The Ultimate Guide to OKRs for SaaS Category Creators: Unlock Your Company's Potential
- olivera31
- Aug 1
- 6 min read
As a SaaS Category Creator, you’re not just launching a product. You’re defining a new market, much like Salesforce did with cloud CRM, HubSpot with inbound marketing, or Influitive with customer marketing. Your mission is to educate the market, outpace competitors, and align missionary-driven teams to build a category that thrives. But pioneering a category is complex, requiring focus, alignment, and measurable progress. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are your strategic tool to achieve this, helping you track category health, rally your team around a North Star metric, and turn bold visions into reality.
Introduction to OKRs
OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, are a goal-setting framework that aligns teams and measures progress toward strategic goals. An Objective is a qualitative, inspiring goal, like “Pioneer the customer marketing category,” while Key Results are measurable outcomes, such as “Increase consistent community engagement by 40%” or “Grow LinkedIn professionals identifying as customer marketers by 25%.” Popularized by Google and used by SaaS leaders like Influitive, OKRs are ideal for Category Creators to ensure every team-from marketing to sales-works toward establishing the category.
For example, Influitive, a pioneer in customer marketing and a company I previously founded, tracks category health by monitoring metrics like the number of LinkedIn professionals identifying with the category. A growing number signals a mature, healthy category, as it shows market recognition and adoption. OKRs help you define these metrics, ensuring you measure not just revenue but also influence and engagement.
Why OKRs Matter for Category Creators
Category Creators in SaaS face unique challenges: educating customers, convincing analysts, and building a robust category that attracts competitors-a sign of health, as customers want options in a vibrant market. OKRs address these by:
Aligning Missionary Teams: SaaS Category Creators thrive with missionary hires-people who believe in the category’s mission over pure visionaries or mercenaries. OKRs align these passionate teams around goals like increasing market awareness or customer advocacy, ensuring everyone is invested in the category’s success.
Focusing on Category Health: OKRs measure category vitality through metrics like LinkedIn group growth, event attendance, or consistent engagement (e.g., Influitive’s focus on active community members). A healthy category sees both you and competitors succeeding, validating the market.
Driving North Star Metrics: Category Creators define unique North Star metrics, like customer health (e.g., engagement frequency) or new business growth (e.g., ARR from category-specific products). OKRs translate these into actionable goals, balancing immediate revenue with long-term influence.
Ensuring Agility: The quarterly OKR cadence allows rapid pivots based on market feedback, crucial when educating a skeptical audience or responding to competitors.
For instance, Influitive’s customer marketing category emphasizes consistent engagement-tracking the number of active community members rather than just total users. This focus on engagement drives more revenue, as engaged advocates attract new business. OKRs help you replicate this by setting KRs like “Increase weekly active users by 30%” or “Achieve 1,000 downloads of a category-defining whitepaper.”
How OKRs Drive Category Creation
For Category Creators, OKRs should focus on defining the category, gaining mindshare, and proving category health. Here are tailored examples across teams, incorporating metrics inspired by Influitive and broader industry insights from HealthTech (e.g., Cedar’s patient engagement) and FinTech (e.g., Ratio’s growth strategies):
Company-Level OKRs:
Objective:
Pioneer and dominate the [new category] market.
Key Results:
Achieve $10M in ARR from [new category] products.
Be recognized as the leader in [new category] by two major analyst firms (e.g., Gartner, Forrester).
Grow LinkedIn professionals identifying with [new category] by 25% (indicating category maturity).
Host 3 category-defining events with 500+ total attendees to boost ecosystem engagement.
Marketing Team OKRs:
Objective:
Establish thought leadership in [new category] with a unique POV (point of view).
Key Results:
Increase organic traffic to category-related content by 100%.
Generate 1,000 Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) from category education campaigns.
Grow social media followers interested in [new category] by 30%.
Publish a whitepaper on [new category] with 2,000 downloads, driving category awareness.
Product Team OKRs:
Objective:
Develop and launch category-defining features for [new category].
Key Results:
Achieve a 40% increase in consistent user engagement with category-defining features.
Reduce customer churn by 15% through improved product offerings.
Implement feedback from 100 customers to improve product satisfaction scores by 20%.
Define a North Star metric (e.g., weekly active users) and improve it by 25%.
Sales Team OKRs:
Objective:
Win key accounts in [target market] to validate [new category].
Key Results:
Close deals with 10 industry-leading companies.
Achieve a 30% win rate for deals involving [new category] products, outpacing competitors.
Increase average deal size by 20% through bundling [new category] offerings.
Secure 5 customer testimonials highlighting [new category] benefits.
Customer Success Team OKRs:
Objective:
Ensure customer success and advocacy in [new category].
Key Results:
Achieve a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 60 or higher, reflecting customer health.
Reduce time-to-value for new customers by 25%.
