Open your homepage. Now open the homepages of the three or four competitors who keep you up at night. Read them side by side.
If you can swap the logos and nobody would notice, you don't have a lead problem. You have a positioning problem.
Mark Evans gave me that test on the podcast, and it stuck because it's almost exactly how I start every GTM teardown I build for founders. I put their homepage next to their closest competitors and score it on the five Strategy Maker pillars. Most of the time the gap shows up in the first ten minutes, before we've looked at a single campaign.
Mark spent years as a technology journalist before he became a fractional CMO, and he now runs Marketing Spark, advising SaaS companies on growth. Here's what I took from our conversation, and what I'd do with it.
1. Positioning comes before the pipeline
Mark mentioned reading that there are about 1,600 CRM products out there. Think about that for a second. Product-market fit won't save you if a buyer can't tell you apart from the other 1,599.
Yet most founders treat positioning as a nice-to-have. They go straight to "leads, leads, leads", then can't work out why the ads, the emails and the content don't land. The tactics aren't broken. They're carrying a message that sounds like everyone else's.
2. Your differentiator can be small
This is the part I wish more founders heard. A differentiator doesn't have to be a big, category-defining idea. Mark's point was that something you're good at, that nobody else offers, is enough to rally around.
It might be how fast you onboard. It might be one integration your competitors keep ignoring. It might be the market you serve that everyone else treats as an afterthought. Pick it, say it plainly on the homepage, and say it the same way in every ad, email and sales call.
Demand generation runs on that narrative. Without it, you're paying to show people a message they'll forget by the next tab.
3. Don't hand over the plan and walk away
Mark shows clients what to do, then does it with them. I loved that, because it's the difference between a strategy deck that sits in a Google Drive folder and one that changes how a team works.
Marketing leaders have to be change agents. That means teaching the team why the plan looks the way it does, staying close while they run it, and fixing it in the first few weeks when reality pushes back. Pointing at a plan and leaving is how good strategy dies.
4. Get a seat at the table, or you're an order-taker
Mark's view is simple. Build real partnerships with the CEO and with the heads of sales, customer success and product. If sales grow, marketing is the hero. If they don't, marketing didn't do its job.
An order-taker can't change anything. They make the banner, write the post, run the campaign they were handed, and get blamed for a pipeline they never had a say in. A partner sits in the forecast meeting and can say "this segment isn't converting, so we're moving budget" before the quarter is gone.
His favourite metric outside revenue tells you where his head is: conversations. People sell to people. If marketing isn't creating more of the right conversations for sales, the dashboard doesn't matter much.
5. The CMO clock is short
Mark pointed out that the average CMO at a Fortune 500 company lasts a little over three years. Everything is measurable now, and companies want results fast.
That's a planning number. If you've got roughly three years to prove marketing drives revenue, the first year can't be spent on activity metrics. Tie the plan to pipeline and revenue from the first quarter, and show the math every month.
Plan the work, then work the plan
Mark's favourite quote is the one I'd tape to every marketer's screen: "Plan the work and work the plan."
So here's the order I'd follow if I were starting over at a SaaS company tomorrow:
Run the homepage test against your three or four closest competitors.
Find the one thing you're good at that nobody else offers, even if it's small.
Rewrite the homepage, the ads and the sales talk track around it.
Get into the room with sales, customer success and product, and agree what marketing owns.
Measure conversations and pipeline, and report them every month.
Want the full conversation? Listen to my podcast episode with Mark Evans, Founder and Fractional CMO of Marketing Spark, where we talk about brand positioning, product-market fit, working with sales and what it takes to become a business-building marketing leader.
