3 ways to kill your marketing team in 2025

Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe with one click.

Hey folks! 👋 This is my last newsletter of 2024!

In this edition, I’ll share 3 ways you can destroy your marketing team in 2025.

1. Make them the “blamable owner” of pipeline ARR

2. Overweight marketing team’s influence on Product

3. Make acquisition more important than retention

I also added a bonus tidbit at the end.

Estimated time: 5 minutes

Your daily AI dose

5 Reasons to join Mindstream

• We’re the only AI newsletter you need

• We’re so good HubSpot bought us (like they bought The Hustle)

• 150,000+ strong community staying ahead of the curve

• We’re actually fun to read

• Written by an awesome team of real people, not AI tools

Click here to subscribe

P.S - you get a load of free stuff when you subscribe

Please support our sponsor Mindstream!

If you do these 3 things, Marketing teams won’t last

As someone who has spent the last several years straddling the intersection of marketing, product, and growth in B2B SaaS. I've witnessed firsthand the systematic destruction of marketing teams' effectiveness. The patterns are clear, yet we keep repeating them.

Let me share a perspective that might challenge how you think about marketing teams working cross-functionally in the modern GTM and PLG landscapes.

1️⃣ Make them the “blamable owner” of pipeline ARR

Marketing’s job is to be a collaborative partner in GTM and sales. There is influenced revenue and then there is pipeline closed by your sales team. Try not to be ignorant and do have those hard conversations on what is controlling the metric you want to change.

We've created a fundamental misalignment in how we measure marketing success. When organizations make marketing teams solely responsible for pipeline ARR, they're essentially asking them to own an outcome that requires complex orchestration across multiple departments.

Think about it: How can marketing own a number that depends on sales execution, product experience, and customer success touchpoints? I am not saying that GTM teams don’t understand this or won’t speak in agreement when confronted with this, but culturally, it always falls on marketing to generate the pipeline for the sales team.

This isn't about avoiding accountability – it's about acknowledging the reality of modern B2B buying journeys, especially as ABX (account-based orchestration) is on the rise.

2️⃣ Overweight marketing team’s influence on product

Marketing does not have product UX or product engineers nor does it rarely have product data people on their team. When metrics are driven by product influence, marketing fails. Again, the solution here is to have a very collaborative team all accountable towards the same goals so that your marketing can lean on their partners to make the change needed.

When marketing is held accountable for product-driven influence, this fails 10 out of 10 times without good cross-functional partners. I’ve worked in the marketing org and I’ve worked inside the product org. I’ve experienced both. This never works. It’s an easy out…

My favorite thing to hear at every company I’ve worked at is how email is needed to magically improve the conversion rate or activation rate of product. However, email is a trigger, not an action. Users make decisions in product. The best tactics are product tactics. Product tactics keep users in product (remember retention?). Email helps resurrect users back into product, but it will never be the main driver of product growth. The tactic itself isn’t capable.

Re-engaging churned users often requires re-educating them about your product’s value or new features. By contrast, retaining someone who’s already active typically revolves around continuous improvements and consistent satisfaction. This is why the activation rate is so important. Increasing retention rates by just 5% can increase revenue by 25%-95% depending on self-serve or enterprise.

Every time you make a marketing lever change without a product lever change against the metric that is influenced by both…you are holding a feather to make an impact, not a hammer. It doesn’t work.

From Lenny Richitisky: “Time and again, we see that growth is strongest when product managers and engineers make it frictionless for users to adopt and expand. Marketing is essential to feed the top of the funnel, but the product team must own the activation and retention loops”

3️⃣ Make acquisition more important than retention

This statement sounds like a broken record.

Here's what nobody talks about: The moment a user signs up, their experience becomes predominantly product-driven. Yet, we continue to hold marketing teams accountable for metrics that are fundamentally influenced by product decisions.

Acquisition stops once your user signs up and takes 1-2 actions in the product. The acquisition source does have some influence, but the channel is not single-handedly the game changer to retention. It never has been.

This isn't just theory. At my last company, we tracked user behavior and found that 80% of our churn points were directly related to product experience issues, not marketing messaging or positioning. Yet marketing was still being measured on retention metrics.

There is only one article you need to read about the importance of retention: The One Growth Metric that Moves Acquisition, Monetization, and Virality written by Brian Balfour.

I've worked on both sides of this equation – leading marketing teams focused on acquisition and product teams obsessed with retention. Working inside product teams helped me become a better marketer and vice versa. I’ve advised CEOs and founders on how to GTM around acquisition and one thing I’ve learned:

Here’s my approach when leading a Marketing or Growth team

🔑 Expectation setting

Out the gate, talk about what you can and cannot be accountable for. I let the team know what I can help influence but can’t own. I let the team know what kind of future levers we will need to pull that will require cross-functional resources.

Start every new initiative or role with explicit clarity about what marketing can and cannot influence. This isn't about limiting responsibility – it's about creating realistic conditions for success. Document these boundaries and get stakeholder alignment early.

🔑 Alignment on problem

I can’t tell you how many times I will spend on getting everyone aligned on the same problem. If you can’t agree on the problem, your solution won’t solve it. Work as a team to have the hard conversations…lean in. Don’t take things personally.

I spend a ton of my time just ensuring all stakeholders agree on the core problem we're trying to solve. This might seem excessive, but it's prevented countless failed initiatives and misaligned metrics.

🔑 Acceptance and grit

Don’t lose sleep over things you can’t control. Accept the circumstances you’re in and work as hard as you can to learn, be humble, and listen. Stay focused and recognize that everyone is struggling with something that you know nothing about.

Looking ahead to 2025

The average tenure for marketing and growth leaders in SaaS is 2 years—which should be a wake-up call. It's not because these leaders lack capability—it's because we've created an environment where success is often impossible by organizational design. Think about who stays in a company over the long-haul 🤔.

As we move into 2025, the companies that will win are those that recognize marketing as a strategic partner in a complex ecosystem, not a standalone pipeline generator or retention-solving king. The question isn't whether marketing teams can deliver value – it's whether organizations will create the conditions necessary for that value to be realized.

Marketing is going to do a lot in 2025, let’s not bog them down with friction. They already have to wear many hats.

The two main areas of focus for 2025:

1. Launching and scaling the new-age ABM/ABX playbooks in an everchanging GTM landscape

2. Owning product-led marketing—ensuring the website is converting, telling the right product story, and evolving the brand. “Your marketing website is a product too” 😉 

Bonus: The 4-fits model to build $100M ARR

If you want some holiday reading material, this is probably the most important biblical piece that will last you years. I still have it bookmarked from 2018. What so many SaaS companies fail to realize is that their product strategy is built with one-type decision-making. For example, in the beginning, you build a product to get PMF. Then you make product decisions to ensure you have strong retention. Then you create a pricing strategy to make sure users pay (Market-Model fit). However, what about Product-Channel fit and Channel-Model fit?

It’s imperative that when you make product strategy decisions, your GTM distribution engine fits within these models. There are sacrifices across each area of the company: product, engineering, marketing, sales, etc - but the end goal is your 4-fits. Don’t overfit one model and neglect the other.

I say all this because I see so many companies and founders struggle with building for distribution. Your distribution strategy is inherently connected to all 4 of these fits. Don’t neglect 🙂 

Interested in starting a newsletter?

Beehiiv 🐝 is the best tool for newsletters. Free to start and they don’t take a cut of your earnings. Use my referral link for a 30-day trial + 20% OFF for 3 months.

Thanks for reading! Happy New Year!

See you in 2025 👋 

If you are interested in sponsoring this newsletter, simply reply!