Ask 10 SaaS growth leaders about what marketing strategies are effective in 2026, and you'll receive 10 different responses. Their answers included LinkedIn, exclusive dinners, SEO, AI search, partnerships, paid advertising, video content, outbound strategies, open-source products, and a reminder that most of the time, nobody really knows what the future holds.
Our expert team of marketers at Rewardful asked 10 founders, growth leaders, and partnership specialists 6 specific questions to gather their diverse views on affiliate- and partner-led growth.
Meet Our 10 SaaS Growth Marketing Leaders
- Tyler Gillespie, Thinking Time Chief, 100.Partners
- Benjamin Thornton, Head of Growth, Keyword.com
- Nico Jeanne, Founder of AdKit
- Nicole Pyzyk, Partnerships Manager, Affilial.com
- Rahul Tulsiani, Senior Marketing Manager, Hippo Rev
- Shreya Jain, B2B AI GTM Consultant
- Elric Legloire, Founder, Outbound Kitchen
- Ryan Wardell, CEO and founder, StartupSauce
- Yahia Bakour, CEO and Founder, Context.dev
- Corey Haines, CEO and Cofounder, Conversion Factory
The Golden Thread: SaaS Growth is Getting Harder to Standardize
The leaders didn’t agree on one winning channel—and that’s the point. SEO, ads, outbound, partnerships, content, and product-led growth are all still producing results. But as AI makes marketing easier to produce, it also makes trust and differentiation harder.
The same shift appears in how our growth leaders measure growth. Instead of treating clicks, MQLs, signups, or impressions as outcomes, many are looking closer to customer value: retention, payback period, product usage, account engagement, and revenue quality.
Across the responses, the golden thread is a move away from maximum reach and toward stronger intent, clearer value, and building customer trust.
The Six Questions We Asked
- What growth channel has worked best for you in 2026 so far?
- Which growth metric gets too much attention, and what do you focus on instead?
- Where does affiliate or partner-led growth fit into your growth mix?
- What’s your prediction for SaaS growth in 2027?
- If you had $10,000 in marketing budget tomorrow, where would you spend it?
- “Most people think SaaS growth is about ___, but it’s actually about ___.” How would you finish the sentence?
Giving everyone the same questions highlighted both the differences between their answers and the points of agreement. This is what they told us (and, of course, what we think).
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity, without changing their meaning.
1. What Growth Channel Has Worked Best for You in 2026?
What we heard: The strongest channels did one of two things: captured existing demand or built trust before the sales conversation began.
Search and discoverability formed the clearest cluster of marketing growth channels from the answers.
Corey Haines, CEO and co-founder of Conversion Factory, chose AI SEO. Benjamin Thornton, Head of Growth at Keyword.com, chose conventional SEO, which makes sense for someone working with a keyword rank tracking tool for SEO and AEO. Ryan Wardell, CEO and founder of StartupSauce, pointed to Reddit and AI Search, while Nico Jeanne, founder of AdKit, is seeing results from a mix of ads and content.
Others are finding growth through channels that depend more heavily on the person behind the message.
For Shreya Jain, LinkedIn is working “by a distance” (compared with other marketing channels) but not as a simple posting channel. She treats it as a coordinated system: Sales Navigator defines the target accounts, content warms the buying committee, and outbound follows once those people already recognize her.
Cold outbound into a stranger’s inbox converts badly, but outbound to someone who has seen three of your posts converts like a warm intro.
Rahul Tulsiani also chose personal LinkedIn accounts over the company page. He believes a company’s story becomes more credible when several people inside the business tell it through their own expertise and experience.
But his highest-return channel is even more personal: closed dinners with 15 or 20 carefully selected people, a private room, and no presentation.
The guest list [for closed dinners] does the filtering, and one dinner has done more for pipeline than a much bigger ad spend at the same accounts.
Then there are the answers that resist over-explanation. Yahia Bakour summarized his best-performing channel simply.
“Yapping on X, surprisingly.”
Yahia Bakour, CEO of Context.dev — on being asked about his highest-performing marketing channel.
