels That Justify Themselves
Much of my work with SaaS companies is rooted in standing up new channels — Google Ads, SEO, organic social, paid social, email — and then holding each channel accountable to performance. Every channel needs to justify its existence with data, not gut feeling.
This means building proper attribution from the start so you can actually see what's driving pipeline. It means setting up tracking that connects marketing activity to sales outcomes — not just impressions and clicks, but deals sourced and revenue influenced. Most SaaS companies I work with don't have this when I walk in the door.
Embracing Experimentation Over Perfection
Here's something most SaaS founders intuitively understand from product development but forget to apply to marketing: you're producing progress even when your tests fail.
A paid social campaign that doesn't convert isn't a waste — it's data. It tells you something about your audience, your messaging, or your targeting. A content strategy that doesn't move organic traffic in month one isn't broken — it's baseline data for month two.
The fractional CMO's job is to build an experimentation framework where every campaign teaches you something, and every insight feeds the next decision. It's incremental improvement over time — not swinging for home runs and hoping.
Creating Community as a Channel
One of the most effective strategies I've built for a SaaS client was a weekly "office hours" webinar. It was informal — a space for users of the software to connect around common workflows and administrative challenges. We promoted it through a combination of organic social, paid social, and remarketing to reach contacts we knew weren't ready to buy yet. Once registered, we nurtured attendees through email.
Over time, this group became a source of brand champions who evolved into advocates for the product. The webinar didn't drive immediate sales — it took a few months to manifest — but I was able to prove in the data that it drove a 38% lift in deals sourced from this campaign. The lesson: not every SaaS marketing channel looks like a traditional funnel. Some of the best ones look like communities.
The SaaS Marketing Challenges a Fractional CMO Actually Solves
SaaS marketing has specific challenges that don't exist in most other industries. A fractional CMO who's worked across multiple software companies recognizes these patterns and knows how to navigate them.
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Partner Programs
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Building channel partnerships, integration partnerships, and co-marketing relationships is a massive growth lever for SaaS — but it requires strategic thinking about who to partner with, how to structure the program, and how to measure whether it's actually driving revenue. Most junior marketing teams don't have the experience to stand these up.
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Review sites and Reputation Management
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Platforms like G2 and Capterra are a necessary reality for SaaS companies. Many of these review sites are fueled by internal efforts to increase review scores — and typically rankings. They're used to increase visibility, but it often becomes a race to the bottom of chasing shallow reviews for not much real feedback. A fractional CMO helps you approach reputation management strategically instead of reactively — building it into your customer lifecycle rather than treating it as a one-off campaign.
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Brand Exposure in a Crowded Market
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When there are 15 competitors in your category and every website looks the same, brand differentiation isn't a nice-to-have — it's survival. A fractional CMO brings the outside perspective to identify what actually makes your product different and translate that into messaging your market cares about.
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What This Looks Like in Practice: VenturEd Solutions
VenturEd Solutions is an EdTech SaaS company that had invested in both HubSpot and Salesforce — but a botched integration from a previous vendor left both systems crippled. Leads weren't routing properly, workflows were conflicting, reporting required manual reconciliation across their U.S. and U.K. teams, and marketing had no reliable way to prove its contribution to pipeline.
As the fractional CMO and central strategist on this engagement, I led the effort to tear the integration down to the studs and rebuild it — not with a patch, but with a documented architecture that defined source-of-truth rules for 60+ fields, standardized data across both systems, and rolled out in controlled stages to avoid disrupting live operations.
This is the kind of SaaS marketing problem that doesn't look like marketing on the surface — but it's exactly where strategic leadership matters most. Without clean data and reliable systems, every campaign you run is built on a shaky foundation.
The results: MQL-to-SQL conversion rates nearly doubled, climbing from 8–11% to an average of ~17% within three months. The team reclaimed an estimated 30 hours per week that had been lost to troubleshooting and manual data reconciliation. And for the first time since the failed implementation, leadership could trust their pipeline dashboards for forecasting. (Full case study on Vaulted)
This is what a SaaS fractional CMO engagement looks like when it's working — not just running campaigns, but building the infrastructure that makes every future campaign more effective.
Ready to Build a Marketing System That Compounds?
If you're running a SaaS company and marketing feels like a series of disconnected experiments with no clear throughline — that's not a team problem. It's a leadership gap.
I work with SaaS companies to build marketing systems that learn, adapt, and compound over time. Whether you need to stand up your first real channels or get more out of the ones you've already invested in, let's start with a conversation about where you are and what's not working.