A playbook written for different conditions
If you learned growth marketing in the years leading up to 2021, you learned a specific approach: raise, spend ahead of revenue, prioritise growth rate over efficiency, and assume the next round will fund the gap.
That worked because capital was cheap and investors rewarded growth almost regardless of what it cost to buy.
Both conditions have gone. Rounds take longer, diligence is harder, and the questions have shifted from "how fast are you growing" to "what does it cost you to grow and how long until that money comes back."
The teams struggling most right now aren't the ones with bad numbers. They're the ones still running a playbook calibrated for the old conditions.
The metric that replaced growth rate
CAC payback period. How many months of gross margin it takes to recover what you spent acquiring a customer.
It's replaced growth rate as the first thing sophisticated investors look at, and unlike a growth percentage it can't be flattered by a good quarter.
Rough benchmarks I'd work to for B2B SaaS:
- Under 12 months — healthy, you can reinvest aggressively
- 12–18 months — normal, workable
- 18–24 months — under pressure, needs a plan
- Over 24 months — you are effectively lending money to your customers
The thing worth internalising is that payback, not CAC, is the number that constrains you. A high CAC with a high-margin, fast-expanding customer can be excellent. A low CAC on a customer who churns in nine months is a slow leak.
What actually changes in the marketing plan
Channel decisions get made on payback, not volume.
The channel that produces the most leads and the channel with the shortest payback are frequently different channels. In good conditions you can fund both. Now you fund the second and treat the first as an experiment with a budget cap.
Retention becomes a marketing responsibility.
If payback is 14 months and your customers churn at 18, you have a business that technically works and cannot be scaled. Marketing has typically treated churn as someone else's metric. In this environment it's the denominator of everything you do.
Expansion revenue moves up the priority list.
Expansion has close to zero acquisition cost. In an efficiency-constrained environment, a pound of expansion revenue is worth considerably more than a pound of new business, and most B2B teams have no marketing programme aimed at it at all.
Brand spend needs an explicit argument.
I'm not saying cut it. I'm saying that "brand is a long-term investment" is no longer a sufficient defence in a budget conversation, and if you can't articulate the mechanism by which it reduces CAC or shortens cycles, it will be cut by someone who can't either.
The trap on the other side
There's an over-correction that's equally damaging, and I'm seeing it more than the original problem now.
Cut all spend that doesn't produce attributable pipeline this quarter. Kill content, events, and community. Move everything to the channels with the shortest measured payback — usually paid search on high-intent terms and outbound.
This works for two or three quarters and then stops, because high-intent demand is finite. You are harvesting a pipeline that something else created, and when you've defunded the thing that created it, the harvest shrinks. Companies that did this in mid-2022 are seeing it now.
The distinction that matters: efficiency is not the same as short-termism. Efficiency means knowing what each pound returns and over what period. Short-termism means refusing to fund anything with a return period longer than a quarter — which is a different decision, usually made by default rather than deliberately.
What I'd do this quarter
Calculate payback properly, by segment. Fully loaded cost — salaries, tools, agency fees — divided by gross margin, not revenue. Most teams find this number is meaningfully worse than they assumed, and that it varies enormously between segments.
Find your best payback segment and concentrate. There is almost always one that pays back twice as fast as the average and receives proportionally less attention.
Build one expansion programme. Behavioural triggers for accounts approaching a usage threshold. Cheapest pipeline available to you.
Protect one long-horizon investment and state its thesis explicitly, with the mechanism and the timeframe. One is defensible. Five without a stated case will not survive the next budget cycle.
The part that's actually good news
Constraints improve decisions. The teams I've worked with over the past year have made sharper channel choices, fixed leaky funnels they'd been routing around for years, and finally defined an ICP narrowly enough to act on — all things they had no reason to do when growth could be bought.
The efficiency era is uncomfortable. It also produces better operators than the era that preceded it.
Hilal Tasdan
B2B SaaS Growth Marketing Consultant & Fractional CMO. Partner in Growth.