Best Marketing Agency For Series B SaaS Companies

Written by: Aaron Rovner, Founder, Saas Hero

Key Takeaways

• At Series B, marketing performance depends on running paid acquisition end to end against CRM revenue data instead of form-fill metrics.
• The right agency owns the full funnel as one team: paid search, paid social, creative, landing pages, and CRM-connected attribution.
• Flat-retainer pricing indexed to total ad spend aligns incentives better than percentage-of-spend or per-channel fee models.
• Board-ready reporting that leads with pipeline, CAC, and payback period keeps finance and leadership aligned on marketing impact.
• SaaSHero fills the execution seat for Series B companies that have strategy in place but lack senior paid-media ownership.

Talk With SaaSHero About Your Series B Growth Plan

What A Series B SaaS Marketing Agency Actually Needs To Do

A Series B marketing agency runs demand generation for a company that has already proven paid acquisition works and now needs it owned end to end across channels. The agency runs paid media, creative, landing pages and CRO, and attribution connected to the CRM as one system. It holds strategy and execution together, optimizes against CRM revenue data rather than form-fill counts, and arrives at every review with a clear next move.

Three themes define what the SERP rewards and what Series B buyers actually need:

• Full-Funnel Demand Generation: Paid search captures demand that already exists, while paid social creates demand that does not. Both channels must run as one program with one measurement layer so you can judge their combined impact accurately.
• The ABM And Mid-Market Transition: At Series B, the recommended motion combines ABM for enterprise with a PLG layer for SMB, using paid LinkedIn, targeted content, events, partner referrals, and product-qualified lead routing. This structure replaces the earlier self-serve or founder-led motion.
• Pipeline Attribution Over Top-Of-Funnel Metrics: The metrics that hold up in Series B board presentations are cost-per-opportunity, pipeline attribution by channel, channel-level CAC, and CAC payback period, not MQL volumes or cost-per-lead.

Every viable Series B agency must navigate three transitions: self-serve to sales-led and ABM, MQL counting to pipeline attribution, and form-fill optimization to CRM-connected measurement.

How To Choose A Marketing Agency For A Series B SaaS Company

The criteria below work for a quick featured-snippet scan and for a deeper internal review. Apply them to every agency on your shortlist, including the incumbent.

1. Optimization To CRM Revenue Data Or Form Submissions An agency optimizing to form fills trains the ad platform to find people who fill out forms, including students, competitors, and job seekers, which means the platform optimizes for the wrong outcome. To see where an agency sits, ask directly what conversion event the ad platform is trained on and whether that event is a CRM-qualified outcome or a page event.
2. Ownership Of The Post-Click Experience Brands with mature measurement infrastructure are paying 25–45% less per acquired customer than those without it, and landing page ownership is where that infrastructure starts. Ask who designs, builds, and tests the pages your campaigns point to.
3. Unified Paid Search And Paid Social Team When different vendors split channels, LinkedIn often gets judged on last-click demo requests and declared a failure while Google takes credit for demand LinkedIn created. Ask whether one team is accountable for both channels.
4. Proactive Test Agenda Many marketing leaders complain that they end up writing the briefs for their agencies. Ask what the agency tested last month that the client did not request and listen for a specific, recent example.
5. Fee Structure And Incentives Percentage-of-spend pricing creates a structural incentive misalignment: the agency earns more when spend is higher, so its financial interest is to scale budget even when the right call might be to hold or reduce spend. Per-channel pricing turns adding or shifting a channel into a contract change. A flat retainer indexed to total ad spend keeps recommendations separate from the invoice.
6. Actual Account Team In Month Seven The strategic lead who presents on the discovery call is rarely the analyst or account manager who will be in your Campaign Manager or Google Ads account every week. Ask for names, titles, and employment status for the long-term team.
7. Reporting That Works For A CFO Board-ready reporting is a requirement at Series B. Ask to see a sample report. If it leads with impressions and clicks, that reflects the ceiling of the agency’s thinking. If it leads with pipeline, CAC, and payback period, it is built for your audience.
8. Ownership Of Attribution Architecture ABM fails without account-level attribution, because knowing which touchpoints influenced pipeline requires proper tracking, not just lead-level CRM data. Ask who configures and maintains conversion tracking and what happens to that configuration if you leave.

