Why the majority of B2B SaaS marketing teams fail at scale
Most marketing teams across Scandinavia make the same mistake. CEOs hire specialists who are amazing in their silos and area of expertise but can't connect the dots to revenue. The end goal in SaaS.
After 15+ years working closely with marketing teams, from Mediacom's and Dentsu’s enterprise clients to transforming House of Control's GTM-strategy as part of Viking Venture (now Viking Growth) and Visma (valued 19 Billion Euro at the moment) I've learned that sustainable growth comes from T-shaped thinking.
There are a few important points that separates effective marketing teams from the rest:
The depth of knowledge
Your team needs people who can actually execute. Someone who understands the technical nuances of LinkedIn's algorithm changes, can diagnose conversion rate drops, or optimize HubSpot workflows without calling support. Thats the fundamentals of confidence and data-driven approaches.
The breadth
Technical and practical execution without business context is very expensive noise. - Gregory Gjini
Your marketers need to understand how their channels connects to the commercial motion and thereafter to the sales pipeline, how product roadmaps impact positioning and differentiation, and how customer success data should deffinetly inform acquisition strategies.
The magic happens when your content marketer understands attribution models, your paid media specialist grasps customer lifetime value, and your demand gen lead can articulate how marketing influences renewal rates.
- How many of you out there can actually prove that you function and have structured your strategy in that way?
This isn't about hiring generalists and deffinetly not just highly skilled specialist. It's about building an agile and smart team where deep expertise meets strategic business understanding that builds confidence and accelerates growth.
The result? Marketing that scales with your ARR, or even shapes it, not against it.
Proving value should not rely on vanity metrics alone, it should prove commercial results. Believe me, if you have this mindset right from the start, everything else follows.
So, what's your experience with building T-shaped marketing teams? Have you seen the difference in performance?