Increase customer referrals by 50%, amplifying category credibility.
Boost consistent engagement in customer communities by 40% (e.g., weekly active advocates).
People and Culture OKRs:
Objective:
Build a missionary-driven team passionate about [new category].
Key Results:
Hire 10 missionary hires (employees who align with the category’s mission) with 90% retention after 6 months.
Achieve an eNPS of 80 among new hires, reflecting belief in the category vision.
Train 100% of employees on the category’s mission and OKR alignment within 60 days.
These OKRs reflect category health by measuring ecosystem growth (e.g., LinkedIn identifiers, event attendance, our point of view reflected in content others write), customer health (e.g., consistent engagement, NPS), and competitive validation (e.g., outpacing competitors in win rates). They also prioritize missionary hires and North Star metrics, ensuring teams are motivated and focused on long-term category success.
Getting Started with OKRs
To implement OKRs effectively as a SaaS Category Creator, follow these steps, tailored to measure category health and drive missionary alignment:
Define Your Category Vision: Clearly articulate the new category and its value. For example, Influitive’s vision of customer marketing focused on building engaged advocate communities, driving consistent interaction over passive membership.
Set Company-Level OKRs: Establish 3-5 objectives focused on category establishment, like market awareness and competitor validation. Include KRs like “Grow LinkedIn category identifiers by 25%” or “Host 3 events with 500+ attendees.”
Cascade OKRs to Teams: Localize company OKRs to team domains, ensuring marketing, product, sales, and customer success align with category goals. Use tools like Mooncamp for transparency.
Ensure Measurable Key Results: Focus on outcomes (e.g., “Increase consistent engagement by 40%”) over tasks (e.g., “Launch a community platform”). Include category health metrics like LinkedIn growth or event participation.
Review and Iterate Regularly: Conduct weekly check-ins and quarterly retrospectives to track category health metrics and adjust OKRs. For example, if competitor growth outpaces yours, pivot to stronger differentiation strategies.
Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Highlight dependencies (e.g., marketing’s content fuels sales’ pitches) to ensure teams work together to build a robust category ecosystem.
Invest in Missionary Hires: Prioritize hiring passionate, mission-driven team members who believe in the category, setting KRs like “Achieve 90% retention of missionary hires.”
Define and Track North Star Metrics: Identify a metric that reflects category success (e.g., consistent engagement for customer marketing) and tie KRs to it, like “Improve North Star metric by 25%.”
Avoid pitfalls like setting too many OKRs, confusing tasks with outcomes (e.g., “Run 5 campaigns” vs. “Generate 1,000 MQLs”), or neglecting category health metrics. Tools like HubSpot’s OKR template or BetterWorks can streamline tracking, ensuring alignment and accountability.
Why Competitors Signal Category Health
A thriving category attracts competitors, which is a good thing-it validates market demand and gives customers options, ensuring they feel confident investing in the space. As Influitive’s customer marketing category grew, the rise in LinkedIn professionals identifying with the term signaled maturity. Your OKRs should measure this health (e.g., “Track 20% growth in category-related LinkedIn profiles”) while ensuring you stay ahead (e.g., “Achieve a 30% higher win rate than competitors”). This balance drives both category growth and your leadership within it.
Insights from Other Industries
While SaaS has been a focus of category creation because of rapid technological change and competitive pressures, there are opportunities in just about every market niche to define new categories, powered by a unique point of view.
The health and wellness space is exploding with new categories. Take Othership, a Canadian-born bathhouse concept that blends guided breathwork, saunas, and cold plunges into a ritualized emotional fitness experience. It’s pioneering the “emotional wellness community studio” category, with competition exploding over the past year. Their OKRs center on metrics like number of returning members per month, guided session completions, community interactions and referrals, all signaling growing cultural traction and ecosystem health.
Meanwhile, in agriculture, companies like AgX Robotics are forging a new category at the intersection of AI and farming through humanoid robotics. They represent a redefinition of the farm workforce. As they evangelize the “agricultural humanoid assistant” category, key OKRs might include trials completed with major farms, task accuracy rates in automated planting or harvesting, and growth in industry analyst mentions - all metrics that validate both product-market fit and emerging category credibility.
In both cases, OKRs help track not only operational progress but the broader success of the category narrative: Are we building mindshare? Are others copying or referencing our POV? Are customers identifying with this new way of doing things?
Build It. Measure It. Own It.
OKRs give you the structure and clarity to turn bold vision into measurable traction, aligning your team around the outcomes that matter most: market recognition, customer advocacy, and ecosystem momentum. Whether you’re redefining SaaS, wellness, or robotics, the right OKRs will help you track category health, stay agile, and lead with purpose.
Ready to dominate your category?
Contact us for a tailored consultation - let’s build a thriving category, one OKR at a time.
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