Apply This Checklist With The SaaSHero Team

Pricing And Incentive Models For Series B SaaS Agencies

Most agency comparison pages skip pricing or share ranges that lack context. Understanding how each model shapes incentives gives you a more reliable comparison than a single number.

Flat Retainer: A fixed monthly fee regardless of channel count or ad spend level. The agency earns the same whether it recommends scaling a channel or cutting one, which keeps advice aligned with performance. The risk is that a weak agency collects the same fee whether it works hard or coasts. Pair the retainer with clear reporting and a short exit clause. At lower spend levels, a flat retainer is usually better than percentage-of-spend because it does not misalign incentives around scaling spend.

Percentage Of Spend: Typically 10–20% of managed ad spend, compressing at higher tiers. Percentage-of-ad-spend pricing carries an obvious conflict of interest because the agency earns more when the client spends more, whether or not spending more is the right call, and for a company with a large and growing media budget it can also get expensive fast relative to the actual work involved. Every recommendation to scale carries an undisclosed financial interest.

Per-Channel Or Per-Service-Line Pricing: The fee tracks how many channels an agency manages. Testing a new channel raises the client’s fees before it has returned anything, and moving budget off one reduces what the agency bills. Reallocation becomes the recommendation the pricing model makes hardest to give, so budget often stays where it started.

A flat retainer indexed to total monthly ad spend, not channel count, removes both conflicts at once. The agency can recommend shifting budget between platforms, opening a Meta test, or shutting a channel down without a contract negotiation or a pay cut. Channel mix becomes an empirical decision.

On absolute ranges, for growth-stage engagements managing $30,000–$100,000 per month in ad spend, management fees typically run $5,000–$15,000 per month or 12–18% of spend. These figures vary by scope, channel count, and whether creative production and landing pages are included, which makes the structural question more important than the headline number.

The Shortlist: Best Marketing Agencies For Series B SaaS Companies

The shortlist below maps each agency to the specific Series B bottleneck it is best positioned to fix, from paid acquisition ownership to demand creation to marketing ops. Use it to narrow your search to the agencies whose strengths match your actual gap. Positioning is drawn from publicly verifiable sources. No founding years, client counts, or performance metrics are stated unless they appear in cited sources.

SaaSHero — Best for Series B SaaS companies whose bottleneck is owning paid acquisition end to end and connecting it to CRM revenue data. The next section covers SaaSHero in more depth so you can see how a full-funnel execution partner operates.

Refine Labs — Best for Series B+ companies ($30M+ ARR) whose bottleneck is demand creation and category positioning. Refine Labs is positioned as an enterprise-focused B2B demand-creation agency, with a starting price near $20K/month for paid media and roughly $31K/month for full service, and a dark-social attribution framework that tracks pipeline from channels that do not click through standard UTM paths. It does not run SEO or content. After founder Chris Walker’s exit in July 2025, Megan Bowen leads as CEO.

Directive Consulting — Best for enterprise SaaS companies with complex buying committees whose bottleneck is connecting paid media to closed revenue. Directive Consulting is built around its Customer Generation methodology, which combines paid media, SEO, content, programmatic, and revenue operations into one framework, and manages $150M+ in annual ad spend. Its startup managed package is publicly reported at $6,500/month, with standard engagements at $8,000/month and above.

Kalungi — Best for Series A–B companies whose bottleneck is marketing leadership rather than execution capacity. Kalungi provides fractional CMO leadership plus full-stack B2B SaaS marketing execution using its T2D3 framework, with CMO Coaching reported at $6,500/month and full-service engagements reported at $15,000–$30,000+/month. Kalungi fills the strategy seat instead of the paid media execution seat.

