The first 90 days with a SaaS marketing agency should establish a shared understanding of the business, turn priorities into agreed work and create a useful rhythm for reviewing results. The agency brings expertise and delivery capacity; your team brings product knowledge, customer insight and commercial decisions.
The plan below is an example you can adapt to your engagement. A website project, an SEO programme and a complete outsourced marketing department will have different deliverables and timelines. Agree the actual scope before treating any checklist as a commitment.
Before the start: give the team useful context
A product demo is a good beginning, but an agency also needs to understand the buyer’s problem. Explain what triggers a purchase, who gets involved, why deals are won or lost and what makes customers stay.
Prepare the material that already exists:
- A product demonstration and access to an appropriate test environment.
- Your ideal customer profile, positioning and sales materials.
- Customer questions, objections and approved examples of successful work.
- Current campaigns, website content and relevant performance reports.
- The people responsible for sales follow-up, product decisions and approvals.
- Access to the systems needed for the agreed work, with appropriate permissions.
Do not delay the whole engagement while building a perfect folder. Identify missing information and decide how it will be gathered.
Days 1–30: agree what matters and start the right work
Understand the starting point
Walk through the current customer journey together, from discovering the business to requesting a demo, buying and getting value from the product.
The review should connect to the scope. If the engagement is paid media, the offer, landing pages and lead handling need attention. If it is content, customer questions, expertise and existing material are central. A broader engagement needs a view across the different parts.
Turn the scope into priorities
Choose a manageable first set of activities. For each, agree:
- The business problem it addresses.
- The output and the person responsible for it.
- What the agency needs from your team.
- The approval point and intended delivery date.
- How you will judge whether it helped.
If the direction is unclear, start with marketing strategy rather than assuming every channel needs a campaign. If you already have a good plan, use the onboarding period to make it executable.
Establish a working rhythm
Choose one main contact on each side, agree where work is tracked and decide how questions are resolved between meetings. Meeting frequency should match the engagement. A focused programme and a full outsourced department do not need identical schedules.
Useful output by this stage: an agreed set of priorities, clear responsibilities and the first work delivered or in progress, with dependencies visible.
Days 31–60: deliver, gather feedback and refine
The emphasis now moves towards consistent delivery. That might mean publishing revised pages, launching agreed campaigns, creating content or implementing email activity. The actual mix comes from the scope, not from the calendar.
Your team should feed back what is happening beyond the marketing report. Are enquiries relevant? Which objections appear in sales conversations? Has the product changed? Does a customer story need updating?
Keep feedback specific. “This description misses the main buying reason” gives a writer something to fix. A collection of conflicting preferences from different stakeholders slows the work down.
Where results are available, use them to adjust the next activity. Where results take longer to emerge, check the work and the assumptions rather than declaring success or failure too early.
Useful output by this stage: agreed work delivered, feedback incorporated and a record of what the team has learned.
Days 61–90: review the evidence and choose the next priorities
Review progress against the objectives agreed at the start. Separate three questions:
- Was the work delivered well? Look at quality, timing, communication and whether the right problems were addressed.
- What changed? Review the relevant measures, including lead quality and sales feedback where available.
- What should happen next? Continue useful activity, revise weak assumptions and stop work that no longer fits.
Account for the sales cycle and channel. A paid campaign may generate early response data, while search visibility or a longer sales process may need more time. Completed activity is evidence of delivery; it is not automatically evidence of revenue impact.
Useful output by this stage: a clear review and an agreed next-phase plan, including any changes in scope.
Who should own what?
Your team owns business context and decisions. This includes the product, customer relationships, commercial priorities, permissions to use client material and sales follow-up. Nominate someone who can consolidate feedback and get decisions made.
The agency owns the agreed specialist work. It should organise delivery, explain recommendations, flag dependencies and report what it has learned.
Both sides own the working relationship. Agree how to raise concerns, change priorities and deal with a deadline that depends on missing input. Make those conversations routine rather than waiting for frustration to build.
An existing marketing manager can retain internal ownership while the agency provides execution. If there is no internal marketing team, agree what the founder needs to contribute and what the agency can manage independently.
How Xander structures the relationship
Our outsourced SaaS marketing department provides one main account lead and specialists selected for the agreed work. Retainers can be based on deliverables, time or a combination, with communication matched to the scope.
Most ongoing engagements use a 30-day rolling agreement. The 90-day plan here is a planning framework, not a requirement to sign a three-month contract. See how we work for more about the relationship.
Questions about getting started
How much of our time will the agency need?
It depends on the product, scope and existing material. Expect time for onboarding, access, customer insight and approvals. Agree who is needed and when; do not assume the same weekly commitment for every engagement.
What if we already have a strategy?
Share it. The first task can be reviewing the assumptions and agreeing delivery priorities rather than creating another strategy document.
What if results are slow?
Ask whether the issue is incomplete work, a weak assumption, insufficient evidence or the time required for that channel and sales cycle. Agree the next decision and what evidence would justify it.
Plan the first phase together
The strongest start is a clear agreement about the work and how both teams will contribute. Talk to Xander about the support your SaaS business needs and the first phase that would make sense.
