We’ve closed over $120,000,000+ in sponsorships at SaaStr over the years.
And I’m still learning about real marketing ROI from them.
For a long time, I thought most marketers were doing it backwards. Here’s the pattern I kept seeing: when a company’s growth was exploding, everyone wanted to sponsor everything. Events, podcasts, newsletters — all of it. But when growth slowed? Sponsors churned. Budgets got slashed. Marketing was almost always the first line item to get cut.
And for years, I thought this was completely wrong.
My logic was simple: the companies hitting headwinds are the ones that should be marketing more. Not the ones already exploding. If your growth is decelerating, shouldn’t you be doing everything you can to get in front of more buyers? Shouldn’t you be doubling down, not pulling back?
It felt so obvious. And yet, almost nobody operated that way.
Then I Looked at the Data. And I Was Wrong.
As time has gone by — and we now have years of numbers and experience across thousands of sponsorships — I’ve come to see that the market’s instinct here is probably right.
Here’s why:
Marketing a product that folks just don’t want to buy can work. But it’s really, really hard.
You can run the campaigns. You can get the impressions. You can book the meetings. But if the product-market fit isn’t there, or if the market has shifted away from you, all that spend turns into a grind with diminishing returns. You’re pushing a boulder uphill.
What’s dramatically easier? Reminding people who already might want to buy your product… to buy it now.
That’s where the real ROI lives. And it’s why the companies that are already crushing it get even more out of their marketing dollars:
- It’s easier to meet prospects that are already somewhere in your funnel — and use that face-to-face meeting to close them.
- It’s easier to meet buyers who are already excited to purchase from some vendor in your space — and after meeting you IRL, they decide to pick you.
- It’s easier to accelerate deals that are already in motion than to create demand from scratch.
This is the compounding effect of marketing when you have momentum. You’re not generating demand out of thin air. You’re capturing demand that already exists — and converting it faster.
The Better You Are Doing, The More Marketing You Should Be Doing. Be Everywhere If You Can.
Companies that are crushing it should market more, not less. Pour fuel on the fire. Every dollar you spend in marketing when you have strong product-market fit and real momentum is worth 5x–10x what it’s worth when you don’t.
And companies seeing huge growth declines? They should probably take that marketing budget and put it into… product.
Fix the thing people aren’t buying. Rebuild the thing the market has moved past. Get back to product-market fit first — and then turn the marketing engine back on.
It sounds counterintuitive, but the data is clear: marketing amplifies momentum. It doesn’t create it.
See Also: Super Bowl Ads
Think about who runs Super Bowl ads. It’s not struggling startups trying to manufacture awareness. It’s the biggest brands in the world — companies that are already everywhere — spending $7M+ for 30 seconds to remind you they exist. To stay top of mind. To nudge you from “I already know them” to “I’m buying from them.”
That’s not wasteful. That’s the same principle at massive scale.
Marketing works best when it accelerates what’s already working. It’s an amplifier, not a defibrillator.
The companies that understand this — the ones that lean in when they’re winning — are the ones that pull away from the pack.
And the ones that try to market their way out of a product problem? They just burn cash faster.
