Building a Marketing Team: Your First Hires

As a marketing leader, one of the key responsibilities you have is designing, building, and leading a marketing team. In addition to delivering results and contributing to overall company success - both individually and as a team leader - you have a key role in team management. For many first time or new team leaders, there are a lot of things to consider, whether you are building the team from scratch, or figuring out how to best guide a team you've inherited.

Having personally built and led marketing teams from 2 to 125 people, I've seen a lot of different team building and leadership challenges and inflection points. Over the next few posts, I'll explore a number of those topics, including team structure, the hiring process, team management, career planning, and team measurement. As always, I welcome feedback on other marketing management topics or questions you'd like to see me cover! But for now, let me dive into the first topic: your first marketing hires.

Local Boston startup exec and former HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe recently published a great piece in the Underscore VC Startup Secrets series on how to hire your first marketing lead . He makes some great points both about the timing of that first marketer, what to look for, and how to set them up for success.

Building on Mike's work, if you've recently joined an early stage company as the first marketing hire - or as the leader of a small marketing team - your first hires are really critical. If you are the only marketer, or have a small team already, and are given a budget to add a team member or two, who should you hire first? To me, this comes down to two things:

1. Key priorities
2. Skillsets

Key priorities

Depending on the stage of the company, the key priorities for you and the marketing team will vary. In the very earliest stages, those priorities may be around defining the core messaging and positioning, identifying the target markets and personas, working with the CEO and sales leadership to define the go to market (GTM) motion, and creating content for the website and early sales presentations. It might be to prepare the company for its first product launch, or help the company move from founder-led sales to supporting the company's first dedicated sales team.

When I joined AlphaBlox as the first non-engineering hire, I worked alongside CEO Michael Skok (now a founding partner at Underscore VC) as we defined and delivered the first sales presentations, pitched potential investors, and helped our first customers achieve success. The priorities then were clearly around finding the initial product market fit, and telling a compelling story. At DataGravity I inherited a small team with a quick mandate to launch the company out of stealth mode. There it was all about preparing for a major unveiling at VM World only months after my arrival.

Slightly later as the company is building out its sales team, they will need help generating leads or meetings with target prospects. As Mike points out, there are a lot of different GTM motions - and the marketing requirements will be different for a high-velocity, low price product than for a major account selling program. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach for marketing to support revenue generation, and before you jump into hiring and building out this side of the marketing team, it is critical that you align with the CEO and sales leadership on this GTM motion.

The key here though is to clearly identify the top priorities for marketing over the next 6-12 months and list out what tasks need to be done. Imagine sitting down with the CEO a year from now - what will you want to be able to tell her your team accomplished in that time period? What outcomes do you want to drive? For me, at AlphaBlox, that was being able to tell Michael that we had successfully landed and implemented our first customers, and had honed our messaging around a repeatable market opportunity. At DataGravity, it was about key launch metrics and post-launch awareness and sales momentum.

While starting to build up a team is important - the goal isn't just to build a team; the goal is to achieve the marketing outcomes that help the company achieve its goals and be successful.

Don't assume you need all the traditional marketing roles covered - focus instead on the tasks you need your team to accomplish.

Once you've identified all the key outcomes and tasks that need to be accomplished, you then need to look at your own skillset, and the skills of anyone else on the marketing team already.

Skillset

At some point in the evolution of any team, it will get big enough that you end up with specialists covering most major areas. For example, by the time I left Formlabs, we had a paid marketing team managing our paid spend; a social media manager managing all our social platforms; a fantastic creative team with dedicated designers, videographers, photographers, and copywriters; a content and localization team; etc. But in the early days, it is much more likely that everyone will wear a lot of hats. This may be as simple as having a marketing communications generalist who spans content marketing, social media, PR, and creative. Or often it means having people that have a mixture of skills spanning different areas of marketing. Maybe you have a product marketer who also happens to have very strong design skills. Or an events manager who also loves curating online communities.

