After the raise: marketing's first 100 days

You've just raised. The money is in the bank, the board wants pipeline, and the temptation is to speed up everywhere at once: hire, increase budgets, rebrand, open new countries.

This is precisely the moment to slow down on one thing: the foundations. The first 100 days after a raise are first and foremost about laying marketing's groundwork. Done well, they also let you show the board results, without waiting for everything to be perfect.

This article is mainly for early-stage start-ups, at seed or Series A. Beyond that, marketing is usually already fairly structured.

The 6 post-raise traps

• Moving too fast without laying the groundwork. Channels get switched on and content gets produced before anyone has defined who you're talking to and what you're saying.
• Hiring without a clear strategy. Without a direction, a new hire executes whatever they're asked, from one emergency to the next.
• Hiring a junior who'll end up firefighting. You're better off bringing in a senior profile who sets the strategy, drives the first workstreams and builds the team around the company's business priorities.
• Letting sales run the company. Marketing needs to own product marketing to align product and sales, so that sales sell what the product actually does, not the other way around.
• Rebranding right away. If only the form changes and not the substance, the benefit is very limited.
• Going international too early. The United States is the textbook example: it often shows up in the targets before the French market, or the first target market, is fully structured.

Start with an audit

Before anything else, you need a global audit. It maps what already exists and brings out what's missing. You can then list the workstreams and prioritize them, taking the other teams' priorities into account.

The 7 foundations to lay, in order

If nothing exists yet, here are the steps to follow, in this order:

1. personas and ICP;
2. the positioning platform;
3. the offer hierarchy and pricing;
4. the semantic, SEO and GEO strategy;
5. sales messaging by persona;
6. rewriting the website content with a product marketing approach, where product pages double as landing pages;
7. overhauling the sales materials: deck, one-pager, etc.

What these foundations unlock

• Accurate targeting. When you launch advertising, ABM or any other lead generation strategy, you reach the right people.
• A common thread for your content. Credibility and visibility come from repetition. Your content should reuse the keywords of your value proposition, and therefore of your positioning platform.
• A strong brand, including your employer brand.
• Product–sales alignment. Marketing becomes the cornerstone of that alignment.

Reassure the board without skipping steps

Laying the foundations doesn't mean waiting to show results. The key is to quickly set up KPIs and steering dashboards:

• take the KPIs or analytics data that already exist and make them visible;
• add new tracking metrics as the workstreams progress;
• identify quick wins that will deliver fast results;
• stay in production mode, delivering usable outputs quickly: KPIs are deliverables too;
• give visibility and meet deadlines.

It all fits into a continuous improvement loop, iterating with the teams. Lead generation can therefore start and be optimized along the way. Hence the importance of having dashboards early on that show progress by channel activated and workstream launched.

A quick win: narrow the target to convert better

The MQL-to-SQL conversion rate is a good indicator of targeting quality.

At a data SaaS scale-up, that rate was below 10% when I arrived. Digging in, there were no personas and no ICP. Once they were defined, through market intelligence and internal interviews, the finding was clear: lead generation targeting was far too broad. There was volume at the top, but very little conversion, because most of the leads targeted were off-target.

The top of the funnel had to be narrowed quickly to align with the personas and the ICP. The conversion rate rose above one third, and the pipeline became cleaner. This usually improves deal velocity too.

The trap is wanting to keep a broad targeting “just in case”, pointing to the one lead that once converted in an unexpected country.

Day 100 is defined with the CEO

There is no single answer to what should be in place after 100 days. Every company has its own maturity, history, teams and ways of working.

So it is essential to align with the CEO from the start on what needs to be in place. The audit drives the roadmap, but that roadmap isn't built alone: it is shared and adapted to the stakes of the other teams and of the company as a whole.

FAQ

Should you hire a head of marketing right after a raise?

Not without a clear strategy. The right first hire is a senior able to set the strategy, drive the first workstreams and build the team around them, rather than a junior who will handle emergencies.

Can you launch lead generation before all the foundations are in place?

Yes. Lead generation can start and be optimized along the way, as long as it is steered by dashboards and the targeting is narrowed as soon as personas and ICP are defined.

Where should you start?

With a global audit that maps what exists, brings out what's missing and lets you prioritize workstreams with the other teams.

How Plan B can help

Plan B supports B2B start-ups and scale-ups after their raise on go-to-market and growth. The audit is the starting point for setting the roadmap. For investment funds, the Operating Partner offer applies the same logic to portfolio companies in their first 100 days.