Hiring the right early Marketing Leader

Andy Stinnes is a seasoned entrepreneur, leader, product builder, and innovator in B2B cloud applications. He advises startups and scaleups in all matters of strategy, go-to-market, and product.

Hiring the right leadership team for your startup is arguably the single most important job for the founding team. Talent has become a little more readily available in the past two years, but it is still scarce, and this is a tough challenge, often accompanied by mis-hires and changeovers. What is the right profile, when do you need which leader, how do we find and attract top performers, can we afford them?

One of the roles I have seen startups struggle with in particular is the first head of marketing. Founding teams are often comprised of technical and domain people who lack a deep understanding and appreciation for the function of marketing and why it is so crucial.

As a result, typical mistakes are:

• Hiring too late: budget constraints and limited appreciation lead founders to hire a junior marketing person to set up the website and start some rudimentary digital marketing. They feel that is sufficient and they will add a marketing manager later, once they get to a couple of million in ARR. As will become evident below, this rarely works out.
• Hiring too senior: the other extreme is the “hunt for the CMO”. Particularly in well-funded startups aspiring fast-growth, there often is a belief that someone “really big”, someone who has been a successful CMO, is needed. Except for very rare cases, this is a big mistake. If the candidate truly deserves that title, they are joining the wrong company. There is no team, no budget to speak of, and they will be frustrated and ineffective and most likely leave soon.
• Hiring for the wrong marketing focus: marketing includes a lot of jobs and nobody can truly address all of them in a startup. It is therefore extremely important to be clear on what the top priority is and to hire a marketing leader who excels in that area. More on that below.

Understanding Marketing – and what your startup needs

Marketing is a very multi-faceted job; the head of marketing probably has the broadest remit among your exec team members.

There is developing the brand, owning the website and SEO, developing thought leadership content and positioning, messaging, and all the sales materials, including customer case studies and webinars. And then there is demand generation, i.e. digital marketing, list development, outbound cadences and ABM. And how about event marketing, and public relations (PR) and analyst relations. Oh, and not to forget owning the marketing tech stack and hiring and developing the marketing team. It is a lot, and you shouldn’t expect the first head of marketing to be able to address all this.

Broadly speaking, you can divide those responsibilities into three groups: demand generation (DG), product marketing (PMM), corporate marketing (MarCom). The first thing founders need to do is to determine their priority across those three.

In virtually all cases corporate marketing can be deprioritized for now. It will become important much later. Deciding between demand generation and product marketing is much harder.

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Demand Generation or Product Marketing

Viscerally, many founders prioritize DG over PMM. The need to win customers intuitively speaks for leads and thus for demand generation. But that is not always the right answer.

This might be a good time to answer a question you might be asking: why do I have to choose? Why can’t I have both? It is a good question and many believe they can have both. To be sure, there are a few superstars out there who are equally good at both. But that is rare. Why? First, there is the obvious, that tackling both is an enormous workload and even the best will have to pick their battles and are unlikely to truly address both sides equally well. Secondly, you will find that DG and PMM require quite different skills and character traits. DG folks are typically more execution focused; they run a machine, are highly analytical, and are task masters. PMMs on the other hand are more strategic and cerebral and good at figuring out the market and how to sell to it.

To determine your most critical need, consider what and to whom you sell. A complex solution in a new or evolving market sold to big enterprise customers will require substantial work by an experienced product marketing-minded marketing leader and you should therefore prioritize PMM. On the other end of the spectrum, the PMM work for a clearly defined and differentiated solution sold to an SMB mass-market will be far less complex. Instead, generating leads and fine-tuning that engine to feed your sales efforts is key and you should therefore look for a head of marketing with a strong DG pedigree. In the many cases that lie somewhere between, the choice is less clear, but I maintain that you must stack rank between those two and let that influence your hiring effort.

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Team composition

As much as you should prioritize between the two in your marketing leader, as a company you do need to cover – to a certain extent – both functions. So, what does the marketing team look like?

A good combo tends to be a head of marketing with PMM focus and heritage supported by a strong execution person for DG being their #1 hire or already in the company. Ask candidates who their top hire would be and, more pointedly, who their DG leader would be. It will tell you a lot.

I have seen CEOs hire equal co-leads of marketing at the director level, one for PMM and one for DG. If their profiles are right and chemistry is good, this can work for a while. But watch carefully for competition (for ultimate leadership) and lack of cooperation.

To add a bit more nuance, also think about your entire founder and exec team. Who has strengths in which area? Does your VP Sales maybe have history with demand generation? How about your product-focused co-founder; are they just a product builder or do they have strength in product marketing, and could they maybe cover that area and allow you to veer more toward DG in your head of marketing?

Profile of your leader

Armed with your clear top priority and a good vision for the composition of the early marketing team, you are now prepared to screen and interview candidates. I am conveniently skipping the difficult part about finding and attracting those candidates; it is a challenge, to be sure, and will require a substantial amount of your attention and help from the extended network.

In my experience for an early-stage B2B SaaS startup the sweet spot candidate looks something like this:

• Typically director level (or only recently promoted to VP)
• Hired and led a small team, no more than a handful
• Roll-up-your-sleeves type “player-coach”, who genuinely wants that and doesn’t just give you lip service about being hands-on
• Creative, likes to experiment, fast learner, doesn’t need ready answers and handholding
• Eager to grow, has potential to mature into VPM – but that is not a preset expectation
• Genuinely excited about the problem and market?

An important aspect to consider is how much marketing has changed over the past decade. B2B marketing used to be much more qualitative and more art than science. Nowadays, while some of that remains, it is much more quantitative, driven by numbers, by experimenting and measuring what works and what does not. Not to mention the changes brought about by product-led growth and the notion of “growth hacking”.

I mention that because the pool of marketing talent who grew up and truly has new-age marketing in their blood is relatively small and young. Look closely and ask hard questions of those candidates who have been around the block a few times. Convince yourself they have truly made that important transition – and not just talk a good game about it.

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When to hire

You will find dissenting views on this question; some think you need to have found product market fit and maybe grown to two fully ramped sales reps before the investment in a marketing leader can pay for itself. Others will say the VP Marketing should be your very first VP-level hire in order to help the company find product market fit and ensure your investment in sales is not wasted.

My take is that, once again, it depends a lot on what and to whom you sell. In the case of the SMB-focused SaaS startup, I agree that the marketing leader – with a DG focus – needs to be a very early, probably the earliest, executive hire. The elephant-hunting enterprise solution startup is a much more difficult case. While they do need leads, those will be few and mostly the result of targeted outbound work, often generated by the first sales hires (see earlier article). As a result, DG takes a backseat to PMM as discussed before. And the need for a marketing leader will depend on the founding team’s ability and strength (and recognition of its importance) in this area. You might be able to delay that hire for some time, until you start seeing early traction with your reps and a degree of repeatability in your sales motion. But be careful – don’t wait too long.

Finding the right marketing leader is not easy. I hope that much is clear. It is ok to make mistakes here – but not ok to procrastinate or abdicate. Watch closely and be prepared to make changes and start over if needed. The faster you do, the less impactful the mistake.