You also likely have a mixture of skills. You may have grown up in one area of marketing in particular, but you've probably been exposed to and developed skills in other areas as well. Personally, I cut my teeth in product marketing, but also did a lot of more general marketing communications work prior to taking that leap to becoming a VP of marketing.

In early to mid stage companies, every manager is also a player, and factoring in what tasks you can (and want) to focus on is important.

At startups, you will also often find people not in the marketing team who nonetheless contribute to marketing outcomes. They may aspire at some point to work in marketing, or they may just really enjoy graphic design, or content writing, or events. Harness that - the more people you can have helping you achieve marketing outcomes, the better!

Similar to the prior step, identify your key skills and the work areas you are, could be, or want to be, focused on; as well as the skills and work areas of anyone already in or supporting the marketing team. Identify what tasks you or they are doing already - and what tasks you or they would like to be doing.

Find the Need-Skill Gaps

Now that you've identified the key tasks you need accomplished in the next 6-12 months, and the skills and capabilities on the team already, you can start to identify the gaps. In some cases, there may be a complete skill gap - perhaps nobody has deep SEO & SEM experience and you really need that to hit your lead and revenue targets. Or you want to start creating product demo videos, but don't have anyone on the team with that skillset. In other cases, there may just not be enough of a given skill - maybe you want to step up your content game, but can only afford part of your time, and borrow part of a non-marketing team member to help.

Clearly identifying the need-skill gaps can make it much easier to prioritize headcount - and to write the job description!

When I joined first Qlik competitive intelligence was a shared responsibility across a number of people and teams. But as we grew, it became increasingly clear that we needed a dedicated person (and ultimately a dedicated team) to truly help us compete in the extremely crowded business intelligence / data analytics space. Thus, one of the teams I built out from scratch during my tenure there was a competitive intelligence team. People from other teams continued to contribute and do their own analysis, but having a centralized team really helped us step our competitive game.

Once you've identified the gaps, you can start to think about how to plug those gaps. Do you need to reallocate existing resources? Are there consultants or agencies that can help? Or do you have enough work in a reasonably congruous area that you should go hire someone. Don't immediately assume that every gap needs to be its own full time person - look for ways to incrementally grow the team, and don't be afraid to create unique roles that span a few areas of marketing.

Generalists Before Specialists

One final word on your first marketing hires. Your need-skill gap work will identify specific areas that you need help, but that doesn't mean you should just look for a specialist in that area. Where possible, especially in the early days, I would recommend looking for more versatile marketers who can not only meet the specific need-skill gap at hand, but also help in other areas where smaller gaps exist now, or may exist in the future.

For example, you may have identified that you really need more content production, so you naturally start down the path of hiring a content marketer. You definitely want to hire someone who can define and write great content. But I'd much rather have someone in that role who can also work on social media, paid campaigns, sales enablement, or myriad other marketing tasks. They may not be an expert in those areas - and I'm not saying you need to set an impossibly high bar and only look for people who've already done it all - but look for what other roles they've played or areas they express interest in. I'm not advocating for not hiring a good content marketer - I'm just advocating for favoring content marketing candidates who also show an interest and aptitude in other marketing areas. I believe in the early stages, you are better served hiring marketing generalists instead of marketing specialists.

What It Means

Hiring is hard. Marketing hiring is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort - time and effort that is hard to come by in a fast-growing startup. But by spending the time to think through your hiring strategy, you will increase your chances for success and avoid costly hiring mistakes. Especially in early stage companies, every hire is going to be heavily scrutinized and, as a leader, you need to show that you are a good shepherd of the company's finances.

If you are charged with growing a marketing team, don't rush to quickly build a team of specialists covering every inch of the marketing landscape. Instead, proceed pragmatically based on what needs you and the company have over the next 6-12 months, and what gaps exist between those needs and the skills already on, or available to, the team.