Not snark... serious question... its not clear to me what sort of services anyone could offer for 30k per week... what sort of thing commands that kind of price tag?
Making $20 million a year SaaS companies into $22 million a year SaaS companies. If you have reasonable expectation that I can actually deliver on that, then you're pretty much willing to say yes to any rate I quote.
If you're curious "How does one turn a $20 million a year SaaS company into a $22 million a year SaaS company?", there exist many options depending on the specifics of the company and virtually all of them are doable. For example, if you increase the rate at which the SaaS company closes deals by a modest amount, that could reasonably hit that by itself. You could do that by some combination of A/B testing, better email marketing, tweaking sales processes, etc, alone or in combination. I've blogged pretty extensively on all those topics if you're curious.
These are not necessarily all that technically complicated. If you can figure out ActionMailer, an if statement, and a for loop, you have every technical capability you need to be an engineer in charge of email marketing. The interesting bits are "What emails do I decide to send?", "What words go in those emails?", and "What goes in the if statement?"
The actual work is exactly as dominated by meat-and-potatoes execution ability as you think it is.
What books can I read to, at the very least, attempt address the questions in your 3rd paragraph, given how unique every business is? Isn't anything you find a book on sales or marketing so abstract that it's 2 or 3 layers of assumptions before you can talk about projections? How does one begin a career in SaaS sales / marketing? What makes for a good "portfolio piece" in that domain?
One of the things that has made Patrick a "tech. celebrity" is that he has written extensively and openly about this very topic. In particular his brand of uniqueness was to take a lot of things that engineers don't like and then turn it into an engineering problem. He didn't guess, he tested.
Here is the amazing thing, he also did all of us a huge service and wrote it up and put it on the internet for everyone to find!
If you haven't yet, spend as much time as you can diving in his blog. Every post he's written is worth the price of admission, but you could definitely limit your search to the ones that focus on the SaaS sales and marketing aspects.
I wouldn't call Patrick a 'tech celebrity', I would call him a 'marketing celebrity' in tech. His writings on how to market yourself are without doubt the best essays I've ever read on the subject.
Those are the standard skills of marketing people I've worked with, getting paid around £30000/year. I find this very peculiar, maybe the companies particularly dysfunctional, but there seems to be a missing variable.
Strategic advisory work. As an industry analyst, I would get paid up to about $18K per day from large clients. (Really a day plus travel plus prep plus some follow-up. And sometimes two of us would do the engagement.) But, still, $5K-$10K per day although we didn't get that level of engagement all that frequently. $10K-$20K is also the rough going rate for speaking at sales meetings, etc.
$2K or so per day was more routine for reports on a variety of topics (competitive analysis, strategic options, etc.) Expert legal work is probably in the $400-$500/hour range.
I can't give any details, but the largest bill I've seen was $1M for ~2 person-weeks worth of work; it was clearly demonstrated ahead of time that it would save the customer about 10x that, and the customer had tried twice already to do it in-house and failed (it was way outside their core expertise).
Imagine you are running a business making $30 million in annual revenue. You run into someone that reliably assures you they are able to increase your sign-up rate by 1% by optimizing your sign-up flow, SEO, and other general magic. This 1% increase in sign-up rates is easily worth $1 - 3 million to you. As a business man, the only question in your mind should be "When can you start?"
