SaaS

The conversion you can see is the wrong one

A trial start is cheap to measure and almost useless to optimise towards. The signal that matters — an account that activates, converts and renews — arrives weeks later, by which point the platform has already learned to find more of whatever produced the cheap signups. Most underperforming SaaS accounts are not badly managed. They are managed well towards the wrong target.

So the first work is plumbing: offline conversion import, qualified-pipeline events fed back to the platforms, and an agreed definition of what counts as a lead worth paying for. Unglamorous, and it decides everything after it.

Self-serve and sales-led are different businesses

• Self-serve lives on volume and activation. The lever is usually the product experience after the click, and paid media's job is to stop sending people the onboarding cannot serve.
• Sales-led lives on qualification. Fewer, better leads beat more leads at every budget, and the campaign is judged on what sales accepts rather than on what the form collected.

Content and search

Software buyers research in public: comparison queries, alternatives, integration questions, "how do I do X" problems your product solves. That traffic converts on a longer horizon than paid and does not stop when the budget does. It is also increasingly what an assistant reads when somebody asks it to recommend a tool, which makes being the page that answers the question directly worth more than it used to be — see SEO.

Where we help most

When paid is spending steadily and nobody can say what it produced, when trial-to-paid has stalled and the acquisition mix is suspected, or when a category has become expensive enough that organic has stopped being optional.