Building a marketing function from first principles

Executive Summary

An early-stage SaaS business needed its first structured marketing capability to support growth beyond founder-led sales.

Working closely with the founders, I established the commercial foundations required to generate consistent demand, introducing structured customer acquisition, CRM processes, reporting and marketing operations where little formal infrastructure previously existed.

The work created the first scalable marketing function and established processes that supported future commercial growth.

My Role

I established the company's first structured marketing capability, working directly with leadership to define priorities, introduce marketing systems and create repeatable acquisition processes that could scale with the business.

Commercial Outcomes

Business Performance

• Established the company's first repeatable demand generation capability

• Increased marketing contribution to the commercial pipeline

• Improved consistency of customer acquisition

Organisational Impact

• Marketing became a structured business function rather than an ad hoc activity.

• Leadership gained visibility into marketing performance.

• Commercial processes became repeatable and scalable.

The Commercial Challenge

Growth depended heavily on founder relationships and reactive marketing activity. Customer acquisition lacked consistency, marketing infrastructure was minimal, and there was no repeatable commercial process supporting pipeline generation. The challenge was creating the foundations for sustainable growth and then optimising current processes, introducing better reporting, legal compliance for outreach practices, and lead generation tracking in order to start paying commission for the high-quality leads that generate revenue, rather than the number of leads reached out.

Strategic Decisions

The programme focused on creating commercial foundations rather than isolated marketing activity.

This included:

• Defining the first marketing strategy

• Introducing CRM and structured lead management

• Establishing demand generation processes

• Developing reporting to support commercial decisions

• Aligning marketing activity with business development objectives

• Building repeatable customer acquisition processes

What Changed

The company moved from founder-led marketing towards a scalable commercial function capable of supporting continued business growth.