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The Dangerous Game of One-Channel Dependency
There’s a dirty little secret in B2B SaaS marketing: a shocking number of companies are way too dependent on a single channel to drive their growth.
Outbound fills the pipeline? Great… until Gmail decides to reroute half your emails into spam.
Google Search sends 80% of your leads? Cool… until an algorithm update drops your rankings overnight.
Paid ads scaling like magic? Amazing… until CPCs double and your CAC shoots through the roof.
This is the danger of one-channel dependency. It feels good while it’s working. You optimize, you get efficient, you stack board slides with charts that go up and to the right.
But what you’re really doing is building your growth house on a single wobbly pillar. And when (not if) that pillar cracks, the whole thing comes tumbling down.
A Few Examples of One-Channel Dependency Gone Wrong
Outbound Email: Outbound used to be the go-to growth engine for early-stage SaaS. Hire a squad of SDRs, load up ZoomInfo, and spray a few thousand emails a week. But the game has shifted. Regulations around spam (GDPR, CASL, CCPA) have tightened, and inbox providers have gotten ruthless about filtering anything that smells like mass outreach.
On top of that, the sheer influx of SaaS companies flooding inboxes has made it much harder to cut through. What was once a relatively predictable channel at scale is now far more expensive and far less effective.
Google Search (Organic): We’ve seen multiple SaaS companies get gutted by Google’s algorithm changes and the rise of AI overviews. Some lost 60–70% of their organic search traffic almost overnight. If your demand gen model is built on “owning a few high-intent keywords,” a sudden drop like that can wipe out your pipeline before you even know what happened.
Google Search (Paid): On the paid side, the story isn’t much prettier. As markets mature, competition ramps, and CPCs climb. Take a category like help desk software — there are nearly 400 companies all bidding on the same handful of core terms. That drives prices into unmanageable territory, where only the biggest players with the deepest budgets can afford to compete. For smaller SaaS companies, it’s like walking into an auction where everyone else brought a million-dollar paddle.
Why Testing is the Safety Net
The best growth leaders don’t get too cozy with one channel. They treat their marketing mix like a portfolio — some tried-and-true “always-on” channels that consistently deliver, plus a constant stream of experiments to discover what’s next.
But testing isn’t just “throw money at an channel and hope for the best.” It requires knowing your numbers cold:
Allowable cost per lead
Allowable cost per opportunity
Conversion rates at every stage
When you understand these, you can back into whether a channel feels scalable or just a shiny distraction. Testing isn’t about gambling; it’s about running small, disciplined bets that either earn a permanent spot in your channel mix or get killed quickly.
Building Your Channel Mix
Think about your marketing mix in two buckets:
Proven “always-on” channels — the reliable engines you can count on quarter after quarter to deliver pipeline. These are the ones you’d feel comfortable putting in front of the board.
Test-and-learn channels — the experiments you’re running to find the next reliable engine. These are scrappy, small-scale bets designed to validate whether a channel is worth scaling or shelving.
The job of a great growth team is to constantly move channels from the test bucket into the always-on bucket. That way, when one of your existing engines slows down (and it will), you’ve already got new ones warming up. It’s less about spreading yourself thin, more about staying future-proof.
The Takeaway
One-channel dependency is comfortable, but it’s dangerous. The most resilient SaaS companies build a diversified marketing mix, fueled by constant testing and disciplined measurement. Your job as a growth leader isn’t to find the one channel that works. It’s to keep building a portfolio of channels that together make your pipeline bulletproof.
Or put another way: if all your revenue is tied to one channel, you don’t really have a growth engine. You just have a lucky streak.
Thanks for reading,
Adam