Powered By Search — Best for high-ACV, multi-stakeholder B2B SaaS companies whose bottleneck is connecting paid media, SEO, and content into one demand engine. Powered by Search uses a bottom-of-funnel-first approach, with estimated retainers of $8,000 to $25,000+ per month. It focuses on long sales cycles rather than early-stage or simple-motion products.

Omniscient Digital — Best for Series B companies whose bottleneck is organic search and content-led growth. Omniscient Digital appears consistently in public comparison content as an SEO and content-led B2B growth agency rather than a paid-media shop. It fits when the primary gap is organic pipeline instead of paid acquisition.

GrowthSpree — Positioned as a full-funnel SaaS demand generation agency. Verifiable public positioning describes a focus on B2B SaaS demand generation across paid and content channels. Buyers should request case studies matched to their ARR band and sales cycle before judging fit.

42 Agency — Best for Series A through growth-stage companies whose bottleneck is marketing ops and attribution rather than distribution. 42 Agency specializes in RevOps-driven demand generation with deep HubSpot and Salesforce implementation expertise. It fits when the CRM is broken before the campaigns are.

Obility — Best for B2B SaaS companies running complex paid programs across search and social. Obility was founded in 2011, is headquartered in Portland, OR, and directory listings report engagements from about $5,000/month. It publishes no pricing directly.

Omni Lab — Best for mid-market B2B SaaS brands running demand generation across paid and content. Omni Lab has partnered with over 200 mid-market B2B SaaS brands, with estimated retainers from $4,800 to $20,000 per month.

Compare Your Bottleneck With SaaSHero’s Team

Why SaaSHero Fits Series B SaaS Companies

SaaSHero operates as the outsourced inbound growth team for B2B companies, with one team owning strategy and execution across paid media, creative, landing pages, and reporting. The team connects all of this work to CRM revenue data rather than form-fill counts. Founded in 2018, SaaSHero has served more than 100 B2B companies and manages roughly $16 million in annual advertising spend, with more than $60 million over its lifetime. About 20 full-time specialists, including in-house designers and copywriters, deliver the work. SaaSHero is a Google Premier Partner (top 3% of agencies) and has been a G2 High Performer in digital marketing for over two years, currently ranked #20 of approximately 6,000 agencies.

Five capability areas come from one team: paid media across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, Reddit, and TikTok; creative from concept through copy and design; landing pages and CRO; attribution and reporting inside the client’s CRM; and strategy. The fee uses a flat retainer indexed to total monthly ad spend, so recommendations about channel shifts or new tests do not change the client’s fee.

The measurement layer follows the framework described earlier. SaaSHero builds the architecture that pushes lifecycle stage events and qualified outcomes back into the ad platforms so bidding learns from CRM data instead of proxy form fills. Series B paid media optimization increasingly depends on offline conversion tracking that feeds qualified opportunities and closed-won deals back into Google Ads and LinkedIn Campaign Manager so bidding optimizes against revenue signals rather than proxy events like MQL completions, and that is the standard setup in every SaaSHero account.

The qualitative fit floor includes established B2B SaaS with product-market fit, a proven sales process, an existing investment in paid acquisition, and an internal marketing team of 2–4 without a paid media specialist. The spend floor is $15k+ in monthly ad spend already flowing. SaaSHero takes over a budget that is already in market and focuses on producing pipeline the sales team accepts.

Published case results include $504,758 in net new ARR added over one year for TripMaster (transit software), an 80-day CAC payback period with 5,000+ new customers for TestGorilla (HR tech post-$70M Series A), a 10x reduction in cost per lead alongside a 163% increase in lead volume for Playvox (CX software), and a 305% increase in conversion rate for Shop Boss (automotive SaaS). See the Series B SaaS Marketing Priorities Guide for a deeper look at how these capability areas map to the post-raise growth stage.

