Article · long read

SaaS Playbook: Marketing

Rachit Parekh · SeedToScale by Accel Free Intermediate India

Freshworks' early marketing approach documented properly: what they measured, what they spent on, and the argument that below two million dollars ARR you should do product marketing and lead generation only. The India cost discipline in it is the part US playbooks never give you.

  • Freshworks worked to a 5 percent lead-to-paid conversion benchmark.
  • For a 1M dollar sales goal, marketing carried a 3M dollar lead goal at an assumed 30 percent conversion.
  • Track spend as CAC over MRR at the individual channel and ad level, not in aggregate.
  • Up to 2M ARR the marketing team was just two functions, product marketing and lead gen, with no SDRs.
Open on seedtoscale.com ↗

It answers 5 questions

  1. How much of my pipeline should come from inbound versus outbound, and when do I add the second channel?
  2. I run demand gen for an Indian SaaS selling globally. Does the US content playbook work here?
  3. We are burning money on Google and LinkedIn ads and cannot tell if it works. How should an early B2B team do paid?
  4. Which Indian companies have actually built a global GTM machine from India, and what is copyable?
  5. What does a world class product marketing function look like, and when does a company need one?

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