A SaaS marketing audit that ends in a ranked action plan.

Nine areas, every time: measurement, paid search, paid social, spend efficiency, website and funnel, organic and AI search, offer and positioning, competitors and lifecycle. For a SaaS company we read them against pipeline and payback, so the ideal customer profile, funnel stage definitions, lead quality, the martech stack, self-serve and sales-assisted motions and retention programmes are all in scope. The output is a findings workbook plus a ranked 90-day plan.

A checklist tells you what to look at. An audit produces findings about your business, each with the measured evidence beside it, a severity band, what leaving it alone costs, and the fix. We keep a fixed nine-area scope so nothing is skipped, but every line in the workbook comes from your analytics, ad accounts, CRM, invoices and live site, never from a template. Use a checklist first if you want; call us for what it cannot answer.

That is usually the first finding. We test the marketing qualified lead definition against what sales actually accepts, trace live test signups and demo requests from click to CRM record to a named owner, and reconcile marketing's report with opportunities and closed revenue. Where the definition is the problem, the workbook says so and the plan rewrites it with sales in the room. Where routing or response time is the problem, we time it and report it.

Yes, and separately. Blending them produces a conversion rate that describes neither. We split the funnel by motion and by segment, follow signups and demo requests along their own paths, and report acquisition cost, accepted opportunities and payback for each. Cross-subsidy between motions is one of the most common findings we write, and it is invisible in a blended dashboard.

Yes, as an inventory with findings: what each tool costs, what it is genuinely used for, where two tools overlap and where data does not flow between them. The CMO Survey names lack of budget (20.1%) and integration or data architecture (19.1%) as the top barriers to getting value from martech, which matches what we usually find. We recommend consolidation where the evidence supports it and resell no software.

Both, because retention decides what acquisition is worth. We review onboarding, lifecycle messaging, expansion campaigns and reactivation, and read them against your own cohorts. Benchmarkit's 2026 benchmarks put median net revenue retention at 102% and show median gross revenue retention falling from 88% to 84%. Where churn is a product or support issue rather than a marketing one, the workbook says so plainly.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of products, motions and ad accounts in scope and the state of your data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For context on scale, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue and 33.6% of digital activity in the hands of outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Not as part of this. The audit is a project with a defined end and no attached retainer, which is what lets the workbook say that a channel we would happily sell is not worth funding for you. Your team, your current agency or another firm can execute the plan. If you later want us to run something, it is scoped and quoted separately.

No, that is part of what the audit measures. Validity's 2026 study found 62% of organisations lost revenue to poor CRM data and only 41% had a named governance owner, so waiting for clean data means waiting forever. We document what the data can and cannot support, label directional findings as directional, and put the repairs in the plan. Building that layer is marketing operations consulting, quoted separately.

Yes. Category, comparison and alternative-to queries are checked in classic search and in AI answers, along with whether your documentation, pricing page and comparison content give an engine anything accurate to quote. Findings name the queries where competitors appear and you do not, and the content and structural changes that would fix it.

Seven days, and yes, because the scope is fixed and we are reading evidence rather than inventing a strategy. Longer audits are usually longer because of access delays and internal scheduling, which is why day one is access and why we ask for roughly three to four hours of your team's time in total: a kickoff, short interviews and the handover call.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced, and what is broken. SaaS marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides segments, positioning, channel roles, budget and measurement. Most teams buy the audit first, because a plan written on unverified numbers is a guess with headings.

Scope of the question. Growth advisory hunts the commercial constraint wherever it sits, including pricing model, ideal customer profile and retention. The marketing audit stays inside the marketing function and produces evidence plus a ranked 90-day plan. If you already believe marketing is the problem, the audit is the cheaper first step.

It is one of the best. The workbook documents what the current setup actually produced, the plan states what the next leader or partner has to deliver, and the measurement framework gives them a baseline to inherit rather than reset. We hold no media and sell no software, so nothing in the audit is written to win the work that follows.

Your team runs it, and every action has a named owner and an acceptance test. Many teams book a review at ninety days to check the leading indicators, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want a standing numbers habit, scorecard advisory sets one up and hands it back, and the parent engagement is the marketing audit itself.