Founder-led sales stops scaling
before anyone admits it.

Deals close because the founder is in the room. Then the founder runs out of rooms. Story Mode helps SaaS teams turn what one person does instinctively into positioning, messaging, and a demand model that someone else can run — which is the actual definition of repeatable.
50+
SaaS & B2B clients
20yr
In growth marketing
2–4wk
To positioning clarity
Trusted by founders at
GroundfloorRaiinmakerBlockonomicsBitrefillDSCVRTradeZeroStep3

What this looks like in practice.

BlockonomicsChief Marketing Officer, Oct 2017 – Jun 2023
The real customer was invisible under the old positioning.

A permissionless Bitcoin payment gateway, effectively a founder and a product with no marketing function and no recurring revenue. It had positioned itself against BitPay — putting a bootstrapped team into a head-on fight it could not fund, while describing a customer segment that already had plenty of options.

  • Repositioned around merchants locked out of conventional banking rails, concentrated in South America and Africa, where permissionless is the only workable option rather than a preference
  • Rebuilt messaging, content, and business development outreach around that segment
  • Built and managed a cross-functional team across content, email, SEO, influencer, and paid
  • Ran sustained funnel optimisation against the new positioning
Conversion 0.5% → 3%; from no recurring revenue to five figures monthly, primarily organic

What they said.

Helped kickstart our marketing strategy from concept to new product launch.

Nick CasaresHead of Product, Step3

Deep knowledge in marketing with a deep passion about crypto. Always quick to produce results.

Sergej KotliarCEO, Bitrefill

Built for SaaS teams building
their first real GTM.

01
Past founder-led, pre-repeatable

Revenue is real and the process lives in one person's head. Nobody else can run the sales conversation because nobody has written down how it works.

02
Category confusion

Prospects understand the demo and cannot explain what you replace. When a buyer cannot categorise you, they compare you to the wrong thing and you lose on the wrong criteria.

03
Activity without pipeline

Content is shipping, ads are running, and nothing compounds — because no one senior decided what any of it was supposed to do.

Sound familiar?

1
Your best sales conversations only happen when the founder runs them.
2
Trials sign up, look around, and never come back.
3
Your positioning describes features your competitors also have.
4
Marketing produces output, and nobody can trace it to revenue.
5
You are about to hire a marketer without knowing what they should own.

Story Mode builds the marketing function a SaaS company needs before it can justify hiring one — positioning, demand, and an operating rhythm that survives the founder stepping back.

What actually gets built.

SaaS marketing fails at clarity far more often than at volume. The work below is aimed at the decisions that determine whether any of the activity compounds.

01
Positioning & category clarity

What you replace, who you are for, and what you are not. A buyer who cannot categorise you compares you to the wrong alternative and judges you on the wrong criteria.

02
Founder-led sales, written down

The objections in the order they arrive, the proof that moves each one, and what the buyer had to believe. Turning instinct into something a second person can run.

03
Demand model

Which channels earn investment at your ACV and sales cycle, and which are someone else's playbook borrowed at the wrong stage.

04
Content strategy for a technical buyer

Material that respects the reader's expertise — evaluation criteria, honest limitations, real implementation detail — rather than top-of-funnel filler.

05
Conversion & lifecycle

Trial-to-paid, onboarding, activation, and expansion. In SaaS the compounding happens after the signup, which is where most marketing stops looking.

06
KPI model & reporting

A measurement frame that connects marketing to pipeline and holds up in a board meeting rather than describing activity.

Consultant, agency, or full-time hire.

All three are reasonable at different moments. The mistake is picking one before the function has been defined by someone who has run it.