Elric Legloire, founder of Outbound Kitchen, split his answer by audience: content works for his own business, while outbound works for his customers.
Partner-led growth also appeared, but in a more operational form than simply recruiting more affiliates. Nicole Pyzyk, Partnerships Manager at Affilial.com, has seen the strongest results from reactivating partners who already joined a program and then went quiet.
Most programs leak more revenue through partners who signed up and went quiet than they gain through new recruitment.
For Tyler Gillespie, Thinking Time Chief at 100.Partners, the answer was partnerships. This is unsurprising for someone whose work revolves around helping B2B companies build partner programs, but notable alongside the number of leaders who chose personal or trust-based distribution.
Finally, for our expert team at Rewardful, it all comes down to customer proof.
“Our best results come from customers doing the talking. Content builds trust and paid captures intent, but proof is often what gets someone over the line, whether it’s a G2 review, a case study with real numbers, a peer recommendation, or an unprompted mention on X, Reddit, or LinkedIn.” – The Rewardful team
The tactics differ, but the basis is similar. Search, social content, closed dinners, communities, and partnerships all work better when they reduce the distance between a company and its buyer.
2. Which Growth Metric Gets Too Much Attention?
What we heard: The most misleading metrics make activity look like progress. The preferred measurements reveal buying intent, revenue quality, and what customers do after acquisition.
The answers fell into two broad groups. Some of our marketing leaders questioned volume metrics such as MQLs, signups, downloads, clicks, and impressions. Others challenged familiar efficiency metrics when they’re viewed without enough context.
Ryan Wardell chose signups, particularly for freemium SaaS products. A registration may increase the size of a dashboard, but it says little about whether someone experienced enough value to become a customer.
For SaaS, and especially freemium, a free or trial signup is just the start. What really matters is conversion rate to paid and 90-day retention rate.
Nico Jeanne made a similar distinction with clicks. Both paid campaigns and SEO content can attract inexpensive traffic from people who were never likely to buy.
People obsess over clicks from SEO and ads, but getting clicks is easy. It doesn’t pay you. I care about whether the person clicking is someone who can actually buy.
MQLs, webinar registrations, event leads, social impressions, and website traffic received similar criticism. These numbers can be useful signals, but they become dangerous when teams treat them as evidence of qualified demand.
The second group of answers questioned metrics commonly used to evaluate acquisition efficiency.
Corey Haines challenged the standard 3:1 LTV:CAC benchmark. Lifetime value often depends on years of projected customer behavior, including uncertain upgrades, downgrades, and changes in usage. That can make an apparently healthy ratio justify spending too much to acquire a customer.
The standard 3:1 LTV:CAC rule is problematic when your LTV is multiple years of cumulative revenue from a customer. Instead, focus on payback period, which is a more accurate metric for how long it takes to recoup your investment in a customer.
Benjamin Thornton also questioned CAC when it is considered in isolation. Acquiring customers more cheaply doesn’t necessarily create a healthier business if those customers fail to stay or expand.
A lower CAC can be very misleading. I’d focus on net dollar retention as a primary metric for overall business health.
Affiliate program revenue can conceal the same problem. A large top-line number may look impressive while hiding fraud, refunds, early churn, or low-value customers.
Rewardful sees the same pattern in partner programs: volume alone rarely tells the full story.
“Across the programs we’ve analyzed, only around 7% of affiliates ever generate a referral, so a large roster can be a vanity metric. What matters is activation and revenue quality.” – The Rewardful team
Most of these arguments were for metrics that help teams distinguish visible activity from valuable growth. A useful number shouldn’t only confirm that something happened, it should also help determine what to do next.
3. Where Does Affiliate or Partner-Led Growth Fit in Your Growth Mix?
What we heard: Partner-led growth wasn’t a simple yes or no. Its role depended on the company’s positioning, product readiness, and ability to keep affiliate partners engaged after recruitment.