Fractional CMO Vs. Execution Team: Matching The Missing Seat

A fractional CMO supplies marketing leadership and strategy across ICP, positioning, channel mix, budget allocation, and accountability for marketing outcomes. An execution team supplies paid media, creative, landing pages, and attribution. These seats differ, and mixing them up creates wasted spend.

A fractional CMO makes the calls on ICP, positioning, channel mix, budget allocation, and priorities, while an agency executes within a strategy and will either ask the client to provide one or quietly substitute its default playbook. A fractional CMO is accountable for marketing outcomes such as pipeline and conversion, while an agency is accountable for deliverables and channel-specific metrics within scope.

Most Series B SaaS companies already have the judgment in-house. The VP of Marketing understands positioning, digital, and the commercial case for paid media. The missing piece is the execution seat, meaning the team that runs paid search, paid social, creative, landing pages, and attribution as one system. That is the role SaaSHero fills. The strongest configuration is a fractional CMO or internal marketing leader directing a focused specialist agency. The internal owner sets the goals and holds the number, and the agency owns strategy and execution across the disciplines underneath it.

Kalungi fits when the bottleneck is the strategy seat. SaaSHero fits when the strategy seat is filled and the bottleneck is owning paid acquisition end to end.

Red Flags And Interview Questions For Series B SaaS Agencies

Several red flags point to structural misfit rather than simple execution gaps.

• The agency does not own landing pages and instead writes recommendations for the client to implement.
• Monthly reports lead with platform metrics such as impressions, clicks, and CPL instead of pipeline, CAC, and payback period.
• The agency waits for direction on what to test, so the marketing leader ends up generating the ideas.
• Pricing is per channel, which turns every test of a new placement into a contract amendment.
• The agency cannot say who will be on the account in month seven, or the answer relies on contractors.
• An agency that cannot answer what happens when its attribution model disagrees with the client’s CRM pipeline source field has not run a real enterprise engagement.

Use these interview questions with any agency, including SaaSHero:

1. What is our ad platform trained on, form fills or qualified opportunities?
2. Who owns the post-click experience, including design, build, hosting, and testing of the landing pages our campaigns point to?
3. What does the monthly report lead with, and can you show us a sample with client names removed?
4. How does your fee change if we move budget between channels or add a new one?
5. Who is in our account in month seven, and are they employees?
6. What did you test last month that a client did not request?
7. What would you change about how you worked with a client who ended the relationship?

Build Vs. Buy: In-House Hire Or Agency For Series B SaaS?

An in-house paid media manager works well when spend is concentrated in one platform, the motion is stable, and someone internally has the fluency to manage and develop them. In-house marketing hires cost $80,000–$180,000 fully loaded per hire and take 2–4 months to recruit, with 3–6 months to build the team and establish processes, making in-house best for Series B+ companies with proven channels and stable budgets.

An agency fits better when the job spans paid search, paid social, creative, landing pages, and attribution and no single hire covers all five. In that scenario, the post-click experience and tracking often receive less attention, which creates silent failures that only appear when the pipeline target is missed.

The strongest configuration at Series B uses an internal owner to set goals and hold the number, with a specialist team owning strategy and execution across the disciplines underneath. This structure does not require a choice between in-house and agency. The stage-by-stage guide to B2B SaaS marketing agency selection shows how this configuration evolves as the company scales.

Conclusion: Run The Framework Before You Run The Search

The framework rests on four questions you can apply to any agency, including the incumbent:

• Is the agency matched to the Series B bottleneck, whether that is paid acquisition end to end or another gap?
• Does it own the measurement layer with CRM-connected attribution instead of platform metrics?
• Does it own the post-click experience with landing pages designed, built, and tested by the same team running the campaigns?
• Does the fee stay stable when channel mix changes, or does every test require a contract amendment?

Run those criteria against the current incumbent before starting a search. When the incumbent clears the bar, the problem often sits upstream of the agency. When it fails on measurement or post-click ownership, those structural gaps rarely resolve without a change. The cost of hiring the wrong agency is typically 6–12 months of wasted time and budget, and staying with the wrong one carries the same cost.

