The ‘30-day plan’ if you’re starting as a marketer in a SaaS company

Your guide to establishing your reputation as a marketer in a new company during the first month of your employment.

When you’re interviewing for a marketing role in a SaaS company and when you’re in the final stages of the interview process, it is common for your hiring manager or the CEO to ask for a ’30-day, 60-day, or a 90-day plan’ to know what you’ll accomplish soon after you join the company.

It is kind of a tricky question. Since you only know about the company from what you’ve read and heard, most of your knowledge would be surface level. You won’t know their actual problems. So, candidates usually go with vanilla answers like ‘I’d revamp the website, write more blogs, be more active on social media, etc.’ But, the truth is, you can’t actually make a solid plan until you join the company.

But, after joining the company, there are a few things you can do to gather data on existing challenges, prioritize them and execute some of them (at least one) within the first 30 days of your employment.

Here’s an actionable 30-day roadmap of what you should do if you’re starting your career as a marketer in a SaaS company.

Week 1 and 2

You might think two weeks is long, but if you exclude weekends, you’ll only have 10 working days during the first two weeks. Use this time to get adjusted to the new environment and lay the groundwork for the upcoming weeks.

Connect with your peers

Introduce yourself to the team and set individual 1:1 meetings with every member of your team (people with whom you’ll be working closely). During these 1:1 meetings following the 60:40 rule. Spend 60% of the conversation talking about common topics and interests and the remaining 40% of the conversation understanding their role, experience, etc.

Understand their strengths to get a sense of where you can get their help in the future. On the other hand, tell them about your experience, skills, and what you’re good at, and tell them you’re happy to help whenever needed. This will give them a chance to reach out to you during future projects.

Meet the decision-makers

If you’re a marketer, it is a given that you’ll be working with multiple teams within your company. This will include the design, product, customer success, support, and sales teams.

So, during your first week, identify key decision makers in each team (by talking to your teammates) and set up 30-minute meetings to say “Hi!”. This will come in handy when you’re working on large projects that might involve these decision-makers.

If you’re new, you might think you’re wasting their time. Don’t worry. From my experience, people are happy to meet new people and even happier to talk about their experiences. So get to know the decision-makers during the first two weeks.

Pro tip: Set regular meetings (at least once a month) with decision-makers to get insights on new challenges and to avoid surprises.

Understand the product

As a marketer, you’ll be spending a lot of time with your product. So get familiar with the product. Watch product demos and read the help documentation to get started. Reading the help documentation is a great way to understand the nuances within the product and also helps you learn its limitations (what the product is or isn’t capable of).

If you get a chance, be a silent spectator on a couple of sales calls to see how the product is being demoed to a prospect. It will also give you an idea about the characteristics of your target persona.

Another great way to get familiar with the product is by answering support tickets. When I joined Zoho as a technical writer in 2015, I spent the first month answering support tickets. It helped me learn the product in and out. Even after that, we had the practice of handling support tickets once a week. It helped us stay updated on the latest issues. If your company doesn’t allow you to answer tickets, at least add yourself as a watcher to interesting tickets and go through support tickets every now and then.

Set up Google Alerts for keywords

This is an important step to stay on top of what’s happening in the market and with your competitors. Set up google alerts for your competitors and specific keywords related to the domain in which your product operates. You can also set up an alert of your own product to see who talks about your product.

Get access to the right tools

Get access to the tools that you’ll be using frequently. This can include Google Analytics, access to your company’s YouTube channel, access to social media scheduling tools, Adwords account, etc.

Week 3 and 4

This is where you get into action. These two weeks are your window to make the best first impression. The reputation you build during this time will go a long way.

Identifying the problem

Talk to your manager and other key stakeholders in the team to understand problem areas and challenges. For example, if you’re a product marketer, you need to speak to your sales team to understand what kind of collateral they need to close more deals. If you’re a content marketer, talk to the SEO and web performance teams to understand problem areas.

List down the challenges and see which section of the marketing/sales funnel they affect.

Prioritizing the problem

The problem you’re trying to solve should check the following boxes:

High impact — should have a significant impact on conversion, revenue, or team satisfaction.

Low dependency — You should be able to solve 80–90% of the problem on your own (with your skills). Shouldn’t rely too much on engineering or design teams. Don’t take up large projects in your first month as it can be a project management nightmare (especially if it involves multiple teams)

Time to completion — Can you complete it within 2–3 weeks?

After choosing the right problem, make a list of key stakeholders who will be involved in the process.

Execution

A few pointers to keep in mind while executing your first project.

Get buy-in from key stakeholders — Convince them by pitching the value. Set expectations on what you need from them and how long will it take to see results. Don’t commit to hard deadlines. Give them an approximate timeline.

Keep key people in the loop — While executing the project, keep your team and other key stakeholders in the loop.

Don’t panic — When you’re executing a project, things will go wrong (irrespective of the project size). Don’t panic. Everybody on your team would’ve faced such moments. Communicate the problem. Learn from them and move on. If you need help, don’t hesitate to ask.

Pro tip: Don’t launch anything on a Friday. If things break, you might ruin the whole weekend for you and your team.

Show your work

Apart from marketing the product, you should also market yourself. So, success or failure, don’t forget to show your work.

If you succeed, people will appreciate you. If you fail, your team will know that you’ve put in your best efforts and also understand what you learned from things that went wrong.

Be open to feedback and learn from your peers’ experiences. Don’t be too stubborn to change your opinion. It wouldn’t let you learn anything new.

And, Keep a work journal. Keep a month-wise note of what you’ve worked on and add a tag ‘milestone’ next to important projects where you think you’ve done really well.

This journal will come in handy when you’re filling up your performance appraisal form. You can exactly point out what you’ve done and the impact you’ve had on the growth of the company.

Next steps…

Based on your learnings, make a plan for the next month or quarter. The periodic 1:1 meetings you had set with key stakeholders will keep giving you new and interesting challenges.

If you’ve come this far, it means whatever I’ve written so far has made sense. I appreciate you taking the time to read this blog. Please share this blog with your friends and colleagues who’re early in their marketing careers or is an aspiring marketers.

Originally published at https://karthikpasupathy.substack.com on October 31, 2022.