For Nicole Pyzyk, partner-led growth is the core of her work. She believes B2B SaaS companies often treat affiliate marketing as a side channel when the right activation and communication cadence can turn it into predictable, compounding revenue.
Corey Haines also considers affiliates and partnerships a mainstay SaaS channel alongside search and advertising. Tyler Gillespie goes further: partnerships are effectively his entire growth strategy.
“I have to dogfood my strategies, so I literally just focus on growing my business with partnerships.” – Tyler Gillespie, Thinking Time Chief at 100.Partners
Other leaders supported partner-led growth but attached clear conditions to it.
Shreya Jain places it later in the mix than many companies might expect. Her concern is that partners amplify whatever is already there, including unclear positioning.
Partner-led growth compounds beautifully, but only after your positioning is sharp. If your own team cannot explain the wedge in one sentence, a partner definitely cannot.
She sees a stronger early opportunity in implementation partners and consultants who already work inside the target customer’s technology stack. They bring context and trust the company has not yet built for itself.
Rahul Tulsiani sees partners as valuable amplifiers for early-stage companies that cannot simply add more headcount. Resellers, affiliates, and system integrators already understand the audience and sit in front of potential buyers. But that advantage only matters when the product is ready.
Partnerships and affiliations only work when you have the right product fit, and the product is actually ready to be adopted. If it isn’t, then all the time you spend finding and signing partners is nothing more than wasted effort.
Ryan Wardell emphasized the trust transferred through a partner recommendation, particularly for products whose value may be difficult to understand from the outside. Benjamin Thornton sees affiliate marketing as a way to formalize and scale the word-of-mouth that is already happening, including in markets where a company lacks an established presence.
At the more tentative end of the spectrum, Context.dev is still exploring the channel. Nico Jeanne has seen a small, largely passive affiliate motion work for AdKit, while Elric Legloire currently uses an affiliate program for one specific part of his business: his membership.
For Rewardful, partner-led growth is central, but we acknowledge it’s not a universal shortcut.
“Affiliate programs work best for transactional, self-serve SaaS, where a trusted recommendation can turn into a signup the same day. And it is never set-and-forget. Programs usually stall from neglect, not bad strategy, so they need the same attention and management as any other growth channel.” – The Rewardful team
These responses are as important as the enthusiastic endorsements. Partner-led growth is most effective when it has a defined role, a product that people are ready to recommend, and a plan to activate affiliate partners after they join.
4. What’s Your Prediction for SaaS Growth in 2027?
What we heard: AI will reshape how SaaS companies are discovered and how marketing is produced. At the same time, several leaders expect it to make human trust, creativity, and specificity more valuable.
One group of predictions focused on how AI is changing discovery.
Shreya Jain expects distribution to become a search problem again. Buyers will increasingly ask AI assistants to shortlist vendors, making clear positioning, structured content, customer language, and public proof more important.
Benjamin Thornton expects the products themselves to change. The data provided by a SaaS product may increasingly become one layer within a wider workflow rather than the product’s primary source of value.
But many of the predictions pointed in the opposite direction too: the more marketing becomes automated, the more valuable human connection may become.
People are going to simultaneously lean into and away from AI. As more work and communications are automated, people crave human connection more than ever.
Corey Haines expects companies to invest more heavily in both short- and long-form video. Video is human, difficult, and time-intensive—qualities that become more valuable when AI can produce much of everything else.
Tyler Gillespie similarly expects AI to commoditize many established marketing channels. Those channels may continue to work, but increased competition will make trust and relationships more important.
Nicole Pyzyk expects that shift to change what successful affiliate and partner programs look like.
The winning shape will flip: smaller programs, fewer partners, but with tight-knit, genuinely engaged audiences instead of chasing scale.
Other leaders expect SaaS growth to become more proactive and specific.
Rahul Tulsiani predicts greater adoption of the account-based experience (ABX). If AI makes everyone’s outreach and content sound alike, companies will need to earn attention with work that cannot come from a generic template: account-specific pages, custom content, early access, and meaningful experiences.
Elric Legloire expects outbound to become more important as the number of SaaS providers continues to grow.