When the bottleneck is owning paid acquisition end to end and connecting it to CRM revenue data, SaaSHero deserves a close look.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What Makes A Marketing Agency Right For A Series B SaaS Company Specifically?

Series B SaaS companies share a common profile: product-market fit is established, a sales team is in place, a CRM is running, and the board asks questions in finance terms such as CAC payback, pipeline coverage, and marketing-sourced revenue. The agency needs to match that profile. It must optimize against CRM outcomes, own the post-click experience so it is accountable from impression to pipeline, run paid search and paid social as one team, and produce reporting that works in a board meeting without a rebuild. An agency that reports platform metrics, waits for test ideas, or prices per channel so every reallocation becomes a negotiation does not match a Series B buyer. The core bottleneck at this stage is owning the acquisition engine end to end and connecting it to the revenue data the company already has.

How Should A Series B SaaS Company Evaluate Agency Pricing?

The most useful question focuses on incentives rather than the raw fee. A percentage-of-spend model rewards larger budgets because the agency earns more when spend scales, regardless of whether scaling is correct. A per-channel model rewards adding channels, since every new test raises the invoice before it returns anything. A flat retainer indexed to total ad spend removes both conflicts so the agency can recommend shifting budget, cutting a channel, or opening a new test without a financial interest in the outcome. On absolute ranges, multi-channel B2B SaaS demand generation engagements at Series B spend levels typically land in the five-figure monthly range before media. Scope varies significantly, and whether creative production, landing pages, and attribution architecture are included or billed separately changes the comparison. The key question to ask any agency is what happens to the fee if you move budget from LinkedIn to Google next month.

What Is The Difference Between A Fractional CMO And A Paid Media Agency For Series B SaaS?

A fractional CMO fills the strategy seat across ICP, positioning, channel mix, budget allocation, and accountability for marketing outcomes as a whole. A paid media agency fills the execution seat across paid search, paid social, creative, landing pages, and attribution. Most Series B SaaS companies already have the judgment in-house, because the VP of Marketing understands the commercial case, has run channels before, and knows what good looks like. The missing piece is the specialist execution team that runs the paid program end to end without constant direction. A fractional CMO fits when the bottleneck is strategic clarity, such as unclear ICP, active repositioning, or no one owning the marketing number. A paid media agency fits when strategy is clear and the bottleneck is execution capacity and measurement rigor. Many Series B companies benefit from both, with an internal owner or fractional CMO setting goals and a specialist agency owning execution.

What Red Flags Should A Series B Marketing Leader Watch For When Evaluating Agencies?

The most reliable red flags show up in structure. An agency that does not own landing pages cannot take responsibility for the full path from ad to pipeline, because it optimizes only half the equation. An agency that reports platform metrics instead of pipeline reveals the ceiling of its thinking. An agency that waits for test ideas shifts the strategy burden back to the marketing leader. An agency priced per channel has a financial interest in keeping the channel mix fixed. An agency that cannot name who will be on the account in month seven, or that relies on contractors, risks losing institutional knowledge when people leave. An agency that claims it has never had a client relationship end badly, or refuses to discuss one, has not built a real portfolio yet.

How Long Does It Take To See Pipeline Results From A Series B Paid Media Agency?

The sales cycle sets the timeline more than the agency’s launch speed. The average B2B SaaS sales cycle now runs past four months, so changes made in paid media in month one will not show up in closed-won pipeline until month five or six at the earliest. A strong agency shows leading indicators earlier. Conversion architecture can be rebuilt and validated in the first 30 days. Landing page and messaging tests can run by day 60. By day 90, you should see enough clean data to judge whether the channel structure and thesis are sound. Judging an agency on pipeline at day 45 means judging setup rather than outcomes. One full sales cycle provides a fair evaluation window, which is why engagement terms shorter than six months rarely give the work enough runway. A good agency explains this upfront and structures reporting around in-flight pipeline signals while you wait for closed-won data.