Embedded consultantAgencyFull-time hire
Who writes the briefThey doYou doThey do, eventually
Accountable forPipelineDeliverablesPipeline
Time to productiveDaysWeeksThree to six month search, then ramp
Cost shapeMonthly retainerRetainer or projectSalary, equity, benefits
Best whenThe function needs definingThe function exists and needs scaleThe function is defined and needs an owner
Who writes the brief
Embedded consultantThey do
AgencyYou do
Full-time hireThey do, eventually
Accountable for
Embedded consultantPipeline
AgencyDeliverables
Full-time hirePipeline
Time to productive
Embedded consultantDays
AgencyWeeks
Full-time hireThree to six month search, then ramp
Cost shape
Embedded consultantMonthly retainer
AgencyRetainer or project
Full-time hireSalary, equity, benefits
Best when
Embedded consultantThe function needs defining
AgencyThe function exists and needs scale
Full-time hireThe function is defined and needs an owner

The first 90 days.

Week 1–2
Understand the business

Founder interviews, sales call review, churn and win reasons. What buyers actually say, rather than what the team assumes they mean.

Founder interviewsSales call reviewWin/loss reasons
Week 3–4
Fix the positioning

What you replace and who you are for, settled well enough that the whole team says the same thing without coordinating.

Category clarityICP definitionMessaging framework
Month 2
Build the demand model

Channel priorities against your ACV and cycle, campaign roadmap, content direction, and the lifecycle work after signup.

Channel prioritiesCampaign roadmapLifecycle build
Month 3
Run it and hand it over

Weekly cadence, pipeline review, and a documented operating system your team keeps — including what the first marketing hire should own.

Weekly rhythmPipeline reviewPlaybook handoff

How we work together.

Embedded SaaS marketing leadership

Monthly retainer, scoped to whether the company needs advisory, embedded leadership, or deeper execution support.

Two to three days a week embedded
Positioning and category clarity
Founder-led sales documented
Demand model and channel priorities
Conversion and lifecycle work
Weekly reporting and KPI model
Optional: AI-enabled workflows
Month-to-month, no lock-in

Scoped against what the company actually needs rather than a package. Reggie has personally led every one of these engagements across 20 years.

Questions.

What does a SaaS marketing consultant do?
Decides what marketing should be doing before deciding what it should be making. In practice that means positioning, category clarity, channel prioritisation, the demand model, and how a lead becomes a customer — then owning the execution against it. A consultant who only produces recommendations has handed you the easy half of the job.
How is this different from a SaaS marketing agency?
An agency executes a brief that someone on your side has to write, and is measured on delivery. Story Mode writes the brief, sits in your leadership meetings, and is measured on pipeline. If nobody internally can brief an agency well, hiring another one rarely fixes it — that is a leadership gap wearing an execution costume.
When should a SaaS startup hire marketing leadership?
When founder-led sales is working but not repeatable. If deals close because the founder is in the room and stall when they are not, the constraint is positioning and process rather than effort. Hiring a junior marketer into that gap usually produces more activity and no more pipeline, because there is nobody senior deciding what the activity should be.
Can Story Mode help before we hire a full-time marketing leader?
That is the common case. Embedded leadership defines what the role should own, builds the operating system, and often writes the job description for the person who inherits it. Hiring a full-time marketing leader into an undefined function is how companies end up replacing them eighteen months later.
How do you move a company beyond founder-led sales?
By making explicit what the founder does implicitly. Which objections come up and in what order, which proof point moves each one, what the buyer had to believe before they signed. That gets written down as positioning and enablement so someone who is not the founder can run the same conversation — which is the actual definition of repeatable.
What happens in the first 90 days?
Weeks one and two are diagnosis: positioning, funnel, channels, team capacity, and the constraints nobody writes down. Weeks three and four identify the few moves most likely to shift traction. From month two the operating plan is running — campaign roadmap, KPI model, ownership map, and a weekly rhythm your team keeps after the engagement ends.
Do you work with B2B SaaS specifically?
Mostly, yes — B2B and technical products are where twenty years of pattern recognition is most useful. That includes fintech, developer tools, AI products, and infrastructure, where the buyer is sophisticated, the sales cycle is long, and the marketing has to survive contact with someone who understands the category better than most marketers do.

Past founder-led sales
and not yet repeatable?

One 30-minute call. A practical conversation about what is actually blocking your go-to-market.

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