The 9 Disciplines of Great SaaS Companies remains one of the most popular posts on marketing on this blog. It’s a wonderful framework by Bill Macaitis, who was the CMO at Zendesk and Slack. Gabe Larsen, the VP of Growth at Kustomer, has a marketing scorecard that goes one level deeper and breaks down some of the key elements of key marketing processes.

The framework breaks down the key marketing operational roles into six buckets. Each bucket has a set of disciplines that the team scores.

The value of this framework is two-fold. First, it enumerates the important priorities for a marketing team. For me, it was the first time I’d seen a taxonomy laid out plainly and simply. And second, the scorecard provides a way for a team to understand their strengths and weaknesses. You might score each on a 1 to 10 scale. Let’s walk through each quickly.

Product Marketing is the starting point for marketing. It includes:

• market intelligence: what are your competitors doing?
• company positioning: what is the narrative of the business? Where does the company play? who does it sell to?
• sales enablement: how strong are the materials sales teams use to pitch?
• product content: the website, blog, whitepapers that describe the product
• analyst relations: how is the team engaging the key analysts in the space?

Comms Marketing

• Design: to what extent does the marketing team have access to the right designers?
• PR: public relations strength
• Content: the capability to produce content
• Social: social media
• Internal Comms: often forgotten, but important because every employee sells the business and contributes to the brand. How effective is the team at enabling each employee to sell the company successfully?

Demand Generation

• these are all pretty straightforward. ABM is account-based marketing, is the sole clarification I’ll make.

Business Development

• how effective is the company at identifying, contacting, qualifying, and approving partners to co-sell products?

Customer Marketing

• Reputation: how strong is the company’s reputation with customers?
• Community: how vibrant is the customer community?
• Communication: how effective is the lifecycle marketing effort to existing customers?

Marketing Operations

• Process: How well defined is the process for executing marketing campaigns+
• Systems: to what extent is the right software deployed?
• Budget: does the team have sufficient capital?
• Reporting: teams win with data. What is the sophistication of metrics to measure success?

You can find a downloadable copy of this spreadsheet here..

If you have comments or suggestions on how to improve this framework or have others to share, let me know on twitter.