As the number of SaaS providers keeps growing, companies need a proactive motion to create demand at scale.
Rewardful sees a similar shift toward creator-led distribution. As AI makes content easier to produce, the relationship between a creator and their audience becomes more valuable.
“AI will make trusted recommendations from customers, creators, affiliates, and partners even more valuable.” – The Rewardful team
Yahia Bakour’s prediction was more direct: product-led companies will dominate. Nico Jeanne, meanwhile, shared a universal truth: the only constant is change.
“Things are moving too fast to predict. Whatever happens, the job is to adapt.” – Nico Jeanne, founder of AdKit
That may be the safest prediction of all. The SaaS growth leaders disagree on which channels and models will benefit most, but adaptability will matter regardless of which forecast proves correct.
5. If You Had $10,000 in Marketing Budget Tomorrow, Where Would You Spend It?
What we heard: Everyone would use the same budget to solve very different problems: from unclear positioning and limited distribution to weak authority or a lack of fast feedback.
The allocations reveal four distinct approaches. Shreya would invest in the foundations: customer research, outbound infrastructure, and founder-led content. Nico would put the entire budget into ads to generate measurable feedback quickly.
Other leaders would build something worth distributing. Elric chose a video podcast, Yahia chose open-source products, and Ryan would create a valuable lead magnet before working with partners to distribute it.
A third group would invest in authority. Corey chose mentions on high-authority websites, while Benjamin would combine ads with backlinks, guest posts, and SEO.
The partnership-led answers favored depth over scale. Nicole would work closely with a small group of credible creators, while Tyler would concentrate on a carefully selected group of high-value partners.
There is no universally correct allocation. The best use of $10,000 depends on the company’s current constraint: its message, authority, speed of learning, owned assets, or access to an audience that already trusts the messenger.
6. “Most People Think SaaS Growth Is About ___, but It’s Actually About ___.” How Would You Finish the Sentence?
What we heard: Different tactics, but a uniform rejection of growth for growth’s sake.
The final question gave each leader the same sentence to complete. Their answers offer a concise summary of the beliefs behind their wider growth strategies.
- “Volume, but it’s actually about concentration.” – Shreya Jain
- “More headcount, but it’s actually about better systems: data, processes, tools.” – Elric Legloire
- “Selling your software to as many people as possible, but it’s actually about building an audience you can then sell a whole suite of products and services to—both yours and those of your affiliate partners.” – Ryan Wardell
- “Getting more customers, but it’s actually about becoming so valuable to existing customers that their usage naturally expands.” – Yahia Bakour
- “Finding the silver bullet, but it’s actually about a thousand gold BBs. Real growth is built by making small investments and letting them compound over time.” – Corey Haines
- “Acquiring new customers, but it’s actually about keeping them.” – Tyler Gillespie
- “Explosive growth, but it’s actually about consistency.” – Benjamin Thornton
- “Most makers think SaaS growth is about the launch, but it’s actually about getting 0.5% better every day.” – Nico Jeanne
- “Being everywhere, but it’s actually about being excellent at solving one problem people have. Be unique, be messy, be human.” – Nicole Pyzyk
- “Reaching more people, but it’s actually about making the few accounts that matter feel like you built the whole thing for them.” – Rahul Tulsiani
- “Finding your next customers yourself, but it’s actually about making it easy for the people who already love your product to bring them to you.” – The Rewardful team
Different words, but a similar direction: less emphasis on visible scale and more on focus, retention, customer value, trusted relationships, and improvements that compound.
SaaS Growth is Moving From Reach to Trust
The SaaS growth leaders we interviewed didn’t necessarily agree on channels, budgets, and what comes next. But almost everyone rejected growth that’s measured purely through volume.
At Rewardful, we naturally think a lot about partner-led growth. These interviews reinforced an important point: partnerships work when there is something worth recommending, a clear reason to recommend it, and an audience that trusts the person making the introduction.
The strongest SaaS growth strategies don’t simply reach more people. They give the right people a reason to pay attention—and to stay.
