Marketing Doesn't Create Momentum. It Amplifies It.

Most operators believe a struggling company should spend more on marketing, not less — get in front of more buyers, outrun the slowdown. Jason Lemkin, who’s closed over $120 million in sponsorship sales as SaaStr’s founder, believed exactly that. The data changed his mind.

Why Everyone Believes This

It’s intuitive: if revenue is soft, the fix looks like top-of-funnel — more impressions, more leads, more shots on goal. Lemkin held this view himself, arguing that companies facing headwinds “should be doing everything you can to get in front of more buyers” rather than pulling back. It’s the default instinct in almost every boardroom facing a growth slowdown.

What the Evidence Shows

Across years of sponsorship data, strong companies converted marketing spend into results 5x to 10x more efficiently than struggling ones. The mechanism: marketing works best at capturing demand that already exists, not generating it from nothing. Super Bowl ads — $7 million-plus for 30 seconds — are the extreme version of this: they reinforce awareness for brands buyers already know, not create demand from zero. Sponsors already winning saw those 470-plus qualified leads per year; sponsors trying to spend their way out of a slump did not see comparable results.

The Correction

“Marketing amplifies momentum. It doesn’t create it.” A struggling company pouring budget into marketing is optimizing the wrong lever — the deals aren’t already in motion, so there’s no momentum to accelerate. Lemkin’s revised framework: companies losing in the market should redirect that budget toward fixing the product, not toward buying more attention for it. Related coverage on how SaaS teams are recalibrating go-to-market spend under AI-driven sales pressure points at the same underlying shift — spend follows what’s already working, not what needs rescuing.

Source: SaaStrAI

Content created with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy.