Most SaaS growth problems are an ICP and pricing problem wearing a marketing costume.

Four areas and a plan. The ideal customer profile, rebuilt from retention and expansion data rather than from a persona workshop; pricing and packaging, including whether the value metric matches consumption; pipeline and go-to-market efficiency, meaning conversion, cycle time and CAC payback by segment; and retention, meaning why accounts leave and what onboarding does to that. The output is a written plan with owners, a go-to-market brief and a monthly scorecard.

Scope and duration. This is a four to six week project that ends in a plan and hands over. A fractional head of growth is ongoing leadership of the revenue system, and a fractional CMO leads the marketing function. Many companies buy the diagnosis first because it defines what the ongoing role should actually be accountable for, which makes the hire cheaper and faster to judge.

Sometimes, and only after looking. Where pipeline really is the constraint, the plan says so and sizes the investment. The more common finding is that conversion, segment mix or retention explains more of the shortfall than volume does, because a leaky funnel and a weak retention floor make every incremental lead worth less. We would rather tell you that in week two than sell you a demand generation programme that cannot pay back.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with ARR scale, how many segments and products are in scope and the state of the data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For budget context, The CMO Survey puts marketing at an average 9.0% of company revenue, with 33.6% of digital activity run by outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

No, and cleaning it is usually part of the value. We work with what exists, reconcile against billing and the finance file, and state plainly which findings are solid and which are directional. 62% of organizations report losing revenue directly because of poor data quality, and only 41% have a dedicated data governance owner. The plan includes the small set of field and process changes that make next quarter's analysis reliable, or marketing operations consulting if the rebuild is larger.

Only where the evidence supports it, and always with the migration risk attached. Pricing architecture is now a structural determinant of retention: usage-based companies post 108% median net revenue retention against 95% for seat-based ones. That does not mean every company should move to usage pricing. It means the value metric has to match how customers experience value, and the plan sets out what a change would cost in churn risk, revenue timing and sales retraining before you decide.

Mostly from data you already own. Closed-won and closed-lost records, billing history, product usage, support volume and renewal outcomes are enough to show which customer characteristics predict retention and expansion. We add a small number of customer conversations to explain the pattern, because numbers show what happened and customers explain why. The result is a definition with evidence behind each criterion, not a persona document with a stock photograph.

Selectively, and the engagement changes shape. Before repeatability exists there is not enough cohort data to model retention properly, so the work becomes narrower: which of the current customers resemble each other, what hypothesis to test next, and what evidence would settle it. If a company has only a handful of customers, we will say honestly that a four-week diagnosis is premature and what to do instead.

The plan is written so it can be read by a board without translation: segment economics, the growth model and the assumptions behind it, stated plainly with their sources. Companies preparing for a raise or a diligence process often want the sharper version of this work, which is investor growth advisory. We are not investment advisors and we give no securities advice in either engagement.

We inform them and your product leadership decides. The analysis surfaces where onboarding loses accounts, which use cases predict expansion and where packaging promises something the product does not deliver, all of which is relevant to the roadmap. What we do not do is write your roadmap, run discovery for features or sit in the product organisation. That boundary keeps the growth plan honest.

The founder or chief executive, the revenue leader, whoever owns marketing, a customer success lead and the person who owns the finance file. Expect a kickoff, a data pull, several short interviews, two or three customer conversations, one decision session and a final review. We take read-only access through your own accounts and never move data out of systems you control.

Targeting and funnel changes show within a quarter because conversion and cycle time respond quickly. Pricing and packaging effects take two to four quarters because they arrive through renewals and expansion, and retention improvements are slower still. That is why the scorecard tracks leading indicators such as pipeline coverage, win rate by segment, time to first value and net retention, rather than a single ARR number that reports the outcome long after the decision.

A marketing audit examines what is currently running and what it returns. This engagement is wider: segments, pricing, the sales motion and retention, which is where software growth is usually decided, and it ends in a plan rather than findings. Companies that want positioning and category work rather than commercial mechanics should look at marketing strategy consulting instead.

Your team runs it, and every workstream has a named owner on your side. Many companies book a review at ninety days to re-measure conversion and retention, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want the weekly numbers habit installed rather than another project, scorecard advisory is the usual follow-on, and the parent engagement is growth advisory.